What if there was a hidden world layered atop visible reality that could only be seen by certain people? What if you were one of those people?

Viz is a casual augmented reality game that enables players to discover and embed virtual objects — or “vobjects” — in physical space by looking through the camera viewfinders of their mobile phones.

By discovering and embedding vobjects, players earn points, advancing their positions on local, national and international leaderboards. These points also allow players to unlock special add-ons, tricks and bonuses for their vobjects (see “Variations and Extensions,” below).

Pervasive & Persistent Social Gaming

Players who install the Viz application on their phone can expect an ambient “always on” play experience that exists within the flow of their everyday lives. Players engage with Viz when they have spare moments in public spaces. The application icon, which sits inobtrusively in the notification area of the player’s phone (see figures below), works in the background and changes in appearance depending on the proximity of vobjects (i.e., a quick glance at your phone’s desktop tells you all you need to know). If the player wants to score points by locating these objects, they can view GPS information and activate the “scanner” tool by simply clicking on the application icon. The game is meant to accompany players as they move through space, providing active and mobile individuals with a persistent low-intensity creative social gaming outlet.

Players

Because of its dependency on user-created content, Viz requires a sizable player base in the areas where it will be played. Like a certain social networking service or other open-ended collaborative production games such as SF0, Viz will begin in specific neighborhoods and cities before expanding to national or international distribution. The game will be released in limited numbers to geographically-constrained player groups, beginning with student beta-testers at urban post-secondary educational institutions. The targeted distribution of the game will expand from there, first to tech subcultures in relevant urban centers, then to various segments of early adopters and tastemakers across the Web. These initial user groups will “seed” the environments of their respective urban areas, ensuring that secondary waves of users have no trouble discovering and interacting with active vobjects.

Objective

The objective of the game is to accumulate points by a) discovering vobjects other players have embedded in the physical world; and, b) having vobjects that you have embedded discovered by others.

Setup/Interface

Viz has two main “active” modes: scanning and embedding. Players toggle between these modes via a simple button interface. The game also has a persistent “passive” mode. This mode informs players of nearby vobjects via inobtrusive notification bar icons on their phone’s desktop. A “library” mode gives the player access to game statistics and other information.

The following illustrations show how Viz looks on the Android operating system.

Figure 1: Passive mode

Subtle alerts, similar to those used to denote wi-fi range/signal strength, appear in the notification bar when players are within 500 yards of a vobject (see icon in upper right corner). By clicking on the alert, players can activate the Viz interface.

• The application can also be launched by clicking on its icon in the applications drawer.
• The rest of the user’s phone works the same as always: the game tries hard not to be intrusive.

Figure 2: Viz Main Screen

Viz’s main screen changes in various ways according to the location and context of the player.

• If the player is outdoors (pictured), a simple compass-like feature will point in the direction of the nearest vobject.
• If the player is indoors and within range of one or more vobjects, the main screen will provide the player with additional information about the number and nature of any vobjects in the immediate area.
• The tabs at the bottom of the main screen toggle between modes and settings.
• Hardware controls enable the user to exit the app at any time.

Figure 3: Map mode

Viz’s map mode shows the location of nearby vobjects (red pins) relative to the player (blue pin). By consulting this map, players can move to within scanning range of a vobject.

• Clicking on a vobject causes a text balloon to pop up indicating whether it has been captured by the player. If the player has already captured the vobject (vobjects can only be captured once — see “Rules,” below), they will be able to click on the balloon and view relevant comments and statistics. If the player has yet to capture the vobject, the balloon will merely say, “Unknown.”
• Players can opt-in to share their location with other players. Map mode will display any participating players as yellow pins.
• Players can zoom in and out and pan the map as in other applications.

Figure 4: Scan mode

Once players have reached the vobject’s GPS location, they can scan the immediate area for the vobject itself by switching Viz into scanning mode. Scanning mode uses the phone’s built-in camera functionality to turn the screen into a kind of window through which the player can look. The player finds the vobject by panning the camera around, examining visual features of their surroundings until they find the feature that contains the vobject. This feature is an image stored in the Viz database and streamed to the phone based on the player’s present location. Viz “locks on” to features by comparing the original embedded image to the image currently visible through the player’s phone. This effect is achieved through the use of image recognition and orientation systems like those recently developed by Nokia or Microsoft. Once players have locked on to a vobject, they can press the “Capture” button (the only button on the scanning screen) to add it to their library and collect points.

• Vibration feedback and various visual cues let the player know when they pan past a vobject.
• Image ghosting helps players to lock in the image.
• A standard dialog box pops up when the player successfully captures a vobject, informing them about how many points they have scored. Players can click on “more” to view a separate info screen containing statistics and comments about the vobject. This screen also contains a submission form enabling players to add their own comments. Once a player has captured a vobject, this info screen is accessible from their Library (see below).
• The “Capture” button appears grayed-out until the image is framed within the approximate boundaries of the original (embedded) image.

