Some of my own first inklings of this sort of systems thinking came about when I was learning how to write JavaScript. One of the first projects I did was a kind of “random log line generator” that put together snippets of beginnings, middles, and ends to create surprising (and often absurd) pseudo-random stories. As I worked to make the program do more sophisticated things — things like check if there had been a car mentioned in an earlier part of the story, and if there had, bring it back in later in the story — I began to see more clearly how traditional fixed linear stories (at the time I was working on various screenplay projects) were in fact complex dynamic systems (at least in terms of the development process — though of course as far as their relationship to spectators goes, they remain so long after they are “finished”). Making a change in one part of the text has cascading effects throughout the whole, changing meanings, altering stakes, and opening (or closing) lines of possibility. It seems obvious now, but for me it also felt like a breakthrough.

Maybe that discovery was part of why I became interested in participatory and environmental media broadly and game design more specifically. The thrill of watching those possibilities open and close and those changes ripple through the system was something I wanted to design for. Why should authors have all the fun playing with the pieces and seeing how things shake out differently as the constituent elements of a story environment are changed? As Phillips puts it, it’s a wonderful game to imagine “how else we might have assembled the same cogs and gears to make [the clockwork machine of a story] run faster or quieter or keep time better.”

This pleasure, I think, is at the heart of game play, not just game design. It’s a unique kind of pleasure that comes from a feeling of real agency, of having one’s actions effect tangible consequences upon a system, and of discovering the new and unforeseen challenges associated with those consequences — and it’s what keeps me passionate about writing, designing, and playing alike.

One little change in a complex system can lead to a cascade of unpredictable outcomes. This is why play testing games is so important. But sometimes there’s just not enough time, and you’ve got to go with what you’ve got. That’s when the real magic can happen, as it did in the qualifying match between Grenada and Barbados at the 1994 Carribean Cup:

There was an unusual match between Barbados and Grenada. Grenada went into the match with a superior goal difference, meaning that Barbados needed to win by two goals to progress to the finals. The trouble was caused by two things. First, unlike most group stages in football competitions, the organizers had deemed that all games must have a winner. All games drawn over 90 minutes would go to sudden death extra time. Secondly and most importantly, there was an unusual rule which stated that in the event of a game going to sudden death extra time the goal would count double, meaning that the winner would be awarded a two goal victory. Barbados was leading 2-0 until the 83rd minute, when Grenada scored, making it 2-1. Approaching the dying moments, the Barbadians realized they had little chance of scoring past Grenada’s mass defense in the time available, so they deliberately scored an own goal to tie the game at 2-2. This would send the game into extra time and give them another half hour to break down the defense. The Grenadians realized what was happening and attempted to score an own goal as well, which would put Barbados back in front by one goal and would eliminate Barbados from the competition. However, the Barbados players started defending their opposition’s goal to prevent them from doing this, and during the game’s last five minutes, the fans were treated to the incredible sight of Grenada trying to score in either goal. Barbados also defended both ends of the pitch, and held off Grenada for the final five minutes, sending the game into extra time. In extra time, Barbados notched the game-winner, and, according to the rules, was awarded a 4-2 victory, which put them through to the next round. (Wikipedia)

More info: snopes.com

A few years ago, these kinds of systems were out of reach for most DIY designers and artists. This is no longer the case. Thanks to freely-available social media, mobile technology, and web publishing tools, ARG producers with shoestring budgets can now roll their own custom ARG management and delivery systems.

About this resource

For the purposes of this post, I’ve chosen to focus on providing examples of free technologies and services that can assist designers in managing/deploying content, architecting participation, and articulating game mechanics. To this end, I’ve organized things according to six key logistical requirements designers might encounter when running an ARG; these requirements are:

• The need to organize game assets and personnel
• The need to create and manage player profiles and communities
• The need to manage multiple web presences and social media profiles
• The need to deploy content on mobile devices
• The need to analyze participation and buzz
• The need to create and distribute physical artifacts

Obviously, not all ARGs are going to have every one of these needs, and some will have others that aren’t listed here. If you can think of a significant category of content-oriented requirements that should be here, please let me know in the comments and I will expand this resource accordingly.

