thread: 2006-07-27 : 10 Observations from my Berlin trip
On 2006-07-31, Vincent wrote:
Okay! Now I want to talk about Spione.
I see two things. One's the thing where Ron doesn't hold your hand. There's a leap that you have to make when you play the game that isn't easy to make, for me, and I generalize to "for gamers." Whether non-gamers find the leap easy to make, I have no idea and no way to discover (at this moment, sitting here at work, not having arranged yet to play the game with any non-gamers). Accordingly: let's leave non-gamers out of the conversation for now.
Right, so. The leap you have to make is the leap of "the cold": seeing the tensions between the spy sheet and the guy sheet and knowing how to act on them. I find it difficult to do (and I suspect that I'm better at it than many gamers - I've been practicing a lot). I'm there looking at "I'm spying on the Berlin NATO office for the CIA" and "I have a brother who visits me from London," and I have to make up for myself how the brother and the spying aren't compatible with one another. If the game held your hand, maybe the supporting cast would come with built-in incompatibility with your character's spying, like Dogs NPCs do. It might say "I have a brother who visits me from London; now he needs me to come home with him to help him care for our dying mother." I wouldn't have to make it up in play; in play I'd just activate it.
The game demands that you create conflicts between the spy and the guy, using the supporting cast; it demands that you already know or can quickly learn how to do this. If you're fumbling around, like we were in Berlin, it's like fumbling around with any sophisticated tool - you don't use it to its potential.
And then there's the deft, beautiful, sophisticated part: the game as a tool, independent of the skills of us, its users. Here's something I wrote at the Spione forum:
So the flashpoint card rules: in order to accomplish a big deal thing, you need two or more cards, right? And there's a good chance that they won't be two of your own cards, right, but one'll be yours and one'll be someone else's - so a lot of the time when a big deal thing happens, it'll be because YOU set it up and SOMEONE ELSE followed through.
Furthermore, covering someone else's card is a commitment to follow through on whatever they set up, right? Whether following through by helping or following through by hindering.
So when it's my turn to talk, what happens is, I set something up a) not knowing how you'll follow through on it, but b) knowing that you WILL.
That's a fantastic creative interaction between the players...
Getting such an interesting, non-straightforward, and desirable social effect out of some simple card manipulation is great design.
Add on top of that, disclosing your spy's trespass. It seems superficially like a nothing, a gesture, but it's not. As an action, it reverberates through the game, both emotionally and procedurally. It was when I figured disclosing out - days later - that the game really lit up for me.
Harald, Georgios - how's that?
