Game Design Outside the Euro-American Binary


Here's a cool article from about a year ago about "weird" human behavior researcher Joe Heinrich discovered when he played perception and fairness games with indigenous and non-Western cultures. (Here's a link straight to his paper.)


What's Fair?

In the Ultimatum Game, anonymous separate participants play for cash. One player gets all the cash and must offer an amount to the other player, but if the recipient declines the offer, then both players don't get any money. What we would expect is the giver to offer a 50-50 split because it's fair. Anyone greedy enough to offer less than that risks losing the whole pot.

Here is what happened when he played with the Machiguenga, the indigenous Peruvians of Machu Pichu:

Photo Source
"When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”"

Turns out that North Americans have a peculiar set of cultural circumstances that make our cognitive development statistically uncharacteristic compared to the rest of the world. Therefore, the psychology tests, perception tests, studies of fairness, economics, game theory, and all that other stuff we believe to be universal to humanity is in fact just idiosyncratic. Shocking!


Photo: Gold West Prototype, mysterybaer


The Euro-American Binary

Okay, maybe not so surprising to game designers. In the hobby industry, we're already familiar with stereotypical differences between "Ameritrash" and "Euro" games. Those divisions are becoming non-existent, as more North American designers employ streamlined sense of design, while European designers adopt sillier, action-packed themes.

So you might ask why Heinrich's findings matter to you if your audience is typically familiar with American and European sphere. Sure, if you were designing a game for the Machiguenga, you would have to do a bit more research to see which "difficult" choices are actually all that difficult in their culture, but otherwise why look outside of our cultural environment?

To do so ignores how selective the data is in current psychology, with little representation outside of the Western academic context. According to Psychology Today:

  •  96% of subjects come from Western industrialized nations, which contain only 12% of the world's population.
  • 67% of American subjects and 80% of international subjects are undergraduate psychology students.
  • An American undergraduate is 4,000 times more likely to be a subject in a psychology experiment than a random person outside the West.

Not exactly the most representative sample, eh?


Photo Source

Design from the World

No culture is monolithic, and strains of differences thread through any community. Certainly on an individual level, people have different senses of fairness and equitable trade. That makes games fun!  That also makes Heinrich's findings all the more pertinent for all game designers.

There are many logical fallacies and behavioral trends we might consider universal elements in ludology, including loss aversion, sunk cost fallacies, prisoner's dilemmas, and so on. How much of our understanding of these phenomena are compromised because their source data comes from a tiny American sub-population?

I look forward to the days to come when game designers outside of the Euro-American binary bring a fresh perspective to our craft . We already see inroads...

  • ...from Japan in the form of Seiji Kanai's Love Letter and Lost Legacy.
  • Masao Suganuma's Machi Koro should prove to be a big hit when it finally gets an official translation stateside.
  • Taiwan's Ta-Te Wu has published a handful of card games through Z-Man Games, including Mountain of Inferno.
  • And of course perennial party game Mafia was designed by Dimitry Davidoff in Moscow way back in the '80s.

I'd love to hear about any more designers from outside Europe or North America. Any to share? What new insights into game design and player behavior are coming from around the world?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5 Graphic Design and Typography Tips for your Card Game

Image
Chris Farrell of Illuminating Games just wrote a thorough critique of card games setting their body text to be so small that they cannot be read at arm's length, let alone across the table. Here's an excerpt, but the whole thing is worth a read for any would-be card game designers out there. (Myself included.) Break out your copy of the base set of Dominion, and look at the Chapel. This has a text box roughly 3.5cm by 4.5cm. It's got a single line of text. That line of text is 1 (one) millimeter high. 1mm! For me, it's only clearly readable at half an arm's length even in the bright light of day. (...) Compare this to a more sane game like Glory to Rome, where the font size is 2-3 times as large (text is 2mm high, keywords 3mm and usually highlighted). I can generally read Glory to Rome cards across the table, and can certainly see the important keywords. To heap insult upon injury, not only does Glory to Rome have far more legible text than Dominion it also has...
Read more

Low-High Dice Game

Image
A dice game inspired by the stock market (and playing lots of Martian Dice). Roll a bunch of dice and choose which sets to keep. Choose your strategy wisely! Stuff You Need Two-to-Six PLAYERS A PENCIL and PAPER to keep score Thirteen standard six-sided DICE How to Play The shortest player takes the first turn. On your turn, first roll all thirteen dice. Several dice will have matching results. These are called SETS. (A single die result is a set, too.) You must choose a set to keep. For example, your first roll results are 111124445555 . The sets are four 1 s, one 2 , three 4 s, and four 5 s. After keeping a set of dice, lock them up in a row. This is called the GOOD TRACK. For example,  you could keep the set of four 1 s, one 2 , three 4 s, or four 5 s . You decide to keep the four 1 s and line them up in your good track. After keeping a set, you may end your turn or re-roll the remaining unlocked dice. When you re-roll, immediately set aside any results tha...
Read more

One Thing to Avoid in Game Design

Image
When game designer Paul Peterson was interviewed for the upcoming Titans Series of games from Calliope Games, there was one segment at 1:55 that really caught my attention (emphasis mine): "A couple years ago I was teaching people how to play Guillotine and I hadn't played in a while. The first thing I did was say, 'The first thing you gonna do when you open your game is you look through this deck and you take this card.' I pulled out the Callous Guards card and threw it over my shoulder. Everybody laughed. I said, ' That's the biggest mistake I ever made as a game designer in my life.'" Oof. Those are strong words. What's the big deal? For context, the game Guillotine is all about collecting the heads of French nobles during the revolution. There is only one guillotine, with a line of nobles waiting for their grim fate. On your turn, you play action cards to change the order of the line, then take the Noble card from the front of the ...
Read more