The Prototype that was Banned from Halfbrick

[Music] Okay. Uh, looks like we're ready to get started. Uh, just a quick message from all the guys in the red shirts. Make sure you turn off your, uh, noise makers, your phones, and everything else. And, yeah, we'll get stuck into it. So, my name is Luke Muscat. I'm the chief creative officer at Halfick Studios. I've made these games. Uh, people will probably know me best from Fruit Ninja and Jetack Joyide. But today I'm going to be talking about something else completely different. A game that no one here has played at all. It's only been played by 17 guys at Half Brick. And this talk is really a story. It's not going to be one of those talks that's full of lots of scientific facts and lots of, you know, really accurate graphs and do these things to make your game better. It's really, you know, a story about something that happened at work. And I learned a lot from uh from this thing happening to me. So, I really hope that everyone else will get something else out of it, too. So, just a quick disclaimer as I start. These are

the guys from Half Brick, and they are really, really great guys. Like, they are really the nicest bunch of people you'll ever meet. Uh, they're definitely not monsters, despite what I may or may not say in all of this presentation, except for maybe Chevy. He's looking pretty monstrous right there. So, a little bit of backstory before I begin. So myself and uh one programmer and one artist worked on Fruit Ninja and then we spent a long time updating that game. We were on it for almost two years just shipping updates and finally you know we managed to ship that off onto another team to work on all of the updates and we were finally ready to do something new. We'd been so burnt out from working on the one thing for so long. So we started doing some prototyping. Here are a bunch of abandoned prototypes uh that we worked on. And you know, they were they were looking pretty good and they were feeling pretty good, but you know, we just weren't quite sure about what we were doing and whether we were on the

right track. We really didn't have any goals or objectives to define our success. So, we said, let's set some tougher goals. Let's come up with some tricky stuff. So, the goal one was to make it massively multiplayer. By massively multiplayer, I don't mean, you know, a thousand person server or anything like that, but something that the whole company could play at once was the idea. The second one was to keep it really super simple to play, as you might expect from someone who's made a game about slicing fruit and spent 10 months working on a onebutton game. I really like simple stuff and really simple ideas and mechanics. Uh, this picture in the background is a flowchart from Warhammer 40,000. And I see that in my head just explodes. And the final goal and the most important one for me was to really get people in the office talking and engaged. And I really just wanted people to be super into this game and talking about it all of the time. And this was my at any cost. I really want to make

sure people get engaged in the game. So for all of these really exciting goals and objectives, spent a bit of time. I worked with another designer called Joe Gatling uh for a while and we came up with this amazing idea that was going to hit all of those goals and it looked like this is made out of uh paper sticky taped down onto a table. We wanted to do a massively multiplayer game but it didn't really seem feasible for us to make a whole heap of backend infrastructure. So we did it all the old school way pen and paper. So it was a 17 player and it wasn't 17 player deliberately. I just simply asked who in the office wants to play this game and we had exactly 17 people sign up. Real time strategy game with a really strong focus on diplomacy and cooperation. So, let me explain to you how it worked. This is a nice big closeup of what it looked like. These were your tanks. These were actually uh little pieces of um magnetic whiteboard strips

with marker on it. Uh all the pages were just glued together onto the table and that was how it was constructed. Very, you know, not fancy, not like a Jason's titanium board game yesterday, that's for sure. And here are the rules. You have three hearts and you are able to do basically two things by and large. You can either move or you can shoot. Both of these cost action points. So, if you move one space, that costs one action point. And if you shoot, that costs one action point. And we'll deduct one heart every time from whoever you shoot at. You have a range. Uh, the range is by default two. So, quite close. It certainly wasn't a very wide range. You could also invest action points in upgrading your range. And the basic rule is last player standing wins. Pretty simple. So the way action points worked was, you know, we weren't going to be able to do this turn by turn with 17 players. And to keep our objective of making it massively

multiplayer if we scaled it up to 50 people, that's just not going to work. So at the beginning of every single day, everyone gets an action point and then you can spend those action points whenever you want. That's kind of how we resolved the that many players issue. The action points are literally leftover badges we had from packs. Um, and you dropped them into a box with a hole cut in the top and there was a little log book next to it and that was uh, you know, that was just people would log what they were doing and that way we knew no one was cheating. Very simple, very low tech. And then the last rule was about trading. So you could send your action points to someone else. And this was what was really interesting to me about the game. The way we visualized it was you couldn't just trade points with anyone on the board. you had to actually shoot that action point to them. So you had the same range as you did for attacking. And so that way anyone within your range is both friend and foe at the same time. You know, you could potentially shoot that person or you could help them out by giving them

action points. And that was really the crux of what I thought would make this game very interesting. So just a really quick uh demonstration just to clarify these rules. This is the grid. The yellow squares are the players. Uh every day everyone gets an action point. In this case, one of the guys moves. That costs an action point. One player trades over an action point. So now this player has two and they shoot twice, which takes off those hearts. Next day there's more action points. The player down the bottom who has done nothing has now collected two action points. You're not obligated to have to use them. And then the final thing about the game was there was a jury. And this was basically lifted straight from Survivor. It's very similar idea. Dead players form a jury. I really wanted a way that the dead players would still be involved and active in the game. And so the way this worked was every day the jury would vote for a player they wanted to help. And any player that got at least three votes from the jury would get an

additional action point that day. So what this would do is as the game kind of more and more people died and the player base shrunk, it would accelerate the game towards a conclusion. That was the idea. And um it also meant you couldn't just be a complete backstabbing bastard, right? Because you really need friends on the jury if you're going to win right right at the end. Very similar to Survivor. So I kicked off the game. This is what it looked like. It was set up in a room uh in a meeting room that happened to have glass walls. Uh and I just sticky taped the rules up on the ball, told everyone how it worked, and I left and went to my desk, gave everyone their first action point, and then I was done. And I I was really thinking, you know, I wonder how long it's going to take someone to actually make a move in this game. I'm really expecting everyone to start hoarding their action points and, you know, saving it up for right at the end and then it just being this crazy allout thing that happens all at once. So 3 hours later, I'm sitting at my desk and there's all this kind of