Organize game assets and personnel

Keeping track of game assets such as websites, physical installations, performers, events, story flows, and the rest of it can quickly turn into a full-time job. For a really big ARG, production management presents challenges on the same order as the logistical operations seen in feature films — and often well beyond. Here are a few tips for how indie ARG designers can keep their games organized:

• Master the whiteboard Whiteboards are perfect for organizing the sprawl of media assets that characterize story- and interaction-heavy game designs like ARGs. If you don’t have a whiteboard, you can just paint one onto any wall. Don’t forget to take a photo backup of the board after you update it in case someone stumbles in and erases your game.

• Map game assets and story elements Mind-mapping software is an indispensible companion to the whiteboard, and can be the perfect tool for planning and tracking nonlinear distributed story-game activities like ARGs. My favorite instance of this kind of software is IHMC Cmap Tools, a free program (created with US tax dollars by the good folks at DARPA) that enables you to create semantic network maps like those described by Douglas Hofstadter in his book, Godel, Escher, Bach. Cmap Tools goes a long way toward automating making such mind maps, and it enables a bunch of other neat features, too, like embedded media, linked maps, parametric layouts, and more. These charts can reveal a lot about the interconnectivity of your story-world’s various components, and are great for visualizing the different ways that players will flow through the experience you are creating.
• Production management and collaboration tools Take your pick: Zoho, Google Wave, Campfire, and Ning are all great free online collaboration apps. For media-specific pre-production and production tools, try Celtx, “the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production system. It replaces ‘paper & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.”

Create and manage player profiles and communities

Customizing individual player experiences in an ARG requires being able link profile information to game states and story elements. Even a simple profile system can unlock powerful game mechanics and storytelling options such as progress-dependent content and in-game ability unlocks.

• Leverage existing profiles ARG designers can lower the bar to entry to their games — and take advantage of the affordances of mature social networking platforms — by making use of players’ existing accounts instead of asking them to sign up for yet another social service. APIs like Facebook Connect can bridge the gap between your game and your players’ everyday media flows — and provide you with a ready-made means for tracking game progress and delivering content. If you have a coder on your team, creating a dedicated app will be relatively easy; if not, Facebook’s developer documentation will help you to get started.
• Create dedicated social networking sites For designers who feel they absolutely must create a standalone player profile system, open-source software packages like Elgg, or free web services like Ning (for which many players will already have an ID) can be used to set up community hubs from scratch (as seen in this top-secret ARG and this fitness game). BuddyPress is perhaps the most interesting of these options, as it makes use of the massive developer community around WordPress, and has plugins that can link player profiles automatically to Facebook accounts.

Manage multiple web presences and social media profiles

Maintaining social media identities across a range of services is essential for running an ARG with a heavy online component. Here are some DIY content management and delivery tips for streamlining this process:

• Post status updates to multiple profiles Most readers are probably familiar with apps such as Seesmic Desktop, HootSuite, CoTweet, or Tweetdeck, all of which enable easy management of multiple social media profiles via a single interface. These apps also make it easy to track responses to your updates, post images to a variety of hosting sites, monitor keyword searches, and, in the case of HootSuite and CoTweet, schedule timed updates (great for producing “Twitter Drama”). There are dozens of similar apps, both offline and on; depending on the range of services you need to update, finding a handy desktop client or cloud app (not to mention one for your mobile devices) shouldn’t be too hard.
• Enable collaborators to easily post to blogs and other social media services Posterous is a powerful email-to-post blogging service that has a lot of potential applications in the DIY ARG space. Running a group blog with Posterous is ridiculously simple and fits into any workflow since the system uses ordinary email to make blog posts. Posterous will convert any images, audio files, or videos into web-friendly formats and lay them out nicely. But its most useful feature is the way it can “Autopost” content to a variety of other services, including WordPress-powered blogs, Facebook, flickr, and Twitter.
• Aggregate posts from players and/or in-game characters Aggregate your content into one place using WordPress plugins like FeedWordPress and Lifestream. These plugins, alongside WordPress’ already-formidable content management features, can enable ARG producers to gather together not only the social media content that they produce, but also — and sometimes more importantly — the content that gets produced by their player communities. FeedWordPress is particularly impressive, as it will archive, categorize, and tag everything that it aggregates — providing you with another layer of content to feed back to your players.

