Ennui

This weekend there were two game jams running at the same time: one was a challenge to make dating sims (mostly with Twine) and one was a QUILTBAG-themed jam which I think was proposed by the MIT game lab.

I kind of had separate ideas for each theme at first, then I realised I really ought to just make one idea work for both jams. So I was going to make a twine game about fruitlessly trying to find love in a bad relationship, but then I decided I didn’t have the emotional energy to put myself through that this week.

So instead, I made a card game about couples trying to plan their futures together. I wanted to make a dating sim that wasn’t about courtship, but about what happens after you end up in a long-term relationship with someone. I’m really interested in the difficult strategy at work in negotiating your life path when it’s become clear that you are going to share that life with another person with their own goals. I got my partner to help me test the game and design cards.

It still needs iteration for balance and extra chaos, but here’s the basic structure of the game I made yesterday:

Theme

This is a co-operative game to be played by two people. Each person takes on a character, and the aim of the game is to live a year in the life of the two characters negotiating priorities in a relationship with each other. If by the end of the year the characters both have less than a given number of 'discontentment points' (presently that number is 3) then they have won the game. If any character has more than that many points, the relationship ends and the game is lost.

The cards

Goals

I took the basic structure of Looney Labs games like Fluxx and Chrononauts and adapted it. The first element is the goal cards. These are life events that the characters will attempt to achieve at the end of each turn. Examples include:
  • Have baby
  • Grow own veg
  • Go to space
  • Buy a Lamborgini

Characters

Each character card has three goals written on it. For the most part, every character's goals are unique, though there is some overlap. For example:
  • 'Diddy Bowie' wants to join a band, go to space and become famous
  • 'Tom Good' wants to quit his job, raise pigs and grow his own vegetables
  • 'Jane Bonned' wants to buy an apartment in the city, buy a lamborgini and flirt with strangers
Each character also has a gender presentation number on a scale of 1-5 and a sexual/romantic orientation number also on a scale of 1-5. Either one of these can be a fluid range or a stable integer. For example:
  • 'Diddy Bowie' gender presentation is 2-4 and his orientation is 1-5
  • 'Tom Good' gender presentation is 4 and his orientation is 1-2
  • 'Jane Bonned' gender presentation is 2 and her orientation is 1-3
Gender presentation and orientation can change, regardless of how fluid a character was to begin with.

Each character begins the game with at least three discontentment points, that they are trying to remove by achieving their goals in the relationship. If a character’s orientation does not match the gender of their partner, then they have one extra discontentment point. If their orientation changes or their partner’s gender changes, this may or may not cause them to acquire a discontentment point during the game, depending on whether this affects their compatibility.

Chance cards

Chance cards are used to test if a goal has been achieved; have the characters managed to make ends meet this month? Approximately half of the deck is a success and half a fail, but half of the deck also includes other events that can soften or strengthen a success or fail. For example:
  • You made ends meet and have achieved your goal this month
  • You did not make ends meet and therefore cannot achieve your goal this month
  • You made ends meet, but you have gender dysphoria. Gain one discontentment point until you successfully transition.
  • You did not make ends meet, but due to a renewed romance you both lose one discontentment point.
  • You made ends meet, but you are consumed by ennui so you will do nothing but mope next turn.

How to play

The rules are likely to change a lot as I work on the game more over time, but this is basically how it works:
  1. Shuffle the character deck and deal out one character each.
  2. Shuffle the goal deck and lay out 12 cards. This is one year in the standard life path that the characters have been socialised to consider normal.
  3. There are 12 turns per game, with the following phases:
    1. Draw phase: each player draws 3 cards
    2. Play phase: each player can either a) replace one card on the life path with one card in their hand, b) add one card in their hand anywhere on the life path and remove the final card from the timeline or c) move any card on the life path to a new position earlier or later in the sequence
    3. Discard phase: both players discard their hand
    4. Test phase: draw a card from the chance deck to see if the current goal card in the life path has been achieved. Resolve any other effects of the chance card.
  4. Each turn, the 'current goal card' moves from left to right, until all goals in sequence have been tested.
  5. When a goal is achieved that is listed on a character card, remove one discontentment point from that character.
  6. If by the end of the game the characters have less than 3 discontentment points each, then the game is won and the relationship has survived.
At the moment, the game is unbalanced: it is too easy to achieve all of your life goals in the course of 12 months. So my first concern is adjusting the rules e.g. cards drawn per turn. I will also need to look into the compatibility of the characters: if two characters both share a life goal and are sexually compatible, then this will unbalance the game depending on which characters you draw, which doesn't seem like much fun to me.

There are also some things surrounding gender transition and orientation shift that are unclear. If gender transition appears in the life path and neither character wants to transition, what happens? If a character’s current gender is 3 and they have to transition, in which direction should they go? Similar questions are presented by shifts in orientation.

I also need to make the language around surprise babies more inclusive of same-sex couples than the current “You’re pregnant!” card. There must be a simple way of expressing the myriad ways that a dependent child might unexpectedly enter one’s life.

Experiments

Once I'm happy with the current balance of the game I'll start adding new elements and adjusting the balance to accommodate them. Here are some ideas:
  • Give characters anti-goals. For example, 'does not want to have a baby' or 'does not want to let self go'.
  • Expand the deck with more goals and characters.
  • Work out how to deal with failed relationships. Is it game over, or can you continue with a new partner?