commotion that I can hear from the other side of the room. I'm like, "What the hell is going on?" And so I walk in to where the board is set up to check out what's going on. And it is a [ __ ] graveyard in there. And not a graveyard in the sense that it's very quiet. A graveyard in the sense that a lot of players are dead. And immediately I'm like, "What the hell is going on? I don't I don't even understand how that could possibly happen so quickly. You guys all only have one action point. How did this happen?" It turns out that there's definitely no one cheating. And the reason I was surprised was because the way I had designed the trading rules did not work the way I thought they would. This is what I had expected to happen on a bit of a bigger Zoom this time. I thought that what the trading rules would do would be localize them into little factions. You'd get little groups of two, three, four, five people working together trying to get an advantage that way because, you know, alliances in this kind of game are really going to help. It turns out this is definitely not what happened at all. So this slide just for

reference is all animated in PowerPoint and it took me like two and a half hours to make this thing happen. So I'm really hoping it it illustrates the point. So this is basically what happened. One player trades over his action point. This is what I expected. What I didn't expect is the chain that happened next. The second player passes both of those action points to the next player. And what happens is through some incredibly advanced, incredibly complicated alliance making. We managed to get this situation. This we we immediately coined as daisy chaining. That player now has nine action points. They could kill three players right now with that. And this is crazy. I mean, I I can see how I obviously the rules afford this happening, but there's no way I predicted it. I really thought what the

what the trading rules were going to do would localize these little factions. So, I mean, everyone is running around pissed off and angry and confused and, you know, and some people are really excited because they managed to pull off this move and I'm like, well, I guess that's a success. People are talking about the game. They're engaged. So, that what that part Yeah. All good. So, a little bit further on now, uh, this is day three. You'll see there are a lot of people in this room. The way that this would been designed again with the whole, you know, you can make your move at any time was I was hoping it wouldn't interfere with work. You'd receive your action point and then you could make your move anytime during the day whenever you have a spare moment. And now we're even at day three, we're at a point where there are so many people in this room, it's a good thing the walls are made of glass because not everyone can fit in there. Um, there's a really interesting thing. This this photo doesn't demonstrate it quite as well, but uh just an interesting subtle thing that I only noticed when I was rehearsing this this

morning was that all the people in this sl uh in this image basically have their arms crossed, which is some interesting body language. So, day five, things are getting crazier still. It's a little bit difficult to see in this photo, but you you'll notice now I've added an extra page below the rules and it says ceasefire 9:00 a.m. till 10:00 a.m. The reason is is people were so into this game that everyone was missing their morning scrums because they were down in the room. So, I literally had to say, "Right, nothing, no actions allowed 9:00 a.m. till 10:00 a.m. Get to scrum and do your work." Uh, you'll also notice the guy in the gray shirt in the middle is actually on crutches. He worked upstairs. So, he was hauling his ass down the stairs up and down all the time on crutches to check out what's going on on the game board. And then things get even crazier. This is day seven. This is an SMS I got

in the morning. This is our CFO, Ral. He was calling in sick that day. and he was so worried about the outcome of the game that he's asking me to veto his powers to another player called Bibbs. Um, he's going to love this. His name's Justin, so his nickname went from Bieber to Bibbs. Uh, cuz he was allowed to veto Bieber. Um, and he's even got an image there attached of the game board from the previous days that he would be able to give very detailed instructions to to that player to make sure that his move that day wouldn't be wasted. And I mean this is just getting crazy. And then you know I said yeah sure okay you can someone can play on your behalf and it caused this massive uproar and it's dramas. At this point I decided to do an anonymous survey. I wanted to find out a bit about what people were thinking and no one would tell me anything. I would go up and ask people and they knew that I was trying to find out what was going on between players and everyone thought I was going to rat them out to the enemy cuz I was the only person across

all the players. So the only way I could get any information out of them was through an anonymous survey. So I wanted to find out about two things. There's a lot of questions, but these were the interesting things. Diplomacy and interacting with other players is, and as you can see, extremely important to me is way, way up there. So great. I mean, you know, we wanted to make a game about cooperation. That seems to be working out just fine. The next one was engagement. I discuss the game with other players 11 plus times a day. This is just crazy. So again, I'm like, I'm feeling pretty good. This is a success, right? Like I've I'm hitting all of the things that I wanted to hit with this prototype. Feeling great. So obviously with all of this going on, productivity in the workplace is going through the roof, right? Oh, wait. No, the other thing it's going way, way down, it's just disastrous. And other players are coming, sorry, not other players, other employees not involved in the game are telling me that this game is just tearing their teams

apart. Like it's just massively disruptive. You know, they'll be looking for someone for a code fix and the person can't be found. Probably should check where they're playing the game. So, by day nine, things start to get pretty tense. And it's not even one particular thing. It's just this general feeling and vibe in the office. You really start to feel that there's some animosity between people from playing this game. There's people who would normally be very friendly and they're looking over their shoulders and they're paranoid and it is just crazy. And you know, at this point I'm still like kicking back and laughing. I'm like, "Oh my god, this is the best thing I've ever made. This is this is so great." So then at some point [ __ ] gets a little too real. And I didn't put a stupid Google image on this slide because I really don't want to like downplay how serious this was. A player came to me and they were upset. Really, really

