Game of Groans

I’ve always loved games. But then, who doesn’t? Games are one of those weird cultural categories in which—allowing for the odd discontinued mechanism or broken link in the chain of memory—there will always be more than there ever were before. I used to only like very specific games. My lifelong aversion to physical activity or competition and my lack of friends in school precluded any interest in sports, and card and board games always pissed me off. (My pouty milquetoast father’s longtime excuse for his dental problems was a disagreement we had over Parcheesi from a time I was too young to remember, or to have understood Parcheesi, for that matter.) Fortunately, I was able to get in on the worldwide joy of structured play thanks to the artistic and technical refinement of videogames in the decade before my birth. I still love them dearly and rely on them as a solitary and social affair, but in college I found that, when coupled with liquor, the poetic import and psychological effect of games took on a whole new definition, and I was off to the races.

I experienced this epiphany in a multifarious sense: for one, my beloved electronic entertainments could be enhanced or at least altered interestingly—an acquaintance’s introduction of “Super Drunkio Kart” was brief but unforgettable. But I also joined an honest-to-god outdoor athletic team, and though I learned and improved in the classical fashion to a minor degree, I remain unconvinced that Ultimate Frisbee is a legitimate sport rather than an interactive channel by which to meet drinking partners for later in the day. In another social arena, I began to semi-regularly view sporting events on television, and found myself far more enveloped in the drama than I ever expected even while merely killing time before a party while “pre-gaming.” (Even the euphemism for abuse of the habit fits the motif!)

But the category in which the two compulsions met most neatly took center stage during the party proper, when drinking games—loosely defined, games where drinking was either a feature or an objective—became priority one. The handful I played ranged wildly in popularity and liquor-centrality. The most prevalent, Beer Pong, is by far the most conventionally physical-skill-based and has almost incidental consumption rules (at least in the lightweight version we practiced), while the elaborate, card-based Kings mostly resembles an improv exercise with chugging. I was continually moved by the unpretentious derangement routinely encountered with these games: some have blithe disregard for hygiene (Beer Pot), some have no actual ending (Rumble Flip Cup). One called Power Hour has no rules other than abiding to periodic drinking.

So I’ve always loved games. And, like many weird narcissists who love a thing, at certain points in my life I’ve entertained fantasies of producing that thing. When drinking games entered my life on a regular basis, that far-flung goal suddenly floated inches from my face. How hard could it be to come up with a game where everybody gets smashed? In the summer of 2010, I gave myself the goal of producing a set of rules for such a game; before two months passed, I had done so. In the next year, it was only played twice, very briefly with different roommates, and never to completion. Eventually I gave up and accepted it as a dud. Let’s explore what I thought would work, and why it did not.

Here It Is: The game was called Top Gun, which, I thought, was my first stroke of genius. I come to games from an audience background of drama—my fixations while growing up were kinetic fiction: action movies and television. The games that I had mostly played, which were videogames, at basic form blended systems and rules (as Roger Ebert helpfully reminded us, the tenets of sports) with the rigid, linear narrative of classical heroic stories. At some point in the history of drama, catchy and connotative titles became important (refer to Happy Friendly Ethnology for deets on that), and I assumed that requisite translated to all leisure experiences. What a vanguard I was, bypassing the lunkheaded drabness of “Basketball” and “Hearts,” what zestful promise of action my name implied, how inspired to correlate a surely simple and appealing activity with a crowd-pleasing property that all enjoy! Wow, just a title and I was already cruising.

Genre: Next I decided—again, reeling from my ingenuity—that reserved ambition was the way to go for my first runaway success of a game. So I made Top Gun a quarters game, assuring that players would always have the required tools, and since I knew at least a couple quarter bouncing games I assumed most would have the basic technical skill down from the start. Here was my first fatal assumption: that I could tone down the difficulty with rule tweaks during play testing. What I was actually doing was leaning toward the far end of the skill pool, not permitting a big enough breadth of form for adjustment without demolishing the game’s basic premise. I imagined players could meet the challenge at a variably equal level regardless of how steep it turned out to be. That’s an approach regularly adopted and carried out for, say, single-player or cooperative role-playing games. A casual, competitive social activity with virtually zero depth and as-yet-undefined reward, not so much.

Commencing Play: I had enough hindsight to suspect the order of player turns (“takeoffs”) to be potentially significant in my game, though not enough to recognize that that was because the game was ridiculous. Emblematic of how little I had thought the foundation through before diving in headfirst was that I suggested that order be determined by “a quick game of Flip Cup.” I thought I had circumvented a generic solution like a coin toss while ensuring ease of practice, maybe even directing the pace of activity with satisfying initial energy, but it was really just extraneous and lazy. Not as in, it was a lazy guideline; it just filled the absence of a guideline nonexistent due to laziness. Suggesting that you solve a problem of the early stage of a game by playing another game undermines your pursuit before you’ve started it. “Hey, guys, that ‘jump ball’ thing is all right but how about we decide first possession with a short boat race? Whew, done!”

The Turn: Eventually I got to the central goals, once I’d gotten past all those pesky trimmings like “explaining what is happening,” and throwing in some more arbitrary theatricality by demanding that the players make up “call signs” to which they were to be exclusively referred throughout game play, in a barely manageable homage to the game’s namesake. During a player’s turn she was to set up three cups, representing enemy fighters, and then had four quarter “missiles” to fire into them for a point each. Reversing my earlier insight regarding skill pressure, I erred on the side of accessibility by providing one more chance than was needed for success. Like with the flip-cup fast start, here I followed videogame-based critical instincts, imagining each turn would necessitate at least minor acclimation. I gave the 1.0 of the rules a single grace shot for the sake of my own measurement while ensuring the playability of early test games. 

