By Judeth Oden Choi, Jodi Forlizzi, Michael Christel, Mackenzie Bates, Rachel Moeller, Jessica Hammer

Link to workshop paper.

Adapting devised theatre methods from Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s Viewpoints and Composition, I have lead bodystorming workshops for transformative game designers with student game and experience designers, educators and rpg designers. The methods help designers create inventive, context-specific mechanics and connect experience goals with design decisions. 

Exercises for sketching game designs:

In our work, we explore the relationship between mechanics and the player experience through playful group ideation, prototyping and discussion. In order to “test” the designer’s hypothesis about the impact design ingredients have on the player experience, we have developed a bodystorming process to rapidly prototype and analyze game recipes centered on game mechanics.

Bodystorming, a way of brainstorming through physical play and movement, is suggested here because:

1. It’s fast. Nothing to build. Nothing to program.
2. Every action on stage tells a story, encouraging the marriage of narrative and mechanic.
3. Act First. Think Last. Get out of your head. Welcome the unexpected action or response.
4. Play as a team. Fun, low-pressure collaboration.
5. Immediate Feedback. The dynamic between the performer and audience is powerful and the response to bodystorming is immediate, requiring little synthesis.

Inspired by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s methods for creating theatre, we call these bodystorming exercises “compositions.” Compositions translate player experience goals into “action, event and image,” exploring the game in concrete, actable ways.

Creating a Movement Vocabulary

Here’s a starting point for thinking about moving in space and time:
Advancing/Retreating — movement in x-plane
Rising/Falling — movement in y-plane
Growing/Shrinking — movement in z-plane

Tempo and Duration — sets tone, mood and emotional state (i.e. urgency, tension)
Spatial Relationship — The position in space of 2 people communicates their relationship. 
Movement communicates a shift in relationship (e.g. power dynamic, change of status, change of feeling).

From these movement principles, we can start to build mechanics and rules — even stories.

Creating Actions and Responses

I’ll illustrate this process with an example.

Let’s say that we are charged with designing a game for middle schoolers in a diverse school district to help them identify and practice grit (i.e. persistence). “Great! Piece of cake!” we think, because really, what game is not about persevering? Some questions that come to mind immediately are:

1. How respresentational or abstract will the game be? Do students need some representation of school to make the connection between persistence in a game and grit in the classroom?
2. What experiences, negative or positive, do students already have with grit? In the classroom? In games?
3. What is the balance of chance vs. choice in a game about grit? On the one hand, you want students to feel empowered, to know that their actions matter. On the other hand, a big part of grit is persisting when the chips are stacked against you. You don’t always deserve the hand you’re dealt or are dealt the hand you deserve.

As a starting point, we draw from our own experiences in the classroom. (For now, we simply acknowledge the ways that our design team does and does not match the demographic of our target audience and keep playing.)

In small groups of 3 or 4, each person shares a 2 minute story of a time when they experienced grit in the classroom. As they tell the story, a notekeeper pulls out action and feeling words.

Then each person stands and acts out a single action, or gesture, that captures (literally or abstractly) the main action of their story. Each person in the group learns the actions of each other person in the group. (We are starting to build mechanics already!)

Next, one person in the group performs their action “at” the group, and the group performs an action individually or together in response to the first. Repeat this 3 or 4 times. Try new responses each time. Record in words or video your favorite action and response pairs. Repeat this for each team member’s actions.

At this point we have generated:
1. Core questions about the game
2. List of feeling words from personal stories
3. List of actions from personal stories
4. 1 performed action per team member
5. ~12 practiced responses to each action.
6. At least 3 or 4 action/response pairs

Creating Compositions

A composition is a quick performance sketch that pulls together and arranged different design elements to try out an idea. For our first round of composing, we decide on a recipe of design elements.

Considering our original questions we make some decisions for this round. We decide to make this sketch school-like, thinking that we could always abstract it later. Our goal is to act out 1–2 minutes of gameplay of a game with the following elements:

Recipe 1

Environment: 
School or using school-like elements

Events:

1. Player A is ahead of Player B.
2. Player A faces an obstacle.
3. Player A falls back.
4. Player B moves ahead.

Ingredients:

1. At least 1 action and 1 response from your personal stories of grit.
2. Creat a physical representation of a school-like architectural feature of the game world
3. Move through the architectural feature during the course of play.
4. Incorporate one moment of slow motion
5. Repeat 1 action at least 3 time
6. Incorporate 1 line of dialogue from personal stories of grit (real or imagined dialogue).
7. Include a shift in power
8. Decide if “success” is based on choice OR chance. Incorporate choice or chance into the game.

Round 2 Recipe

Recipe is the same as above. Choose new action, responses and quotes. If last time your game was based on chance, this time make it based on choice.

Round 3 Recipe

Now let’s abstract the gameplay even more. Change the environment. Any action that looks school-like, revise to make less literal.

Continue in this vein. Each round we might tweak the recipe or switch out elements to help you address your questions. For example, does grit ever have negative impacts? What happens when grit fails? Maybe we change the list of events to emphasisize the negative impacts.

You can imagine that doing some or all of these exercises with middle school students might generate insight to actual school life, and may even challenge our original assumptions about grit.

Responding to Compositions

It’s absolutely necesssary that you have an audience for your compositions. Your audience could be one person. It could be the other members of your development team. But someone needs to be watching, because they will be able to see things that you can’t when you are in it.

Borrowing from Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, I suggest the following format for audience response sessions:

1. Ask the audience a meaning-making question. ( i.e. “What stood out to you?” “Can you tell the story of what you just saw?”)
2. Ask the audience focused questions. You direct the conversation. (i.e. “What do you think about the hand-raising mechanic?”)
3. Allow the audience to ask you questions. This will reveal where they were surprised, interested and confused. Encourage these questions to focus on the design choices. (i.e “Why did you choose…?”)
4. Discussion and suggestions. You are not obligated to answer questions. You decide how much or how little to open discussion.

As you are discussing each composition, keep a running tab of interesting ideas, mechanics, rules, themes, questions, etc. You will use these to synthesize the most interesting and successful elements of the compositions and begin to tie them together.

If you’re really having fun with this process, you can take the synthesized list of ingredients from the compostions and use those to create new, more focused recipes. Imagine using these recipes not just for bodystorming, but to inspire early artist sketches, rule or concept design.

Building a shared vision

By first visualizing the design space, and then bodystorming and discussing aspects of gameplay to explore that design space, you can explore multiple design choices, refine player experience goals, and better understand how game mechanics and themes interact to create the player experience.

By engaging physically with the goals and “ingredients” of a game, we are compelled to work collaboratively, iterate rapidly, and respond critically, building a shared vision for the game as the process unfolds.

Special thanks to Jennifer Olsen for letting me try out these techniques on our project. This process has also been developed through workshops at a Metatopia Game Design Festival. Credit also goes to my colleagues at Will Power to Youthwho taught me the exercises and methods employed.

References and further reading

Ensemble & Movement Practices

Bogart, A., & Landau, T. (2004). The viewpoints book: a practical guide to viewpoints and composition. Theatre Communications Group.

Bartenieff, I., & Lewis, D. (1980). Body movement: Coping with the environment. Psychology Press.

Rohd, M. (1998). Theatre for community, conflict & dialogue: The hope is vital training manual. Heinemann Drama.

Will Power to Youth Training Manual, 2006.

Critical Feedback

Lerman, L., & Borstel, J. (2003). Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process: A method for getting useful feedback on anything you make, from dance to dessert. Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

Embodied Design

Schleicher, Dennis, Peter Jones, O. K.. Bodystorming as Embodied Designing.