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Why you should read this
This is a story about a party game. Why should you, alpha gamer, with your BGG IV drip and Terra Mystica Strategy Omnibus, care about a party game, especially one designed by a John Q. Yokel like me? Answers:
I discovered a fruitful design method while making Stinker that I've not seen described before. This isn't just a designer diary and it's not ultimately about a party game; it's a love story, and even the most hardened strategists need love stories. Let's begin there:First, I fell in love
My ladylove's name is Kristen. We've been together eight years. We met at a comedy club where I was doing improv in the unfunny, over-reaching way talentless amateurs everywhere do. She liked me anyway. If my life has ever been graced by the divine, that was it. She's my why.
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Among her many kindnesses, she indulges my relentless habit of designing and playing games. She likes games, but not with the apocalyptic intensity I do.
Except for word games. Kristen is an ICE COLD MURDERER at word games. Many times I've watched in awe as she's eviscerated some other Boggle shark online with face-melting speed. Ever see someone get 100 words in 100 seconds? I have. You may have seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate, but I've seen Kristen playing Boggle.
You know how sometimes you look at the online leaderboard for some game you play and you see the high score is like 17,000,000 and your own best score is 400 despite hernia-inducing effort and you wonder whether that 17,000,000 is legit or reflects some sort of cheating? That 17,000,000 is Kristen's score and she's not cheating. She really is five orders of magnitude better than you.
So one day in 2010 I decided to design a word game for her as a gift. I'd been designing small, bad word games for ages, usually pen and paper strategy games in the vein of Sid Sackson's Beyond Words. By 2010 I'd found many ways to ensure a word game sucks, though it didn't stop me from continued sucking.
One early concept I tried for Kristen's game wasn't so much a game as a mechanism: Each player has a jumble of random letter tiles, and they race to be the first to create a grammatically correct sentence using at least twenty tiles. The winner gets a point. Repeat until someone gets enough to win. I didn't know any word-construction games requiring complete sentences, so I thought it might feel fresh.
It didn't. Among other problems, only anagramming savants could win (duh). Who would play it with Kristen? No one, which was unacceptable, because games are like the Velveteen Rabbit: unreal until played threadbare.
But! In playtesting, we noticed something: It was funny.
Because players didn't have the time or letter-flexibility to make sense, their sentences tickled with near-meaning or felt like they would have meaning if we were living in an alternative reality with three extra dimensions. It was funny.
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When we saw that, I got excited because I saw the seed of a great party game.
Brief game design philosophy interlude
To see why I was excited, you should know my philosophy of party game design.
I believe there are three ways to make a party game funny; most funny party games are a blend of these approaches, but usually lean more on one than the others:
The Funny Game approach
The designer creates jokes and puts them in the game, then the players experience them. Examples: Cards Against Humanity, Exploding Kittens.
The Funny People approach
The game asks players to make up funny things. Examples: Say Anything, Balderdash
The Funny Accidents approach
The game places constraints (usually communication constraints) on the way players can respond such that the players are accidentally funny. Examples: Time's Up!, Telestrations
Each has advantages and disadvantages:
The Funny Game approach
Advantage: doesn't require much creativity, which allows players to relax and play without feeling pressure to be brilliant. Disadvantage: precludes creativity and the humor can feel like it's on rails; canned jokes can go stale quickly.The Funny People approach
Advantage: allows for and encourages creativity Disadvantage: players feel pressure to be creative, which can be intimidating. Players say stuff like "I'm not creative enough for that game" when asked to play.The Funny Accidents approach
Advantage: usually allows for lots of creativity, but creativity isn't required (since the humor can happen by accident), which takes the pressure off. Splits the difference between the advantages and disadvantages of the other two approaches. Disadvantage: If a player is hidebound to be clever, she can get frustrated because the constraints that create the accidental humor make cleverness harder than it would otherwise be.I don't like the Funny Game approach, which bores me. That leaves the Funny People and Funny Accidents approaches, both of which I like, but I like the Funny Accidents approach most. It's hard for many people to be clever on the spot, so I don't think asking players to do that should be the main way a game delivers yuks.
So I'm always on the lookout for game mechanisms that cause funny accidents.
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Back to our story
Now you'll understand why I got excited about our anagramming mechanism: the humor emerged accidentally from a situation in which no one was trying to be funny, exactly what you need for a Funny Accidents game.
Not only was the humor accidental, but I discovered it accidentally, while working on another kind of game. I like to discover funny stuff by accident because when I do it intentionally I can fool myself into thinking a mechanism is funnier than it is because I'm a desperate game designer and I WANT it to be funny.
