DB

I want to capture the feeling of an experience–and that’s the essence of most forms of art. We want to evoke things that we’ve experienced in our lives and transport it like a picture frame…like a portal to that place for others. There’s something about that capturing process in the different mediums of art that make it extremely difficult to get those points across.

In a game there are rules and objectives to follow and usually an agreement on how you are going to play. It is in those rules and in the initiation and opening and that seed of a game that we as designers try to capture life. There is something to say about the weight of flavor which can establish genre and expedite the “shared fictional world contract” that make that experience easier to get to together, especially when you are in an improv environment or at a table.

Besides the decorations and flavor and the heavy lifting that those works do for a player and a group of players in a game, the rules by themselves should imply part of the experience that you want to facilitate. In Dread, the Tower evokes the very feeling of that game’s name. It is a centerpiece. Its instability weighs on your person, on your character, and it emphasizes that things are only going to get harder and harder. It is only an eventuality until someone falls. (Well until the tower falls.)

It is evocative design like that with center pieces and props to support game play and feeling that make me want to make games in the first place.

The sentiment that I wanted to capture in the game that I’m working on with Dance With Me is that of trying to match someone’s dance steps. It is a delicate task and you can only do so much in regards to listening and feeling your lead’s direction. There is no physical connection like there is in dance. No touch to guide you with unspoken words. However, there are other games that evoke that feeling of connection through an (almost) psychic link. The game that I’m thinking of is The Mind.

The Mind is a card game where your goal as a team is to progressively count up without saying anything to your group and your partners. This is done in a nonverbal way–typically through timing, much like in the way that dance is. If timing and body language are the only things that you can use to gain a sense of psychic connection, and because it is possible in that game to gain that feeling of connection…then it is feasible to believe and ask the same of players in Dance With Me. (Granted, they are doing partner dances with a possibly it will be abstracted to more than just that type of dance.) Part of that connection and that knowing of what the other is trying to do (like reads in fighting games) will elicit the same crazy feeling of knowing what it’s like to be heard without ever saying a word.

And I hope that it evokes and is effective in that. I hope that it is also effective in eliciting the musicality and expression that is inherent in dance and music…in the give and take, and intention and release as you try to fulfill your dance moves work–which are based off of upbeats and downbeats. We’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck in my playtesting.