Again I fooled myself with assumptions about adjustability. I could always increase the quarter-to-cup ratio (though it would render the game increasingly plodding and drawn-out) but I couldn’t equalize it without alienating the majority of players. The problem with this portion wasn’t that it made things too easy—quite the contrary in most cases—but that it was so inelegant that it reflected the general shoddiness of the game design to a nearly existential degree. In a target practice mini-game in Legend of Zelda or something, they’ll usually give you more arrows than targets you need to hit, but if you don’t use your exact stock, it makes no difference; the game just ends. Here, if a player happens to hit three in a row (I’ve seen it happen), what does she do with the last quarter? Spin it on the counter with a regal flourish? It’s like I hadn’t finished coloring in the lines of my invented system. My rigidity regarding this element correlates with my delusional thematic obsession. There kind of had to be four missiles, right? ‘Cause that’s how many those jets have, at least in Independence Day where you can see the read-out. And Maverick and Goose never went up against more than a couple MiGs, right, huh? Did I really think that the drunken players, electrified, would imagine taking to the skies to match skills with the Soviets’ finest? Am I the dumbest person alive? 

While trying to imbue my simple premise with a unique flavor and tension, I had forgotten the particularly binary simplicity of all the drinking games I’d played. In a Beer Pong or Flip Cup point, you either make the shot or you don’t—hence the addictive quality. The design begins and ends with pure back-and-forth momentum, so there’s no chance for awkwardness—they’re designed to be perfect, not complex. (I’ve engaged in lengthy debates over a particular Pong by-law that would, under certain conditions, make one final shot superfluous. We cared about this stuff.) What I’d intended as a more complexly rewarding spectrum of success was really enacted as a spectrum of failure. Who wants to either be bored or repeatedly reminded of the precise degree to which they are bad at something? But that was far from the most idiotic part of the game.

The Twist: It was no accident that my obsessions with videogame design bled into this endeavor. Though I’d intended to hook in players with the promise of adventures on the Highway to the Danger Zone, Top Gun wasn’t actually based upon the movie—rather, I structured it according to my memories of the original, tie-in Nintendo game. As I recalled, it had a first-person dogfight simulation followed by a side-scrolling sequence where you must land on the aircraft carrier. The air combat was simple and fine, but I never got past the first level, because the landing was practically impossible, requiring precise speed and angle positioning with the primitive NES controller in a matter of seconds. It’s probable that my youthful fumbling exacerbated the challenge to a notable degree, but when I read up on the game for this piece my memories were corroborated: the developer, Konami, produced a sequel two years later that greatly decreased the difficulty of the landing sequence. Naturally, in my design document I neglected to follow the wisdom implemented two decades earlier. If a player managed to “down” any “fighters,” before her turn ended she was prompted to line up the cups vertically, then attempt to bounce a quarter into the furthest cup. Only by successfully landing did the points count. I won’t waste time trying to rationalize the logic behind suddenly spiking the already erratic difficulty through the fucking atmosphere, but wait—it gets worse. 

If, instead of being inhumanly lucky or dexterous, they “crashed” on the attempt, they could try once more before negating all the time and effort they had just expended into my autistic ego trip. But if they already had points banked toward whatever total, game-winning goal I had insanely suggested (it took all of my chutzpah to not presume the players hadn’t already stormed out and erased my number from their phones after one turn) they had a choice to make after the first attempt (man, I was cooking now!): they could “eject” and have their turn be over, but if they tried to land and failed again, all of their points would be erased. Again, I don’t have any self-analysis or criticism here; I literally thought that wrapping frustration and futility inside boredom and failure constituted riveting player agency instead of just compounding a shitty time with a wasted evening.

Oh Yeah, Drinking: As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, I treated the intended central form of the thing as an afterthought. You’d think that figuring out how to get people drunk would be the least of my problems, but my ineptness knew no bounds. I could never work out how, in a multi-player, non-cooperative game, they could prompt each other to drink, so I just threw into the rules an “oh, yeah” that stated the intention for them to consume their own cups as they hit them. There are a couple issues with this. (Though that’s a relative estimation insofar as the whole thing was one big nonstarter.) People aren’t usually inclined to drink something that has a dirty piece of metal in it. In both of the games I ran, the mildly disgusted players ended up yielding the same cups of beer around for each turn while drinking from their personal containers. Notably, that hasn’t always been my experience—in the several times I played a game called Baseball, I never saw someone wimp out in the same situation (“don’t drink the quarter” invariably became a running chant). So, huh. The other issue was that it was hard to swallow that you had to impede yourself by getting drunker if you wanted to succeed, probably to an extreme degree if my nonsensical point-scoring system was to be followed. Even I could see the crazy imbalance in having the potential winner be blotto while the rest of the players had potentially gone without more than a few sips. So I awkwardly tried to counteract this by having players who hit the “ocean”—i.e. the countertop—during a landing attempt drink all of the cups in the “runway”. But I was missing the point, after all; the imbalance wasn’t really such a big deal either. I mean, the two most primal drinking games occupy either end of the scale—in Beer Pong you drink a lot if you lose, in Flip Cup if you win. 

I’ve realized, more generally, that if people are having a fun time and are excited by the prospect of further enjoyment, they’ll set their inhibitions and compulsions aside for the moment so as not to upset the apple cart of good vibes. So—and I’m thankful that this is what I took away from the experience—it speaks to the universal appeal of drinking games, and games in general, that if they’re done right, people will put up with a lot of bullshit in order to participate. If anything, my game serves as a kind of control for the experience, pushing the bounds of tolerability in the pursuit of leisure so that we see what we’re really like when the mood is neutral instead of ecstatic. We can appreciate the simple genius of a really good game when it’s posed in the light of a really incompetent one. You’re welcome, society.