Category: Switching the Current – game design blog

After a few weeks discussing what this game is really about, it’s time to realise what’s in my head and playtest it on October 20 at Linköping University (sign up here to join us – it’s played the old-fashioned way, i.e. on-site and face-to-face). In this post, I’ll tell you a little bit more about how I work as a game designer and also what I’ve learned about working in game design processes involving a team of experts and stakeholders.

For those of you who read my last post, I’ll just add that it generated some really excellent feedback from my team, which resulted in me reading e.g. Hagens (2020). This provided an overview of the issue the game will be dealing with, and gave me a better idea of the scope of the energy system and the changes it may undergo during the game. For the first playtest, we’ll restrict ourselves to the parts of the game in which populations interact with energy distributors for fossil fuels, biofuels, and electricity, who in turn interact with energy producers. Although this is only a very small – and very likely the easiest – part of the game, it will likely prove difficult enough for the players and control team to deal with. The objective will be to give me a fair understanding of how players handle the kind of game mechanics I’m imagining us using in the final game, and I believe this will also give my colleagues an opportunity to learn more about what kinds of negotiations and interactions this level of detail give rise to.

When I design board games, I have an idea (which may come to me suddenly or growing glacially slow over periods of months or even years), which is then followed by sketching, often on a classic paper notepad. What’s in that sketch varies – sometimes it’s a map with game pieces strewn over it, sometimes the structure of the game round or some mechanic – but what never varies is that there are always (huge) gaps that need to be filled in. It seems my mind can only do so much abstract work without losing track of things and, at times, several sketching rounds are needed, during which the game idea changes (sometimes radically). In the end, there’s really only one way to fill in the gaps enough to come close to the structure of a playable game: constructing game pieces.

This is the point where I’m at now – in fairness, however, I’ve already been doing some of this for weeks now. What I’ve learned since I designed my first megagame together with Ola Leifler and Ola Uhrqvist three years ago is that a clear understanding of what the game is about can almost only be reached by sitting everyone (i.e. the experts and stakeholders connected to the game) down and drawing the structure of the game on e.g. a (digital) whiteboard (such as Miro) along with some game pieces to represent key features.

In my experience, discussing things without the assistance of drawing leads mostly to abstract discussions and people stating (often over and over, as if they are likely themselves making up their minds as they speak) what they want the game to be about or what it should do – often in theory or very abstract terms. This is valuable in the beginning of a research project, but until the team sit down and sketch together, I find that the understanding of each individual differs quite a lot from the others, which is very confusing in the game design process. Thus, for my next project (which just so happens to be the Changing the Game of Consumption megagame), I’ll get to sketching a lot faster in order to allow the project participants to create a joint understanding of what the game we’re creating is really about.

As for how my brain works, it cannot create clarity when viewing all parts of the game simultaneously, i.e. from a birds-eye view, and so I need to delve into making game pieces to get to grips with how the game really works. This process is really the same as someone setting about untangling a heap of yarn: they pick a thread, any thread, and follow it for as long as they can without getting stuck. When they do, they pick up another thread and repeat the process. After following a fair amount of threads in this way, I’m usually able to take step back and see the structure of the game in a new light – it may even be that a structure has emerged that was not there before.

What I imagine myself doing when I throw myself into making game pieces is putting myself in the shoes of the player and seeing the game at ‘ground level’, from the perspective of those who are going to play it. If I have a certain game piece placed in this position and tied to this kind of action, what options am I left with as a player standing in the room by this table, looking out over a sea of people? Will I be so engrossed in understanding my options and meticulously planning the perfect move that I will lose sight of the focus of the game? Will I realise that I need to talk to a number of people to make sense of what’s really going on, understanding which actions and resources I have access to and how to use them to survive the round?

This work is both intensely enjoyable and very frustrating, and it takes a lot of time, some of which is spent realising that all I’ve done so far is not going to work. Also, it is best done on my own. I find that discussing the game with others should be done in relation to more or less complete parts of the game (or when completely out of ideas), as such discussions inevitably lead to taking a step back and looking at the overarching theme/goal of the game, which is less than productive when creating/modifying existing game pieces and making sense of how they fit together. This is my current view, and it may well be that it changes over the coming months and years of game design.

Those are my thoughts looking up from a number of hours creating game pieces and fitting them together to make a game – in my next blog post, I’ll likely discuss some thoughts that have popped up during the week and after presenting and discussing the prototype to my team.

