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games.mdwn

I’m interested in replacing the culture of violent games, and the whole idea of violence being legitimate and fun, with games based on giving and cooepration.

There’s some work I did on [[heritage-games]].

Koz Ross is maintaining a list of free software and free culture game development tools and resources, [[here|https://notabug.org/koz.ross/awesome-gamedev]].

Main Research Question

How can one create educational games (every game educates, like any creation of art, whether you want it or not) based on giving, self sacrifice and cooperation, instead of games based on violence and selfish competition? How can this be done with board games, and with computer games?

Initial Brainstorming

Game ideas:

Evolution - A game based on the concept of evolution, in which cooperation and altruism bring success.
Gardening - A board game based on Cultivation.
Gardening 2 - A gardening simulation which includes real info snippets and is based on facts about real-life growing of food (and e.g. you get points for healthy food VS more money for cheap unhealthy food you make)
Snakes - Some kind of multi-player “snake” game, in which progress is caused by cooperation. Also like that old “nighfall incident” game.
Oppression Monopoly
Meeting - A game with two players moving on a board, in which the goal is for the players to meet
One voice - A decision-making game which teaches the players about unanimous decisions and compares the results to majority-wins voting and other bad methods
Trait cards - Each player gets cards representing traits affecting the chance of surviving random events. Cards can be moved between players etc. and the goal is to survive by cooperation in trait assignment and giving up good traits for other players who need them more. It also teaches about helping the weak.

General concepts:

Demonstrate how selfishness hurts you, how it hurts others and how cooperation and sacrifice bring good results
Create games by taking existing competitive games of all kinds, and converting them into new versions which work a bit differently
A game in which the players get a list of randomly chosen traits, and they need to choose together which ones to keep, and how to assign them to players. A player can choose selfishly, or choose the best thing for the group.
Card games based on cooperation
In multiplayer games over the internet there’s an element of cooperation with strangers, and anonymous giving. This can help teach about cooperation and consequences of taking without giving back. Maybe give players some chance to chat during the game.

Snakes

There’s a grid of cells. Suppose it’s a board game for simplicity, not a computer game. Each player (out of say 2-4 players) is a snake on the grid. Each player has a definition of its maximal length, we’ll see later how it’s determined. A snake whose head is adjacent to one of the tail cells of another snake, can pick up an item from that snake or place an item on it.

The purpose can be to fill the entire grid with snakes. What makes it hard is:

Stepping on some cells requires picking up a card. Sometimes it says “bad” things like shortening the snake’s length.
When playing selfishly and without planning, it’s hard to fill the grid without blocking each other

Another idea for the game’s goal is to reach a certain state regarding picking up the cards, for example find a specific card hiding somewhere on the board. Or, to remove the randomness element, get some combination of cards or remove them from the board line in a memory game.

Another idea: The cells making each snake are memory game cards. They come from picking up cards from the board. Then snakes can exchange cards, and a snake which has 2 identical cards, they are removed from it. It makes the snake shorter, relaxing the overall board traffic load.

Ideas for operations on an adjacent snake tile:

Shorten the snake
Extend the snake
Take a card from it
Put a card on it
Make some exchange with it
Take a part of its tail to be your own

As to determining which operations are allowed, here’s an idea. There can be types of snakes. Team members can have different roles. For exaple there may be a snake that can only take from other snakes, and another snake that can only give to others. The team needs to plan together how to combine everyone’s abilities for the best overall result.

Okay, I think I have a collection of ideas here for parts of the game, and I can start combining them and create ideas for complete game rules, and see if there are good results.

Idea for goal: Find 3 specific cards, and bring them using the snakes to 3 specific destination tiles. Idea for movement: When a snake moves, it “drags” the cards underneath it. But to make it convenient, it will work like this: First the head moves, and then you take the last tail tile (includes the card under it, if there is any) and place it in the previous location of the head tile. Ideas for number of steps:

Each snake steps once at most
Use dice
Each player / snake type has a maximal step size, and maybe cards or game events can change this value during the game. Make it better or worse.

Another idea for goal: Instead of 3 specific cards, the board is full of pairs like a memory game, and the goal is to match 3 or as much as you can before you get stuck and/or the board is filled with snake tiles.

Suppose the goal is to match pairs, i.e. bring one pair member to the its twin tile. How do you do that? Idea: Place cards on the board using the tail, i.e. if there’s a card in the last tail tile, a snake can use its turn to drop that tile, shortening itself by 1. Picking up a card is different: One snake needs to be with its head tile adjacent to another snake’s tile. Example x is a card that snake A wants to give to snake B. when B moves, the card will be moving with it.

    .-----------------------.
    |   |   | x |   |   | B |:~
    '-------.-|-.-----------'
            | A |
.-----------|---|
|   |   |   |   |
'---.-------'---'
|   |
'---'

Perhaps tail detachment can be implemented like this too. All the tiles behind x will stay where they are while the rest will move forward with B. This can also be a way to drop cards from another snake. But how can we do effective self-dropping of cards from the edge of the tail? Basically, you’d have to take the tile-rotation-while-moving into account, and plan ahead to get the card to be the last tile exactly in the right location. If it’s too hard, I’ll see and fix later.

Question: How does a snake pick up cards, how does it know where to drop them abd where to find them? Idea: Taking, dropping, etc. can be “skills” a snake can get by getting cards and giving them to other players. When the game starts each player has one basic skill, and cards can give more.

Turns: Let’s assume for now that in each turn, a player can do one of these:

Move
Take a card
Flip a card
Drop a card