“A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal.” (Costikyan, 1994) The game of Monopoly is a piece of conditional design whose several components make up an engaging and highly interactive activity for its audience. This essay explores the makeup of those components, the interactive possibilities within the gameplay, and the way that its design allows for structured play for its audience.
When analysing games, whether they be board games, video games, or other, one of the first parts that must be determined in order to set a course for the gameplay is the mechanics and information structure of the game. As such, the designer/creator must ask themselves, ‘how much information should players have about the state of the system?’ (Fullerton, 2014) and henceforth, determine whether the game will have an open, closed, or dynamic information structure. By having an open information structure, as is the case with Monopoly, all of the participating players are in complete awareness of every aspect of the game; there is no hidden information, and nothing to be revealed. The object of the game, therefore, is narrowed down into a sequence, rather than a game where revealing information is key, such as in games like Cluedo. Monopoly is a strategy game whose objective is player elimination, where all players compete against each other for money and properties and where the goal is to bankrupt everybody else until they are the last one standing.
As a designer for games, another of the key aspects that must be determined in order to establish rules is how much control the designer is going to give up to the audience/players, and how much is going to be limited and/or unchanging. This dynamic is most clear in video games where the difference between Sandbox games such as Grand Theft Auto, where the audience is in almost complete control of every situation and free to explore the gaming area to its every boundary, and story games such as the Mario Bros games, where the player must follow a predetermined storyline rather than be allowed the freedom to roam indefinitely. In board games, rules are much more evident, and in Monopoly, the distinction between controllable elements of the game, and those that escape the players’ reach is clear. For the most part, Monopoly players do not control the flow of the game, as they rely on chance by rolling dice in order to move a determined amount of spaces or picking up ‘chance’ and ‘community chest’ cards that adjust gameplay in different manners. Chance is a major factor in the success of board games such as Monopoly, as it assures that the outcome will be different each time that it’s played, and therefore does not become predictable (Lee Mitchell, 2012). In addition, each singular player is not in control of what other players do, so there is a limited amount of strategy that can be involved. On the other hand, a player is autonomous in the turn-based decisions that they must make, such as whether or not to buy the property they have landed on, whether or not to sell or trade properties that they already own, and when and if they want to buy houses or hotels for their owned properties. In addition, Monopoly creators allow for players to make up their own ‘house rules’, which may be determined at the beginning of the game, and are not in the official rulebook included with the game. These house rules allow for customisation and individualisation of the game for each player, and is a loose way of letting go off some control by the designers.
The audience, or players, of Monopoly, may at all times feel that they are ultimately in control of how the game plays out, chance actions exempted, but the power that they actually have is incredibly limited, because of the way the game has been designed. The determination of Monopoly as being a turn-based game means that players are tightly constrained to a sequence that is out of their control, and ultimately makes the game more challenging, as it does not allow them the freedom of performing certain actions such as buying, selling, trading, etc, at the precise moment that they might want to. This means that the players must rely on calculation-based strategy, involving guesswork and interaction with the other players, in order to attempt to gauge their moves, their decisions, and act accordingly in the manner that will most benefit themselves. Even though, for example, the players are manually moving their pieces across the board, it is an illusion of control, as ultimately, the dice are what are really moving the pieces and determining their placements. Therefore, the audience loses control, and it belongs to chance.
The way that limited, turn-based board games like Monopoly function, however, in order to move the gameplay along in the manner in which it was designed to work, is through feedback. Though not immediately apparent, each move or circumstance during the game provides feedback, whether it be balancing or reinforcing. Balancing feedback assures that the game will not lean too favourably towards one player at any point, so that it lasts longer and doesn’t make it too easy to win. Reinforcing feedback guides the behaviour of players one way or another, through positive or negative consequences depending on what is played. (Fullerton, 2014) For example: if a player rolls doubles (the same number on both dice), they are automatically awarded another turn. This is reinforcing feedback, as it encourages players to roll doubles (whether or not that is up to them is another matter). However, if a player rolls doubles thrice in a row, they are immediately sent to jail. This is an example of balancing feedback, in which, in order to stabilise the progress of the players, it pulls the winning player back. This assures that a single player who keeps rolling doubles will not end up with an unreasonable advantage over the other players. Another example of reinforcing feedback is the rule that when a player owns all of the properties of one colour, the rent they are due for each of those properties is doubled. This encourages players to acquire all of the properties in a colour group, as it benefits them more than if they own individual properties across the board. On the other hand, another example of balancing reinforcement is the chance card that indicates that the player who picked up the card must pay x money for each house that they own and x money for each hotel that they own. Houses and hotels on properties are an enormous source of income for the player who owns it, and are the most direct way of bankrupting the other players. This card forces the player in advantage to pay a penalty for their success, and thus levels out the playing field once more. In a subtle manner that is only apparent to the designer and studier of the game, these types of feedback shape the gameplay in a way that the players cannot control, in order to assure the pacing, rules, and fairness that the designer has intended for it.
