Push - Pull (Go Look at this!)

This is beautiful and smart. It, more than anything else, captures what drew me toward the Indie gaming community--the idea that a game could not only be about these characters, but about the cooperation between all the game's participants to develop this cool story. There are so many mechanics built to support the push and now we are beginning to consider how to build in the pull to the mechanics, too, rather than letting that just be something that 'happens.'

It also encapsulates why I have been disappointed with certain kinds of rules hacking that I have been doing in my game. Many of my initial tweaks were done with the hope that the players would take them up as an immensely cooperative venture, as a cue to engage in some serious pull exchanges. Yet, in those early cases, I did not provide any mechanical support for that effort. Only more recently have I found little tricks that elicit solicitation and not just assertion.

I mentioned that my group plays deities and I really wanted to provide them an opportunity to create a world. Unfortunately, I did that by giving each player cards which they could use to insert an element into the world--they just needed a little cooperation from their fellows to get the 'votes' to push it through. This essentially meant that each player carved out a niche of pushes rooted in trades for supporting another player's push. The result was hodge-podge and lacked the coherence for which I had hoped. This is definitely not my players' fault--the rules I gave them did not support the supportive, co-creative process I envisioned.

My second effort pleased me much more--not a full blown world creation, but local world modification. The players can play tokens to introduce small elements associated with the story or appeal to the 'thematic oppositions' of the setting to create more enduring features. Since players get tokens when another player plays off their idea, it encourages the player to establish elements that 'pull' other players in. I have only play-tested this a little, but the immediate results were far more satisfying.

It is probably no accident that I came up with this sort of mechanic after reviewing Mo's game (Crime and Punishment) for Game Chef--it wasn't a deliberate steal (ooh, I like this, let me take it over here), but I definitely grokked Mo's pull-ish mechanic and saw in it a better actualization of something I had been striving toward.