upset. and they were like, "This game I feel at this point is damaging the relationships I have at work, uh, personal friendships I have with other people here, and generally making me not want to come to work and be involved in this. This is alarm bells, right? Like, this is not good. This was not the intention of the game at all." And this is pretty serious business. And we're hearing it from a couple of people, not just one person. One person in particular, but, you know, a lot of other people are starting to resonate with this as well. So at this point we shut down the game because honestly productivity in the whole office had come to a halt. People are getting upset. That's not what we want to happen at the office at all. So after that I'm trying to figure out what made this happen. What turned a bunch of really nice people who normally play together really well to do these kinds of things and to get so upset and worked up about the game? I just couldn't really understand

and I was trying to figure out at first my response was you know ah these guys they're just taking it way too seriously it's really all their own fault but I really wanted to understand the mechanics of why this happened and I'm in two minds right like on the one mind I'm wow I've made something amazing and powerful and incredible and you know it's a great story and it's just this crazy cool thing and the other mind I'm really upset because I've done something that's literally damaged the office, the office that I love and the, you know, the people that I'm very close with, it's causing problems for them. So, I feel terrible. And in a third mind, I'm like, maybe this will make a good GDC talk one day. So, I do another another survey to figure out what turned these guys into such monsters. Um, and the first question I ask is, you know, the game was exciting and compelling. And yeah, like look at that. Overwhelmingly, yes, the game was exciting and compelling. Great. That's fantastic. But this one's a bit more interesting. Start to ask a little bit tougher questions. The game made me feel

paranoid. Almost 75% of people agree or strongly agree. And I mean, I don't know about you guys, but paranoia I don't think is a positive feeling. And so then, you know, I asked a final question that was really a tough question, which was the game made me feel upset at times. And that was the response I got, which to me was pretty incredible. like more than half the players at some point felt upset in the game. And again, you know, I'm really not trying to make a game to upset people. I want them to be excited. I want them to be embracing the positives of the game and not really responding to the negatives. So, I'm in two minds. you know, the game is a success in that I did that did manage to make something so compelling and so engaging, but in the other hand, it's a failure because I've done something that's hurt people and damaged people and been, you know, a detriment to the office. And again, at this point, I'm still kind of like, ah, maybe it's those guys. They just taken it too seriously and and all of that.

So, I decided to launch an investigation to, you know, get a bit of better understanding why all this happened more than just beyond a survey. Um, I start going and talking to various people and, you know, really drilling down into what they were doing and what was happening behind the scenes that I couldn't see as an observer. And it turns out there was a lot happening behind the scenes that was completely invisible to me. And some of it is just way escalated beyond what I thought it would be. So, this is one of the very first things I uncovered, secret plans. So, this is a secret plan put together by the artist of Fruit Ninja, Shaft. Um, and you can see this is a pretty complicated plan. This is involving a large amount of action points moving through a very large amount of people. And then you can see the uh the green numbers is displaying how many action points are in the pool at that particular time. And it's timed all the way down to killing Shaz, which is our boss, Chenille Dio, with the very

last action point. To think about how long it would have taken to coers with so many players to make this plan happen is incredible. Like, that's a massive amount of organization and a massive amount of time effort. So, this blew me away. But not as much as when I found this, which is the actual secret plan. So, the first secret plan was just to throw everyone else off the scent. This is the actual plan to take all of those action points from that those players. They think they're about to take out all the guys on the left side and then turn around and backstab all the guys on the other side. So, before I'd been thinking, wow, this is a lot of forethought, a lot of really, you know, really deep strategic stuff going on. And then it turns out it's like another layer deeper. This is just crazy. I I love this. And so this was reflected in productivity. This is a quote from one

of the guys at work, uh, Fruity. Sorry, we use a lot of nicknames at Half Rick. So all of these names sort of might seem a bit weird. So yeah, I would normally spend normally have 11 or 12 tabs open in Spark, which is our little internal messaging program, talking about the game for up to 6 hours of the day every day. So these guys actually sent me through a bunch of chat logs. I some of them are hilarious. I should put them up somewhere at some point, but I I didn't have enough time to fit it all into this presentation, but there's one great one from Fruity and he's talking to he's got like nine conversations on the fly. It's really difficult to keep up with. And then he says, "Ah, okay. That's probably enough of that. I should probably actually get stuck into work." And the time stamp next to it says 3:30 p.m. And you know, people are getting so invested. This is another player. They've created this Excel sheet and they're trying to track all the action points and which players they're with and the two kind of different sides

understanding the total pool of action points they have available. So, what this really shows is that at this point, the main currency isn't really action points at all. It's information. That's what people are really trying to get to. And that leads us to spies. So, let's say hypothetically there are two players playing the game and they're in the kitchen chatting about it and talking about their potential plans. And say there's a third person in there, not involved in the game at all, just quietly making a coffee. That person might overhear things and these things might be interesting to the players. So the players actually start recruiting spies and there are up to five people who are not playing the game at all who are relaying information and then there's even double agents who are feeding fake information and it is just incredible. It's just getting out of control and it sort of starts to explain

why players who weren't even sorry employees who weren't even part of the game, you know, really their time was getting impinged on a lot. And the spies thing gets even crazier somehow. So, this is a really poorly drawn map top down of one section of the office. All of the brown tables, uh, sorry, brown squares there are tables where people sit at. The green one is where the game is set up. Those blue lines there, that shows where the walls of that office are. And those walls are made of glass. As I mentioned before, turns out this is an important point because if you were going to employ a spy, the people sitting at these desks can see that table all day long. They always know what's going on in the game. They're just sitting there working away. And if someone happens to walk into the office, they can jump on and say, "Hey, guess what? I think there's some [ __ ] going down. you should probably jump over and check out. And at first people were getting baffled by this. They turn up to the room and then all of a sudden there's a crowd of like 20 people

