FDG2020 Tabletop Workshop - The Making of La Mancha
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In this presentation, I describe the creation of my Don Quixote-themed storytelling game, La Mancha. For this, we used methods from design outside of games themselves to turn La Mancha into a system that allowed players to deeply engage the story and literary analysis of The Quijote via social play.
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FDG2020 Tabletop Workshop - The Making of La Mancha
- 1. THE MAKING OF LA MANCHA Chris Totten – Kent State University Games as Literary Criticism
- 2. Christopher W. Totten ◦ Assistant Professor, Animation Game Design program, Kent State Tuscarawas ◦ Makes games ◦ Commercial games (mobile, indie, tabletop) ◦ Serious/educational games ◦ Experimental games ◦ Author ◦ An Architectural Approach to Level Design (2nd edition 2019) ◦ Level Design: Processes and Experiences (editor - 2016) ◦ Game Character Creation in Blender and Unity (2012) ◦ Co-founder: Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) Arcade, GAMEFEST Akron
- 5. La Mancha – design goals Design goals: ◦ Explore the narrative and themes of Don Quixote in a game ◦ Create an approachable introduction to the (863 page) novel ◦ Be an engaging commercial product ◦ Learn tabletop design/publishing
- 6. Architectural design concepts ◦ Precedent studies ◦ “Design Thinking”
- 7. La Mancha – design Don Quixote verbs: ◦ Travel ◦ Storytelling (about your deeds) ◦ Quoting (books of chivalry) ◦ Declaring love (to one who inspires your actions) ◦ Fighting ◦ Earning (treasure, resources)
- 8. La Mancha – design ◦ Quoting books of chivalry in response to situations = social call-and-response games The Metagame by Eric Zimmerman, John Sharp, and Colleen Macklin
- 10. Precedent studies ◦ Analyzing previous works and applying their successes and failures to your work Zeitgeist ◦ Grouping of works with common elements in a short period of time (Bonser, 2020)
- 11. ◦ System > reenactment ◦ Player interaction = literary involvement
- 12. Fruitful Void ◦ Social space between players and the game itself that players fill with meaningful content (Jason Morningstar, 2013) Elements of successful classroom games (Stott and Neustaedter, 2013) ◦ Freedom to fail ◦ Rapid feedback ◦ Progression ◦ Storytelling
- 13. La Mancha – design “Journey deck” – story prompts from Don Quixote ◦ Encounters – use 1 chivalry card to tell a story ◦ Loves – use 3 chivalry cards to compose a poem and earn the love’s favor ◦ Feats – use treasures + loves + die rolls to overcome challenges
- 14. Architectural design thinking ◦ Empathizing with users ◦ Organizing design input from seemingly unrelated sources
- 15. “My favorite thing about being an architect is that if I’m doing, for example, a hospital project, I get to learn about doctors and what they do during their day, and how to make it easier.” ~Matthew Geiss
- 16. Single work theory ◦ Considers games as singular media works ◦ Often considers games via their mechanics first ◦ Examples: games displayed as artworks in museums, games in the classroom Pac-Man (Toru Iwatani, 1980) on display at Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2012
- 17. Collected work theory ◦ Considers games as networks of individual artworks that combine to form interactive experiences ◦ Approaches parts of games individually and on their own terms ◦ Examples: game music cover bands, conference track talks, concept art books Dataset Diptych 06 by Alan Butler, 2018. Project that exposes game assets to make statements about social justice and urban realism
- 18. Don Quixote – relevant themes ◦ Meta-commentary on literature ◦ Format subverts the chivalric novel ◦ Invented “fictional author” character ◦ Characters in Vol. II have read Vol. I
- 19. Don Quixote – relevant themes ◦ Characters’ agency over aspects of their identity ◦ Don Quixote adopting the trappings of knighthood (higher social class) ◦ Dorothea presenting as male ◦ Don Quixote’s impact on culture
- 22. Let’s talk! ◦ E-mail: ctotten@kent.edu ◦ Twitter: ◦ @totter87 ◦ @pfbstudios ◦ www.pfbstudios.com ◦ Buy La Mancha! ◦ Physical: https://bit.ly/3ip1rF6 ◦ Digital: https://totter87.itch.io/la-mancha
Editor's Notes
- Thank you for coming everyone and to the organizers for letting me give this postmortem of my game, La Mancha, and how game design was used as a method of literary analysis.
- For those who don’t know me, I’m Chris Totten. I teach at Kent State University in Ohio, in the United States. I’m a game develop who’s worked on both commercial and serious games titles. I’m also an author and co-founder of art museum based games festivals such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum Arcade.
- Today I’d like to talk to you about my Don Quixote-themed storytelling game, La Mancha: how it came to be, how I used principles of architectural design to make it, and whether any of this was successful. For those who haven’t seen it, La Mancha is a storytelling game for 3-5 players where everyone takes on the role of chivalrous knights trying to be the most renowned in the land. To do so you respond to story prompts from the novel using cards with quotes from real books of chivalry. Throughout the game, you also recite love poetry to other players and battle great monsters like giants (which may possibly be windmills.)
- If you’re unfamiliar with Don Quixote, it’s a novel published in Spain in 1605 by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. It’s considered by many to be the first modern novel and an important piece of world literature. It’s had an important cultural impact, showing up in art, in theater, as a cursed movie, as comics, as postmodernism, as sketches on Sesame Street, and even in cool indie games, among others.
- Don Quixote is a very large book though, so upon reading it, my game designer brain wanted to make something that enticed non-readers to take up the book and readers to explore the themes through gameplay. As a video game developer, I also had some goals related to wanting to learn to self-publish tabletop games.
