"The Week" (Day 7)

I'm finalizing and streamlining the game rules to present the first (real?) iteration in class tomorrow.

Before, I had three player roles (the Earth, the Mining Co., the Town) but I started looking at the verbs for each player and realized it was redundant. The Town's only action in the game was to place houses on the surface to try to hamper the Mining Company, but that wasn't terribly active and wasn't too interesting. The Town player would spend most of the time watching their pieces get destroyed -- which might be an interesting emotional / aesthetic effect, but it would result in too much learned helplessness / hopelessness and probably and angry resignation from the game.

So, I've combined the Earth and the Town players. Now it is simply Anaconda (Mining Co.) vs. Butte (the town). However, I've been doing research on other board games and learned about one work called "Train." The rules and labels are kept vague on purpose, to force players to have a dialogue or actively interpret what they are enacting.

Thus, Anaconda is now simply "Player 1" and Butte is now simply "Player 2"

Similarly, I refer to the minerals as just "pennies" and the cardboard is just cardboard. I don't label them as their real-life cognates because I'd prefer the player to arrive to that conclusion on their own.

In the game "Train" however, they have cards at the end that explain what's going on -- I think I'll have that. Epilogue cards? Epilogue cards.

"The Week" (Day 6)

I did some more research on materials. I'm not used to working like this, so I'm kind of proud of myself for working out the details:

The big idea here was that instead of using bottlecaps, I use pennies. At the Berkeley Pit they mined for copper, so using pennies provides a convenient mental model for players -- they're digging for copper... Except pennies are actually made of zinc and coated in copper. I started thinking of a chemistry experiment I did in high school, where we filed the copper coating off the penny and dropped it in a container of hydrochloric acid. The zinc burned away.

So if I poured diluted hydrochloric acid into the game board at the end of the game, the pennies would produce a chemical effect -- like the acid lake that has formed at the Berkeley Pit. To augment the acid lake effect, I was also planning on using green chalk for the chemical tokens -- the chalk would react with the acid and produce carbon dioxide as well. In addition, I could mix baking soda into the soil itself, which would react with the acid to produce a foaming effect.

(My only fear is that the three chemical reactions would interact, with the products reacting with each other. I'll have to consult a chemist before attempting this in a live demonstration...)

The best part? There'll be this soggy cardboard box foaming, with acidic mud bubbling out onto the floor -- how do you clean it up? That's the same question facing the EPA at the real-life pit site, a toxic lake.

This isn't for Studio, but I'm Posting It Here Anyway

This is for my "Design and Education" course.

Cognitivism

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"The Week" (Day 5)

More field research. This time I had my friend Eddie play with burying things in the dirt / place cardboard.

He didn't seem to like the idea of touching dirt with his bare hands -- his hands will get dirty! -- but once he started and embraced the idea, he readily experimented with dirt. At this point I'm glad I didn't choose perlite, because even with the potting soil Eddie was accidentally flinging some out of the box in his digging frenzy. Perlite, being exceedingly dusty, would've been a disaster.

I'm against providing gloves for players though. Living in a snow-filled frozen cesspool of a city, I haven't seen dry dirt in a while, so playing with dirt -- touching it with bare hands -- is a relatively novel sensation. It's kind of like some sort of communion with nature, I suppose?

Before I was thinking the cardboard would serve as some sort of impervious surface to stop the other player from digging, but in-practice the digging player will always use so much force that they rip the cardboard out of the ground. Now I'm thinking that it can instead serve as some sort of trap -- when the other player tries to dig forcefully, they end up caving in all the surrounding dirt around them, which compromises their mining operation and they have to dig more to excavate the minerals.

The interaction is getting more interesting now, I think...

"The Week" (Day 4)

I've played around with the game design and done some field research with friends / peers.

Here's what I'm thinking for a new type of game:

Three players. They alternate between roles. The goal is to get as many points from all 3 rounds as possible.

• Role 1: The Earth. You place the precious minerals (bottle caps) and the impermeable rock (cardboard). You get points based on how many bottle caps don't get found. And something about toxic waste.
• Role 2: The Town / Labor Unions. You place houses on the surface. These houses can't get buried or moved. You get points based on how many digs the company does + how many houses aren't polluted by toxic waste. If you place toxic waste in a
• Role 3: The Mining Co. You mine for minerals. For every bottlecap you mine, you can place one toxic waste. You can stop at anytime you want.

... so now we have this sort of player generated architecture, of pits and impermeable rock and walls and houses. I'm not sure how I can connect it to narrative: maybe there's a different ending based on who comes in 1st / 2nd / 3rd? For example, if Mining = 1st, Unions = 2nd, Earth = 3rd, then it is largely the same as the fate that befell Butte, Montana; the company leaves, the unions leave but they're poor and weak, and the Earth is full of toxic waste.

I'm thinking the toxic waste can be green chalk -- and for the grand finale, I pour water into the pits that the mining company dug, and so the water turns green like a polluted lake.

"The Week" (Day 3)

I've built a cardboard prototype. It might not look like much, but it took a while to find the right box / the right plastic lining / the right dirt.

First I spent an hour at the local hardware store trying to find the right kind of dirt. (Why use plastic beads when you can just use dirt?) I was thinking about using perlite because it was coarse and dry enough to roll down into pits that players dig, but the gardening dude advised against it because it was white (dirt usually isn't white) and it was really dusty. I ended up getting some potting soil, thinking that would be crumbly enough for my initial design. It wasn't.

So now that I've done some actual prototyping, I'm realizing that I have to re-visit my original design and changes the ruleset. In game design, we usually just play around with the materials to see what interesting interactions emerge, then try to build rules that promote those interactions. We'll see what happens I guess.

"The Week" (Day 2)

I've started cardboard prototyping for a first iteration.

I built a dump-truck-shaped scooper for players to use. Behold:

I've realized plastic beads are probably a bad choice of material, and totally unnecessary for a first prototype. Now I'm thinking the "dirt" can be small pieces of shredded newspaper (or something like it?) and the "ore" can be beads -- but if so, won't the beads settle to the bottom? I don't want the ore to settle to the bottom... In which case the beads should be the "chemicals"?

I'll be headed down to Chinatown on Friday, so I think I'll go to Canal Plastics and get a handful or two of tiddlywinks (small plastic discs) or something. We'll see? At any rate -- progress!