Figure 5: Embed mode

Once players have accumulated enough points to embed a vobject, they may do so by switching Viz into embed mode. In this mode, players can point their phone’s camera at an object in the physical world to which they wish to attach a vobject. By pressing the “Embed” button, players will expend points and attach a vobject linked to their profile to the physical object, building or landscape they see in their viewfinder. This vobject now becomes something for other players to find (and therefore a new way for the embedding player to earn points).

• Embedding a vobject is a simple point-and-shoot operation.
• Players can consult an “Image Legibility” reading while in embed mode to make sure that the vobject they are embedding will be easily capturable by anyone who finds it.
• The embed screen is only available to players who have enough points to embed a vobject. If a player attempts to switch into embed mode when they do not have enough points to embed a vobject, an alert box (not pictured) will inform them that they need to earn more points before they can complete this action.
• If a player has purchased or unlocked a power-up — for example, a bonus modifier of 10 points/scan — they will be asked if they would like to use this power-up on the vobject they are embedding. This process is discussed below in both “Rules” and “Variations and Extensions.”

Figure 6: The Library

Library mode enables players to view lists of the vobjects they have captured, the vobjects they have embedded, and the points the have earned. The screen also contains a button that launches a Settings window (not pictured) wherein players can adjust profile information.

• Two simple buttons allow players to toggle between lists of vobjects they have captured and vobjects they have embedded.
• Clicking on an individual vobject in a list opens a dialog containing additional information about that vobject, including how many times it has been scanned, when and where it was embedded, and who embedded it.
• Profile information can be modified in the “Settings” screen (not pictured).
• All lists are scrollable to conserve screen space.

Procedures/Controls

Read Map To locate vobjects, players will activate the GPS map function of Viz to help them get within range.

Capture Vobject Once players are near a vobject, they will scan the area using Viz’s camera function until they “see” the vobject superimposed over real space. They will then press the “Capture” button to collect the vobject and score points.

Embed Vobject To embed vobjects, players must first accumulate enough points to do so. Once they have the requisite points, players can activate Viz’s embedding tool. This tool enables players to embed a vobject in a particular location by pointing their phone’s camera at a real-world object, building or landscape. Once the player has selected the view to which they want to attach their object, they will press the “embed” button. Doing so subtracts points from the player’s account.

Check stats Players can read statistics about their own usage, how many points they have, and how many points they earn from embedded vobjects by switching to library mode.

Review Vobjects Library mode also enables players to view lists of the vobjects they have captured or embedded; by clicking on the vobject identifiers (GPS coordinates or city/postal code designators), players can view additional information about each vobject.

Unlock Power-ups Players can use points to unlock power-ups which modify the way the vobjects they embed tally scores and affect other players. The power-ups button in library mode accesses a list (not pictured) of power-ups, organized by price. Power-ups that players have purchased are displayed in this list with a star next to them.

Use Power-ups Players can attach a power-up to a vobject as they embed it in a physical place. If a player has any power-ups to use, they will be given the option to use them at the time of embedding.

Modify profile settings Players can change their username, home location and other information in a standard profile/settings dialog. This profile can also be modified via an online web interface.

Flow/Game States

See attached flow chart (pictured below).

Rules

Beyond the rules implied and specified above, readers should be aware of the following scoring rules and constraints:

• Whenever a vobject is discovered, points are awarded to both the discoverer and the embedder.
• Objects that are discovered on a regular basis score fewer points than objects that are only viewed occasionally. Players can thus adopt a variety of strategies for accumulating points: for example, player A might embed objects in obvious public spaces (e.g. tourist sites, popular cafes, etc) in order to get a large volume of low-value discoveries, while player B might embed fewer objects in more hard-to-find locations in order to get a small volume of high-value discoveries.
• Any objects that are not found within a period of thirty days will disappear. This constraint prevents players from embedding objects in overly obscure locations and adds an element of gambling to certain placement strategies — e.g. players must balance the risk of their object not being found at all against the potential gain of it being found only once or twice.
• Embedding vobjects (and unlocking extra functionality) “costs” points, motivating players to earn as much as possible.
• Vobjects may only be scanned once. Players may not scan their own Vobjects.

Variations

Power-ups

When embedding, players can opt to attach “power-ups” to their vobjects. These power-ups have a variety of effects on scoring and gameplay. Below are two proposed power-ups and their effects:

• Trap The Trap power-up causes the player who scans the vobject to lose 500 points. The embedder of the vobject receives these points in addition to those they collect for the vobject being scanned.
• Trade When a vobject imbued with the Trade power-up is scanned, the player who scans it becomes the owner. In exchange, the former owner of the vobject receives one of the scanning player’s vobjects (selected at random). If the scanning player has no embedded vobjects in play, the Trade power-up is lost.

