Trivial Pursuits

A few months ago, I purchased the game Half Truth to play with my family. The game was designed by Richard Garfield, best known for Magic: The Gathering, alongside Jeopardy! Greatest of All Time winner Ken Jennings. I enjoyed it a lot, with my only complaint being about a scoring system that was a little too complex for the mass market.

Then, a week or two ago, I discovered the TV show The Chase while I was looking for something to watch on Netflix. In The Chase, a team of three players attempts to out-trivia a trivia master and absolute unit nicknamed The Beast. While there were several varying rounds, I found myself excited, nervous, and energized throughout the entire episode – great for TV viewing, not so much when you’re trying to go to sleep. Incidentally, a revival of The Chase has been confirmed by ABC, featuring the aforementioned Ken Jennings alongside the other Jeopardy! GOAT contestants.

Both games are primarily trivia games, but possess significant press-your-luck elements as well. However, despite the narrow category in which both reside, I was struck by how they are very different from each other. Observing these games alongside each other provides us with a valuable lesson about understanding what you want your players to get out of a game.

Difficulty

Half Truth is designed to be played by everyone from preteens to grandparents, while the competitors in The Chase are all hardcore trivia junkies. So obviously, Half Truth questions should be easy and Chase questions should be difficult, right? Wrong! Half Truth is much more difficult. The secret to this seemingly odd discrepancy lies in the goals of each game.

Half Truth is a conventional game, and like all games, its goal is to challenge the player. However, there’s a fine line between “challenge” and “frustrate”, especially for trivia games where usually someone knows the answer or they don’t. Trivial Pursuit, for instance, often gets bogged down because people don’t know enough exact answers to get the right pie wedges.

Modern trivia games frequently have questions that are so difficult, they don’t expect players to get it exactly, but have rewards for approximately right answers. The widely acclaimed Wits and Wagers plays a sort of Price is Right game, where players have to bet on which of the whole table’s guesses to an answer is closest to the target number without going over. Terra and its sequel America use a map and hand out points to people who get within a certain number of spaces of the right answer.

In Half Truth‘s case, each question has six possible answers and three of them are right. Not only that, you only need to make one guess. This means that if you’re completely stumped, you can just flip a coin and you’ll probably get it right! Hooray!

…So where’s the challenge? Note that in the previous paragraph, I said you only “need to” make one guess, not that you “can” make one guess. If you feel confident enough, you can make two or three guesses. If any of them are wrong, you earn no points, but you can earn significantly more if you go above one guess. This creates a fascinating metagame angle, where you’re not only testing your knowledge, but your knowledge of your knowledge. Do you really know enough about movies, or geography, or weird European holidays, to go all in and get those extra points?

The key difference between Half Truth and The Chase is that while Half Truth challenges you to understand your own knowledge, The Chase challenges you to surpass other people’s – particularly

Vicarious Competition

The Chase, being a game show, is different from a board game because it doesn’t care at all what the people playing the game on the show feel or want – the real players are the audience at home. More specifically, The Chase wants the audience to get most of the questions so they can play along themselves.

The Chase is set up so a home audience can guess with precision how well they would do if they were in a competitor’s shoes. The gameplay is segmented into various sections, including a multiple-choice section and several “quick-fire” sections where the competitor answers questions as fast as possible. Importantly, all of these have an easy-to-follow score associated with them, so it’s easy to gauge how well you would have done if you had gotten the same questions.

This difference in design goals extends to the press-your-luck section of The Chase, as well. Each competitor earns money through quickfire questions, then The Beast offers them two different sums of money in a Deal or No Deal – style negotiation. This may seem like an afterthought in the grand scheme of the game, but it’s a great opportunity for the audience to make their own choice based on the values given. When the competitor breezes through when they could have won more money, or gets eliminated when being conservative could have pushed them towards the end, the people watching say to themselves, a bit smugly, “I wouldn’t have done that.”

The co-op nature of the show, and the presence of someone who’s an even better trivia master than all of the people who volunteered to compete, also help the audience feel smart. In the final round, The Beast has to answer many rapid-fire questions in a row, and given that he’s still human and fallible, he generally gets four to six wrong each time. If you can beat the person who gets paid to not let trivia enthusiasts win prize money, you can feel exceptional about your own trivia skills.

Returning to my previous section, this is why the questions are easy in The Chase. If they were very difficult, it would be an unapproachable competition between nerds who know more than you, but by making most of them something that most people could get, the show producers help stimulate this sense of vicarious competition.