In this post I’ll first deal with the three design directions that I outlined in an earlier post and then go on to an attempt at formulating the main real-world issue that I believe we’re trying to get at with the game. This is surely not the final wording, but it may be enough to actually complete the first version of the game, which we’re going to playtest this autumn (sign up here if you want to participate – the form is in Swedish, however, and in case this stops you from signing up, please let me know).

Over the past week, I’ve pursued the three design directions and tried to make a basic megagame out of each one of them. This endeavour has been less than successful, and the reason is that each one of them all failed to encompass the entirety of the issue we’re trying to get at with this game in a different way, which meant that each time I realised that I was indeed creating a whole new game. This in itself isn’t a problem (Wallman even mentioned in his series of blog posts this would be the case), and through this exploration I found that I was still struggling to define the main real-world issue on which I am to base the game.

In the case of the Power Grid board game, the definition of energy as ‘electricity’ and leaving out the need for/consumption of electricity/energy made the scaffolding provided by the game too narrow to make it useful – this isn’t a game primarily about producing and distributing electricity/energy in competition with other companies, but about a society trying to get to grips with its reliance on an unsustainable energy system. As for building a game directly on the model energy system created by a member of our team, this included both the production/transfer and consumption of multiple types of energy (electricity, various fuels/gas) connected to data on expected behaviours of individuals, which meant that the society that the energy system was set to provide for is invisible. The opposite was true for the Climate Change Megagame, which is primarily about deciding which parts of society that are to be changed in order to reach a carbon-free society by 2050, and thus leaves out the matter of energy or – more precisely – leaves it to be handled by invisible mechanisms such as the ‘market principle’ or ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ reasoning.

What dawned on me as I studied these three games was that the megagame we’re constructing needs to – in addition to making energy the main concern on which all other, environmental or otherwise, depend – take into account the whole of the energy system, not just the parts of that I – and likely most people – normally think about. Energy is so fundamental as to make it difficult to think of as a separate entity, and so in our everyday lives we very often do so only in terms of electricity, gas, and various types of fuels. This is one conception we should be challenging, so that players become aware of all the energy produced and expended by the role they are playing, wherever and however this takes place. Otherwise, players are likely to repeat the mistakes of the past and in so doing we risk perpetuating the misconceptions about the energy system on our planet that led to the situation we’re currently in rather than give people a chance to see it in a different light and get innovative about solving problems related to it after playing our game.

The problem became even more apparent as I attempted to create a game based on what I had learned. After sketching up the traditional parts of the energy system – transportation of people and goods, heating of houses and food, and powering industrial production processes – which are indeed very easily represented in a game (sourcing, production, distribution, consumption), and began working on consumption goods/food and building of vehicles/houses, I noticed that I automatically changed focus from energy to which raw materials were used, how much of a carbon footprint was created, and what kind of environmental impact would be involved. I found that I was unable to understand how to approach e.g. the purchase of a cheap flashlight from an energy point of view – the complexity of trying to figure out the steps in which to get to grips with how something as mundane as a one-dollar trinket came into being in terms of energy was simply baffling to my mind.

However, I understood that this was something I could not simply hand-wave and leave for later, as it stands at the very centre of the main real-world issue we’re trying to get at: a sustainable energy system – for the entire planet, not just the parts we arbitrarily select to look at. From a game-design perspective it would in my opinion be ridiculous to expect players of a game about the transition of the energy system to a sustainable one to not question the fact that consumption goods appear in stores each turn from outside the game, are sold by business players to satisfy the demands of population players, and are then incinerated to produce heat and electricity to be used by industrial players and population players. I found myself asking where this (almost magical) resource came from, where the energy required to create it was expended, and – perhaps more to the point – who were so kind as to supply it in endless amounts whenever we asked them to (by way of giving them money)? Was it part of an exchange of energy of some sort, so that we give them (or someone in a multi-partner trade deal) an equal amount of energy in return? These questions are crucial in understanding what we’re trying to do here:

Understanding the sustainability of the energy system in light of all of the energy imported, exported, produced, and consumed by the people represented by the different roles in the game.

This way of seeing the issue means that consumer goods and food cannot be treated as separate parts of the game, and that buying a car made abroad or building a house does not primarily mean expending ‘resources’ but energy. With this, the game will most likely move into disputed territory by making use of some rather broad generalisations that may not sit well with everybody – but this is one thing that I find that games are good at, i.e. help us traverse bridges that are too narrow for our everyday shoes or too weak to support the weight of our preconceptions of things. It will most likely involve (Swedish) players facing the fact that they are used to having at their command a vast amount of energy that they need not be overly concerned about spending as there is (very nearly) always more where it came from, all but free of charge.

