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Inis: Coopetition and seizing the moment

By lurieben July 18, 2017 July 9, 2017 Games

Inis is a game of following many paths, all at once. You play leaders of Celtic tribes exploring a previously uncharted land. You discover new territories, build castles and religious buildings, hold feasts and have feuds, and compete to be declared the high chief of the new territory. It comes with beautiful art (including ethereally lovely landscapes and mysterious myths illustrating cards), a great draft-based action system and the possibility of glorious deeds. But I find the path to victory the most fascinating. In many games where players compete for land, there’s a straight path to winning. You build up resources, train soldiers and fight your opponents. As you win, others lose their forces and get weaker.

Yet in Inis, your moves towards victory are often simultaneously others’ moves towards victory. In the game, there are three ways to win – and any one can get you there:

Have your pieces present in six spaces.
Have your pieces present in any number of spaces that together contain at least six buildings of a certain type.
Rule over at least six pieces belonging to other players (you “rule over” their pieces if you have more pieces in that space than they do – if you have three pieces in a space, I have two and another player has two, you “rule over” four of our pieces).

It’s fascinating because there’s a simultaneous push and pull.

Push outwards – You want to spread thin in order to win by having your pieces in many spaces. But the more you spread out, the easier it is for someone else to rule over your scattered pieces and move towards that victory.
Pull inwards – You want to concentrate your forces to rule over large numbers of opposing players’ pieces (e.g. ruling four pieces with five or yours gets you close to winning) and to give you a powerful army to attack with. But the more you do that, the more territories your opponents can easily claim without a fight.

You pull your opponents up the ladder behind you as you expand and then have to figure out how to push them down without losing your own balance. For example, if someone is about to be present in six territories and win, you can attack them in one of those territories to push them out of it. But then you don’t get to rule over their pieces there any more, since they’ve been removed. It hurts you and it hurts them.

Since you can win different ways, multiple players can “win” at once. If they do, suddenly the tiebreaker becomes whether you’ve met the victory condition for just one path or for several. So you have to grow in all directions at the same time, trying for all three ways to win, accepting that your fortunes will ebb and flow and seeking opportunities to coexist and grow with your opponents. At least until the moment where you realize that they’re about to win and you can’t coexist anymore.

In other words, Inis is about being open to opportunity, and about knowing when to make your move and when to cooperate. It’s about watching your options grow and shrink and making decisions on both logic and instinct – a real gem of a game.

Spoiler Alert: When Your Product Launch Is Spoiled

By lurieben June 14, 2016 June 14, 2016 Games, Public Relations

In many competitive industries, your product launch is your golden opportunity to build hype and get people excited. When better? There’s a shiny new product coming out, with new rules, ideas, art and more. But in the games industry, your product launch faces a challenge that moviemakers and Harry Potter readers know well: the risk of having your launch spoiled ahead of schedule.

Let’s talk about spoilers in the games industry

Most games are self-contained: you buy a box, it contains little wooden sheep, plastic spaceships or an artistically designer board, and you play it as-is. In these games, little is gained by tightly controlling the flow of information, since all players come into the game with equal knowledge and equal access to all the parts. For example, in Settlers of Catan or Carcassone, there’s unlikely to be new parts.

Other games exist in a world of unequal knowledge and investment. Consider:

Magic: the Gathering– the world’s most popular collectible card game. In Magic, the game continually releases new sets of cards, and players build decks from a subset of the most recent cards to compete with. When a new set comes in, older ones rotate out of the most popular competitive formats.
Miniatures-based wargames – There are a wide range of these, such as Warhammer or Warmachine, where players collect an army of plastic or metal figures belonging to a particular faction, then play against players with their own separately collected armies from the same or other factions. For example, an army themed around Arthurian knights vs. an army themed around Tolkein-esque forest-dwelling elves. In these games, new models are released regularly, so the business model depends on – every so often – refreshing the core ruleset and rebalancing all the individual models’ rules.

What these games share is that players make a financial and emotional investment in a Magic deck or a Warmachine faction. It’s less playing “the game as a whole” than being “an Eldrazi deck player” or “an Elves faction player.” It creates passionate fans – which is fantastic! – but also poses challenges when planning the launch of a new Magic set or a new miniatures games edition.

On the one hand, players have made investments, and the cards or the models people they like to play may no longer be competitive. So they want to know – what will the new rules be? What new cards are coming out? Should I get excited or be disappointed? Players are eager for information, eager to be the first ones “in the know” so they can show off their information, eager to find out what’s going on. Controlling the flow of that information in the run up to the launch date is therefore critical so that new concepts, miniatures or rules can be revealed in context and in their best light.

When the news gets out

Just within the last year, Magic producer Wizards of the Coast suspended several of its most active players – volunteer judges – for sharing information on upcoming cards, and Warmachine manufacturer Privateer Press found that all of the rules for its new edition had gotten out early, likely as part of a localization/translation process where someone failed to follow a non-disclosure agreement.

In both cases, there was a backlash from the community. Wizards of the Coast’s crackdown was widely seen as unjustified – the judges had shared information, not stolen it themselves – and Privateer Press started to face harsher questions as people began to see the new edition all at once rather than rolled out with the planned discussion, inside insight, and framing. They called for people to not share unofficial spoilers but – at least publicly – did not appear to take action against those sharing them.

Not only that, but the releases were less well received, because they didn’t have the chance to be framed correctly. People argued about the reality of these spoilers, making their unveiling a contentious time rather than one where people could get excited together.

