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Scouts Design Games At The Winter 2016 Balboa Oaks Merit Badge Midway
Several times a year I volunteer at a local merit badge midway to run a workshop for the game design merit badge that I helped to create for the Boy Scouts of America. Last weekend I ran two sessions of my three-hour workshop at the Balboa Oaks Merit Badge Midway in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, and as with every time I’ve run these workshops, I was impressed with the wide variety of games these young men designed.
My workshops always begin with a Socratic-dialog-heavy talk about the various elements that comprise a game, the different ways we can describe a game’s play value (what makes it fun to play), and how intellectual property rights apply to games. I then do an exercise with the boys in making changes to game rules to see what effects those have on players, using set of Spider-Man tic-tac-toe sets. (You’d be amazed at the number of variations on tic-tac-toe the scouts have come up with over the past couple of years). With each of these topics, the scouts satisfy various merit badge requirements.
The more advanced (and most fun) requirements involve the scouts proposing a game concept, and once I approve it, prototyping their game and playtesting it with other scouts.
Here are some of the games the scouts designed last weekend.
Lucky 80
by Spencer, Troop 1
Vision Statement: A 2-8 player dice game in which players roll four die until they get 80.
Play Value: To test peoples luck, and challenge your self to play and test your gambling skills.
Set-Up: 2-8 people can play.
Progression:
- Each player takes turns rolling the four dice and put how many points they got on a sheet of paper
- Each player repeats until one of them reaches 80, but if you roll the dice and they add up to 13 you lose a turn (13 is an unlucky number)
Resolution: The player who gets 80 points wins
Resources: 4 die.
Empire
by Robert, Troop 805
Vision Statement: Empire is a board card for 2-8 players competing to build the best metropolis.
Play Value: Competing against other players, building a city
Set-Up:
- Lay out cards in a rectangle
- Your choose your career: sailor, engineer, soldier, mountains, ocean, each with different abilities
Progression:
- You get 1 Credit every time it’s your turn
- There are 4 types of land forms — Mountain, Ocean, Forest — each with a different cost
- You can gain one of the following items when you take down a different land form — Ammo, Wild Cat, Wild Dog, Damage x2 — each with a different cost and damage
- There are four types of cities — City, Airport, Skyscraper,
- Metropolis — each with a different cost
- There are 8 types of weapons — Combound Bow, Shotgun, Sword, Revolver, Uzi, Long Sword, AK 48, Mini-Gun — each with a different cost, damage and ammo
Resolution:
- When time runs out, the player with the best city wins
Resources: Credits, time, and health
Epic Face Adventure
by Danny, Troop 10
Vision Statement: Epic Face Adventure is a single player electronic game in which the player has to make it through 3 different levels of gameplay without dying
Play Value: Fantasy, jumping and running, killing monsters, getting gold, challenge
Resources: Gold
Hookie
by William, Troop 911
Vision Statement: Hookie is a single player electronic game, where the player avoids school for 20 days (20 levels by finding specific items throughout their house before their parent comes home. The items are designed to help the player convince the parent they are still sick.
Play Value: The game will be enjoyed by kids who like to play hide and seek type games. Players will be challenged to find specific items around the house in a timely manner. They can play solo or against others
Set-Up: Players start in bed on the first day, and are provided a list of items to search for around the house.
Progression: Using the computer arrow keys the player, move about the house. Each level has a time limit of 3 minutes and each day the items become either more difficult to find or more in number.
Resolution: If the parent comes home and the items have not been found they lose. Once they lose 3 times the game resets to level 1.
Resources: Days remaining, items found
Phantom
by Christian, Troop 555
Vision Statement: A player vs. team board game in which the team has to take a treasure from a lost temple while avoiding the single player.
Play Value: This game will be fun because the team has to work together to outsmart the single player and sometimes make amendments to their plans.
Set-Up:
- The single player/Phantom decides where the treasure is and where he starts.
- The team/explorers shuffles their cards and takes six of them while still having their own condition cards (condition cards are two-sided cards with one side saying awake the other saying possessed. Explorers can use these to keep track of who’s awake and who’s possessed.)
Progression (Explorers):
- The explorers have 50 turns to take the treasure and bring it out of the temple
- The turns go: 1st explorer, 2nd explorer, …, and Phantom
- The explorers use cards and dice to move or they can stay/rest and draw 2 new cards
- A player can pass/wake another explorer that is possessed
- Once the treasure is taken, the explorers have to get out of the temple as fast as they can
- The explorers can pass each other and give the treasure
Progression (Phantom):
- The Phantom has to stop the players from getting away with the treasure
- The Phantom uses a 6-sided die to get around and can go through walls
- The Phantom can pass/possess explorers, putting them under his/her control
- The Phantom moves the possessed after his turn using a 6-sided die
Resolution:
- The game ends when the team escapes,all are possessed, or the explorers run out of moves
- If the explorer makes it out with the treasure they win; otherwise, the Phantom wins
Resources: pawns, cards, treasure
Red Square
by Jonghun, Troop 1
Vision Statement: Red Square is a single-player electronic game in which the player is a e: red square that must avoid blue balls and collect yellow coins to reach the end of each level.