instantly. It's just, you know, and you know, at this point it's pretty obvious the game has kind of it's it's not just a game anymore. It's infected the office. It's gone out of it's not contained to this little room. It's running through the chat system. It's depending on where people are sitting in the office. It's just crazy. So then there's also things happening in the jury that I was completely blind to while the game was happening. Obviously, as I was saying, the jury is really important because you want people to vote for you. That's how you are going to, you know, right at the end game win the game. So it turns out there's an email thread among all the players running in secret. And in that email thread, people are running propaganda campaigns and giving you reasons why you should give them action points and not other people action points. And it's just again, it's just like this whole other level of strategy that I had no idea. And it certainly wasn't part of the original intention with the

design. And then it starts getting even crazier. People create anonymous email accounts and they jump in on this thread and they're effectively poisoning the jury. This one's pretty mild. I And you know, I've actually blacked out the names because I was talking to people about this and they've they felt deeply ashamed about what they were doing here because they're saying, you know, like don't trust this person. And that might be one thing, but when you're in an office environment and you're saying, you know, I'm not saying don't trust Game Master 69. This person is saying don't trust Luke Muscat. He's a bastard. And so that's, you know, that's getting personal. That's very personal at that point. So what was it about the game that made everyone go crazy, I wondered. Definitely the context is a big deal. I mean, I'm certainly not blind to that. The fact that it happened in the office among friends, that's going to make a really big change to it, but I don't think that's the entire blame. I mean,

we play games at Half Rick all of the time, constantly. That's mostly what we do. We play video games. We play poker every Friday night. We've had three monthlong 500 tournaments. Every game you can imagine, we've played it and it's never had an effect like this on the office. So in this case, I really don't think the context can be blamed. I think the context is just an amplifier that increased everything that happened. The time investment, I think, was a really big thing, too. Don't you love how literal Google image search is? sometimes going to search time investment and you get a clock sitting on the word investing. I mean, by the time you put in five or six or seven days worth of work into this game, you know, you've built up these relationships, even though like at first it's just this arbitrary thing and it's just little pieces of paper sliding around some other paper, they begin to develop meaning. The time really, really makes a big difference.

But then I think there were some really key rules that really set this whole thing off. I'm going to go through a couple of them really quick. The daisy chaining implications is really I think the biggest culprit here. So this is the same image as before um just with arrows so you can see it visually. So what's interesting in most games if you decide you don't want to be a part of an alliance fine you're out of that alliance and you know it might have been a fourperson alliance before but now you're on the edge and it's a threeperson alliance. But look what happens in this game if you decide you don't want to be a part of the alliance. This purple player here has decided to opt out. They have completely destroyed this chain. They've really caused massive disruption to the strategies of these guys. And I mean this is basically peer pressure 101, right? If you say, "I'm not going to be a part of this," and then that pisses off nine other people and completely there's something they're going to feel passionate about this big grand strategy and you're the one thing getting in the way of that happening.

Imagine the pressure you feel about that. It's Yeah. I mean, join us or die pretty much. And even then, you know, you could you could uh not join and you'd probably get killed straight away and then it would form back around you. There's literally nothing to incentivize you from straying away from the major group. The zero randomness thing was interesting, too, because when you have three action points and you're in range of someone, guaranteed 100% you could kill that person and take them out of the game. There's no randomness. There's no, you know, ah, you got a lucky shot. That's cool. There's no um, you know, oh, that was unlucky for you. The reason I have a screenshot of Fruit Ninja here is this is something that, you know, the role of randomness is something we're very interested in. And what we do in Fruit Ninja is deliberately put bombs overlapping fruit sometimes and create unfair situations randomly. The reason is is unless you're really skilled, you're probably going to slice the bomb and die. And this means you can you get to place some of the blame and some of the burden that you're feeling onto the

game itself. You say to yourself, I could have got a high score if it wasn't for that bomb there. Or sometimes, you know, I got a really lucky run. And when you do that in a competitive environment, it really takes the edge off. It's the same as in poker, you know, you'll be all playing and someone's just bluffing and doing rising and rising and then all of a sudden they get something on the river and it's hilarious. Everyone laughs and it's a good fun interaction. This had none of that. It was all this pure clinical, you know, no randomness at all. I also had a theory about the jury uh which I sort of mentioned before that because it was real people this had a really big effect on the game and you know you're actually personally attacking people and it really blurs the lines between you the relationship you have in the game versus the relationship you have in the office and you know most of the guys at Halfbreak are really good friends as well. They go out on the weekends together and so it was really you know making a lot of worlds collide and really causing a lot of stress. So originally this was the end of my

talk when I uh pitched this talk to the GDC board. I said you know I'm basically going to tell a story and tell how it all goes. And then they sort of encouraged me to instead of doing a 25minut talk about that actually fill it out to an hour and explore some other games and all of that. So I said okay cool that that sounds interesting let's do that. And it was actually been a really interesting process for me by doing this. It's really I'm really glad they pushed me to do it because I've had a lot of time to go through and look at other games and, you know, really do some thinking about what I was doing with the game and how I feel about how everything went down. So, I wanted to look at a couple of other games that make people crazy. Who's played Neptune's Pride? I have not very not many people at all. Okay, I'm glad that I have a little thing here that explains how it works. It's a free browserbased strategy game. Um, it's very simple. This is kind of a simplification of the rules, but you know, you capture stars by moving around ships. You collect money every 24