Deploy content on mobile devices

Engaging with players and storytellers via their mobile devices opens up exciting new realms of location-based gaming and participation.

• Automate SMS interactions and/or make a location-based game As GPS and smart phones become increasingly ubiquitous, third party apps for developing and managing games that take place in the physical world are starting to emerge. SCVNGR is an interesting early arrival to this space. According to their website, SCVNGR is “the world’s first platform to enable anyone, anywhere to develop, manage and deploy sophisticated interactive location-based mobile games, tours and experiences.” I’ve used the system for a few projects, and it works quite well. Just a couple of years ago, setting up an SMS-driven interactive location-based game was a serious coding challenge that required serious money and time. Now it’s free and easy. Also, it should be noted that games designed with SCVNGR will work best on iPhone or Android, but are also fully playable via SMS (significant for designers who want to keep the bar to entry for their games as low as possible).
• The WAAG Society‘s 7scenes application goes a step further than SCVNGR, enabling all manner of location-based interactivity. The app is supposed to expand beyond Nokia phones in mid-2010, meaning that you’ll be able to develop GPS games for iPhone and Android using 7scenes’ great interface. The only drawback: the full service isn’t free.
• Make a custom phone app Objective C coding skills aren’t as easy to come by as plain old HTML and JavaScript know-how. Which is precisely why PhoneGap is so cool: “PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.”

• Piggy-back on an existing game or platform If it makes sense in your story, why not just use existing mobile media services to extend your game into physical space? Just as social media services like Twitter and Facebook have long been used by in-game characters and agencies, so too can web-connected mobile media services like Foursquare, Brightkite, and Gowalla function as vehicles for cross-media storytelling (for an example of this, click here). And since many of these services provide RSS feeds for user profiles, you can easily connect the mobile end of your game world back into your web presence.
• See also: Locative media resources

Analyze participation and buzz

Committed participants are easy to track. They post in Unfiction forums, attend events, set up profiles, and communicate with in-game characters. Tracking lurkers and occasional participants is a different matter — but a significant one, since casual observers will often compose the bulk of a game’s audience.

• Monitor Twitter activity Web apps like Twitalyzer, Twitter Analyzer, and Twittersheep (to name just a few) can help you to track and understand your player community. Thanks to Twitter’s remarkably open and flexible API, new tools for analyzing buzz and influence on Twitter come out almost every day. Try a search like this one to see what’s current — or check out top-n lists like this, this or this.
• Monitor link sharing Link shortening services like bit.ly may present serious problems to future archivists, but for real-time web projects, they’re an easy way to track traffic flows and spreadable media. From bit.ly’s FAQ: “bit.ly users receive a unique bit.ly link that lets them track clicks and other data separately, while still seeing totals for all bit.ly links pointing to the same long link.”

• Monitor site traffic Google Analytics is a free service that enables you to monitor traffic sources and activity via a simple script that you can copy and paste into your site’s header. This is particularly useful for ARGs that have large lurker populations and/or are geographically dispersed. It’s also a good way to see which parts of a website are being read — and which are being skipped over.

Produce physical artifacts, merchandise, and e-commerce

Locative media isn’t the only way to bring your game into the physical experience of your players. Artifacts such as books, clothing, and other customized items have enormous potential as vehicles for real world storytelling and play.

• Publish books and pamphlets Print on Demand continues to revolutionize indie publishing, which is good news for transmedia producers who want to incorporate novels, graphic novels, comic books, photo albums, or other printed materials into their projects. Lulu.com will print your books on demand using the same kinds of presses that are used to make the trade paperbacks published by the big “legitimate” presses — and they’ll help you to distribute them, too. Setting up a Lulu.com storefront is almost as easy as creating a blog with Blogger — only the output is a real book, an item with heft and presence.
• Make stuff — and retail it Merchandise can be a good way to generate money for charitable causes. It can also be a clever way to tell a story. Indie ARG Must Love Robots did both of these things with their in-game clothing brand, Inactiveware. Like Lulu.com, Cafe Press and other on demand services make it possible for transmedia producers to quickly create and retail a variety of physical media artifacts — from t-shirts and mugs to mousepads and posters — that can extend and enrich their story worlds.

