Rolling dice alone: Board games with remote friends

Board games are hard at the best of times – you have to find a bunch of friends who have the free time to play, find a game everyone is happy to play, and make sure the game can be played in the time you’ve all got free. When friends leave the state you live in and move elsewhere, things get even harder!

Last year, I presented “My Friends Keep Leaving and it is Ruining Board Games Day”, where I summarised the state of telepresence board gaming: highlighting the problems involved in it, and reporting on some of the efforts in progress to make it better.

This talk was presented at OSCON 2015

Transcript

1. Rolling dice alone: Board games with remote friends #roomservicequesadilla
2. Demonstration!
3. Who am I?
7. CC BY-SA 3.0 @chrisjrn
8. Dev (mostly iOS) work
10. CC BY-SA 2.0 @chrisjrn
11. I speak Australian
12. I speak Australian, mate
13. I LOVE Questions
14. Games
15. Video games
16. Boardgames
20. I am opinionated and loud
21. The Problem
22. Tech has made the world seem small
26. Camaraderie
27. The Solution?
28. Digital Boardgames
29. Dice Apps
35. Issues: i.e. everything sucks
36. RNG sucks
37. Interrupts suck
38. Lack of tactile sucks
39. Computer rule lawyers suck
40. Play by email sucks
41. Timezones suck
42. Lack of presence sucks
43. The noises and animations are great though
44. We need something else
45. Hybrid Boardgames!
48. Why isn’t this more common?
49. What do we hybridise?
50. Not really sure…
51. Back to the drawing board
52. Time for some research
53. Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics Hunicke, LeBlanc, Zubek, 2004
54. Hunicke, LeBlanc, Zubek, 2004 Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics The rules and mechanisms
55. Hunicke, LeBlanc, Zubek, 2004 Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics The run-time behaviour
56. Hunicke, LeBlanc, Zubek, 2004 Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics The responses evoked in the players
57. Aesthetics are the bit we care about Dynamics Aesthetics
58. What does this mean?
59. We need to keep the mechanics that players associate with feelings
60. but… we are weird
61. So with that in mind lets get some mechanics
62. Cards
63. Shuffling Cards
64. Shared & Individual Decks
65. Drawing & Drafting Cards
66. Position & Movement
67. Hidden vs Public Information
68. Meatspace
69. Bluffing & Lying
70. Mistakes & Cheating
71. Arguing & Rules Lawyering
72. Asymmetric Players
73. So what does this all mean?
74. The next step
75. So much of us is in our faces and bodies
76. Basically lots of cameras
77. Some way to point and get detail
78. Applications to help maintain state
79. Leave as much of the game ALONE as possible
80. Hybrid Zombicide
82. What are the important bits?
83. Position
84. Maintaining player state
85. Combat
86. What did I do?
87. Cameras
88. Drones!
90. Maintaining state
91. Dice
98. So how is it shaping up?
99. Cameras
100. Player state
101. Combat
102. THE FUTURE!
103. THE FUTURE!
104. VoIP still sucks
105. Needs waaaaaaay more cameras
106. Remote players are still removed
107. There really needs to be a community around this
108. Questions?
109. How Do I Game Design? Design games, understand people! Thursday 1:40pm The Mün and back - a Kerbal tale Friday 11:10am Thanks
110. Thanks lonely.coffee @the_mcjones