Fracture (a competitive game towards diversity)
Spending half a day with Celia Pearce, Jeanie Choi, Isabella Carlsson, Mike Lazer-Walker and Joshua Sloane gave us a chance to test how a game designer or designers might work with the affordance of a tangible cellular automata game. It was a perfect test of what translates and how quickly one can write code, test, and iterate.
Celia had come to the lab with a few idea in mind, and so we picked a straight forward one about building a game with diversity as the objective. The rules are simple, AutomaTiles are happiest when around colors other than its own. From there, we sketched out ideas of what constraints make sense, what constitutes a move, and what the AutomaTiles afford for gameplay interaction. Initially, we thought to make the game a collaborative one, where everyone wins or no one wins. We played a bit with this, but felt the game needed more agency for each player.
Instead of keeping the game cooperative, we kept the goal of becoming diverse, but made it competitive. Each player is trying to make their subpopulation as diverse as possible before others make their population diverse. Since it is difficult to pull a tile from the middle of a dense grid of tiles, Mike proposed a neat mechanic, which is to simply fracture or break apart the entire population into 2 separate pieces. With this mechanic, a players move can do two things: 1) make their own tiles more diverse or prepared to be more diverse for a future move 2) make another players tiles less diverse. This tension of trying to help yourself out while keeping your friends struggling to diversify appears to be a tricky balance, and one that we had fun chasing.
The starting setup for the board looks like this:
and the gameplay looks like this:
All of the code for the AutomaTiles is here with comments and a description of the game and its rules.