Help me improve this resource: send me an email or leave a reply in the comments if you have any suggestions.

Since its release in the early 1960s, Acquire has inspired generations of game designers and enthusiasts with its elegant and replayable design. Many game designers, including Ticket to Ride designer Alan R. Moon, cite Acquire as a seminal work in the evoution of tabletop gaming. This post provides designer-centric coverage of the game. Other useful starting points for people interested in learning more about Acquire can be found at webnoir.com and gamereport.com, among many others.

Overview

Acquire is a resource management strategy game in which players compete to earn money through the establishment and merger of corporations. By founding, merging and investing in corporations, players earn cash and stock. The game is won by the player who generates the most personal wealth by the time all the game tiles are either used or rendered unplayable.

Players

Acquire is designed to be played by 2 to 6 players. Larger groups are possible, but each additional player in excess of the recommended six compromises the pacing and balance of the system, primarily due to the limited number of tile spaces on the game board. The game requires that one player play the role of the banker, managing stock and cash transactions. This player must complete additional tasks to fulfill her responsibilities as banker, but her experience of the game is otherwise identical to the other players. Play unfolds in a turn-based manner, with the order of play being determined by random draw and seating position. Perceived imbalances caused by the differential between the players’ initial turn ranks are mitigated by the chance involved in tile selection and the random seeding of the board that precedes commencement of play.

Acquire has a unique and engaging hybrid interaction pattern. This pattern can be broken down into two overlapping parts: multilateral competition for resources and cash, and uni-/bi-/multi-lateral cooperation to build, expand and merge corporations. The multilateral competition pattern is easy to identify: by tactically placing tiles and trading stocks, each player attempts to outplay the others in order to earn the most cash. The uni-/bi-/multi-lateral cooperation pattern is a little more subtle. This kind of interaction occurs dynamically at various times throughout the game as players find themselves involved in de facto cartels and trading blocs. For example, two players might work together to pump up the value of a corporation’s stock in anticipation of a merger if they both have a substantial amount of stock in that corporation. This dynamic generates a relationship between the board and the players that does not exist in more familiar multilateral competition tabletop games. Risk, for example, visually maps individual player success via the state of the board — a quick glance at a game-in-progress tells you all you need to know about who’s powerful and well-positioned and who’s not. Similarly, Monopoly ties houses and hotels to properties which are in turn tied to individual players. This player “ownership” of sections of the board does not exist in Acquire, which is ultimately as much about the players’ collective speculation on a dynamically co-created imaginary market as it is about the rise and fall of their individual fortunes.

A typical game of Acquire takes about 30-60 minutes, depending on the speed of the players and the player-controlled “banker.” Beyond the core game mechanics, players spend a lot of time storytelling about the rise and fall of the various corporations on the board — ooh, Sackson’s expanding like the Blob. I knew it! — or the fortunes and actions of the individual players — heads up, Jeff’s getting serious about Quantum. The game tends to freeze up a bit toward the end, excluding trailing players and leading to a somewhat anti-climactic finale. That said, the inherent dynamism and complexity of the system makes the potential for victory seem within reach for most players until the late mid-game.

Objective

Simply put, the objective of Acquire is to make money by founding, building and merging corporations, and selling stock. These ends are achieved through the strategic placement of tiles and the expenditure of cash from the players’ reserves. The game is typically won by the player who holds the majority of shares in the surviving “safe” corporations, although occasional victories can be had by players who buy and sell in high volume in the early game.

Procedures

Players of Acquire participate in two central procedures, Setup and Turns. Setup occurs at the outset of the game and seeds the board with a random selection of tiles, ensuring different starting conditions for every game. The core game play then takes place as players take their Turns.