Four tactics for managing your product launch post-spoilers:

Keep your big news in your back pocket.If a transformational change gets revealed earlier than you expected, there’s two ways things can go. In one, you have your preview piece all ready to go. You share it, people get excited about your news rather than the unofficial spoilers, and you move on. In another, you’re frantically starting to write that piece the day after your news is on social media – and you’re already behind the social news cycle.
Investment sparks entitlement.You care a lot about keeping your intellectual product under your control, but your fans do not. They want to know, and they do not welcome after-the-fact efforts to punish leaks. Expect that information that needs to be kept private should be kept close to hand – attempting to pull it back off the internet or social media once it’s out there is generally not received well.
Contextualize your choices.Spoilers are typically released insight-free, with no glimpse into your process or the broader vision of the product. Even after spoilers come out, you can still share a great story about “why,” “how” and “who” that can be really interesting to your audiences. You’re the designer and the producer – you have insights no one else does!
Step up your rich content.So rules may have come out, or an image of a card or a model’s rules. You can add value to that by – say – showing the model in action on the battlefield in a battle report, or sharing some behind the scenes full-art images that show more than you’d get from a grainy spoiler. If you are the source for the best information, people will continue to look to you.

Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/15725991454/; not under copyright as a United States government work.

Space Alert & Crisis Communication

By lurieben July 16, 2015 July 16, 2015 Games, Public Relations

Last week, a friend introduced me to a board game called Space Alert, a game of controlled cooperative chaos. You’re a team, new recruits crewing a tiny, poorly-built spaceship that has to go on 10-minute scouting missions. For those 10 minutes, a CD plays that tells you what problems you’ve encountered – broken computers, asteroids, alien attacks or communications breakdowns – and when you’ve encountered them.

You have a board that shows your spaceship and the various things you can do – charge up the reactor, fire the lasers, power up the shields, etc. You and your team have to work together to lay out on the table a series of cards to plan out in advance what moves and actions each of you will take to deal with every crisis and get home safe.

After the time is up, you’ll flip over your cards and go through the game again to see whether your plans actually worked as intended. Because you play the cards representing your “moves” face down, there’s infinite possibilities for chaos. Did you want to take the elevator down to recharge the nuclear reactor this turn? Whoops, the communications officer forgot to tell you that he already got in the elevator and it’s full. So you’ll have to wait until next turn to get down there and recharge the reactor. Of course, the security chief was expecting to use the power you generated to fire the lasers *this* turn, and now she’s stuck futilely hammering on the “laser” button as they make a sad sputtering noise like a deflating balloon and the enemies swoop in and start shooting…

…really, it’s a brilliant bit of concise, panicked, entertaining game design. And with the professional hat on, it’s a fantastic social media crisis simulator dressed up in board game clothes. At the beginning, you go in assuming that you know what you’re doing, and that everything will go smoothly. For a little bit, it does. But then, when things start to go wrong, suddenly everyone starts talking at cross-purposes under pressure. No one is clearly in charge, and information flows start to get clogged.

In both social and gaming, there need to be structure and processes for resolving each individual issue as well as for seeing the big picture. Before you reply on Facebook to a critic, does legal need to sign off? Are they familiar with the necessary turnaround time for social media? What do you do when other departments or executives start to reply on their own, or show up without complete information and start calling for specific actions? You’re going to get in each other’s way.

In both cases, when a crisis shows up, the response has to be:

Measured – appropriate for the reputational risks posed by the issue.
Coordinated – PR is just one member of a much larger “crew.” You’re the communications officer, but if you don’t have a plan in place across the organization to bring in the right people and express a unified brand message, you won’t make the
Goal-oriented – not responding just to respond, but intended to counter a false perception or address a concern with a tangible end state in mind.

All of these tie back to practice and preparation, whether it’s driven by the bitter experience of previous crises or a staged drill. You wouldn’t go into space without a test run – so why do so many brands venture out into social media without preparing for the risks?

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Learning to Notice ideas

By lurieben February 25, 2015 March 22, 2016 Games, Public Relations

Before I talk about ideas, I have a short story about games. Bear with me, if you will.

Every weekend, I spend a few hours playing a roleplaying game called Fate. It’s a fantasy setting (dragons, pirates, gnomes, all sorts of similar excellent critters) and the characters we play are – well, not heroes exactly, but people trying to shape a world that’s much bigger than they are.

One of us is a world-class swordswoman, another silver-tongued, others wield the primal forces of the world. Me, I’m good at a skill called Notice. All it does is let you notice things. But what that means (in this particular game) is that it lets you define the scene. Roll well, and you can describe a detail that might not have been there before, a detail that you can turn to your advantage.

So we’re facing off with some palace guards in an open southern courtyard. I look around for something I can turn to my advantage. Roll Notice – and I have the opportunity to add to the scene the detail that there’s a big awning providing some shade from the sun over half the courtyard. We knock it down, and suddenly half the guards are tangled up in cloth, making things easier for our merry crew.

What am I getting at with all this?

For clients, I often take the data they’ve collected (let’s say, social media data, or customer metrics) and making recommendations based on it. That’s the scene set before you. Here’s the numbers you have – what do you do now? And that’s a great place to work from (many folks don’t even collect metrics, so if they don’t, you may want to work on selling that in first).

But there are many things that aren’t in the numbers. Or at least, not in those numbers. Those are easy – they’re in front of you and you know they relate. But you don’t want to get so focused on the scene that’s been set before you that you forget to search for the detail you could add to the scene. What isn’t there that – if it were – would be fantastic for you? Then, can you get it to be there somehow?

It’s not a new idea – the idea of thinking about a problem sideways, or from another angle. But I think it’s still worth asking: What can you add to the scene?

Category: Games