Misery Farming

Pairs well with: Stress and energy drinks.
Brutus scale: 0/10 – it’s all down to your own planning, kids.

This week The Misery Farmers are excited to tell you our experiences with the Global Game Jam 2016. Well, Briony is, because she was the only one of the three musketeers to actually have the time to take part this year (curse you, academia *mutter, grumble, mutter*). Despite this we are fairly confident that she, at least, has thoroughly flown the board game flag at this international event.

Global Game Jam is the biggest game jam in the world, where individuals, groups and companies from around the globe are challenged to make a video (or other) game in just 48 hours. Their website likes to think of it as ‘a hackathon focused on game development’. The game must be playable to others by the end of the event, and must be loosely tied to a theme. The theme for 2016 was ‘ritual’. Teams may be of any size (including being on your lonesome), and roles are not constrained. You can have musicians to create music, artists to draw up some designs, hard-core programmers who write the gritty stuff… And Briony to be hungover and eat flapjacks.

Luckily for Briony, she had a partner in flapjack crime, Chris*, to help share the load.

Game Jam has many regional venues where people can take part**. Fortunately, the University of Southampton, where all of The Misery Farmers are current PhD drones researchers, is one of them. This really takes the hassle out of the ‘international’ nature of a global event.

The event kicks off on Friday evening with a series of introductory talks and meetings with the people you’re going to be trapped in a lab with for the entire weekend. For our event this included a well prepared organisers’ talk about what to expect (stress), and what to aim for (less stress?). Good job Southampton organisers.

Following this there was a talk from professional video game designers Boss Alien, who have a strong track record of taking part in the GJJ. They provided us with insider knowledge based on previous experience in other jams. Finally, the video produced by the organisers of event themselves showed a series of talks from game designers around the world showcasing the work that they had produced. At the end of this video the theme was announced.

The rest of the evening was spent networking with fellow jammers to get an idea of teams.  What ideas would people have? What sort of media did they want to make? How succinctly could they explain their ideas? At the end of this people should ideally form some groups, and have a loose idea on what they wanted to do. Briony was keen to assemble a crack team who would be very good and also not notice when she occasionally took a cheeky nap. A tough ask.

Briony and Chris (Briss?) had decided that they wanted to make a board game. Stage one complete. But what about? They brainstormed some ‘ritual’ ideas… and concluded that, both being children of academia, it was a totally ridiculous and depressing area to be in. Is that what they meant by ritual? Let’s say yes. Well then, stage two complete. Ace.***

Now, to decide how they wanted the game to play.

2 hours later they’d come up with a basic first draft of the game, in a glorious multi-layered white paper format, which we’ll have you know was definitely meant to represent the white-paper format of academic treatises and not the lack of other materials.

The concept was to complete ‘project cards’ which were worth varying victory points at the end of the game. The cards ranged from rubbish conference papers, to journal papers, research bids, and the all-powerful thesis (that’s where the fantasy element comes in. We all know that theses are the most worthless academic document of all). Each player would begin with a starting job role which had different starting resources. At four points throughout the game, each player would be forced to pick up an event card, which described an undesirable situation based on real academic life. With a little bit of artistic licence, obviously, since an accurate depiction of your supervisor giving you a withering look and asking what exactly the point of your research is would ruin the light-hearted spirit of play. (What are we doing with our lives?!) You would have to complete your event cards** before being able to move on and complete further project cards.

The resources of the game are collectable through worker placement on four dials****. Briony and Chris (and the rest of team Misery) had figured that deciding what the resources should be in the first place may actually be the hardest part of the game designing process. In fact, it turned out to be the quickest decision that they made all weekend.

‘What do all postgrads, lecturers, fellows and professors run on?’

‘Uh… Coffee. Postgrad labour for marking and demonstrating. Grant money or funding. Annnnd…’

‘ – Sleep! Sleep is the premium resource in this game. Done.’

And so the second draft of the game came about, complete with spinning ‘cogs’*****. Now was the perfect time to try a play test, especially after much of the advice we had previously been given was to play your game at the soonest possible point in time. The idea was then to refine what you had for the rest of the weekend.

The first play test started off slowly, as Briss had deliberately left some spaces blank in order to add to as the game went on. Throughout the game they were able to discuss with the other players and themselves to get a better idea of the different strategies people may use. Based on that they could scribble on the paper draft copy of the game, and amend things as they went.

Academia: The Game going a hell of a lot better than Academia: The Reality. No tears, no existential crises, no waiting three months for your supervisor to email you back before you can move on to your next task. Bam!

After much tweaking, the first play test actually went well! They came out with a better functioning game (would’ve sucked if it had just got worse) and so they were able to turn their attention to the graphics and other features that needed work. By the end of Saturday evening they had a range of fully written and themed cards ready for use, and had worked out what they wanted the board to end up looking like.

Sadly, Briony had other commitments on Sunday but our faithful friend Chris ploughed on diligently. He refined more graphics, and did yet more tweaking. By the end of the weekend Team Misery had an OK magnificent game to be proud of, and have plans in the near future to fully finish off the game. Stay tuned, board gaming world, you may yet play our very own creation.

The game jam itself was a pretty rad excellent experience. We learnt a hell of a lot about planning and timing. We also really began to appreciate the sheer amount of effort that goes into every single detail and decision of a board game.

Seriously, board game designers, you guys are doing an amazing job and we sure do appreciate it.

The real winner of the day was gaming itself.

If you’d like to see any of the video games that were produced, you can find them on the Global Game Jam site.

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* Not to be confused with Friendly Robot Boyfriend Chris.

** And in a lot of cases actually stay at the venue for the full 48 hours.

*** Some examples of our event cards are listed below:

- ‘Your University decides to ‘reward’ you by asking you to be the one responsible for a new course. After realising that literally nobody else in the department wants anything to do with it, you decide the only way to move forward is to blackmail your colleagues with photos from the last Christmas party. Lose two sleep resource tokens as you move around at night, intimidating your peers.’

‘Your most recent peer reviewed paper has made reviewer number two so angry he has transmorphed into a manticore. He is now pillaging the local villages, showing no sign of stopping his killing spree. It is your responsibility to intervene with reviewer two and calm him down. Sadly, your calming words have no effect and you are forced to distract him with some students. Sacrifice two student labour resources.’

‘Your superior finally succumbs to the pressure of overseeing a thousand projects at once. Once the ambulance leaves, you suddenly realise it is your responsibility to take over their job. Lose all your coffee, and call an ambulance for yourself.’

‘The co-author you were writing a killer paper with has mysteriously gone missing. You can’t seem to contact her through messenger pigeons, and her students haven’t seen her in weeks. Bravely, you decide to search the nearby settlements for any trace. After trekking through forest you stumble upon a dank and intimidating cave. You see remnants of clothing strewn about, and a large amount of blood. Your fears are confirmed when you find a severed arm, still grasping the draft paper. She didn’t even manage to finish writing the abstract, the MOOSE. Loose one sleep resource from the horrors you have seen.’

'Some poor fool has asked you how your research is going. Try not to cry. Pay two of any resource.’

*** Lizzy had, in fact, had a conversation with someone about a week beforehand about the possibility of an academic board game. She’d interpreted as some kind of horror-theme, and maintains that the game should have basically ended up a lot more similar to Arkham or Eldritch Horror.

**** Much in the style of Tzolk’in.

***** These were just paper with a pin poked through them, with some blue tack added to the pointy end. Sadly the game jam didn’t have any card available for the creation of board games, but we can forgive them.