Setup

Game setup consists of a resource randomization phase, an initial resource allocation, a random seeding phase, and a secondary resource allocation:

• Resource randomization — In Acquire, players place numbered tiles onto their corresponding game board squares to expand and merge corporations. Each player has a “hand” of six tiles and plays one tile per turn. At the end of each turn, a new tile is drawn, replenishing the hand. To enforce randomness onto the allocation of these key resources, the first physical setup procedure in the game is to dump all 108 tiles onto the table and arrange them into a face-down cluster.
• Resource allocation 1 — In the initial resource allocation phase, one player is chosen to be the banker. This player will manage the exchange of cash and stocks for the remainder of the game. The banker provides each player with $6,000 in game money, divided into four $1000, three $500 and five $100 bills. With this range of denominations, players can make initial stock purchases without needing to involve the banker in making change. Given our play testing experience, players rarely need to actively “break” their larger bills. Players who run out of $100 bills will usually pick up a few in change each turn, guaranteeing an easy flow cash transactions.
• Random seeding — The random seeding phase of the setup is one of the most crucial moments in the game, as it determines the initial conditions of the stock market into which the players will be investing. The game board consists of a 12 x 9 grid of squares identified horizontally by number and vertically by letter (e.g. the square in the upper left corner is marked 1a, while the square in the lower right corner is marked 12i). After receiving their cash resources, each player randomly draws a tile from the face-down cluster and places it on the corresponding square on the game board. This procedure elegantly serves two purposes. First, it settles the question of turn order, as the player who draws the “lowest” tile (i.e. the one closest to 1a) goes first. Second, it “seeds” the board with a random selection of tiles. The result of this seeding is reminiscent of Conway’s Game of Life: complex, unpredictable patterns emerge through the combination of these initial tile placements with the other procedures called for by Acquire’s simple rule set. The result is a dynamic game board landscape that evolves to a different end-state with each replaying.
• Resource allocation 2 — Setup concludes with the players each gathering six tiles from the face-down cluster. These tiles comprise the players’ “hands,” and are kept secret. While the designers have given the players options when it comes to the secrecy of other resources — the stock cards, for example, can be left open to public view without seriously damaging the game — it is important to note that they have set firm guidelines for the tiles. If players were to know which tiles one another had, the game’s strategic complexity would multiply beyond reasonable bounds as players would be forced to consider both the strategic placement of their own tiles and those of their opponents. Such computations would seriously compromise the game’s capacity to enable intergenerational/intercompetency play experiences.

Turns

A player turn involves four steps: placing a tile on the game board, processing the consequences of the placed tile, buying stocks and drawing a new tile from the face-down cluster:

• Placing tiles — Players select one of their six secretly-held tiles to place on the board. To make this selection, players need to evaluate the consequences of placing a given tile onto its corresponding square. Tiles placed adjacent to other tiles, for example, will create, expand or merge a corporation. In the early game, the ratio of the number of empty squares on the board (depending on the number of players, this varies between 102 and 106) to the six tiles in each player’s hand is 17- or 18-to-1, meaning that the range of available moves might not contain a placement that is adjacent to another tile. This means that some players will find themselves unable to place a tile that will create, expand or merge a corporation. However, as play proceeds and the game board fills up, the ratio of squares-to-tiles decreases, ramping up the frequency of corporate foundings, expansions and mergers. Finally, the number of tiles in each players’ hand exceeds the number of playable squares on the game board. The game ends shortly after this state is reached.
• Processing consequences — After placing a tile onto the game board, players must make the appropriate adjustments to both their own resources and to shared game tokens. For example, suppose a player places a tile next to an “unincorporated” tile, thereby creating a corporation (so long as fewer than 7 corporations are on the board). In this case, the player must first select a corporation token from the remaining tokens contained in the banker’s box, then place that token on top of one of the tiles in the newly-formed corporation. Finally, the player will collect a single stock card for the corporation that they founded. These resource and token manipulations take place almost every turn during the mid-game, when most moves will create, expand or merge a corporation.
• Buying stocks — Players must decide which new stocks (if any) they will purchase by analyzing the projected fortunes of corporations (as represented by the tiles and tokens on the game board) and investors (as represented by the “stock portfolios” and piles of money that sit in front of the players at the table). A common strategy in this regard is to identify smaller corporations likely to be consumed by “safe” corporations (corporations with more than 11 tiles), and then to buy stock in them. This stock can then be sold or exchanged (at a markup of 2 to 1) for stock in the larger corporation when a merger occurs. Players are slowed from achieving unshakably dominant majority shareholder positions by a rule that limits the purchase of stocks to a maximum of three per turn.
• Drawing a new tile — Players replenish their hand at the end of their turn. As the game approaches its conclusion, some players will find that they have tiles in their hand that cannot be played due to the safe corporation rule. The safe corporation rule states that two corporations that have 11 or more tiles cannot merge, and no tile that would otherwise cause them to merge can be placed on the board. Players who have such tiles in their possession may trade them in for another randomly-picked tile at the end of their turn. This procedure ensures that players who are stymied by the arrangement of safe corporations on the game board can remain engaged and hopeful that they will receive a better tile on the exchange. Crucially, however, this exchange is limited to one tile per turn, which prevents players from quickly cycling through the available playable tiles during the endgame. This rule effectively injects another element of chance into the increasingly deterministic final stages of the game.