hours, similar to to the game I did. Um, and you can invest that money to produce either economy or industry. If you invest in economy, you get more money next payday, next 24 hours. Industry generates ships. And is the first to capture 50% of the stars wins. Again, it's very simple, very clinical. Um, if you have if you're on the same kind of weapon level and you know, 80 ships attacks a 100 ships, then the 100 ships wins and have 20 ships left over. It's just an algorithm and I it's amazing. So, this is a great quote straight off the uh Neptune's Pride website. The most horrible game you will ever play. It is brilliant. And there's a lot of similarities here with uh with the prototype. There's a constant influx of actionable points that then you can do whenever you want because effectively Neptune's Pride and it takes even longer to play out up to a month, but it's effectively real time. Moving between the stars can take like 3 days because of how slow everything moves. You can

execute at any time. There's an abstract representation, you know, just like how we had little squares with people's names on it. This has little circles and triangles representing stars and ships. Really heavy focus on diplomacy. no randomness and time investment. These are all very similar. There's a lot of differences as well, but there's definitely some, you know, repeating kind of themes here. The first time I played a game, it was probably about a year ago. Uh, it was a eight player game. I knew three of the players, and it was the most terrifying, horrible experience of playing a game that I've ever had, but so so memorable. So incredibly memorable. And a similar thing happened where as I was playing, you know, at first you don't really care, but then the time investment gets in and you're getting more and more into it and you're messaging all of the other players and getting ready to backstab someone. And then at some point, uh, this is right near the end of the game. One of the friends I was playing with rings me at 4:00 a.m. in the morning and wakes me up and he says, "Look, I know

it's 4:00 a.m., but we need to do something right now. We're about to lose this game. Um, so much for being able to play whenever you want. So, I played a second game leading up to this GDC talk because I thought that would be a good idea. I should refresh myself on how the game works, and it was just as horrible as last time. I I had a couple of theories that I wanted to test out by playing the game again. One of them was that uh this is the actual chat log from like two days ago that I just screen capped out. Um, one of the theories I had was maybe what we should do is everyone assume an alias and no one will know who anyone is and then nothing will hurt quite as bad. It won't feel so personal. So, we had eight friends all jump in on this game and we all set these crazy aliases so no one would be able to be able to do it. But the same thing happened again. And you know, we'd be talking about the game on GTO and in person. And you know, slowly the game seeps out into the real world. And then

soon enough, you know, you start figuring out who is who. And by this point, you know, I'm not saying, uh, I'm going to attack the red guy. I'm literally saying, I'm going to attack Jonathan. And, you know, he's literally communicating to me that he's sorry for attacking me. So, that whole theory kind of just went up in my face. And it was just as horrible as last time. It just kind of kicked in a bit later. And it's because the rules are so evocative. It's nothing to do with the theme. It could wouldn't matter if it was in space. It wouldn't matter if it looked as terrible as my prototype did. The rules are just so evocative. So, with this screenshot here, this was from about a week and a half ago. I woke up in the morning um and checked the game to see what was happening. And this is the screen I opened up to. I was the blue player. And I felt physically sick looking at this screen. And without any context, you're looking at this and it just looks like a bunch of ships moving around. But this represented to me three weeks worth of work that was about to

turn on me. I could tell by the way that the ships were moving around that I was about to get backstabbed big time by my friends and I saw this screen and oh my god like my chest was tightening up. I thought I was going to have a stroke. is such a powerful actual physical reaction to the game. And again, just because the rules are so evocative and I just started, you know, I really started thinking, you know, about this engagement versus fun idea. You know, when I was doing uh the prototype, I just wanted something that was exciting and as compelling as possible at any costs, like I said, but there's definitely a correlation here between the game being exciting and compelling and it being having negative feelings as well, it being making you feel paranoid. So you I really wanted to find out a bit more about that. So what happened was I uh I got onto the Neptune's Pride website and I sent an email to the the developer and said, "Hey, I doing this GDC talk. I really think I want to have a big section about Neptune's Pride in it. Would you be available to have a chat on

Skype or something sometime?" And the person gets back to me, his name is Jay, and he goes to me like, "Oh yeah, that's cool. We should meet up and have a beer. I live up the road." Now, this might happen all the time if you live in San Francisco, but this does not happen in Australia in Brisbane, that's for sure. So, I met up with Jay and I had some questions for him. Uh, you know, he's a really good guy, really smart, um, really knows what he's doing. And I asked him about, you know, what his intent was when he was making the game. He didn't mean for it to be so intense. He didn't mean for it to, you know, bring out such these amazing strong feelings in people. But I had a particular question in mind that I wanted to ask him about. So on edge.com there, Neptune's Pride got given this award for the most effective tool for ending friendships. And so I said to Jay, you know, how does it make you feel when you see this? You know, what do you how do you respond to seeing this comment? This is what he said. This is slightly paraphrased. That's awesome. The game

made an impact. It obviously made an impact on you as well. making an impact is why we make games. And this was really amazing for me. You know, I was listening to him and, you know, he did mention that there was some things that he wasn't happy about, such as it's difficult to make the game really popular because most people only want to play it once. Um, he he also mentioned a particular scenario where players have emailed him asking him to block their account so they can't come back and play it again. um just like you know gambling addicts I guess. But you know his his main sentiment here was that you know he's so happy that the game had such a big impact. And so after I had this beer with him I sort of went away and I was really thinking and you know really reflecting on myself going you know so you know making games making impact that's why we do it. Is that why I make games to make an impact? I guess kind of my goal was to make an impact when I look back at what my main goals were for

the prototype, but I'm not sure that's the whole story for me. I don't think it's impact at any cost. If I wanted to make an impact, I could just stab someone in the leg. That would be one way to make an impact. That's for sure. So, another set of game rules that make people go crazy is Dota, League of Legends, and all of the MOBAs. And I'm sure most people here are pretty familiar with the infamy that comes along with the the uh communities in these games. So before I'd done this talk, you know, when the GDC board said you should check out some other games, they said, you know, you got to do a section about either Dota or LOL. It's, you know, it's infamously toxic. You really need to find out about it. I'd never played the games at all. I didn't even understand how they worked. Um, just to give a really, really quick overview for anyone who's not familiar with how the game works. And this is a gross simplification of what is a very rich, very complex genre. But basically, you have a few heroes per side. Uh, you

