Origami and Game Jams

February's submission to OMGAM coincided with the Emotional Mecha Jam on itch.io.  

This would be my first submission to a public game jam, so I stepped a bit beyond my normally rough-hewn markdown and cobbled together some free fonts and art in MS Publisher, and put out something that could be printed and played.

This is also, for better or worse, when I made the whimsical decision that all of my OMGAM games for 2019 would use Fudge Dice.

A lot of elements went into this game.  I'm not going to delve into the layers of meaning and innuendo in the title, art choices, and half-page of setting description.  That is the "Emo" part for the game jam, and you can unpack it on your own if you are interested in things like that.

The resolution system and game mechanisms were informed by a number or inspirational works.  To highlight a few:

Nuclear War featured concealed strategies where players committed to a series of actions and revealed them to the other player in order.

Burning Wheel handled conflict resolution similarly to Nuclear War with its pre-declared / concealed actions.  But these actions followed something of a roshambo pattern where some actions were either strong or weak against other actions.

WarGames where "the only winning move is not to play"

Nash Equilibrium, and moreover the theory of non-zero-sum games in general (I don't like to call them that, but that is a blog post for another time) majorly influenced the development of this game

How strongly did Nash Equilibrium influence the development of this game?  Well, enough such that I intentionally left in a trivially optimal outcome if all players cooperate towards it.  And strongly enough that I baked these sorts of positive-sum outcomes into most of the games that I would write in 2019.

Lets look at how it worked:

Players had a list of objectives that were randomly weighted with positive or negative points.  This could mean that the starting conditions of the game strongly favoured one player over another.  Such are the fortunes of war.

This was mitigated by some degree by players being able to jockey for position, to prioritise each others objective lists, and ultimately to "abort" altogether if they had more objectives to preserve rather than to destroy.

After initial setup was complete, the game was mostly a game of maneuver, moving yours or another player's objectives up or down their list to determine which would be destroyed and which would survive if someone decided to strike.

Players could try to order their target lists to their benefit, or to another player's detriment.

There are a lot of things that I left unstated in the game:

I didn't clearly define winning conditions, just some abstract system of points.

I didn't tell players how to best order their target lists during game setup, though there are clearly optimal choices to optimise ones own or to spoil another player's.

I didn't describe the nature of the conflict or the intentional and collateral targets, but some of that may emerge dynamically based on how the dice fall and how the players behave.

I didn't tell the players that they were in competition or even on different sides of the conflict.

With no explicit mandate for competition, the only implied scoring was for each player's own set of points. There were no explicit value judgments made about whether a player should try to get a positive or negative total of points.  Nothing told the player that it was a good judgement to blow up that civilian infrastructure, regardless of what its positive or negative point value might have been.

That said, if a player only wanted to maximize their own positive point value with no other concerns, there was a trivially optimal path.  And, similar to the Prisoners' Dilemma, our Nash Equilibrium is to cooperate.  To leave other players' objective lists alone, order yours optimally, and let everyone maximise their own points as they see fit.