The Future Is Now

When Good Games Go Bad

Here's a game design theory question for you: if you can break a game by playing it wrong, is that a fault of the game's design?

Last week I played New Angeles with my group. Pictured is your author -- centre, with the odd-shaped head -- struggling to deal with the intricacies of futuristic mega-corporate tomfoolery.

In New Angeles, players take on the role of mega-corporations in the cyberpunk -- but not Cyberpunk, because that licence expired -- city of, er, New Angeles, and their job is to keep the city running while also making more profit than each other; one of the players may also be working for the government, trying to cause chaos in the city so that the Feds have an excuse to come in and kick the mega-corps out. It plays a bit like an evil neoliberal Pandemic, with various escalating threats, er, threatening the city, and the mega-corps coming up with plans to reduce said threat while also making a bit of cash.

We played it like Pandemic, working together to keep New Angeles out of trouble, which was great for the people of the city but a bit rubbish for the government mole, because there was no way to undermine all that good civic work without unmasking and then being locked out of the game by the other players, who have no reason to support any of the mole's proposals.

(There are a few other problems with the way New Angeles implements its traitor mechanic but this isn't a review of the game.)

We were playing it wrong. We weren't supposed to be so cooperative; we were supposed to be more selfish, allowing the city to suffer for profit, bribing or forcing other players to support our proposals if necessary. With everyone being a bastard to everyone else, the government traitor could work without standing out as a wrong'un.

It made for a rather flat experience, which is I suppose an incentive to not play the game in such a friendly and helpful manner, but that seems a bit passive to me; everything kept ticking along to the end, whereas you'd expect problems to be more apparent earlier on if you're getting a fundamental part of the game wrong. I was the traitor and I did note that I was powerless quite soon, but I assumed I was just being rubbish, because I am rubbish at most games.

Hence my question. If a game allows you to play it wrong without it being clear you're playing it wrong, is that bad game design? Or is it players being dense? Both? Neither?

We're going to try New Angeles again, with the benefit of knowing where we went wrong the first time. I'm sure it will be a better game the second time around, but I wonder if it will prompt any more interesting questions?

Being the Bad Guy (But Only If There's Profit to Be Made)

Bear with me, this does come together. Sort of.

Thought one. I like role-playing game mechanics that give players things to do that aren't "my character does this". I'm thinking of things like the winter phase in The One Ring or Pendragon, where we see what happens between adventures, or the domain management rules in D&D, or the way the player-characters' survivor community in Mutant: Year Zero works. This is stuff that affects the game world and the characters but isn't about playing the characters themselves.

Thought two. In cyberpunk games the setup tends to be player-characters versus the evil corporations. I can see why; the source fiction supports it, faceless corporations make good villains, as the real world shows us -- ooh, politics! -- and it's a fertile ground for adventure and conflict. What you don't tend to see is players as corporations. I'm sure there's a Shadowrun sourcebook for playing as a corporation, because there's a Shadowrun sourcebook for everything, but otherwise the only instances I can think of are the card game Netrunner, which puts one player in the role of the corporation, and the computer game Syndicate, in which the player takes the part of the COO of struggling Eurocorp, in a setting in which corporate disputes are resolved with minguns and rocket launchers.

You can see where I'm going with this. How about, instead of the usual cyberpunk setup, or even placing the player-characters as corporate agents, letting the players be the corporation itself? Let's take Syndicate as the basic structure, with the players taking control of a minor corporation's business affairs. We could split the gameplay into two main phases.

The first would be a "boardroom" -- for lack of a better word -- phase in which projects and research are funded, intelligence on rival organisations is gathered, and shareholders can demand certain actions. We could probably cannibalise Mutant: Year Zero's ark mechanics for this.

The second part of the game -- which I will call the "street" phase -- would be more traditional, with corporate agents -- the player-characters -- going out into the neon-drenched city to disrupt the schemes of other corporations by recruiting their employees, stealing their plans, and eliminating their agents. Perhaps there could be some sort of resource mechanic that puts a limit on the mission; once the situation on the ground becomes unprofitable the team is ordered to pull out, unless the players can convince the board to extend funding. Maybe that's too spreadsheety.


The end goal would be up to the players, but becoming the pre-eminent corporation is the obvious one. I wouldn't want to delve too much into the business side of things; the idea is to provide some background and structure for the adventures, not to spend half of every session going through an accurate simulation of corporate economics.

If your group isn't into cyberpunk -- I suspect at least one member of mine wouldn't go anywhere near this in that genre -- then the same kind of structure could be applied with ease to something like Eberron and its dragonmarked houses, or a colonial setting, whether it's the East India Company or the Eastern Galactic Arm Company.

Would anyone play this? The fact that Hostile Takeover: The Faceless Corporation RPG doesn't already exist suggests not, but I think it could be fun.