go and you kill guys, and when you kill guys, you level up and get stronger. And your goal is to destroy the other team's base. And defending that base, there's turrets. I'm really sorry for everyone who plays this game a lot. I know that's such a simple version, but you know, you could do a whole talk just about this. And you know, this is a great quote. This is uh from Idle Thumbs recently. Uh and it really kind of sums up about when people are playing Dota. I I think I just lose my mind when I'm playing Dota. I forget who I even am. I'm like the Hulk. And you know, this is something you see a lot of is you jump on the forums and it's all people talking about how terrible the community is and how enraged everyone is and that everyone needs to relax. So, a guy called Jeffrey Lynn is doing a lot of interesting stuff here. He did a really fantastic presentation and I think it was on Wednesday maybe. Really excellent. He's the lead behavior science guy. He's got a more official title than that, but I don't remember what it is. And he's doing some really great stuff leading a team trying to

figure out how to make League of Legends much less toxic than it currently is. But what's interesting is, you know, what he's focusing on isn't really about changing the gameplay and the rules itself. It's all of the meta systems that surround it. So, you know, he's looking at doing tribunals to punish players and honor to uh to reward good players. But I really wanted to look at those core kind of rules and figure out why why this happens in the first place. And again, we start to see a couple of similarities here. The time investment to play a game of League of Legends is high. It takes a long time. not one month long time but it's still you know probably by the time you open the game can take up to a solid hour and during that hour you have to be 100% focused you get that time investment effect and you know if you're playing a game of Counterstrike or whatever you could play a game for an hour but you might cycle through a whole set of players and you know people dropping in and dropping out but that can't happen in League of Legends not at all in there

the players are leveling up and so you know if someone's been playing for half an hour and then they drop out I I mean, what are you going to do? Add a new player that's back on level one? That's not going to work out. And every player is a vital link. And again, this really reminded me of the whole peer pressure kind of thing, but in a different way. Um, if a with only five players per team, if someone isn't performing at their best, you know, say they're only playing at half their ability, that's that takes your team from 100% effective to 90% effective. And that's a big deal. you know, the team is really relying on every player to play well and do well to win in the game. And you want to win cuz you're putting a whole hour of unbroken time into that game. But more than all of this, I think what is really the crux of it is the underpinning structure of the game experience. And it's what I think creates such intensity in the player behavior. And I want to use the word intensity here, not toxicity. because the intensity means, you know, you get

those really toxic players, but then you get the guys who just love the game and, you know, do really great things in the community as well. So, I think what it comes down to is this. There's a really big positive feedback loop in this game. You kill stuff, which lets you level up, which lets you kill stuff easier. Again, sorry for the very simp, you know, oversimplification. Pushing against this though is the defensive advantage. So, as you push into the person's territory, as you're gaining the advantage and you're able to attack more and more and you push towards their base, they gain a defensive advantage through the turrets which are helping them defend and the fact that they're closer to their base so they can get there faster after they respawn. And, you know, there's a whole bunch of mechanics there that give the defenders an advantage. And so, you get this scenario where you have these two forces pushing against each other. you have the everinccreasing positive feedback loop of leveling up, leveling up, leveling up, getting stronger and stronger, and then that's getting pushed in the other way from the defensive advantage. And you know, when you're

pressing a defensive advantage, you probably get a few kills. So then you start to level up and these two forces are kind of pushing back and forth against each other. And then at some point, maybe about 60 70% of the way through the game, you hit the tipping point. And all of a sudden the positive feedback loop manages to overcome the defensive advantage. And after this point, you know, the game is in most scenarios as good as lost. And the thing is is this tipping point happens at a very specific time. Usually experienced players especially who can kind of see the entire game and understand everything that's going on can see that moment when that happens and all of a sudden one side has the advantage. And the thing is is once you have that advantage, it's not like the game is over straight away. If you're on the losing side, you're now going to get your ass beaten for a solid 5 minutes. You're just going to get swarmed over and over and over. And you know, that really doesn't feel good. They really

punish you once you hit that point. I mean, this is what it looks like when uh your Nexus is getting destroyed and there's just so many minions and champs just all over you. You generally spawn and get completely destroyed instantly. And you can see this kind of positive feedback loop in this. I got this screenshot, you know, straight off Google images. And if you look up closely, you can see in the corner, you know, one player is just really pressing that that advantage with the positive feedback loop and just getting kill after kill after kill. And to really rub salt into the wounds near the end, um, oh, sorry, yeah, the blame game. If if it happens at this particular tipping point, it's really easy to blame someone in particular, right? you know, you say, "Ah, if this person hadn't have done that thing, even though you'd been working together as a team for a solid half an hour, maybe you hit that tipping point and all of a sudden it's one person's fault." And to make it worse, the best time for you to express that is when you have the least amount

of things competing for your attention, which is when you're dead. So, if you've just died, you're probably not in a great state of mind uh and in a really good mood to be communicating with some other people. All of that said, I'm not going to let the players completely off the hook. The players definitely have to wear some of the responsibility. And for me, the example that sums this up the best of all games is Monopoly. So, if you're like a nuclear 1950s family playing Monopoly, it's probably going to be quite, you know, quite nice. You're playing, it's pleasant. It's this the rules and you know, oh, you you get some good wins and you get some unlucky losses and things like that. But then you play a game against Monopoly with a group of people who are all about those like the under the table deals, the deal cutting, the, you know, the bargaining, the ransoms, you know, I'm taking this property and you've got to pay me some exorbitant amount of money. That game is very different. It has a very different