Parallel to the informational structure, the designer of a game must at all times be aware of the interactive possibilities that are being created and offered to the audience during gameplay. These interactions are the result of rules and/or direct or indirect competition, both against other players, and against the game itself. The more interactive possibilities, the more complex, dynamic, and engaging the game will be. This does not necessarily mean that the game will be more difficult, however, as that depends entirely on the game itself. Chess, for example, is a game with a singular interactive possibility: moving the pieces around the board in predetermined forms, and it is a game that requires a high intellect and keen ability for strategy. In either case, however, the game is a “goal-directed interaction” where the game state changes depending on the player’s decisions. Monopoly is a game, and as such, the game interacts with its audience as its audience interacts with it, and, as a multi-player game, it also allows for player-to-player interaction (Costikyan, 1994). In board games, the interactions performed during gameplay allow for a higher sense of authorship from the players, as their decisions and actions shape the outcome more heavily than a predetermined line of code or algorithm would allow for in a similar style of video games. By providing the “freedom to experiment with alternate strategies and approaches” (Costikyan, 1994, p.20), the game’s purpose as a goal-oriented interaction is fulfilled.
In Monopoly, there are several different interactive possibilities, some of which are laid out by the designer and have limited outcomes, and some which are dependent on the players themselves, and their own decisions and personalities. These interactions can vary in mode, the types of which can be summarized as the following: continuous or immediate interaction, stepped or hierarchical interaction, and passive or static interaction. Where there is more than one mode of interaction in the same action, it is called composite interaction. (Spence, 2006) Most of Monopoly is based on passive, or static, interaction, in which the audience is exposed to all of the information at all times, and browses it before making a decision to act, rather than acting in order to receive the information; this is possible because of the game’s open information structure, as detailed above. As Robert Spence indicates in Information Visualization: Design for Interaction, “Interaction is prompted and guided by a need to explore”. The player interacts passively with the game by observing the placement of properties and monopolies, the position of other players on the board and calculating the needed roll of dice in order to land on the spaces that will most benefit them. They do so by watching the other players’ turns, as well, without taking any action, and are still interacting with it. In this case, the intention of the player is opportunistic in the sense that their interaction has no particular purpose other than to explore the possibilities and current information of the game. (Spence, 2006)
Other interactive possibilities within Monopoly are immediate, manual and dynamic, and make up the core structure of the game. Players perform different kinds of actions in order to progress the gameplay, the most obvious of these being rolling the dice and moving the game pieces around the board. This interaction is self-explanatory and widely common across the majority of board games, so that it becomes familiar to players who have engaged with board games previously and requires little to no explanation from the designer. Another simple kind of interaction is picking up ‘chance’ or ‘community chest’ cards when landing on the respective space on the board. As this involves physical movement, reading, and then acting according to the instructions, it could be considered composite interaction: both passive and immediate.
In the end, however, Monopoly revolves around money: making it and avoiding losing it. The open information structure of the game allows for a passive and immediate interaction mode, encouraged by the player’s intention to, again, make money and avoid losing it, while trying to prevent others from succeeding themselves. These interactions are based on free will while allowing the players to control the direction of the game once the chance section of the game is minimised (after all of the properties have been bought). It is this part of the game where Monopoly becomes majorly authored by the players and audience, rather than the designer and creator, and this freedom of direction is what makes it such an incredibly successful game.
Examine the informational structure and interactive possibilities of one piece of conditional design of your choice. Explore these as examples of interaction, with particular reference to the role of the audience & designer in each.
Baggerman, L. (2000) Design for Interaction: User friendly graphics ; print, web, product, environmental. Gloucester, MA: Rockport Publishers.
Costikyan, G. (1994) I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games. Available at: http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/05164.51146.pdf (Accessed: 14 December 2016).
Crawford, C. (2003) Chris Crawford on Game Design. USA: New Riders Publishing.
Divestopedia and Institute, S. (2016) What is sandbox (in gaming)? - definition from Techopedia. Available at: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/3952/sandbox-gaming (Accessed: 18 December 2016).
Fullerton, T. (2014) Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. 3rd edn. Boca Ratón, FL: CRC Press.
Lee Mitchell, B. (2012) Game Design Essentials. Indianapolis, Indiana: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Merriam-Webster (2016) Definition of HOUSE RULE. Available at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/house%20rule (Accessed: 18 December 2016).
Spence, R. (2006) Information visualization: Design for Interaction. 2nd edn. Harlow, England: Addison Wesley.
Tekinbas, K. (2003) Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. London, England: The MIT Press.
Unknown (2009) Game Design Concepts: Formal Elements of Games. Available at: https://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/level-3-formal-elements-of-games/ (Accessed: 15 November 2016).
Unknown (no date) Interaction Framework. Available at: http://jcsites.juniata.edu/faculty/rhodes/ida/interactframe.html (Accessed: 2 December 2016).
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