In the following years, I built a party game to magnify the humor we'd discovered, and it became what is now Stinker.
The resulting game is simple:
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1. Each player has a random jumble of letter tiles and two "wild" tiles that can stand in for any letter.
2. A prompt is read aloud, and the players construct an answer to the prompt with their tiles.
3. There are no rules governing how to use your tiles; you can make a word, a phrase, a sentence, or anything else you can think of, and it needn't have proper spelling or grammar.
4. When you're done constructing your answer, you yell "Stinker!"
5. When all players but one have finished constructing their answers, that one straggler becomes the judge for the round. She selects a winning answer and its author gets points equal to the number of non-wild tiles in it.
6. Each player passes their letter tiles to the right and a new round begins. Most points after ten rounds wins.
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You'd be surprised at how much work it took to arrive at those rules. I'll spare you the details in favor of discussing the most important thing I learned in the process.
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Designing for an audience of one is an unexpectedly fantastic thing to do
When I set out to create Stinker, I assumed designing a game for Kristen alone would yield an unpublishable game.
Broadly speaking, there are two motivations for designing games: 1) a desire to satisfy others (the crowd-pleaser's desire); and 2) a desire to satisfy oneself (the auteur's desire). Commercially successful designers tend to be more crowd-pleaser than auteur for obvious reasons.
Going into this project, it seemed to me that designing for one other person combined the worst qualities of these motivations. Catering to one taste made it unlikely I'd find a broad audience, and designing for someone other than myself would require an intimate understanding of her largely inexpressible shades of feeling toward game mechanisms, which requires empathy. Empathy is hard.
But I did it anyway. I wasn't designing for an audience of one because I thought it was a good approach; I was doing it because I wanted to put my feelings for Kristen into a game.
BUT LO! To my surprise, it turned out to be a GREAT method. Designing for one is my new favorite practice. Here's why:
If I design a game Kristen alone enjoys, she'll have no one to play it with, so she won't have the chance to enjoy it. Therefore in designing for her, I must also design for everyone she knows.
But the risk for the crowd-pleaser is that in trying to please everyone, he'll create something tolerated by all and adored by none. (This explains a lot of Top 40 pop music, big-budget movies, and Apples to Apples — THAT'S RIGHT, I SAID IT.)
However, because my overall goal was to make Kristen happy, I was forced to keep to one perspective, which prevented me from diluting the game's flavor. Stinker would strike a balance between broad appeal and having a personality, like you know, the Rolling Stones or something. (P.S. Stinker is the Rolling Stones of games.)
What kind of humor does Stinker create?
I wish descriptions of party games described their humor better. Just as there are flavors of humor generally (insult, observational, black, etc), there are flavors of humor in party games:
Cards Against Humanity: taboo (except not, you know, Taboo)
Say Anything: witty, bawdy (depending on drunkenness)
Time's Up!: slapstick
In Stinker the humor tends toward the absurd. If you like Monty Python, you'll like Stinker. The images of questions and answers in this essay are all examples of real in-game responses I've seen, to give you an idea of its tone.
I adore this kind of humor (a preference Kristen and I share) and I'm terribly, probably cloyingly, proud of having designed a game that yields so much of it. As for why I like this humor so much, I don't know. Partly, it's because I'm not sure how it works.
When I play Cards Against Humanity and someone brings out the "Big, Black Dick" card, I know what's happening: A taboo has been broken and now I'm back in middle school tittering in a corner. Jokes are like magic tricks for me and the more I know how they work, the less funny they are. I feel manipulated.
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Stinker's not like that. I don't know why I think the Boob-Tennis All-Around is funny. Chances are neither does the player who made it up because she created it partly by accident.
Thankfully, it seems many people have an affection for this kind of humor and I don't know other games that coax it out of players as effortlessly as Stinker does. If it succeeds, I wager that'll be the reason.
Why is it called Stinker?
It's an anagram for Kristen. For me, the game is really called Kristen, in disguise. I like to think Stinker players feel a little of her spirit when they play. That would be among the best things I could give the world.
In any case I put as much love into Stinker as I know how to put. If you play it, I hope that comes across.
Three Notes
You can buy Stinker at Amazon for now, and it may be out in Barnes & Noble by the time this essay goes live. If you don't see it at your local game store, I'd be grateful if you mentioned your interest in it to them (supposing you have an interest). I want to turn Stinker into an app. It's perfect for an app. If you're a developer and you're interested, PM me. Don't try to play it with Scrabble or Bananagrams tile sets. You'll have a terrible experience because the letter distribution has to be completely different to make Stinker work.Nick Bentley
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