Goals

So which of these is better? Neither. Both of them understood what their goals were and fulfilled them about equally well.

If Half Truth were played as a game show, it might have some appeal, but the questions are such stumpers even the contestants would admit that they’re guessing most of the time. The Chase can’t be played at home at all, because so much of it hinges on The Beast’s knowledge and charisma. But these are just the obvious features.

Let’s consider the active playtime of both games, for example. The Chase makes each contestant go through their own round with The Beast before the team version – this pads out the show to a full hour of airtime, but also gives the contestants more time to sweat in a one-on-one contest. This is a great idea for a TV show, where the audience isn’t playing at all, but in a tabletop game, only one player getting to play for an extensive time period is an ill-advised design decision. Half Truth has all players answering questions at the same time, a fairly standard party game setup that works well for its purposes.

The character of the press-your-luck element for each game is different as well. Gambling for more points is the core of Half Truth, with the game designed to tempt you to bet big every round. You’re also playing for fake board game points (and maybe your dignity as a trivia master), so you don’t feel bad biting off more than you can chew on occasion. You have many opportunities to try, so failing one isn’t that big a deal.

Meanwhile, The Chase‘s press-your-luck element has much higher stakes, because the contestant has to choose to undergo an easier/harder trivia gauntlet for less/more money, with elimination on the line should they fail. Unlike a traditional game, were winning by 1 point or 50 points is irrelevant, exiting The Chase with $30,000 versus $80,000 matters a lot. There’s only three points where contestants actually have to press their luck, but this rarity just makes the pressure and tension of the decision more palpable.

I could give a few more examples, but in summary, Half Truth excels at being a trivia board game, and The Chase excels at being a trivia game show. Both of them excel in this way because they knew what they were going for and constructed everything, from the format of the game to the questions themselves and even the tone, to meet these goals.

Conclusion

When you’re designing a game, it’s easy to get caught up in the trappings or in small tweaks and forget what your goal was when you started making it. However, having a desired goal or emotional reaction in mind and designing in pursuit of it makes for a much more focused game that forgoes the design clichés that don’t benefit it. I hope that by showing the different tacks that these two excellent quiz games took with their own goals in mind, you can use this as inspiration for your own thought process.

A Perfectly Normal House! Design Diary

The inspiration for my new game, A Perfectly Normal House!, came on the Monday before Halloween, when I was alerted to a buck-wild 3D real estate walkthrough that was making the rounds across the more online parts of Twitter. What struck me is that it was scary, not because it put together a horrifying narrative, but precisely because of the opposite – it was the surreal nature of the house from the eBay DVD warehouse adjoining a baptismal font to the bizarre architectural layout. I’m very fond of liminal spaces and areas that feel like they don’t belong without being overtly supernatural, so I knew I wanted to create a game that captured the experience of exploring this house.

Then I realized, hey, Halloween’s coming up! Since this is a horror game, I should release it on Halloween! This sound line of thinking had one flaw: I had to make an entire game, start to finish, in 5 days. Not being the kind of person who usually does things like game jams, this was a way tighter deadline than anything else I had made before. This is the story behind the 5 days it took to build A Perfectly Normal House!

Tuesday: Brainstorming

When creating a top-down design – that is, a design inspired from a genre or real-life concept – the main goal is to capture the “feel” of something, whether it’s Camp Grizzly‘s tribute to sleepaway camp slasher films or Twilight Struggle‘s recreation of the Cold War. In this case, what I wanted to capture was the sense of shock and dread you discovered when looking at the rooms of this house that shouldn’t exist.

My first pass on APNH! was pretty close to the final version, where you randomly generate rooms with things that could make you lose composure points. I used “composure” instead of the more popular “sanity” because the concept of “losing sanity” is harmful to a lot of people, and everyone has times where they’ve lost their composure, so it was a more relatable experience. Originally, I had a press-your-luck element, where you could leave the house at any time and calculate its value based on the rooms you discovered. I didn’t even need to playtest this without realizing the issue: The player was incentivized to not experience the weirdest parts of the game, which was where all the enjoyment was.

The solution I came up with in the time I had was to make the game fully deterministic, and have the player’s only function to be rolling for room contents and arranging them as they see fit. This flies against common game design knowledge, but I ultimately went with it because APNH! is an experiential game, and the golden rule of good experiential design is “create the right experience.” This way, I could force the player to get really weird and use Composure as a timer to make sure it wouldn’t go on so long it would become boring.

