Games To F*** Up At

My friends and I have gathered to play Telephone. It's our favorite game, and we've spent months practicing to make sure we can hear each other as clearly as possible. We sit in a circle and confidently enunciate our chosen sentence into each others' ears, and at the end of the game it's revealed the starting sentence was exactly the same as the final phrase. There's a hollow pit in our stomachs, although none of us know why. We played Telephone as efficiently and effectively as we possibly could. We won the game, fair and square. So why does it feel hollow?

C. Thi Nguyen, in his book Games: Agency As Art, describes a set of games (which include Twister and Telephone) as "stupid games." Opposed to "striving games," stupid games are unique as the way to enjoy them is to ultimately fail at their playing. Telephone is structurally designed to build fun out of the limits of human hearing, and Twister is a strategic chaos-creating game as we push our bodies to their limits and ultimately collapse. This framework reveals another way to understand player enjoyment of games, and could open a new door in thinking about tabletop role-playing games and how we understand their mechanics in play.

This blog post is an exploration of various ways we enjoy stumbling in games, and how we can connect those desires to TTRPGs.

Points Of Failure

I'm interested in expanding the framework of "stupid games" into a broader understanding of games built around enjoying failure. The taxonomy I'm imagining is built around a game's Point of Failure, i.e the spot in the game where, when this particular component is unoptimized, people are happier than if that particular component is optimized. This isn't an unconscious desire; rather players are often actively aware that the game is more fun with this point of failure present, and will encourage people to lean into the failure.

• Stupid Games, as discussed earlier, are games where the players' mechanical interface is the point of failure. This includes their physical ability or intellectual capacity, but could also include controls in a video game or dice rolls in a board game. Often it's considered important for the collapse to be legitimate — making up a new sentence in Telephone is considered "cheating."
• Casual Games are games where the players' meta-knowledge is the point of failure. These are games where the better you get at the game, the less enjoyable the game becomes for everyone playing. Magic: The Gathering's Commander format is a good example of this, as is Among Us or other PvP video games.
• Doomed Games are games where the players explicitly hold onto character desires that are set to fail. Ten Candles is a clear example of this, where the players are cautioned to hold out hope for survival while also intellectually understanding that survival is impossible. One might preserve optimal meta-knowledge or mechanics, but still lead characters who within their internal reality are failing.

All of these different points of failure (and others, that haven't occurred to me yet!) show up in TTRPGs in different fashions, although some have more natural homes in other settings. Collectively these games represent an interest in "failing for fun," although they're distinct from the "fail forward" model provided by Apocalypse World and other TTRPGs. Failing Forwards means that experiencing character-failure or mechanics-failure can still be interesting and fun, while this model sets up a practical need for some amount of failure. While you're supposed to try and survive Ten Candles, the game stops being coherent if you actually manage to somehow defy the mechanics and survive.

TTRPGs To Fuck Up At

With our limited and preliminary taxonomy of "ways to be bad at games on purpose," we're all set to think about how we could implement this in our TTRPG design.

Doomed Games are the most obvious in their implementation, as TTRPGs have been exploring the tension between player desires and character desires for decades. I would be more interested in exploring what a Doomed Game is like in a non-TTRPG medium — could you have a board game with a knowingly-impossible win state? What would it feel like to cooperatively strive towards a game position everyone understands is impossible?

Casual Games are present in any TTRPG where optimizing one's meta-position decreases the fun of the game. This is most common in the community around Dungeons & Dragons, where players will be openly critical of people attempting to optimize or maximize their position in the game. Tumblr user Txttletale made a fantastic post about the failures of optimization as a play goal, in which she brought up the example from Mark Rosewater that "if we designed a card that said 'whenever you slam your head against the table, deal 1 damage to your opponent’, people would slam their heads against the table all match and then say 'this game sucks.'"

I believe it's still possible to create games where a limited meta-knowledge constructively enhances play experience. But many of these games weren't designed with that limitation as an explicit factor of what makes the game enjoyable.

Stupid Games (a name which I still don't personally like very much, as it can be very obscuring to the game's nature) seems to me the most compelling route for implementation in TTRPGs. I suppose games like Dread or Starcrossed, which rely on the inevitable collapse of a Jenga tower, fit into this model. But I'd be curious about what a TTRPG looks like when it's relying on imperfect choices, the limitations of our bodies and minds in play. I think there's a lot of potential there, even as it pushes players to contort themselves both literally and metaphorically.

Next Steps

This is a very small blog post, more of an exploration on a concept than any sort of call to arms or layout of some deeper theory. I'm interested in constructing a temporary taxonomy for understanding a particular subcategory of games, and I lay out the options present because I hope it can motivate other designers to push into a similar strange creative space, and I'm really interested in what could come next.