Week 4 - Design Journal #4

Whether sports are perceived as a pastime or a way of life, participating in them is simple. However, converting these physical endeavors into a board game is not so much. The distinction between these two is that, in sports, your actions “convey meaning… [making] it matter more both to you and the audience” (Foddy 6:20) highlighting the consequences of every move, imbuing it with meaning not just for you but also for the audience invested in the outcome.

During our session on Tuesday, we were put into teams to brainstorm ideas of what sports we could translate into a board game. The game didn’t have to be a one-for-one of the real thing, but essentially, it showed that if an individual didn’t want to do any physical movement, then they could play this version, for say. It sounds easy, but “the events in our game [needed to] matter” (Foddy 20:57) because it added depth, creating some kind of engagement. I introduced Spothocking, a German variation of skateboarding involving a stool, which sounded fascinating but didn't quite align with our preferences. As the class progressed, we eventually settled on Beamer as the sport of choice for our game.

Fast forward to Thursday, our team’s version of Beamer was brought to life, and it was better than I expected. We played a few games to test it out and, along the way, added in some rules to make the game a bit more fair for the green team (survivors). In the original Beamer game, the offensive team runs outwards away from the defensive team and tries to not get hit, while in ours, the offensive (green) team has to find keys and match them up to the right exit. Essentially, we made more changes, but the overall aspect was that we successfully made it into a tabletop game.

In the end, creating some sort of game is a testament to how our minds work. Are we able to make something that “will be engaging and memorable” (Foddy 22:17) to the player as a whole?