For my next blog post, I’ll be going into how the talks I’ll have with my colleagues – who are far more knowledgeable in all things energy than I – will impacted the design of the game. Unless I’m simply too busy designing the first playtest session to write, in which case I’ll update you on that event and what was learned.

With all the games I’ve designed so far, there has come a moment when all (or at least some) of the basic tenets of the game suddenly become utterly clear. This may sound suspiciously like an epiphany, but I would say that it is more of a decision, reached through hours and days of sifting information, listening to other’s ideas, and failed attempts at drawing up lists of the things I’d like to see in the game. Nor does it mean that I’ve drawn up a comprehensive plan, so that the rest of the process is simply a matter of putting in a number of hours of design and playtesting to make this grand idea into reality. On the contrary, I often find that what this stage of the process is mostly about is my brain catching up to what has been evident (to many others) all along. I suspect this is the case here, so please bear with me.

The game will be about negotiating the allocation of available energy in light of the fact that our supply of energy isn’t unlimited.

This very basic – and to be fair, even crude – statement is the sum of the realisations about the energy system and the world in general I’ve made over the past few weeks. I’ll list them below, not only for you to marvel at the size of the stone I’ve been living under for most of my life, but to clarify my thinking regarding the basic tenets for the game that I’ve put down at the end of this blog post.

The first realisation I made was that the real problem with the current energy system is that much of our current use of fossil fuels, and indeed some of the ‘renewable’ energy types as well, can in fact be compared to using our/the world’s savings to pay for an ever-increasing consumption of everyday products rather than investments meant to yield higher returns later on. The second was that the word ‘transition’ is mostly used (and thus understood) in the context of from which sources we will obtain our energy in the future, rather than addressing our use of energy in terms of scale of consumption and who is given access to energy. The third was that when we say that energy has been ‘saved’, this often means that we have managed to shift energy consumption from one part of the process to another, and that the amount of energy consumed is roughly the same on the whole.

The fourth realisation emerged from the combination of the facts that we expect our children to lead not just comparable but better lives than we do, and that most people consider a fair reward for a hard day’s work to be something that requires energy to make, such as a bag of crisps, a hot shower, a new sweater, or a weekend in a nearby city. This means that any vision of the future in which people are expected to work as much as we do and be rewarded (or even compensated) with access to less energy than we currently are appears utterly undesirable to most people’s minds – it simply doesn’t fit with our expectations on life. In my opinion, this isn’t extraordinary in any way, but part of being human: I imagine that, throughout history, people have been expecting more of life for both themselves and their children (call it hope, if you will) – what’s changed over the last hundred years or so is that quite a few of those people have been able to use Earth’s vast supply of fossil energy to get (some) of the things they were asking for. Being children of our time, the only thing that separates us from our pre-fossil-fuel-using ancestors is that we’re less used to being refused when we ask life (and society) for more than our parents had.

The implications for the game are these: when it begins (in the 2020s), the population has a lifestyle that consumes a certain amount of energy either directly (e.g. fuel for driving cars and heating houses) or indirectly (e.g. transportation of goods to the country/stores/houses, production of goods/food, building of housing, healthcare, community services). No actions can be taken in the game without allocation of energy – money is simply the grease to make the wheels go round, nothing more. This means that e.g. eliminating all private cars in the game without making any other changes will only force players to allocate more energy to public transportation and delivery services, as the distance people and goods/food must travel to be consumed has not changed. This also applies to shifting production of goods/food from global to local in order to avoid spending energy on long-distance transportation between production sites and stores/houses – this means more energy must instead be allocated to the sourcing and transporting of raw materials and powering of production facilities. At the end of the game, players will realise that their success should really be assessed based on their access to energy, which is not necessarily related to the amount of money they have.

To my mind, this game is meant to address what I refer to as the ‘slippery aspect’ of the problem that the energy system is set up to solve – unless players become aware of the assumption inherent in the game – i.e. that a perceived need for energy not automatically means that the world should produce more energy so that we can have what we want, which is to say more than our parents had – and actively attempt to change this, they will spend most of the game shifting the problem around rather than dealing with it. As for the strategy of relying on technological development and the possibility of solving the problem through increased energy efficiency without having to make any changes to consumption patterns, it will certainly be available in the game. Taking this path will, however, require spending energy on researching these new solutions and investments to make them available to the public, as well as running the risk of technology not being available when needed – in my view, expecting results from research the way one does from factory production is akin to gambling, however high the odds of failure are. Else, players are looking at a future that will either be considerably warmer (small or no changes in energy consumption patterns) or very restricted in terms of individual freedom (severe cuts in the use of non-renewable fuels).