Other

Finding and Leaving Traces

Viz is an inherently social game. Players get to experience the thrill of discovering secret objects left behind by other people, often in scenic or humorous locations. Interacting with these objects reveals additional layers of sociality: for example, upon discovering a vobject, players may choose to attach a voice or text “comment” to the item, which can be then read (and responded to) by the vobject’s embedder and any subsequent discoverers. Importantly, however, players don’t need to comment on vobjects in order to experience the social dimension of Viz — even if players ignore all but the most basic affordances of the game, they will engage in the fundamentally social activity of finding and leaving traces of passage. In this sense, embedded vobjects are reminiscent of the Inuit inuksuks (or inuksuit) found in the far North:

An inuksuk… is a man-made stone landmark or cairn, used by the Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic region of North America, from Alaska to Greenland…

The inuksuk may have been used for navigation, as a point of reference, a marker for hunting grounds, or as a food cache. The word inuksuk means “something which acts for or performs the function of a person.” The word comes from the morphemes inuk (“person”) and -suk (“ersatz” or “substitute”)… (Wikipedia: Inuksuk)

Inspiration

This idea sprung from two sources. First, a whiteboard session with my colleagues Amanda Tasse and Lauren Fenton got me thinking about the issues involved in making an augmented reality game with a social dimension (our original idea was a kind of “truth or dare” casual mobile app wherein players could discover other players in proximate space via GPS or other location/context-sensing technologies and challenge them to do humiliating and/or dangerous things). This brainstorming session raised a few intriguing questions: What kinds of ambient AR gaming experiences would players reasonably want to layer atop their “real” lives? What motivation would they have to participate? And, crucially, what kinds of game mechanics can we create with AR that simply can’t be created any other way (ie, how can we avoid simply using AR as a gimmick)?

The second source of inspiration is largely a consequence of the first. In an effort to answer some of the questions raised during the whiteboard session with Amanda and Lauren, I started looking around the web for existing AR games and apps. I found plenty of cool examples. But the most thought-provoking discovery occurred when I came across Denno- Coil, a recent Japanese science fiction series about kids living in a world wherein AR has been seemlessly integrated into everyone’s lives via special eyeglasses and visors. The story and setting conceits of Denno Coil are a goldmine for AR developers. Here are a few notes I clipped from the Wikipedia article on the series [Accessed 20 September 2009] as I was developing my own game concept:

• [Users] access the virtual world through Internet-connected visors called denno- eyeglasses. This allows them to see virtual reality superimposed on objective reality. To visually confirm something as virtual, the children often lift their glasses from their eyes. The visors also work in conjunction with futuristic ear monitors placed behind the ear, which allows them to hear sounds from the virtual environment.
• Software tools are visually represented as tactile tools (e.g. a fishing rod) which occupy 3D virtual space and must be manipulated by hand. Metatags, which can be used to damage or enhance virtual objects with certain properties, are visually represented as o-fuda.
• Virtual objects such as pets cannot be recalled or reset; when a pet runs away, it must be chased and caught in 3D space. Virtual objects and pets are also susceptible to a form of “death” by data corruption or deletion.
• Fumie Hashimoto handles a software spray can loaded with so-called “black bug spray”.
• A virus on the run…leaves behind a (virtually) tangible, evaporating black trail of raw “denno- substance”.

See also: Serial Experiments Lain

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.

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.
• 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.

If you own the copyright to any of the materials presented in this post and want me to remove them from public view, please let me know via email and I will do so.

As far as I can remember, Jonas Marshall was the local ringleader when it came to pen-and-paper role-playing and strategy games. It was in his basement on Third Street in southwest Calgary where I saw my first set of polyhedral dice. Jonas’s younger brother, Paul, was my age; we, along with the avuncular Ryan Sullivan and a couple of other semi-interchangable bright-eyed and dirty-fingernailed boys, constituted the Rideau/Roxboro geek cohort of our time. Most of us were already into games of various sorts — from video games we typed into our computers from BASIC programs printed in magazines, to simpler fantasy and board games like Crossbows and Catapults or Risk. If the games we played used dice, they used six-sided dice only. Jonas, on the other hand, three years older than the rest of us, had games that used the full set of Platonic solids and more: the near-spherical d20, the better-than-rolling-two-regular-dice d12, the percentile-generating d10, the sturdy-rolling outlier d8 and the dangerous-to-tread-upon d4.

