There is a huge sigh of relief that occurs after a team settles on a design and makes their way toward play testing. While play testing might reveal this to be a false sense of security, it’s nice to revel in the moment while it lasts. With a few adjustments, Decision Maker is now in development. Keep in mind that it is possible to build and prototype a board game in a fraction of the time it would take to build a digital game, and thus I’ll be talking about construction and prototyping here.
Decision Maker is designed to train students on making better decisions under uncertain conditions. Players are offered a prospect (e.g., 25% chance of winning $400) on a playing card, and they must decide what sure bet (e.g., $105) they would take in lieu of the prospect. The winner of each round of play is the player who places a sure bet above the utility of the prospect (i.e., $100) but below the sure bets of their competitors. The winner of the round gets to keep the utility (i.e., $100) indicated on each card. However, even if they make a correct decision and beat their competitors, they only get to keep the value of the utility if the gamble actually pays using spinner. If no one wins the round, the card is recycled back into the deck. The overall winner of the game is the player with the most money after the deck of prospects is exhausted. In Decision Maker, a player is constantly trying to maximize their winnings without being too greedy.
We had to make a few changes to the game design, which may affect flow. Because players must all bet on the same prospect, there was no obvious method for controlling flow for individual players. This problem is typical in the classroom as well; teachers struggle to accommodate a wide range of abilities. Consequently, we abandoned the staircase procedure, where all prospects would be ranked according to difficulty, and opted for a simple two-level design. In the two-level design, if any single player gets more than three wins in a row, all players start drawing from a challenge deck. The prospects in the challenge deck are more difficult to judge because the probabilities and values are more extreme. If a player misses a question from the challenge deck, all players must go back to using the regular deck, and the player who advanced the group to the challenge deck loses a turn. Once the regular deck is exhausted, all players use the challenge deck. If for some reason, the challenge deck is depleted first, then users default to the regular deck. During the final point tally, winnings from the challenge deck are doubled, so there is an incentive to move to the challenge deck. A player can elect to draw from the challenge deck at any point during the game, but they will lose a turn if the gamble doesn’t pay off. The list of prospects for the regular deck follow: {99% chance of winning $5000; 90% chance of winning $400; 70% chance of winning $150; 55% chance of winning $700; 10% chance of winning $500; 6% chance of winning $2500; 0.2% chance of winning $10000}. Ten variations of these prospects (70 prospects total) will be created using the same percentage but a different value to keep the computation of utility difficult (e.g., 99% chance of winning $4970). The challenge level has 10 variations of the following prospects: {0.99% chance of winning $5000; 0.90% chance of winning $400; 0.70% chance of winning $150; 0.55% chance of winning $700; 0.10% chance of winning $500; 0.6% chance of winning $2500; 0.02% chance of winning $10000}. The combined total number of prospects for both levels is 140. While the elimination of the classic psychophysical staircase procedure will limit our control over flow, the two-level version of the game should provide players with an opportunity to practice before moving on to more difficult challenges.
A second change we made to the game was to eliminate the use of physical feats of strength before advancing to new levels. We originally included physical tasks in the game to break up the monotony of judging the prospects. However, there were two factors that influenced our decision. First, physical feats were never married to the lesson that we were trying to teach. It’s important that every element of the game be designed with learning in mind. Including a fun game-within-game may devalue the reward and joy derived from the primary lesson. In psychology, it is known that secondary reinforcers devalue primary reinforcers. If you starting paying a child to do something they would normally do for free, they may ultimately stop that activity and become focused on the money. Second, including the ability to move between levels by risking the loss of a turn gives the players a choice that involves strategy. Including physical feats would only detract from the strategic aspects of the game.
Additionally, we have not made a final decision on whether to include windfalls and calamity cards in the game. These cards would be biased to benefit loosing players and penalize winning players, restoring balance to the game. Cards might reward or penalize the players with extra turns or money. We will conduct a play test to see how they affect the game, and we might decide to keep them as options for players to include in the decks.
Finally, maintaining this blog has proved surprisingly valuable to the development process for this game. The student designer of this game reads the blog and reacts to my comments quickly and effectively. We have many face-to-face interactions, but the blog seems to help her consolidate the material. If she doesn’t get something, she is not shy about asking for additional explanations, which only intensifies our discourse.
