Back-of-the-Envelope Game Design

A couple of nights ago, I was having trouble falling asleep. Shortly after lying down in bed, my mind was filled with thoughts of atoms combining in different proportions. I attribute this to reading The Last Sorcerers. I had just finished sections on Dalton’s Atomic Theory and the crucial contributions of Avogadro, Berzelius and Cannizzaro. (Perhaps they should be the ABC of Atomic Theory along with D for Dalton. There’s also Gay-Lussac…) Interestingly, Avogadro’s significant contributions went unrecognized for almost 50 years until Cannizzaro’s appearance at the 1860 Karlshruhe conference. Interestingly, Cannizzaro only made it to the conference because he had no revolutions or insurrections to participate in, having just missed Garibaldi’s liberation of Sicily.

But I digress. In fact, my swirling mind moved from atoms and molecules to thinking about board- and card-game mechanisms. I was recently introduced to a new game with a card set collection aspect layered on an area control board game. I’d also been revisiting several older games in my collection that had not been played in five to ten years. I had to re-learn the rules. Once you’ve played many different types of games, there’s little that is new “under the sun” (to quote the Teacher of Ecclesiastes). Newer games often repackage old underlying mechanisms of older games – with their own twists and themes, of course! The history of education is replete with similar examples, but that’s another story.

What started out as a semi-conscious falling asleep stage turned into an increasingly awake stage. This was annoying because I try to start my day relatively early and I don’t want to be short on sleep. My mind was working at an excited pace (I couldn’t help myself) and I had envisioned basic sets of game cards representing atoms. These could be combined to form molecules using valency rules. As players played sets of cards in front of them in the form of molecules, they could score points based on simple goal cards, e.g., CO₂ for greenhouse gas, H₂S for rotten gas, etc. But more complex goal cards involving chemical reactions would allow for the stealing and remixing of card sets. A player with O₂ and H₂ could stead another H₂ from another player and recombine them into two H₂O satisfying the Rocket Fuel goal.

Since I’m preparing for an Origin-of-Life conference in mid-July, thoughts about prebiotic chemistry invaded my consciousness. I started thinking about Urey-Miller chemistry, carbonic chemistry, increased atmospheric oxidation, and how the game could be divided into different eras. Things were starting to get complicated. And I was supposed to be trying to sleep. After 15 minutes, I hit upon a solution. I got out of bed. There were some envelopes (spam mail) on the table. I grabbed a pen and in a couple of minutes jotted down the ideas swirling through my head. You can see it below.

While it doesn’t have everything that crossed through my mind, it has the gist of the idea with some examples. More importantly, after my selective data dump, I read another chapter of The Last Sorcerers and felt drowsy enough to go to sleep.

Where do I go from here? If I want to further this project, it will take a lot of refining to make something that’s both enjoyably playable but yet retains its core chemical concepts. It’s hard to do both well – a testament to the failure of many “educational” games; they’re just not as interesting to play. There are already so many other interesting things I’d like to do this summer, and it’s almost half gone! Once the semester starts again, I’m probably going to get busy. I don’t think I have the discipline of famed game designer Reiner Knizia, who has a doctorate in mathematics, and designed games in the evenings outside of his day job in the financial industry. He eventually quit his day job to design games full-time. I don’t have Knizia’s talent, and I happen to love my day job as a chemistry professor. However I do feel a tickling itch of creativity bubbling up that might combine my love of games, chemistry and education.

Coincidentally, this weekend I started reading Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson. Here are some quotes from the Introduction. “Because play is often about breaking rules and experimenting with new conventions, it turns out to be the seedbed for many innovations that ultimately develop into much sturdier and significant forms. The institutions that so dominate traditional history – political bodies, corporations, religions – can tell you quite a bit about the current state of the social order. But if you are trying to figure out what’s coming next, you are better off exploring the margins of play: the hobbies and curiosity pieces and subcultures of human beings devising new ways to have fun… a space of wonder and delight where the normal rules have been suspended, where people are free to explore the spontaneous, unpredictable, and immensely creative work of play. You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun.”

Realistically, I don’t think my designing a game is going to change the world or solve the riddle of the origin-of-life. However I am likely to enjoy the work of creating something that could be both fun and educational. And even if it doesn’t see the light of day beyond family and friends, it will be a fun project. My spouse, trained as a chemist, thought the initial idea had promise – and she’d at least humor me with a few games of my yet unnamed and unrealized creation. But if this game actually gets designed and goes further than I anticipate, well, you saw it here first – on a picture of the back of an envelope!