The subject-matter of the games Jonas played (fantasy, science fiction, espionage, etc.) was almost certainly the main driver of my interest in playing them; that said, the fact that these games used an array of esoteric dice foreign to my eyes and completely alien to those of my parents and teachers was undeniably an attraction. Unlike the by-then over-familiar six-sided dice that generated random numbers for the bulk of the games I played in my childhood, a set of polyhedral dice was something otherworldly and almost magical. It became de rigeur for each of us to own at least one complete set — often bought one at a time with the money left over from allowances spent on comic books and game manuals — and to keep this set in an well-considered game-appropriate pouch or box. I had a velvety purple Crown Royal bag that resonated nicely with my magic-user alter ego; had I been able to afford one, I would have probably upgraded to leather.

In addition to their stochastic function within the games we played, polyhedral dice — the way they were carried, handled and regarded — played an almost ritual role in our gaming activities. Gaming sessions would begin as we arrived in the Marshall brothers’ basement (after first pausing to eat ravioli and drink milk graciously served by the tireless Mrs. Marshall), took our seats on the tight carpet and poured our dice onto the floor as if emptying our pouches of coins or magic tokens. A red and translucent d4, a solid black d20, a light blue d8 with orange numbers grease-penciled in: each die had a certain power, a look, a kind of meaning-rich resonance in my young mind. Each was supposed to be a ‘good roller,’ and it was not unheard of to discard a die that consistently rolled against one’s desires. Jealousies existed. My black d20 was reknowned for its power.

In the early days, the older — indeed, seemingly wizened and grey though let’s face it, he was just a twelve or thirteen year-old — Jonas Marshall would function as Dungeon Master (or game master, or whatever the moderator/admin/storyteller was called in the game we were playing), and while he set up the cardboard screens that contained saving throw charts and random event lists, the rest of us would get our character sheets together and test-roll our dice and maybe even line them up in ascending or descending order. But this was more than just a readying of the tools necessary to play a game. The reality was, we each had our own special dice and those dice were laden with personal meanings related to the pivotal function they would play in the ongoing co-creation of story and incident that emerged from and constituted our gaming activity. This wasn’t Monopoly; even though storytelling was certainly a key component of any Monopoly session, the narrative component, like the dice-rolling itself, was simple and repetitive and predictable: someone gets rich, everyone else goes broke. In Dungeons and Dragons or Top Secret or Traveller (my personal favorite), absolutely anything could happen, there was no end to the game (only the conclusion of chapters or ‘modules’), and the role that dice and random numbers played was richer and more nuanced by orders of magnitude.

This nuanced relationship between randomness, storytelling and play was probably my favorite thing about [insert RPG here], and while the dice we used initially seemed weird and possibly even merely arbitrary and decorative, it quickly became apparent that the depth and sophistication of the RPG experience — at least one wherein randomness has a hand in everything from how much coinage is found on a dead kobold to the duration and effects of drunkenness on a female half-elf cleric who is unwittingly carrying a cursed morning star — utterly depended on going beyond the traditional xd6 system for random number generation used in typical board games.

Role-playing games use polyhedral dice because of the many different kinds of randomness they can generate. Six-sided dice generate even odds when when you roll one die at a time and are looking for a number between one and six; but when you start needing more numbers, which happens very quickly when you’re designing a game system that tracks a large amount of variables across multiple domains, simply adding dice messes with the odds and removes pure randomness from certain parts of the system. For example, any kid knows that the seven is the most likely number to roll when you toss two six-sided dice because there are more possible combinations of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 that add up to seven (1+6, 2+5, 3+4, 4+3, 5+2, 6+1) than there are for any other number between 2 and 12. A 12-sided die (d12) changes all that. You’re just as likely to roll a 7 on a d12 as you are a 1 (which you can’t even roll at all on 2d6). This “pure” randomness frees designers from having to take into account the imbalances in the probabilities of combined dice rolls, opening the doors to new uses for randomness that incorporate regular result distributions within larger numerical ranges (and, of course, the many irregular distributions produced by combinations of multiple dice).

By using polyhedral dice, RPG designers enabled a wide variety of new uses for dice rolls, from simply randomly selecting one item from a list of 20 using a d20, to managing a sliding scale of modifiers within a die-specific range or on bell curves created by multiple dice. This flexibility made possible the richly detailed game mechanics of classic RPGs, and set the stage conceptually for the computationally-managed RPG combat and experience engines under the hood of games like World of Warcraft.

I know I’m not alone in appreciating the deep formal, epistemological and sentimental connections between polyhedral dice, the story/game systems of my childhood, and the exciting possiblities of interactive and generative computational art. The playful interplay of randomness and rulesets that I discovered in the Marshalls’ basement led me down a path toward my present interests in the relationships between play, story and procedural authority; remembering how the dice made me feel reminds me that emotional engagement always wins the day, particularly when it comes to calling audiences to action and engagement, and that speaking to and from the heart is, at the end, what we’re all really after.