So if the game’s deterministic, what’s the value in requiring the player to go through it at all? I could, with some aid or research, create a weird real estate generator that you could just load all at once. While there were time constraints here, I felt that wouldn’t give the same effect because the one-by-one production of each item in the room created a building sense of…”dread” isn’t the right word, but maybe “bafflement” – that you can’t get with an all-at-once approach.

Wednesday: Creating Lists

I used to think I was good at math until I made a bunch of dice result tables for A Perfectly Normal House!. It turns out that, when I want a result to occur about 5 percent of the time, and it starts from 05, I am very likely to commit a fencepost error and make it go from 05-10. I wish there were an automated tool I could use for something like this – there’s a table generator online but it doesn’t let you input ranges, unfortunately,

Beyond my inability to count, the biggest challenge was just coming up with enough stuff to fill out the tables. Much like party games, which I cover in The Arty of Party, the bulk of the design work on APNH! was finding lots and lots of items that fit the spirit of the story I wanted players to tell through the game. As mentioned, I didn’t want to get overtly supernatural, but I had a few other limits too. I didn’t want to get overtly scatological or sexual, both because that would be too easy and because I want Phantom Knight Games to mostly stick to a PG rating.

I also didn’t want to do anything that crossed the line from “creepy” to “scary” – no dismembered body parts or murder evidence or things like that – because that would turn the narrative into “the pieces of some slasher movie monster slowly come together as you explore the house.” I didn’t want a narrative at all, to be frank – I wanted the game to reflect the absurdities of a house that’s been lived in a little too much. There shouldn’t be any form of plot or progression, only weirdness upon weirdness until your player-avatar can’t take it anymore.

My listmaking was mostly arbitrary, but I went into it with targets for how often you should lose Composure in a given room. I absolutely didn’t want the game to end at the first cuil (level of weirdness, of which there are three), and preferably not the second either. I ultimately settled on having about 15% of the objects at cuil 1 making the player lose composure, followed by 30% at cuil 2 and 50% at cuil 3, when all hell breaks loose.

Thursday: Playtesting

I normally prefer to playtest more than twice, but I was on a very tight schedule, so twice it would have to be. The first playtest was with an online D&D group made up of some of my college friends, and took place over Google Drawings. One of the members of this group was my friend Christopher, who took it upon himself to reorganize the Google Sheet where I had my list of objects, as well as calculate the average amount of Composure loss per cuil. He did such a service to the game that I gave him a Special Thanks credit. In any event, the playtest went very smoothly and ended with the hapless realtor discovering a room filled with unloaded submachine guns. My main takeaway from here was the starting Composure for the player should be much higher than I already had it, and I settled on 20. I also made it a bit more likely to roll bathrooms and kitchens.

The second playtest was with my dad. I tried to be more hands-off, since this would be my only chance at something approaching a “blind” playtest, and we used pencil and paper this time. I came very close to having to explain what an anime hug pillow is to my dad. THESE ARE THE SACRIFICES I MAKE FOR MY ART. Anyway, the playtest worked great, and had a weird number of bathrooms considering he didn’t roll up that many kitchens. Satisfied, I started on the final part of my project: Laying it out in InDesign.

Friday: Creating the PDF

This was mostly boring behind-the-scenes work, so I’ll spare you the details. InDesign’s ability to carry over text across multiple boxes proved invaluable, as I was constantly tweaking the font size and whatnot. Getting everything to fit on one page with no weird hanging boxes onto the next page was a real challenge, but I was eventually able to get all the content looking at least fairly nice.

I did end up with some white space in cuil 2, so I included a coupon for pizza and a poetry corner. Want to see them? Get a copy of A Perfectly Normal House! and see for yourself!

Saturday and Beyond

On Saturday, I successfully launched A Perfectly Normal House! on itch.io, and got more downloads than I expected for a company as tiny as mine.

On the whole, I think working on APNH! within the deadline I gave myself was a good idea. I haven’t been able to get a lot of work done on my games since quarantine began because it makes playtesting much more cumbersome, so it was nice to be able to shake the rust off and remind myself that I can use my skills to make people happy. Once things go back to normal, I don’t expect I’ll be making a lot more small projects like this, but if the circumstances arise I might do so.

I’ll close this design diary with one more exhortation to get the game – it’s free, and if you’re the kind of person who likes looking at a space and wondering “what the hell?”, you’ll have a great time. Good luck, and happy house hunting!