Expanding on your final point, I suppose you could look at the players' forfeiture of the prize money as them losing interest in the victory points. Without going into the commentary you wanted to avoid, I think there's a very interesting consideration of the vast difference between games that do and do not feature monetary rewards. There's an inherent "meta" circle that exists when playing for money in that you're playing for a resource that will presumably continue to help you in the real world (i.e. outside the game and its magic circle). Not only does the game's magic circle have a direct, unbreakable and constant connection to the outside world (that, I would argue, prevents the magic circle from fully forming a solid boundary), but it also affects the players' experience: the amount of victory points (money) matters, and it matters a different amount to different people. This might be comparable to something like a legacy game where you keep some resource reward from game to game, but obviously it goes beyond that.
Casino type games are the obvious example of this phenomenon, but it also has me wondering about traditional games that gain such a competitive following that there becomes an economic basis to allow for rewards. Chess comes to mind as a game that is treated like a sport at a high level in this way. It just has me wondering now about how "external" incentive changes the player psychology and perception of the game, how does it change the experience. Does it automatically break or weaken the magic circle if you're playing at the World Series of Boardgames, for example? Thoughts?
Thanks again for these emails. I really have all my designs on the backburner, but they are making me think of dusting them off.
A few points.
The people running the games in Squid Game were pretty steadfast in keeping the games "fair" so I doubt they would have allowed cookie breakage.
Deok-Su was also breaking the game for a more obvious reason. He knew that the others would eventually do his bidding by sitting and waiting since they didn't want to lose their lives. He leveraged a position that he knew he had, just like many in semi co-ops.
I hate semi co-ops under their current premise. I "tanked" a game because I knew I wasn't going to win under the same premise. I think they are failed designs because of that.
I think there is a better way to do semi co-ops by using those elements in different places besides the winning condition. I have a game on my backburner where there are scoring elements that are handed out when a threshold is met that are BIG points... but they are only handed out to those that contribute to that element's threshold being met. You help to overcome the big monster, you get credit... if you were instead doing something else with your actions, no pie for you. A person in that game is very unable to win if they ignore EVERY monster that comes to play because the points are too big, but they might win if they engage 1 or 2. If everyone ignores the monster, bad things happen to motivate them.
It may not be the cleanest solution to the goal, but I like that way better than playing 2 hours to have someone tank and make a "meh" or "never again" experience.
Expanding on your final point, I suppose you could look at the players' forfeiture of the prize money as them losing interest in the victory points. Without going into the commentary you wanted to avoid, I think there's a very interesting consideration of the vast difference between games that do and do not feature monetary rewards. There's an inherent "meta" circle that exists when playing for money in that you're playing for a resource that will presumably continue to help you in the real world (i.e. outside the game and its magic circle). Not only does the game's magic circle have a direct, unbreakable and constant connection to the outside world (that, I would argue, prevents the magic circle from fully forming a solid boundary), but it also affects the players' experience: the amount of victory points (money) matters, and it matters a different amount to different people. This might be comparable to something like a legacy game where you keep some resource reward from game to game, but obviously it goes beyond that.
Casino type games are the obvious example of this phenomenon, but it also has me wondering about traditional games that gain such a competitive following that there becomes an economic basis to allow for rewards. Chess comes to mind as a game that is treated like a sport at a high level in this way. It just has me wondering now about how "external" incentive changes the player psychology and perception of the game, how does it change the experience. Does it automatically break or weaken the magic circle if you're playing at the World Series of Boardgames, for example? Thoughts?
Thanks again for these emails. I really have all my designs on the backburner, but they are making me think of dusting them off.
A few points.
The people running the games in Squid Game were pretty steadfast in keeping the games "fair" so I doubt they would have allowed cookie breakage.
Deok-Su was also breaking the game for a more obvious reason. He knew that the others would eventually do his bidding by sitting and waiting since they didn't want to lose their lives. He leveraged a position that he knew he had, just like many in semi co-ops.
I hate semi co-ops under their current premise. I "tanked" a game because I knew I wasn't going to win under the same premise. I think they are failed designs because of that.
I think there is a better way to do semi co-ops by using those elements in different places besides the winning condition. I have a game on my backburner where there are scoring elements that are handed out when a threshold is met that are BIG points... but they are only handed out to those that contribute to that element's threshold being met. You help to overcome the big monster, you get credit... if you were instead doing something else with your actions, no pie for you. A person in that game is very unable to win if they ignore EVERY monster that comes to play because the points are too big, but they might win if they engage 1 or 2. If everyone ignores the monster, bad things happen to motivate them.
It may not be the cleanest solution to the goal, but I like that way better than playing 2 hours to have someone tank and make a "meh" or "never again" experience.