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Ideological Environment
For a third and final case study, we look at Suspicion, an unpublished card game designed for an office environment, to be played over a week of real time. Eric created Suspicion while working at a game development company in New York City in the mid-1990s and organized two full playtests of the game. As with A.I. and Seasons of Darkness, the game's design makes explicit use of its surrounding cultural environment. But it also engages in a form of cultural resistance not found in the other two case studies. Each game of Suspicion began with an invitation. Everyone in the company received an email explaining that a game would take place the following week; if they wanted to play, they needed to send a reply. Players were instructed not to disclose to other employees whether or not they had decided to play. In a company of about a hundred, each game involved approximately 20 players. The following week, when the game began, players were given the game rules and a small collection of cards. One of these cards contained the player's identity. Each player in the conspiracy-themed game belonged to two groups, a sect and an institution. A player might, for example, belong to the Sect of the Turquoise Gear and the Institution of the State. Every player's pair of group affiliations was unique, so no two players belonged to the exact same pair of groups. Each player also began the game with six Stash Cards. Each Stash Card had the color and insignia of one of the groups in the game. The goal of the game was to locate other players in your groups and work with them to acquire Stash Cards with the color and insignia of the group you shared. The first Sect and the first Institution that came to the referee (Eric) with all of their members and a certain number of Stash Cards corresponding to the group won the game.To help players find each other, each group was given a code word or code gesture to help identify other players in that group. In order to acquire Stash Cards, a player had to use Accusation Cards to formally accuse another player of being in a group. If your accusation was correct, you could use any of your Stash Cards to "attack" the accused, an attack that played out as a simple dueling card game. If your accusation was incorrect, the target could take a Stash Card from you. Players could also freely trade cards with each other, but usually did so only with other members of their groups. The general trajectory of the game started with players figuring out who was and was not playing, next using code words and gestures to identify others in their groups, and eventually sharing knowledge and Stash Cards within a group in order to strategically attack other players. The play of Suspicion engaged with its cultural environment in a variety of ways.
Lived Conflict
As with Seasons of Darkness, Suspicion took place in a physical space not designed for the artificial play of a game: an office environment. Unlike the LARP,the game space was not a public space that players visited for a limited time. It was the place where they worked, including their offices, lunchrooms, and conference rooms. The game's cultural environment was a space players already knew intimately. For this reason, the game truly colonized its environment. The workspace became synonymous with the magic circle; the time and place of the workday became the time and place of the game. There were a few formal restrictions on where the game could be played (a scheduled meeting with an outside client was out of bounds), but otherwise, when a player arrived at work, he or she had to be ready to attack or be attacked. All games embody a conflict, and tension arises in a game as players struggle to resolve the conflict. One of the roles that the magic circle plays is to contain game conflict rather than allowing it to spill out into ordinary life. As with Assassin, in Suspicion there was no escape from the game conflict; the play of the game had to be integrated into the rest of one's life.
Interventions Shaking It Up
Because Suspicion operated in and among ordinary work activities, the play of the game took over and transformed the workplace. For example, in Suspicion each group has a code word or code gesture that it can use to identify other members of the same group. This communicative game mechanic leads to strangely strategic conversations. Each player attempts to reveal his own code word or gesture to find allies, but does so in a very surreptitious manner, so that another group won't notice and acquire the information. As a result of this mechanic, players became very self-conscious about how they interacted with one another. The game added a new layer of meaning to every in-office speech-act, turning it into a complex action that could be used to identify allies or to foil rivals. As we explored in Games as the Play of Meaning, part of the play of any game is making sense of its meanings and representations. By invading and appropriating ordinary communication, Suspicion brings this sense-making aspect of games center stage. Is the person you're talking to about a work task playing the game? Are they trying to tell you something? Have you unintentionally let your code word slip? The sense of altered consciousness was so pervasive that even workers not playing the game joined in, pretending that they too, had a secret identity. From the player reports that followed each playtest, it was clear that these extra layers of meaning were somewhat uncomfortable to inhabit, but nevertheless intensely pleasurable as play. In Defining Play, we established that play is free movement within a more rigid structure. When the rigid structures themselves change as a result of play's movement, the result is transformative play. Through the play of Suspicion, the social spaces of work were altered. Even when players were not talking about the game, the distrust and self-consciousness of Suspicion inflected their interactions. Suspicion was designed to undercut the existing power relationships at work. In any company, an institutional structure defines control and authority: who makes the decisions, who is paid more, who is the boss of whom. When Suspicion players are randomly assigned to sects and institutions at the start of the game, the makeup of these groups has nothing to do with the existing departmental, spatial, economic, or authoritative relationships among players. Suspicion reshuffled and thereby transformed these power relations, changing in some way each player's relationships to the other participants. The structure of player identity in Suspicion (each player is assigned a unique combination of group allegiances), ensures that you cannot completely trust anyone else. You might have found the members of your Sect, but each of them belongs to a different Institution that is opposed to your own. One of your Sect members might suggest that you pool your Stash Cards with his, so that your Sect's valuable cards are more properly protected—but he might simply be planning to selfishly use the cards for his Institution. This sense of constant uncertainty and distrust created a tense game atmosphere. The game rewarded deception and play involved much trickery and backstabbing. Not only were existing power relationships undermined, but they were never given the chance to settle into a stable hierarchy. Suspicion revealed some of the cultural rhetorics, or ideologies, that help constitute the workplace. But because the game transformed power relationships, it also served as a site of cultural resistance. By undermining the company's existing patterns of authority, it highlighted the typically invisible ways that power usually operated. Games sometimes exhibit forbidden play, forms of nongame interaction not permitted in ordinary life. In Suspicion, a worker might drop in on his boss, accuse her of being an enemy, and attack her mercilessly with his Stash Cards. By recasting company authority as a tangled web of deception, relationships among company workers were radically transformed. Through its play, Suspicion operated as a cultural critique. It succeeded only because of the way it blurred the edges of the magic circle. A softball game at a company picnic might act temporarily to reframe company authority, but it is not taking place in the participants' actual workplace. The subversive potential for cultural resistance in Suspicion emerges directly from its literal appropriation of the cultural environment.As with our other examples, Suspicion achieves its distinctive play through specific design decisions. Of the three games, Suspicion in some ways plays most radically with its cultural context. Seasons of Darkness, as a role-playing game, did not involve explicit competition between players. A.I. was a huge project, but its puzzle structure, in which the game designers held the solutions, kept the structures of authority clear. Through the contextual ambiguities that it created, Suspicion was truly culturally transgressive. In a typical game, the magic circle acts to contain inter-player conflict. Suspicion was not only designed to create mistrust and deception, but had players acting against each other in their usual place of work. The magic circle enframed the office; there was no escape from other players after the game if things went wrong. During the climax of the second game, one player made an offer to pay another cash for her Stash Cards. The exchange of money never took place, but its mere possibility caused intense emotions to erupt. The game was in danger of imploding, leading the designer to implement a rule outlawing the use of real-world money in the game. This anecdote points out the power and challenge of designing games as cultural environments. As a transformative political statement about the power of the corporate workplace, Suspicion was a success, seducing players with its genuinely pleasurable game play even while the game play itself engaged in a cultural critique of the players' work context. At the same time, the mischievous resistance of the game was balanced by the need for a sense of responsibility toward the players. Cultural environments are always home to someone and even a game that embodies a radical critique needs to maintain a spirit of fair play to those it impacts.
