Devlog 2 - Group Juggling

This week my group and I worked to reimagine the folk game 'Group Juggling'.  In the original game, a large group of people stand in a circle and throw an object around in a pattern.  As they become used to throwing the ball in that pattern, you can add more balls to increase the difficulty.

My group initially decided to increase the difficulty by adding 2 different colored objects that would follow different paths. We tossed yellow rings in one order and then added red rings that would go the opposite way. This did increase the difficulty, but it took a lot of setup and became confusing very quickly.  We also wanted to shift the game from a team-building exercise to something more competitive, so we added the rule that if you drop the object you're out.  This shifted the objective of the game from cooperation to competition.  In addition to this, we took out the set pattern entirely and made it so that you could toss the object to anyone in the circle.  We also shifted from using rings to using beanbags because they were easier to throw and catch.

While we were play testing with the other group, we came across a lot of issues that we had to fix on the fly. We had never played with more than 5 people in our group. Our idea in theory had been to have one less beanbag than there were people, which worked when there were 5 of us playing but got too chaotic with any more than that. We then determined that the maximum amount of bean bags should be 4. Once you get to four players you remove one, same with three players. When we got down to the final two players, we figured out that it should act as a shootout where the two finalists stand back to back, take three paces, turn, and throw their beanbags at each other. They would then proceed to 'juggle' the two beanbags with each other as a third person calls out for them to take steps backward as time goes on to increase the difficulty.  The game ends when one of the two either drops a bag.

During this experience, I realized how differently people behave with each other when playing a game than in other situations. Gordon Calleja states in Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design that "play context....offer socially agreed-on conventions for acting and interpreting the actions of others that can alter or relax the strictures of everyday social conventions." I could see this happening with the different ways people who hadn't talked before today interacted with each other. Comparing it to the first day of class, everyone was a lot more relaxed and talked more freely.

Playing the other group's game made me think about what was said in Chapter 1 of Games, Design, and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design: "A game is a kind of system. It takes inputs and generates different kinds of outputs. The elements of the game interact and produce different dynamics...Without the game design, the rock and lines are just that—a rock and some lines.".  They were able to create a really fun experience using 4 hula hoops, cones, and beanbags.  Without the rules they put in place, the objects don't mean much. Because of the systems that they created and the goals that were set, they became ways to measure success and failure within that system. Toss the beanbag, catch it in the cone, and move the hula hoop.  

The use of objects and trying to get to the 'end' in order to win made me think of when objects and playspace and their relationship are talked about in Chapter 1 of Games, Design, and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design. Our game focused less on the restrictions of the playspace or having a set goal defined within it, so it was cool to see a different approach to how to use it. We only really change the player's relation to it in the final rounds of group juggling by having the two players slowly separate to increase the difficulty of the competitors. In the other game, it is a core aspect. As the teammates separate, they get closer to their goal but it also becomes harder to catch each other's tosses. In essence, we made use of the same idea but in two different ways.