The Subject and Scope
Obviously, different types of games have different tensions and require different considerations from designers. To keep the subject and size of this thesis manageable, I restrict most of the case studies and comparisons to a style of Live-Action Roleplaying employed by the MIT Assassins’ Guild, a 20 year old gaming community in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is active both in design and in frequent play. The reasons behind this choice go beyond my personal involvement and familiarity of the group, although having such accessibility to the group’s materials and people has certainly proven to be an advantage. The MIT Assassins’ Guild is highly prolific in the production of games; about a dozen new games are created and played every year, a remarkable number in the field of Live-Action Roleplaying. This group maintains an extensive digital archive of game rules and compendia, which is a valuable resource for source material research. It is also active in refining tools that aid game designers in the implementation of their games. These tools, as we shall see, reinforce existing motifs and tendencies in game design just as much as they intend to accelerate the creation of new games. There is also a significant overlap between the game designers and the game players in the group, which offers an intriguing insight on the question of reception. Most of the prolific designers are also frequent players and the majority of the players who have been involved with the Guild for more than two years have been involved in the design or management of at least one game.
Furthermore, members of the MIT Assassins’ Guild actively discuss mechanics design, often conducting thought-experiments regarding possible variants and alternatives to game mechanics from previous games. Some games are designed specifically for the purposes of testing new ideas and nearly all Guild games put a twist on established game mechanics for the purposes of experimentation. This process of continual iteration and variation produces a wealth of alternative approaches to game design. The subtle differences in these approaches reveal the creative tensions that drive the effort of game design in the MIT Assassins’ Guild, and this thesis takes close looks at the reasons why those tensions exist and at some of the more interesting results produced by the confluence of those tensions.
My approach includes textual analysis of MIT Assassins’ Guild games with an ethnographic angle to examine their game design vocabulary and to develop a better understanding of their game design practices. By including textual analysis, analysis of modes and processes of production and analysis of consumption, supported with sustained observations of the players and interviews with the game designers, this would make the vocabulary and frameworks used by game designers available for the growing number of media designers, media theorists, educators and other academics who may be interested in the properties of games but lack the tools to engage in a discussion of game mechanics.
The transparency of the products and the design process of the MIT Assassins’ Guild facilitate this approach by being readily available for analysis. Like digital games, MIT Assassins’ Guild games are driven by rules that can rigidly constrain player decisions and guide game progression in an anticipatable manner. This connection has not gone unnoticed by other notables in the discussion of games. Janet Murray has cited the MIT Assassins’ Guild in her 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck for its innovations and its particular qualities as a roleplaying group in MIT. Other leading figures in contemporary digital game thinking, such as Mark “Mahk� LeBlanc , have credited the MIT Assassins’ Guild as being a formative influence on their work.
Infrequent examples from other theorists, game-playing groups or game types are included to give a glimpse of some alternatives to the solutions arrived at by the MIT Assassins’ Guild when it may not be immediately obvious that alternatives exist. These examples are not meant to demonstrate the full scope of possible solutions for a given issue in game design. Comparisons with material and practices outside of the Guild are intended to highlight the reasons behind the specific implementation of mechanics in MIT Assassins’ Guild games, using the Guild’s own terminology whenever possible.
It is possible to tease out broad tendencies in directions of game mechanic evolution over several years of documented games by the MIT Assassins’ Guild. However, in a creative landscape of continual iteration, few of the alternative approaches mentioned above could be reasonably understood to be definitive. The primary exception to this rule comes in the form of games that are frequently cited by the game designers as being significant in the evolution of game design. The names of games such as Antartica, Murder on the Starlight Express and Reality Check III frequently arise in discussion with game designers of the MIT Assassins’ Guild because of their role in the introduction or the refining of game mechanics and concepts. Just as important (and much more memorable) are the games remembered to have catastrophic interactions of mechanics such as Maelstrom, From Dusk to Dawn, Nanopunk: Tranquility Base and Spin Cycle. References to past games in this thesis generally highlight games that the designers cite with regularity, which are important for understanding how the designers themselves see aspects of these games as being significant in their current context of game design. Note that there are also references to games that I have authored for the purposes of testing ideas that emerged from the preparation of this thesis. This is mostly due to personal familiarity with the material and the details of implementation; these references do not imply that my games have had nearly as much impact in game design practices as those mentioned above. As for their actual impact, only time will tell; I am in no position to make this assessment at this time of writing.
Although the plurality of the games designed and played by the MIT Assassins’ Guild fit a genre of gaming known to the larger Live-Action Roleplaying Community as “Assassin,� the fact remains that a large number of games played by the Guild do not fit easily within that genre. The descriptor “Guild game� is a blanket term to describe all games that are both run and played within the MIT Assassins’ Guild. It is a fairly inclusive term that is laden with some assumptions about the logistical circumstances of the game, the attitude towards play and the demographic of the players. Not only is this a more useful catchall term than “Assassin game,� it is also a phrase used by members of the Guild themselves. As we will later examine, the phrase “Guild game� places surprisingly few restrictions on the setting of the game or the requirements for specific mechanics, although peer pressure among Guild game designers and players produces unwritten expectations that must be acknowledged by the designers.
This is neither a how-to guide for writing a good Guild game nor a glimpse into “the ultimate Guild game.� The rhetoric used within the community of the MIT Assassins’ Guild has a tendency to imply that enduring generalizations and rules-of-thumb are all directions in the trajectory of an “übergame� that would be all things for all players. Even experienced Guild game designers who openly contradict this assumption have a tendency to lapse into vocabulary that implies finality. For instance, the clause “a good Guild game must…� commonly rears its head in conversations with Guild game designers, suggesting that the accumulation of enough “musts� would yield “a good Guild game,� oddly pulling a discussion of Guild game mechanics into the direction of genre theory. In personal discussions, however, most Guild game designers readily accept that different designers will produce very different games, simply as a result of different individuals having different strengths in game design. Furthermore, a vocal proportion of Guild players openly defend their desire to play many different types of games, an opinion that reflects an understanding that among of the selection of Guild games available to players, many of them can be markedly different while being just as enjoyable. Both the inconsistency in game designers and the palate of game players indicate that a guide for writing a uniformly “good� Guild game would be a waste of time.
