Commons Game – Initial Design Schematic

Hi Jose,

Nice work: I like the potential here.

– I like that commons acts aren’t predefined, but set based on group context and values.

– The crowd funding aspect was a little confusing. It didn’t get any introduction or explanation, then seemed to be quite central. Is this an optional mechanism or a “mandatory” pre-requisite step? My opinion is it should be optional, but I’d need to understand your intent more. I’ve made a subsequent related comment about CC’s.

– It wasn’t clear whether this was intended to be a simulation or a real-world prototyping exercise: the use of wording in your design brief and your voice over seem to imply it’s a real-world exercise with problems of real significance and with commensurate actual effort required of “players”. If that is your intent, I think that stretches the practical application as a game, and will complicate or at least limit its potential as a broad teaching/ learning tool.

For the purpose of the rest of my feedback, I’ll assume that’s a misreading on my part, and the intent is a simulation game/ exercise.

– I’ve spent last year doing some work on a method framework that enables a network of stakeholders to discuss and establish a shared view of quality and value, and I have gamified aspects of that work. Some elements from that work might be useful here, particularly in defining the CA’s.

– I think that a turn mechanic would help to overcome various design and game mechanic challenges: game play would work around turns, for example:
– a set number of turns per player per game, or
– each player must complete the current turn before any player can move to the next turn, or
– a player might be able to be a limited number of turns behind the most advanced players, then either stall those player, forfeit a turn, (or have that turn become common?)
– turns are forfeited through inaction (loss of opportunity)

– a turn might provide the opportunity for more than one type of action, but limit the number of actions of a specific type or class (e.g. In 1 turn, a player could typically: give 1 turn of physical effort on a single CA, share or use 2 resources, do 1 turn of research, receive 1 turn of effort from another player, receive 2 resources, etc)

– Commons Acts (CA’s) could be defined and agreed by the game stakeholders/ players in multiple dimensions: CC value as you’ve noted, but also other dimensions such as requisite tasks and associated turn effort. For assist short-running games or to generally simplify game startup, there might be some predefined or partially templated examples.

– To simplify the game mechanic, the requisite tasks might follow a common, stereotypical cycle such as Deming’s plan, do, study, act (PDSA) cycle (or similar). Each step in that model could have both a turn count and a CC ‘earned value’, with CC’s only awarded to each contributing player once a cycle completes. More complex CA’s might require multiple cycles to deliver meaningful commons value and for players to gain full CC’s.

– Your description implies that the game must run for a significant length of time. I think that’s an unnecessary limiting constraint. Instead, let the group of players/ stakeholders mutually agree and determine the total game duration (in turns?) and the turn cycle duration: this could be minutes, hours, days, etc). Using turns in this way as a key game mechanism means the game can scale from short, intensive simulation from say a one hour session (maybe with commons acts definitions as prework) through to longer running scenarios.

– Turns used as described should also limit the potential for false claims and the need for referees.

– If your intent around including the crowd funding was to inject pseudo capital or seed CC’s into the game, perhaps it’s simple enough to just randomly assign a range of starting CC’s to each player.

– As an alternative to random CC allocation, it might be interesting to have some stereotypical character profiles that players can choose to adopt each time they play. These might be based on existing “pre commons” demographics: economic, educational, skill and social profiles, and a commensurate number or range of CC’s. This could be quite powerful in exploring and understanding motivation for different player types, building empathy for others and enabling people to “walk a mile” in others shoes.

– player-character profiles might also allow for the elements

– I would love the game to enable coop-etition at multiple levels: both success for the groups shared commons acts goals, but also the individual players needs and goals. So I think could be explicit Personal Acts (PA’s) or goals that each player would declare.

– It would be nice to have a way to support online play, however even though I’m a software guy by trade, I have a strong preference – both personally and based on what I’ve seen have the most impact – for these sorts of games to be low-tech and simple to set up without a lot of complex parts. So yes to online play, but using simple tools and mechanics that can also be used without technology with a co-located group.

– As a closing note: Monopoly has a terrible game mechanic, and is a bad reference game for cooperative mechanics. If you’d like better alternative examples, please let me know.

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