Matthieu Castelli, C4M

The Concept

Our group set out to explore the design space that occurs when many players are gathered in a single space. Examples include: the audience at a stadium event, moviegoers waiting in a theater before the film begins, etc. There have been repeated attempts to provide entertainment experiences for people who are forced to wait, but the game produced in these scenarios typically fall into a problematic mechanic we refer to as a “voting mechanic.” Our goal was to make a game that would actually be fun for the crowd given the realities of large scale colocated play.

Our first step in this process was to define exactly what we meant by many colocated players. Obviously, crowds can range wildly in number and proximity. The crowd size could range from a dozen people in a queue to a Superbowl crowd of thousands. Also, the space the players occupy could be contained, such as a waiting room, or scattered in a location, such as throughout a museum.

We feel that any of the options above present interesting game design challenges, We chose to focus on a more specific set of problems. We assume that the players will all be present in the same space and not scattered throughout a larger space. This meant that players would all be in the same area, largely looking at the same thing, and able to see the entirety of the game playing population. The number of players was set to groups from 20 to 2000 people with an eye towards games which would scale gracefully between these numbers.

Identifying the Problems

Our next step was to investigate why games of this type have historically been difficult to make. While there have been some interesting implementations of games involving trivia or other interactions, the majority of games in this space have fallen into the broad category which we termed "voting games". In these games, all the players contribute individual selections to choose something. These votes are then tallied and thrown into various buckets, and eventually, a single choice is made by the collection of all players' selections. Voting may be used to decide the answer to a question, the movement of an on-screen avatar, or the selection of a path through an environment.

The group recognized, and it is generally recognized, that these voting games are not fun. Analyzing how voting mechanics work, we found some specific problems include the lack of the following critical elements:

1. Impact – When voters choose an option, they are just one of many people contributing to a large pool. It is very rare that a single vote decides an issue. That means that any one voter does not have much effect on the outcome. In a successful game, players need to feel that they are impacting the whole group.
2. Relevance – This lack of impact also leads to a lack of relevance in the game. If the player’s choice has no effect on the game, then there’s no reason for the player to play at all. Players need to feel that they are individually affecting their own score, etc.
3. Fame – Voting anonymizes all of the participants. While this is absolutely necessary to fair voting, it also means that no voter is ever showcased or identified by the game for achievement. In a good game, Individual players should be featured by the game and have little moments of fame. Most importantly, they should leave the game with memories of specific experiences in the game where they felt effective.
4. Socialization – Due to the need for secrecy, voting is a solitary activity, despite the large number of people participating. We think it is essential that players feel that they are in a space with other people and that being there matters.
5. Interesting Choices – Voting generally involves binary or one-dimensional choices. Good games rarely involve such limited options. Players should have several different types of choices, not just multiple similar actions.
6. Varying Participation – Regardless of one’s enthusiasm or investment in the system, voting only allows one kind of participation: casting the vote. Games should accommodate various levels of engagement from players and non-players in the space, so that more dedicated players can gain more form the experience.
7. Strategic Complexity – The one-dimensionality of voting also means that there is no opportunity to create gameplay depth. Players should be making interesting choices in the game such that they can form strategies and been able to plan their actions.
8. Identification – Voting takes place in a void. While voters know what actions they took, they have no sense of the overall status of the system. In a good game, it should be easy for players to identify themselves in the game and where they are on the system so that this information can influence their play.

In addition to the problems with traditional approaches to our setting, we also decided on some constraints that we felt were important to a game involving this many people in a contained space. The constraints allowed us to focus our design explorations and narrowed the problem set, giving us a nice box in which we could think creatively.

The constraints we identified as important in this space were:

1. Spectacle – The game should be fun to watch, even if you're not an active participant. This gives something to entertain even non-players.
2. Drop In / Out – Players should be able to freely join or leave the game. This accounts for the fact that players are not in the space specifically to play the game, so they are likely to have a very light connection to it.
3. Venue-Based – The game should only be able to be played effectively in these kinds of spaces. We want the setting to be essential to the experience. Otherwise, you could simply play a mobile or internet game instead.
4. Intuitive – The rules of the game should be easy to grasp in a very short amount of time. Again, as people did not come to the space to play a game, they cannot be expected to be interested in learning complex instructions.
5. Automated – The game should be able to run without a human mediator, allowing it to be a consistent experience across several locations.
6. Short Sessions – Each round of the game should be brief to accommodate late comers and light engagement.
7. Accommodate Griefers – Griefers will exist in the space, and we must accommodate this. The game should either actively prevent griefing, or it should allow griefing to exist in relatively harmless ways.
8. Clumping – Players will arrive in various-sized groups and should be allowed to play together. This shouldn’t be necessary to play, but it would be ideal if players who arrived alone could play by themselves and players with friends could all play together.

