Week 05- Failure Is Nothing To Be Ashamed Of

I have just finished the fifth week of my Design for Play Class in which we converted a sport of our choosing into a playable board game. My group chose water polo and while I wouldn’t say our game was horrible, I would say I learned a lot through the trial and mostly errors of our playthroughs. My weekly readings, The Slow Grind: Skateboarding Videogames and the Culture and Practice of Skateboarding, showcased a lot of similar concepts my group explored to create our game. One of the first things discussed in the reading is the act of skating, “the core mechanics of skating are the same— balance on a skateboard while using the skater’s effort or gravity to move through an environment. For skaters, that is just the beginning. Skating begins when the skater navigates the urban or suburban environment with purpose and style and, more pointedly, attempts tricks.” - The Slow Grind: Skateboarding Videogames and the Culture and Practice of Skateboarding. Reflecting on the particular movements, skills, and equipment needed to partake in the original sport can help you focus on the key concepts that will make your game feel like the real thing. With water polo we had a major challenge, how could we make a game feel like playing in the water? While it was a brief conversation I did suggest bringing some water bottles into our game so a player could spray their competitor if they were able to steal the ball or vice versa, but we ultimately realized many of our classmates may not be too fond of getting wet in the middle of the day. So instead we resulted in punishment cards that related to water-like injuries such as getting chlorine in your eyes and being blinded for a turn, or getting a cramp and having to swim to the shallow end moving you back 3 spaces. Researching the history of your game can also help you build the aesthetic and immerse your players into the world you're creating. The Slow Grind spoke of how “Tight micro-communities popped up around the country, sharing the trait of a deep commitment to skating best captured in the saying, ‘skate or die.’. Water Polo also shares the same ‘skate or die’ mindset as the early invention of the game was a lot more physical, people used to wrestle and even dunk people underwater fighting for the ball. Knowing this my group went for a more competitive variation of this ruff and tough sport and tried to showcase a person's strength through strategy and dice rolling. This of course caused problems in the playthrough as many people were confused about what dice to roll, when to roll, and why. Due to my group and I having past dice experience playing the game Dungeons and Dragons we didn’t see the complications until people who had never used more than a six-sided die began to play. In The Slow Grind it writes on how “skateboarding videogames focus on translating the specific mechanics of the individual athlete.” and while my group tried to showcase this using dice rolls it ended up not translating the way we wanted and much of the beauty of water polo got lost in a sea of over-explained rules, which was my fault as I wrote the rules. Even though by the end of class I felt that I had not only let my group members down by misrepresenting our hard work through word jumbles and embarrassed by my classmates' reactions to what we created, I take the loss as a growing opportunity. Yes, I might have made a rather poor water polo game, but now I know what not to do next time. Gaming is meant to be easy and fun, so a lot of hard work has to be put into it so it may be so.