Rules

Acquire‘s compact rule set generates entertaining, social and multi-layered play experiences. It is a minimalist blend of Go and Monopoly. Unlike economic simulation games that generate complexity and nuance through the proliferation of objectives and constraints, Acquire creates rich interactions via a set of simple mechanics. The rule set generates lively multiplayer-Go-like board play through a few simple rules concerning the placement of tiles and the consequences thereof. It generates an active card-and-cash market by simply constraining how and when stocks may be bought. Most importantly, it links these two play activities — board play and card/cash game — so tightly that the one could not exist without the other. ((This essential interdependence of rules, boundaries and game resources does not preclude looseness or “give” in the system. The 1999 Hasbro rulebook, for example, leaves it up to the players to “decide as a group whether the money and stocks they acquire will be openly displayed.” Numerous modifications and editions discussed online suggest that the system can tolerate a lot of bend-and-tweak before it breaks. And yes, I just said, “bend-and-tweak.”))

Resources

Acquire has three key game resources: tiles, stocks and cash.

• Tiles — Having playable, strategically-relevant tiles can make all the difference, especially in the early game. Unlike stocks and cash, a player’s collection of tiles is determined through random draws. As noted above, injections of randomness such as this help to offset the potentially deterministic outcomes generated by board play mechanics alone.
• Stocks — Stocks accrue value as their issuing corporations expand. Corporations that grow beyond 11 tiles in size become “safe corporations,” meaning that they can not be consumed as the consequence of a merger (and that they cannot engage in a merger with another safe corporation). Players will attempt to corner the market in stocks for the most valuable safe corporations (i.e. not all stocks are made the same), while quickly flipping the lower-valued stocks of minor corporations through mergers and acquisitions. ((Obviously, the safe corporation rule also has key design implications when it comes to the evolution of the board play aspect of the game. I haven’t done the math on this, but I would guess that to allow two corporations of more than 11 tiles to merge would create a monopoly situation at around the same time turn-wise of the actual rule set’s mid-game. As the end-game draws near, this key constraint accelerates the pace at which the number of playable squares decrease, bottle-necking the players into an increasingly small array of possibilities with — at least for some — an increasingly large potential payoff.))
• Cash — Cash is necessary evil — albeit a highly-appropriate one, given the subject-matter of Acquire. As a game resource, it tracks the results of the players’ stock market activities. Cash may not be traded among the players, and aside from the up-front money given to them during the setup of the game, the only way players can earn money is through buying and selling stocks, or earning bonuses. Extra cash bonuses are given to the majority and minority stockholders when a corporation goes defunct following a merger. Tracking and processing cash transactions and stock values sometimes threatens the quick pace of the game, but the designers have done their best to mitigate this problem by providing simple charts specifying the going rates for stocks, majority and minority bonuses, and so forth.

Boundaries

Acquire’s boundaries are pretty standard: play is constrained to the tabletop, with the board as the central focus. In so-called “open display” games, the players’ money and stocks are a second circle of interest. In all versions of the game, the players’ personalities and knowledge of one another — both of which have roots that often go well beyond the shallow temporal constraints of a 45-minute board-gaming session — are also circumscribed by the magic circle.

Outcome

Winning Acquire depends on a combination of strategy and luck. A good draw of tiles properly played will put any player into potential victory position. Nevertheless, sudden shifts in fortune can occur well into the late game, leading to upset victories and close seconds. This randomness is essential to the game’s design as it confounds the deterministic tendencies inherent in small-grid proximal-square set-making board games (or SGPSSMBGs™ for short).

1999 Hasbro Ruleset

Formal element breakdown schema: Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop.
Scans: thanks, E.

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