We began approaching the design process by defining a specific use case for these games. Our case study is set in a movie theater in the twenty minutes before the movie starts. We choose this case because it fits within all of our initial considerations and because it represents a genuine setting that would be interested in this kind of game experience. Currently, the entertainment in a movie theater before the movie starts is limited and not engaging, so a better activity would make the entire movie experience more fun.  

The choice of the movie theater brought us some further assumptions about the play of the game. Initially, very few people will be in the theater, and they will be spaced out quite a bit. As more people come into the space, the density of players will increase, though not all of the people in the theater will be playing. In fact, many of the people in the theater will have no interest in the game at all. Players will routinely be coming into and out of the game.

The parameters of this movie theater case study are as follows:

• The game begins 5-20 minutes prior to the show as the audience is drifting in.
• Players should be able in whatever groups they arrived in, whether it’s solo play or in small groups. These groups should be able to play as a small group and grow.
•  The first people to arrive start the game.
• The movie screen will tell the players how to join and encourage them to take part in the game.
• The first round of the game ends fairly quickly. There should be many short rounds of the game before the movie starts.
• As the number of players increases, it will also increase the difficulty, length, or scoring potential of each round of play
• Players should feel connected, and the game should encourage quick, light social interactions.
• Each round should build on the previous rounds either by building on previous results or maintaining previous teams.
• The game’s ending time is variable such that games end at slightly unpredictable time.
• The game is focused on the location of the theater, and requires the players to be present at the theater to play. They cannot play the game from home.
• Each round has a clear winner that is displayed before the whole audience.
• The game ends as the movie experience formally begins.

With this case study in mind, we brainstormed several game designs which we felt would work well in this space. Each of these contains a list of the problems that it solves (of the ones we identified) and the constraints which it fulfills.

Problems Solved:

• Impact
• Relevance
• Fame
• Socialization
• Varying Participation
• Identification

Constraints Fulfilled

• Drop In/Out
• Intuitive
• Automated
• Short Session
• Accommodating Griefers
• Affording Clumping

A grid of letters is shown on screen alongside a word found list. Players interact with their smartphone by selecting letters on the grid to compose words. The rules for word creation are the same as in Boggle. However, the first player to find a given word adds that word to the found word list along with her name. That player earns a certain amount of points based on the length of the word; other players can score that word, but earn less points. The winner is the player with the most points.

Problems Solved:

• Fame
• Socialization
• Varying Participation
• Identification

Constraints Fulfilled

• Venue-Based
• Intuitive
• Automated
• Short Session
• Affording Clumping

Music is played, and the screen displays a variation of a DDR/Rockstar rhythm track. Each player follows a track and taps the beat or visual cues on his smartphone. Each player's score is based on the number of correct taps modified by longest consecutive correct taps. Players are organized into teams and teams score based on the collective scores of its players. Featured players are called out on the winning team as well as the overall high-scoring player.

Problems Solved:

• Relevance
• Fame
• Varying Participation
• Strategic Complexity
• Identification

Constraints Fulfilled

• Drop In/Out
• Intuitive
• Automated
• Short Session
• Accommodating Griefers

Players join by inputting their seat number and are given another player's name as a target. Each round, a player shoots by inputting a seat number. The game gives the player feedback how close and/or in what direction from that hit the target is. Once a player hits his target, he's given a new one. Each hit gives the player points based on how quickly the hit was made, and the player with the most points wins. A clumping version of this game could allow players to recruit any players they hit to their own team, and the winner of the game is the last clump.  

Problems Solved:

• Impact
• Relevance
• Fame
• Socialization
• Varying Participation
• Identification

Constraints Fulfilled

• Spectacle
• Drop In/Out
• Intuitive
• Automated
• Short Session
• Accommodating Griefers

The players are working together to catch a set of thieves that are traveling around the world. The world is represented on the main screen, and players act choosing a location on the globe to search. The moves are submitted through a local device each round. If a player lands within a certain radius of a thief, the crowd is told that player is close and the player moves on her handheld to a more local map to continue the search. To win a level, the entire player base must either catch the one criminal on the lowest-level spot with a certain number of players in the same move, or the players must simultaneously catch a number of criminals on the board. The players who perform the capture are displayed on the screen before the next round. 

Problems Solved:

• Fame
• Socialization
• Varying Participation
• Identification

Constraints Fulfilled

• Spectacle
• Drop In/Out
• Venue-Based
• Intuitive
• Automated
• Short Session
• Accommodating Griefers
• Affording Clumping

4 huge inflated balls are dropped in the audience, representing the Ghosts. A large spotlight illuminating the audience represents Pac-Man. So the audience collectively moves the balls towards the spotlight by passing it from person to person. If a ball is caught in the spotlight, Pac-Man is caught and the players win. The players lose if Pac-man is not caught within a time limit. The game can be expanded with power pellets that the spotlight can capture that make the spotlight dangerous to the balls for a period of time.