feeling. It really changes the game. The rules have stayed the same, but the players have changed and the player the game feels different. So, I'm not going to let the players completely off the hook on this one. They definitely have some responsibility. So, getting towards the end here, I have some conclusions. Um, through all of this, I learned a lot. You know, I didn't just learn about game design through analyzing this. And you know, I just loved the fact that having to prepare for this talk really made me reflect on myself as a designer. So, I learned a lot about design game design in general. And, you know, played some new games and, you know, really got to spend some time analyzing them. I learned a lot about players, about how they respond, about how players are really smart and really good at taking your rules and twisting them and coming up with ways to kind of subvert the game. But I also learned a lot about myself as a designer. Game design is really powerful. Like really, really, really powerful. Just the pure mechanics of the

game have the ability to completely change people and the way that they act. And I think this is something that I hadn't really respected before I did this prototype. I was, you know, as I said at the beginning, I wanted the game to be as engaging as possible at any cost. And I hadn't really thought about that that much and how well I would, you know, how compelling something could be and just how powerful the pure mechanics of the game could be. I was really thinking, you know, how could possib that that bad? But game design is very powerful. Just the pure mechanics. And again, Neptune's pride shows that as well. I learned about a lot a lot about players as well about how they react uh and how I guess if anything I learned how much I don't know about them and how unpredictable they are and finally I learned a lot about myself as well and

realized I'd never really taken time as a designer to stop and think and look kind of introspectively at what I was doing and what my goals were after doing all of this and doing all of this process. You know, I I really think, you know, I still want to make a very compelling, very engaging game, but I'm no longer willing to do it at any cost. If it's going to be compelling and engaging, the thing I want the players to take away from the game is the positive experiences they had. I want them to be at the pub talking about that great thing they did together and not kind of mourning over the terrible thing that happened to them. And for me, these are really, you know, my first steps. I've been doing game design for not long compared to a lot of people, but six and a half years. This is really the first time I've thought hard about what I'm trying to achieve as a designer and you know where my limits are. The prototype Tank Turns Tactics will live on. I'm going to do it again at some point. I've actually tried to do it a couple of times, but uh I haven't figured out a way to do it without

destroying the office again. One potential idea is to take it down to the university and destroy them. Um, alternatively, I could test it out at rival game companies. That might work out okay, too. But I want to change it to make it a more positive experience eventually. I really think that there's something powerful here, and I've kind of accidentally stumbled across something really interesting. I just don't know how to get it there yet. I'm still still thinking about it. I have some ideas, but yes. So, anyway, that's my story about a crazy game experiment. It made me learn a lot not about just games, but myself. I haven't really heard other people tell stories like this I guess and you know uh heard about other people's journeys as designers and how they learned things about themselves and what self-realizations they had. So I really hope now other people will share theirs. Thanks.

So, we have some time for some questions. If people want to come up to the microphones, uh, also there will be emailed out the evaluation forms. If you guys could fill that out and give me feedback, that would be awesome. That'd be fantastic. Uh, yes. So, um, thank you for sharing the story. It makes me realize we're not alone cuz we also had to ban a game in the office for very, very similar reasons. Oh, wow. Cool. Although, although our game was, uh, the classic game of diplomacy. Yes. Have you tried that in your office? No. Actually, we have done it a couple of times in the office. I haven't been involved. Uh that was, you know, one of the games when I I mentioned this one, people say, you know, it's definitely got that kind of diplomacy vibe. Uh I think, you know, even though diplomacy, you know, has definitely has those similar effects when the guys in the office have played it, it's never had that ability where it's kind of spread virally out into the rest of the office. So I mean people have played it and gotten very invested and you know had their ups and downs but it's kind of

remained contained to a fairly small set of players and I think that was one of the differentiators between the prototype and deployment. Interesting. Thank you. Thanks. Uh yes. So you mentioned that um the adding randomness to a game can actually give players an outlet to essentially blame the game mechanics instead of each other uh for if something didn't necessarily go their way. uh is actually is introducing randomness like rolling a dieice to actually hit another tank like one of the things you thought of or yeah those those values that's something that I definitely want to try out I think for a couple of reasons one for the randomness factor but it also means that people will have to be when they're devising their tactics they're going to have to build in fail safes so I mean the very similar idea I had was you know we could make it a coin make it 50/50 whether a hit lands or not that means you can't you know very clinically build up six action points and then know that you need to move three and then you've got three shots and you'll take them out. You're going to need to build in a bit of you know a bit of buffer room there.

And you know sometimes even though you build in buffer you might you know you might get out of it and keep lots of action points at the end or you might uh you know use all your action points and not manage to kill them and they have one heart left. I think it would be really interesting. I'd be interested to know when we do it whether that takes some of the intensity and the edge off and whether that makes it less engaging for people. I'm really not sure. Um it's something I'm certainly looking to try and be really interested to see the results. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, I feel like uh I kind of wonder if the game would benefit from a negative feedback loop. Like maybe instead of giving action points, the judges could actually take away action points. Um, but one question I had was given that you kind of mentioned that the game was sort of poisonous, did anyone in the office ask you to bring it back? And yeah, interesting question. Um, so when I decided I wanted to investigate more about the game, I sent out an email

and um, I said, "Okay, anyone who played the game, anyone who played the prototype, you know the one I'm talking about, let me know cuz I want to talk to you and I want to find out more about your experience." And about 5 minutes later, I had an email from almost every single person who is involved in the game. And I think about 70% of them said something along the lines of, you know, I'm curled up in the fetal position right now and don't want to have anything to do with it. 30% of the players said, oh my god, yes, let's do it again. Let's play. Um, interestingly, the people who were saying, "Yes, let's do it, let's play," were the kind of uh the mastermind players. You know, they were definitely those Kingmaker players and then the players, for one of a better word, that were very much pawns in someone else's game. Um, so I mean it but everyone agreed that there was something there's something there. There has to be something for it to evoke such powerful emotions and that you know we should we should you know keep on exploring that