Based on this, I’ve formulated some basic tenets for the game:

• The primary currency in the game will be energy. Money will be used primarily to facilitate trade and may be useless to players in many situations.
• The game will be based on a status-quo system, meaning that at the start of the game all energy will be allocated based on the current consumption pattern and during the game players will negotiate changes to the allocation rather than spend their time buying and selling energy.
• Populations will be very sensitive to changes in lifestyle and, unless radical action is taken during the game, will expect to be able to consume more energy, i.e. have access to more energy and/or enjoy a higher energy-to-consumption ratio, at the end of the game.
• Individuals’ desire for independence/personal freedom will be the main problem facing all attempts to increase energy efficiency based on them forming communities/collectives in order to share resources.
• Populations will initially expect all deficiencies (of energy and otherwise) that they suffer to be handled by the local authorities to handle, which will involve allocation of energy.
• Politicians will have the power to declare the direction society/populations should ideally be moving in, but are limited to persuading other players to do things, even their own agencies/authorities.
• Businesses will be faced with the Fishbanks dilemma: if they make more money now, they may make no money later – however, if they do not cater to the needs of the population now, they may not be around to enjoy their profits later.

So far, so good – next I’ll go on to see what this means in terms of the three design directions I outlined in an earlier post.

Next week, I will begin design of the game along the three approaches I mentioned in my last post, and before then I need to develop my understanding of what kind of game I’m supposed to design. Not only in the sense of what kind of game it’s supposed to be – it’s already been decided that I’m creating a megagame – but more specifically what part of reality it’s supposed to reflect (and to what degree) and what playing the game will mean for those involved. In this case, access to what I will here refer to loosely as a ’design brief’ is extremely useful – not only will it facilitate making design decisions, but it will also reduce the number of times the game needs to be (more or less completely) redesigned after receiving feedback from my team. There is no formal design brief handed to me by the project, nor have we included the drawing up of one in the project structure – I find this situation to be less than ideal as I stand ready to begin the design process, and so will take this insight with me to my next project, which just happens to be the Changing the Game of Consumption megagame, which I also blog about (a link will be added once I’ve published my first post). In the meantime, I’ll draw up a design brief on my own based on what I’ve learned so far and ask my team for feedback.

This research project started in November 2021 and has thus been running for a little less than a year. During this time, the nine-person project team has undertaken a literature review and a gap analysis, as well as spent quite a few hours discussing what each of us see this game being about. Being a game designer in a group of scholars, my priority has been to listen in order to learn as much as I can about the topic (energy systems and their transition from unsustainable to sustainable) and keep an open mind so as not to dismiss any ideas that may prove useful later on. I’ve made a tonne of notes along the way, which I’ve now revisited in an effort to put together a design brief in the form of a list of things that should be in the game. I plan on using this list to assess the outcome of my work and help me stay on track during the design process, as well as show it to the members of my team in order to receive feedback and make course corrections in my work.

The items on the list below consist of things that the members of my team have expressly stated they believe should be included in the game and things that I think should be included based on discussions between various team members and my experience. This is simply the first version of theis list, and it may well be updated when my team read it and provide me with feedback:

• The game should include mechanics for manipulating a simplified model of the Swedish energy system over time in order to receive results that affect both individual/groups of players and the game as a whole.
• Players should be able to take on roles that they are not trained for outside of the game, thus providing them with an opportunity to explore the transition of the energy system from a different angle than they would in real life.
• Players should experience the effects of both their own and all players’ collective actions and be forced to adapt strategies and actions to a continually developing situation.
• The game should be constructed so as to inspire players to experiment with new ideas in a setting that is similar but not identical to the reality they face outside of the game.

Looking at it, I realise that the list is quite abstract and say very little about what mechanics to use or level of difficulty/requirements on preparation. Also, I’m guessing that quite a few of the people on my team feel that it leaves out important things that they want to see in the game or feel that they have contributed in our discussions. This is precisely why I made it – to get the discussion going and benefit by the power of the fantastic minds I work with. In my experience, being a game designer is less about being a rock star and more about serving as a secretary on a committee of highly skilled professionals: I ask them a question, then listen carefully to what they say and note all the ideas that come up, both the ideas they have and those that crop up in my mind as I listen to them.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the thoughts that my team have offered and try to say something of how I receive and integrate feedback in the design process.

In my very first post, I briefly presented myself and the Switching the Current project and stated the aim of this blog on megagame design: it’s part open research journal, part invitation to contribute with thoughts and ideas to the game design process. In this post, I’ll go into the choices made and dilemmas faced at the very beginning of the design process, i.e. where to start.