- My background is in architecture, so I generally approach projects with methods from that discipline. While this usually manifests as using spatial organization principles in level design, I’ve also been very interested in the mental processes that designers in classical arts and design fields use to organize seemingly disparate elements of projects into cohesive works. For an architect this might be addressing site conditions, structural loads, client wishes, and references to architectural context. For games, we can create similarly rich projects with concepts that I’ll cover today.
- First, let’s start from a top-down perspective and establish how the core mechanisms of La Mancha came to be. I listed activities that the characters take throughout the book. While everyone remembers the famous scene where Don Quixote attacks the windmills, much of the rest of the story is based on characters telling one another stories and Don Quixote quoting lines from his favorite books of chivalry.
- A lot of this sounded to me like activities found in party games like The Metagame or Apples to Apples, so I started with gameplay mechanics based on that model, but built in a Don Quixote fashion – with cards that included quotes from the books of chivalry mentioned in the novel. In this way, fun interactions could be had as players yelled the names of famous knights or invoking phrases like “Julius Caeser’s ashes!”
- The Metagame callout gives us a segue to the next design concept, which is precedent studies. This is one area that I think the game industry has a really weird relationship. It’s not really a universally accepted part of game making and you see games either lean super-heavily into things that came before or you see people give games bad reviews for being unoriginal.
- Precedent studies and references are a really common part of other fields of design though. You might be influenced by that previous work’s style, or the work might deal with similar issues as your work. Requiring a precedent study or analytique drawing is a common assignment in architecture schools. Architect and game design writer Sarah Bonser points out that a series works that share precedents is how a zeitgeist forms. Game Designers Chris Lowthorpe and Sean Taylor even liken the precedent process to the common musical practice of sampling.
- So for La Mancha, I used precedents. For example, I played literary tabletop games like Moby Dick or Dune to see how they addressed the stories they were based on. Here I saw that creating the systems of the book created a better game experience than trying to reenact the book. I also saw that players thought about the story more when you got them talking and when you gave them ways to directly influence one another’s play.
- This bears out in work like that from game designer Jason Morningstar, who describes the fruitful void of space between players of a game that can be filled with meaningful discussion. Likewise, you see it in Stott and Neustaeder’s elements of successful classroom games, which emphasize socialization and storytelling.
- I also looked at video games that let players play with the forms of works in other fields like Federico Fasche’s Mediterranean Voidland or my own Lissitzky’s Revenge. These games turn the works they are based on – Russian Constructivist graphics and a picturesque Mediterranean town – into interactive gameplay elements. How the player manipulates the pieces or their viewpoint creates new interpretations of the works.
- So those ideas learned from precedents became part of La Mancha: the game should not be a reenactment of the novel, but put you in the novel’s world and give you the tools of the characters so you can forge your own path through La Mancha. The players get to do their own sampling of elements from Don Quixote to make their own stories.
- The last design methodology is architectural design thinking. While this term has been sadly buzz-word-ified, architects use it to describe both user-based design and the act of organizing all the facets of a design project: from the physical realities of building design to the contributions of professionals from wildly varied but essential disciplines who make buildings into reality.
- One of my own professors even had this to say about working in architecture (read here). This is important when thinking about games, because it goes beyond the top-down idea of games as singular clusters of mechanics, and into a series of micro-elements that influence moment-by-moment experience.
- If we explore this idea a bit, we can see two points of view for understanding games that have useful applications. The first is single work theory, which sees games as holistic works with interactivity as their defining element. You see this often in areas where games are applied to non-entertainment contexts such as bringing games into the classroom or as displayed in art museums.
- That’s not the only way to see games though. Let’s conceive of another model, called collected works theory, which considers games as networks of individual artworks that combine to form interactive experiences. This model acknowledges that the disciplines required to make parts of games down to individual assets are just that, entire disciplines, which can themselves greatly influence games.
- Looking at the game from these two perspectives helped make a rich system of analysis at both macro and micro-scales. The game’s general mechanics put you into the role of Don Quixote, and the design and artwork of individual cards each address themes. These cards, for example, make players think about the form of a game and ask them to rewrite the theme and rules in the same way Cervantes does in the novel.
- These cards explore how Don Quixote invents his own reality to challenge his social class, down to the artwork used on the card for Don Quixote’s lady love, Dulcinea del Toboso, which is based on the popular optical illusion of the old woman and young woman. This kind of focused micro-design makes the game modular so we easily add promotional cards like this one based on Chris Crawford’s Dragon Speech at the Computer Game Developers Conference in 1992, where he quit the industry while role playing as Don Quixote.
- So was any of this a success? La Mancha, I’m happy to say, did win some awards at shows like Serious Play and was included in the 2018 Meaningful Play festival. We also ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, during which we were able to craft the campaign so that it addressed multiple audiences: regular tabletop fans and fans of the novel. We even see this bear out in both retail sales and the game’s adoption at libraries.
- So where does some of this research go from here? Beyond more deeply researching historic design processes similar to the ones described here, I’m continuing to apply individual parts of the game development process as critical practices. My latest project and example is an indie game called Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends, based on the 1905 comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland by animation pioneer Winsor McCay. Here, art direction is being studied as an interpretive practice – we are attempting to recreate McCay’s visual style which influenced so many works, but reinterpret it through the lens of those works that have come in the intervening years. Through this we hope to establish more regular critical dialogues with other fine arts based disciplines for which techniques like precedent studies and design thinking are more common practices.
- These cards explore how Don Quixote invents his own reality to challenge his social class, down to the artwork used on the card for Don Quixote’s lady love, Dulcinea del Toboso, which is based on the popular optical illusion of the old woman and young woman. This kind of focused micro-design makes the game modular so we easily add promotional cards like this one based on Chris Crawford’s Dragon Speech at the Computer Game Developers Conference in 1992, where he quit the industry while role playing as Don Quixote.