and see what else there is to learn. Did the game ever resolve itself? Did you actually have a winner at the end or you never got that far? It kind of did and kind of didn't. I mean, you know, we pretty much said, "Okay, look, we got to shut it down." And they the players kind of mutually agreed to what the first, second, third, fourth place was. Uh, I mean, it kind of concluded, but not in a natural sort of way. It was kind of stunted by the fact that we said we were cutting it off. Cool. Thanks. Um, did did people feel worse or better when they were in the jury? So, that was interesting as well. Um, a lot of players were once they were in the jury and they it didn't seem like they were so actively involved in the game. That was one thing. But then active players, they obviously knew who was in the jury. And these active players would start like hassling people in the jury to vote for them. And it was kind of you in the jury, you couldn't really escape. So in Survivor, for example, all of people who are out and

they're in the jury, they leave the island, right? and then they come back once a week to vote and and that's sort of it or actually it's right at the end, isn't it? They they come back in so they kind of get separated from it. In this jury, the players were still always there and they kind of get hassled and that caused a lot of negative feelings as well. And then the other thing I was going to suggest was um if you an idea might be if you give if you give an action point that you're like immune to that person's shots for a couple of turns or something and that way like it makes the daisy chains if you give that guy nine AP he can't kill anybody because everybody's immune to his shots for the next and so it it might cause some of that that crazy daisy chaining to to they'd have to take that into account that Yeah, definitely. Gift meant something more than just an a way to aggregate power. Yeah. No, that's a that's a great suggestion. Thanks. Hi. So, uh I was in digital games for about 11 years and

I've gone into teaching and I I agree that preparing talks on a subject, it really makes you think so hard about what you're doing. So, it's lovely to see people still in the industry doing that as well. One of the things I teach is uh paper prototyping. Uh, so it's lovely to see you guys doing that. Do you think though that the physicality of the tokens made them worth more like the AD points? I definitely think that it could have. Yes, because um I mean there's something powerful there where you physically handing it to someone. That's a lot different to um to you know passing it off in a system or just like sending a message. Uh we actually started building a digital version of this because I was very interested to see if just taking the exact same rules and then making it digital what effect that would have. Uh unfortunately we didn't manage to get around to doing it before this talk. Yeah, there's a psychological principle called uh reciprocity but basically when you've given something to somebody they

feel very indebted to you which would obviously amplify the betrayal if that person intended turns on you. That's right. Although, yeah, Neptune's Pride was an interesting one because I gave uh gave one of my friends all of my technology and a lot of my money and uh he certainly didn't feel indebted to me after that. That's for sure. Thank you. Thanks. So, I'm curious about the backstabbing. Um you know, ostensibly or at a cursory analysis, you've got the jury mechanic which should hypothetically discourage the the backstabbing and yet it completely didn't. And I'm wondering if you have any insights into why that happened. Is it because there was so much propaganda and politics within the office environment that did it or was there something else mechanically that wasn't working to uh to disincentivize that backstabbing? I guess you know at a simple level you needed three jurors to aggregate one extra action point. if you took out enough of the other players um and you know had a strong enough force

yourself, all of the players that you're allied with are generating one action point per day. Whereas in the jury like you know technically they're generating onethird of an action point per day. So I think that kind of imbalance there was a large part of it. Uh I think it'd be really interesting if they could just straight up give a whole action point. Every person in the jury could pass off what action point they normally would have gotten onto any player they wish. That said, it frightens me what that would do to the jury as well. The jury was already pretty intense, but that would make it even crazier. So, but yeah, it was interesting. It really didn't curb that kind of backstabbing the way that I thought it would. Now, it was just like uh any three jurors uh could get that one action point. So, I guess in that case, um you didn't have to have all friends on the jury. You just had to have three friends on the jury and you could alienate everyone else or uh Yes, that that's true. Although um I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but the way that works is it actually stacks as well. So if nine people vote for you,

you get three action points, okay, from that. So, you know, it was it was interesting that way and a lot of people there was a little bit of a thing going around where multiple people were in one alliance and what they did was they pretended they were all on different factions and then they'd target three different jurors each. So then effectively that kind of faction would capture the majority of the uh the action points from the jury is it's crazy these guys. It turns out people who are like game developers think really deeply about games they're playing and yeah I think we have time for one more question. Yeah. So, um, your the talk about about this kind of game reminds me a lot of, um, years ago, um, I had a tiptop, uh, game club at my, uh, college and, uh, we're playing this one board game. I don't know how many people are familiar with it, uh, the Battlestar Galactica board game, which actually really I definitely recommend it to everybody because it really captures that, you know, feeling of like

the show. But um what was really interesting that you know what you're talking about reminded me of is that the one of the main sort of dramatic mechanics there is that every character is dealt a loyalty card in secret. So one of one person is the Sylon who is secretly trying to screw everyone over but the mechanics are such that you don't necessarily know exactly who that is. So it creates this interesting scenario where everyone's paranoid of each other yet the overall game itself is cooperative. People aren't necessarily um basically it's like it's it's like the a team of people against the one sabotur who's trying who's basically I guess helping the board win if you will. So, so that that might be actually a good a good board game to look at in, you know, sort of figuring out, you know, how to leverage those really strong dramatic mechanics yet to rein it in. I think really that sort of cooperative aspect with the sabotur I

think really helps because then players it it gives more it puts the focus more on um teamwork and and sort of mitigates some of those toxic factors you were talking about. That's awesome. That's a great suggestion. Thanks very much. Okay, thanks everyone.