I’ll begin by admitting one of my flaws as a game designer (and elsewhere): when I do something new, I have a tendency to invent the wheel – even when I’m well aware there’s plenty of experience to draw upon. When researching what later became the Climate Change Megagame (CCM), I listened to Episode 2 of the Last Turn Madness: a podcast about Megagames in which Jim Wallman discussed megagames. Had I been anyone but myself, I would have immediately googled and found Wallman’s four-post guide to ‘Megagame Design The Easy Way’ that he wrote just six months before I began to wrestle with the megagame format in earnest. Being who I am, I instead opted to start from scratch having studied Urban Nightmare: State of Chaos and attended a playtest session of Event Horizon by megagame designer Johan Olofsson of Gothenburg Megagames. This choice took me and my fellow game designers on a long and winding journey that began with a highly detailed board game (a genre which I’m more familiar with and which grew impossibly complex already at 20 players in September 2019, via three playtests of increasingly less complex versions in late 2019 and early 2020, to a complete overhaul in the summer of 2020 and ultimately to the relatively playable (but far from perfect) online version of the CCM that was played by 45 players (roughly half of what it was designed for) in November 2020.

The lesson I learned during this journey is explained in a few lines by Wallman in his guide: start with an existing (board or computer) game and develop it into a megagame. Before worrying about copyright infringements, rest assured that the resulting megagame won’t look anything like the original – by the time it’s been scaled up to host dozens or even hundreds of players, it’s certain to be quite unrecognisable even to the designers of the original game. Wallman provides three excellent examples of this process and in my future posts I will explain how I’ve utilised his advice – here, I’ll simply note that I’ve learned my lesson: it is far, far easier to start out the process of designing a megagame with an existing game (or any other kind of structure, e.g. a computer model or an organisational chart) as a scaffold.

For the current design process, this meant that the very first choice to be made was not whether or not to use a scaffold, but which game or other structure to use as a scaffold. I decided on presenting my research team with three potential approaches that I will develop side by side in the months to come – my idea was that additional approaches would have required too much effort from both me and my team and fewer would have limited the scope of the design process already at the outset. I will continually evaluate each approach to determine if it’s interesting in terms of achieving the goals of our research project, and eventually arrive at a single design approach by elimination and merging of approaches.

The three approaches that I currently pursue are:

• Adapting the Power Grid board game by Friedemann Friese
• Redesigning the CCM to place its focus on the transition of the energy system
• Creating a megagame based on a model of the Swedish energy system that is currently being constructed by members of my team, primarily Associate Professor Lena Buffoni at the Department of Computer and Information Science at Linköping University

The first approach has the advantage of being a well-known game about a national energy system, albeit focusing exclusively on electricity and not going into details regarding who the energy consumers are and what they want. In this choice I was inspired by Wallman’s development of the Sengoku megagame that was based on the classic board game Shogun by Dirk Henn. After I’ve populated the megagame version with 50-100 players it’s very likely that there’s much of the original game left – however, I consider it an interesting starting point as the original game design will suggest both which player groups are essential (producers, suppliers and consumers of energy) and which aspects of reality have been removed in order to make the board game playable (civic society, land use, politics).

The second approach has the advantage of already being a megagame for 80+ players and having been built to simulate a geographic area (the county of Östergötland in southeast Sweden). The drawback with this approach is that, due to the complex nature of the energy system, it was intentionally simplified during the design process so as not to steal the attention of the players from other parts of the game. Thus, the transition of the energy system that we wish to focus on in the Switching the Current megagame is more or less invisible in the current version of CCM, as it is implicit in almost every part of the game. However, as much of the logic of a megagame is already present, an attempt at redesigning it to focus on the energy system should be well worth the effort.

The third option originated in the fact that the Switching the Current project has a simulation component, attempting to ascertain if and how computer simulations can be used to support playing megagames – I simply asked myself if it is possible to design a megagame based on the computer model that it is supposed to support. This would be quite complicated if the computer model was entirely based on the megagame itself, but as it is currently being developed with the aim to simulate the energy system in Sweden, I plan on basing the design of the megagame on the model of the energy system and then let the game design process inform the development of the computer model. However, as the model is in it’s early phases of development, this approach will have to wait until later this year before I begin to develop it.

With this, I’ve outlined the three paths I have chosen for the game design process. In my next post, I’ll be going into the ‘game design brief’ that I’ll get from my team after they’ve held workshops and interviews with some stakeholders based on a presentation of two of the three design approaches.