The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated the need to maintain a social connection when computers increasingly mediate our communication. Individuals experimented with different ways to stay in touch with their friends and family, including weekly video calls, which quickly became tiresome and less regular. It can be hard to chat when nothing much has happened lately or when you don’t feel confident enough to speak up in large group conversation. Additionally, for many people working from home, another video meeting is the last thing they want to do.
A popular option to avoid these issues was to organise quizzes or games. They create conversation; everyone has a turn to speak and do something. Simply put, there is a set of rules which mediate the social interactions between the participants. We rely on unspoken rules such as body language and physical distance during real-life meetings, but virtual meetings make perceiving these cues much harder. Using a clear set of rules makes the social flow explicit.
Also, board games, and more specifically cooperative ones, successfully bring groups together and create a sense of togetherness. They offer ways for players to immerse themselves in a theme while promoting collaborative problem solving, thus re-creating the feeling of a team working towards a common goal.
Could the framework of cooperative board games provide a more human and social dimension to our digital storytelling and participatory experiences work? Would it also bring some solutions to the problems of remote working and socialising?
Our research started by analysing the design of popular collaborative board games (including popular titles such as Pandemic, Arkham Horror, The Crew, Mysterium) and various RPGs (such as Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu) to extract re-usable patterns that will improve participatory experiences.
The patterns
Analysing the games, we looked for aspects that could enhance the social feeling and create an ongoing conversation. Below are a few of the high-level concepts we found.
Episodic & regular
A lot of cooperative board games seem to offer a discoverable narrative. Usually, they can change what will happen next, but sometimes the story is just delivered to them in instalments. Moreover, the story is sometimes divided into episodes. Each episode can be experienced one after the other but offers the possibility to take a break in between. This means you can play with your group of friends over a few evenings or a few months at your own pace.
The story keeps the players engaged with suspense and anticipation while pushing them to meet again to discover what’s next. A similar thing can be observed when multiple people tune in to a TV show broadcast each week (as opposed to the series being available all at once): it creates a regular rendez-vous and an occasion to chat after the show.
Asynchronous
Most cooperative board games seem to encourage players to take turns. This allows people to discuss what they want to do without the pressure of time but also makes explicit who is currently in charge. Players make it clear when they’re done and who is next.
The flow allows everyone to express themselves confidently by carving out a space for each individual while maintaining group conversation. However, it can create a quarterbacking problem where a single player might instruct everyone else what to do. Fortunately, there’s a variety of ways to counteract it, from entirely silent games to passing around a leader token.
Objective
In cooperative board games, the group is trying to achieve something together. Usually, there is an objective: collect several things or reach several points. It gives purpose to the group, painting the game as a common enemy to be defeated together.
This can be made more exciting by using a countdown. In the spirit of asynchronicity, this is rarely to do with a time limit in real life but rather a threshold within the game. For instance, having to do something before turn three otherwise there will be bad consequences. The countdown creates a sense of urgency, reinforcing the social connection and the idea that the group is in it together.
Roles & responsibilities
Cooperative tasks set by board games usually require creating a balanced team. Each player will have a character or role with different strengths and weaknesses. This has two advantages:
- It forces the group to organise and converse, making it feel like a team where everyone contributes.
- It makes everyone feel useful and included. A well-designed game will require a contribution from the different aspects of each role.
To succeed, the group has to be cohesive, and a single player cannot go ahead and do everything. This naturally creates a social feeling within the group as they undertake and complete the tasks together.
The different characters in Arkham Horror: The Living Card Game showing their different strengths and weaknesses.
Communication
To cooperate you need to communicate your intentions and your needs. In most board games, players are encouraged to narrate their actions so that everyone can follow what is going on. This can also include reading additional text provided by the game to give a narrative flavour.
Naturally, any limitation on communication increases the challenge but can also restrain the social aspect of the game by decreasing player interaction. Such a tool should be used carefully because it can dramatically increase the tension but also kill the social fun.
Though the players are usually encouraged to think for themselves, communication with the rest of the group to organise and plan is often necessary. For instance, the current player might submit their plan to the group to get their approval or ask them for additional resources to succeed.
The board
Board games have three main spaces where information is kept:
- The hand which has the player’s private information
- The board which represents all the information that isn’t secret and that everyone in the group has access to.
- The rulebook which gives meaning to the information on the board and in the hand
In that dynamic, the board is the central shared space between the players that summarises their current and past actions. Everyone contributes to that space, changing it as they progress to construct a shared picture. It’s the ultimate representation of the group’s collaboration and what connects them.
The relationship between the hand and the board.
Uncertainty & discoverability
If you could do anything without risk you would lose the sense of accomplishment. In board games, that principle of chance and randomness is often applied to the player’s actions. They rarely succeed automatically, which makes their achievements more valuable but also helps to keep the whole group interested in each other’s actions, particularly when it’s not their turn.
Everyone has a vested interest in your success when the task is cooperative. When the outcome of a test is revealed or a new element is discovered, it is shown to everyone at once, creating a shared moment of tension that can result in euphoria or disappointment.
Tactility
While digital applications now power some board games, by and large, the players have to move everything on the board physically. When a player takes an action, they might place a card down, then move a token, pick up some resources and then roll the dice. Because the players have to do all of this themselves, it contributes to their understanding of the game but also ensures that their intentions are broken down into smaller steps for the rest of the group.
As opposed to digital games, in board games, nothing happens without you purposefully doing it. Besides the fun aspect of moving pieces of cardboard around, it forces players to decompose their actions, making it clear to the group but also to themselves.
Tactile elements such as tokens, cards and figurines are an important part of board games.
Conclusion
From the start of our investigation, the concept of the board seemed central. It’s a shared space that we don’t often see in digital experiences, where everything tends to be personalised. By its own limitation, the board game makes the same information available to everyone in the same way. Could reverting to using a separate screen for a shared board bring back the positive side-effects it might have on togetherness?
We wanted to try this but multi-screen applications come with a few challenges of their own. The main one being attention division — it’s hard to know which screen to look at and when. This is due to a couple of things:
- The content is usually in real-time. You might miss something if you don’t pause, creating FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
- The multi-screen features are often added on top of an existing piece of content. That content is rarely designed for multiple devices and has to work on a single screen.
However, by taking inspiration from board games, we can make this experience asynchronous. This gives players time to switch between screens at their leisure, without feeling something is happening without their knowledge. The tactile quality of board games can help us create experiences where each player understands what’s happening every step of the way. And, by creating a new piece of content specifically designed for multiple screens, we can ensure the experience is optimal.
As a result, we decided to build a prototype game using the patterns we’ve outlined in this article to help us assess if they’re applicable in other digital experiences relevant to the BBC. It would take advantage of multiple screens to recreate the board and hand dynamic found in board games but would also work on a single screen by combining both.
A preview of the prototype.
This is the first in a series of articles, and in a coming installment we will describe how we approached building the prototype as well as how we implemented each of these patterns.
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