Behavioral Game Design Contest

From Boulder-GameDevwiki

The Contest:

Implement a game based on one(or both) of Hopson's two design principles:

How to make players play hard. Translated into the language we've been using, how do we make players maintain a high, consistent rate of activity? Looking at our four basic schedules, the answer is a variable ratio schedule, one where each response has a chance of producing a reward. Activity level is a function of how soon the participant expects a reward to occur. The more certain they are that something good or interesting will happen soon, the harder they'll play. When the player knows the reward is a long way off, such as when the player has just leveled and needs thousands of points before they can do it again, motivation is low and so is player activity.

How to make players play forever. The short answer is to make sure that there is always, always a reason for the player to be playing. The variable schedules I discussed produce a constant probability of reward, and thus the player always has a reason to do the next thing. What a game designer also wants from players is a lot of "behavioral momentum," a tendency to keep doing what they're doing even during the parts where there isn't an immediate reward. One schedule that produces a lot of momentum is the avoidance schedule, where the players work to prevent bad things from happening. Even when there's nothing going on, the player can achieve something positive by postponing a negative consequence.

His article can be found here: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010427/hopson_01.htm And also as an attachment to an email I sent you earlier ;-)

To paraphrase, either implement a game with is based on a variable ratio schedule, a game with an avoidance schedule, or some combination thereof. If you need more information on what this means, the paper is attached. It's more important to us that you produce something cool. If it appears you've made an effort to structure some key aspect of your game on these principles, that's fine - you don't need to study the paper and make sure you're following the guidelines to a T.

The goal of this competion is to create a game which uses one of these behavioral principles as a base. When judging, the focus will be on the strengths and weaknesses of your game. As all of your games will be based on at least one of these behavioral principles, we hope to see the gameplay strengths, and weaknesses, that collectively manifest themselves as a result.

Implementation: You may implement your game through whatever medium is most comfortable for you. We're encouraging computer games, and to support that, we'll be offering a series of tutorials over the coming weeks in order to help you cross in to the digital medium. If you'd rather implement your game as a card game, board game, live action role playing game, party game, or even a game that involves shooting each other with rubber bands, that's perfectly fine. Unless deemed hazardous, illegal, or otherwise infeasible, all games will be playtested.

Prizes: Prizes will scale on participation. At present, I play on rewarding the top 3. I haven't yet picked out what will be awarded, however given the health of our budget, they should be sweet. I'll figure something out, but in the meantime I'm open to suggestions.

Deadline: 2/20/07.