Play Value: Challenge
Set-Up: The player spawns in at the beginning of the level as a red square.
Progression: The player uses arrow keys to avoid blue balls and collect yellow coins.
Resolution: The player must reach the end of each level.
Resources: Coins
As always, the scouts were very inventive, given the limited resources and time they had available. Even better, they were not only proud of the games they made, they really enjoyed playing other scout’s games. After all, as I explained to them, creating fun experiences for others to enjoy is what game design is all about.
How Stage Magic Influenced My Career
On Saturday night, we attended a taping of the CW television show Masters of Illusion. They tape the show five nights in a row, and then edit it all into 12 episodes that will appear in the summer. After we arrived and sat down, one of the ushers decided to relocate our party to the front row, where the cameramen did close-up shots of us to use as audience reaction shots throughout the season. Then the host, Dean Cain, who I best know as Superman in Lois And Clark, taped all twelve of his openings and closings. Later, we were surprised and excited to see our friend magician David Blatter of David and Leeman happened to be on stage that night doing their always-wonderful magic act. Toward the end of the evening, magician Naathan Phan invited me onstage to strap him into a straightjacket that he soon escaped from while singing. All in all, a magical night!
I’ve been interested in magic since childhood, when I read a biography of the magician Houdini, famous for his escapes from handcuffs, safes, and straightjackets — just like in the magic act I participated in this weekend. At the age of ten, I took a magic class taught on weekends at the local park, and soon I was buying Harry Blackstone, Jr. and Marshall Brodien magic kits at the toy store so that I could do magic on my own. I eventually started reading magic books and magazines so that I could construct my own apparatus, and when I saved up enough of my allowance, traveled down to Bert Wheeler’s Magic Shop in Hollywood to buy professional quality equipment. On weekends I would put on magic shows for the neighborhood kids, accompanied by music I had recorded on a tape recorder. My signature trick was pouring milk, flour, and the contents of an egg into an empty paper bag, and when I tore the bag open, there were cookies inside!
My interest in performing magic waned when I went into college and discovered another type of magical device — the computer — which transported me into the realm of video game development. However, I carried forward much of what I learned about performing magic into my work as a video game designer.
Magic routines are all based around trickery — sleight of hand, hidden doors, and other forms of deception — to convince the audience that they are perceiving something other than what they are actually seeing. This requires the magician to call the audience’s attention away from the reality of the trick and focus elsewhere so that the illusion can occur. However, to truly engage the audience and get them to fully suspend their disbelief, the magician must also be a good storyteller — employing what magicians call “patter” — to keep the experience interesting, entertaining, and move the plot of the magic trick along.
This is something we need to do in games a well. Games also require a willing suspension of disbelief from the player, since game designers want players to become immersed in the game, believing that the characters they are portraying and the situations they are in are real. However, as realistic as computer graphics are becoming, there is always some trickery involved in creating that virtual reality, and game designers need to divert the player’s attention away from the flaws that break the illusion. Good storytelling can play a part in that, focusing attention on a part of the part of the experience that is important for the players to remember, or more importantly, to perceive.
When creating a game, I am mindful of that fact that I am creating an illusion, and an imperfect one at that. Therefore, I must use whatever tricks are at my disposal — story, dialog, music, visual effects and interaction — to convince my players that they are experiencing something more than what they are actually seeing.
Writing about this, I’m tempted to take up my magic act again. I never lost my interest in magic, and magicians always have been a part of my life. One of the customers at the computer store I worked in was close-up magic expert Al Goshman. When When my wife and I were dating, we took a magic course together, the final class of which was held at The Magic Castle, the famous club for magicians in Hollywood. I’ve been lucky enough to see Harry Blackstone, Jr., David Copperfield, and Penn and Teller perform live. In fact, I once had a phone call with Penn about possibly doing a game project together when I was a producer at Disney Computer Software, but unfortunately the talks never went anywhere. I did do a game project with filmmaker Jeff Blyth, who is also an amateur magician, and he was kind enough to invite us one evening to the Magic Castle, where he is a member. Now, one of my wife’s fellow high school teachers is David Blatter, who as I mentioned above, is also a member of David and Leeman, a magic team that has appeared on America’s Got Talent as well as the Masters of Illusion show we saw taped.
After posting on Facebook that I saw him perform on Saturday, David wrote back that it’s never too late for me to return to magic myself. Perhaps I will. Now that I’m a teacher myself at The Los Angeles Film School, maybe I can also figure out a way to incorporate magic into my classroom. If I can get all my students to stay awake during my Game Production lectures, that would really be a trick!
David Mullich 