After about nine hours of discussion, we came to a few conclusions about designing games in these spaces. Most of these conclusions were drawn from commonalities which we found in many of the designs listed above as well as those in the appendix below.

These conclusions included:

• It is of core importance to preserve each player's impact and relevance in a group setting. The problem with many large scale games is that players don’t feel like they have meaningful moves or any significant effect on the system individually. A successful game must empower individual players.
• The "star" effect is very important in the group setting. The star effect is something which we learned from a couple Walt Disney Imagineering examples and refers to the experience of one person in the audience being singled-out in a positive way. There are two aspects of this which were of primary interest to us:
  • Star Halo – When one person in the audience has been singled-out in a positive way, the other people around her in the audience also feel a little of the "star" feeling. Hitting various individuals in different areas of the audience with allow the star feeling to dissipate throughout the rest of the audience. This was featured in Turtle Talk with Crush at Disneyland and works very well for audiences up to 100 people.
  • Temporary Celebrity – In larger theaters, the star halo doesn't work as well, because of the sheer size of the audience. In this case, one thing which does work well, is the creation of temporary celebrities. As others in the audience see the celebrity elsewhere in the Disney parks, they remember the experience and feel part of that stardom and feel part of it.
• The Star Halo described above is critically important to most of the games we described, and contributes greatly to feelings of impact and relevance.
• Easy access to these games is critically important. Since no one came to play a game, players must be able to instantly recognize and interpret the rules and procedures of the game.
• These games should be tolerant to drop out and non-participation for the same reason
• It is often useful to think of most of the audience as terrain from the individual player's perspective. By this, we mean that the individual player recognizes some, but not all, other players in the audience as actual collaborators or competitors, and the rest of the audience (many of them players) are basically the terrain around which these few players interact. Though not true of all games, this seemed to be a useful perspective to have when thinking about the games we brainstormed.
• Avoiding player elimination is a very good thing. When a player is kicked out of a game, they are bored until the next round. Nearly all of our games avoided this.
• Though automation of the game through technology is not necessary, it definitely allows for the productization of these games. Most of the game concepts which we considered assumed that each player would have an app-enabled smart phone with them in the theater.
• Though we didn't address it much in the game brainstorms we featured due to the limitations of our case study, we definitely believe that each of the venues for large audiences will shape the dynamics of games which will work in those spaces. For example, the perfect game for the crowd awaiting a World Cup match would be very different from the crowd awaiting a movie in a small theater, and it is actually very different from the crowd during half-time at a World Cup match.
• We feel that the creation of broad, light social connections through these games is a very positive thing. These light interactions include cheering together when your team wins, shaking your fist at your competitors, etc. The core of them is that they have momentary meaning and then pass.
• It's worth reiterating that it's very important for individual players to know where they are in the space. Possibilities include:
  • Giving the players a color (usually through their app-enabled device) and representing that color on screen (for games where the players work as a team)
  • Using the player's seat number to identify them. This works well in spaces where the players can be anonymous but their location in the space matters.
  • Allowing the players to log in through their app-enabled devices and allowing them to register or be assigned a nickname.

Soccer Game - Audience members pick an individual player on their phones, and a virtual match is created with actual players from the match which is about to start. When  a virtual player gets the ball, one of the audience members who picked them is randomly selected to pick the player's next move (e.g. pass, shoot, dribble).

Handball of Random Players – A beachball variant, a virtual ball is bounced out to random players’ smartphones and the player has to hit a button to bounce the ball back to the center where a new random player is picked.

Multiseat Tank – Players each have a role in a vehicle that they pilot around a central screen. One player could drive while another shoots weapons. This could be used in a collaborative or a team-based competitive setting.

Worms Across the Theater - This pretty much became the Battleship/Assassin game but included different firing mechanics and weapons.

Spotlight Drawing - A spotlight passes over the audience, and those who it hits hold up a red sign, leaving a trail of red in its wake.

Mister X - One person is picked and must slowly release information about himself. Others try to pick him out of the audience.

Virus – A large scale version of Pandemic, certain players are infected and try to spread their disease around the space while other player spread cures to stop the disease. The winner is the side that eventually takes over the space.

Pit-like Trading Game – Players could have tradable elements on their smartphone that they then trade with other players in the space in real time to try to make sets.

Group Tangrams/Human Tetris - Camera looks at the audience from the perspective of the screen. Players see shapes on the screen which they as the whole audience must make by holding up black or white cards. Scored based on how closely the audience matches the image on screen in a specific time.

Slide Puzzle – Players could be selectively turning their locations on or off to allow an object to move around, or could be passing a set of objects around the space to make a certain shape.

section 6

next section

select a section:
1. Introduction
2. Workgroup Reports Overview
3. Using Games as a Delivery Vehicle for Political and Cultural Messages
4. Making Online Multiplayer a Better Place
5. In Search of Better Narrative in Games
6. Designing Games for Many Colocated Players
7. The Renaissance of Game Designers
8. Schedule & Sponsors