A new production of “Hamlet” needs to be rehearsed. A new game about a royal power struggle requires playtesting, and unlike in the theatre, game designers don’t want help from the same ensemble every time. As they refine the rules, they always need to see responses on first encounter. Peers and connoisseurs who wear T-shirts where the “C” in “Game Club” is Pac-Man can be helpful in tweaking the design, but civilians are, too; they are less likely to have intellectualized their appreciation of fun, and the play’s the thing. So game designers need to put out the word for fresh specimens.
Which is how I ended up in the basement of N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts after work the other night, for the last playtest of a game called Starry Heavens before its début at the Museum of Modern Art. Starry Heavens was created for a party tonight celebrating “Talk to Me,” an exhibit that “explores the communication between people and things.” “Talk to Me” includes video games, and so does the party, which is hosted by the video-game journal Kill Screen—but Starry Heavens has no screens, no wires. It’s a board game in which the players are the pieces.
If the heavens coöperate, the Starry Heavens board will be in MOMA’s sculpture garden: a constellation of black, gray, and white steel discs around a twelve-foot weather balloon. But at the final dress rehearsal downtown, the set was still provisional: letter-size sheets of paper deliberately scattered on the floor and connected by a web of blue masking tape. A single page of rules was taped to the brick wall.
The person playing the ruler stands on a yellow circle in the center, holding onto the string of the balloon. Everyone else (about twenty people came through over the course of an hour of playtesting, and the rules do not specify an upper limit) starts on the edges of the board. When the ruler calls out a color, the others can move along the tape to a space of that color. Between colors, they can banish someone from the board, it takes two players on adjacent spaces pointing at someone to banish them. And if you’ve banished two people and are near the center, you can banish the ruler and take her place.
This probably sounds as baffling as Immanuel Kant’s “The Critique of Practical Reason”—the source of the name Starry Heavens—but once you step onto the board, the heady literary references and celestial metaphors fall away. Instead you listen to the ruler: “Black…Banish…Gray…Banish…” You worry about how to get close enough to someone else to banish them without getting banished yourself, and what to do if you bump into someone trying to move to the same space you wanted to.
The rules say that both players retreat to their previous spaces, but they don’t tell you how to react to that awkward contact, other than that you’re not allowed to say, “Excuse me,” because you’re not allowed to talk. Although there’s no punishment for talking, at least not during the playtest.
“We played where the ruler could banish people who broke rules, but that was too fussy,” Eric Zimmerman, one-half of the team behind Starry Heavens, told the testers during a break in the action. Zimmerman, who has the commanding voice and thick-framed glasses of an impresario, kept advancing toward the center, then stepping away to observe and make notes. His behavior didn’t really disrupt the game; Starry Heavens was designed so players can enter and exit in the middle of a round without ruining things for everyone else. Convenient for a party at an art museum, or for a reporter.
Some elements of Starry Heavens were still solidifying. What do you do when a new ruler takes over: break the silence, or bow? And at the beginning of the evening, we kept our arms at our sides until we banished someone, when we folded one arm across our chest, and the other after our second banishment. Later, Zimmerman asked us to try it the opposite way, crossing our arms upon entering the board and releasing them as we banished others.
“What do people think of the new arm arrangements?” he asked the room.
A man in an orange shirt said that arms folded was more uncomfortable.
“I agree that it is uncomfortable, but maybe that is good?” said Zimmerman’s partner, Nathalie Pozzi, who kept her arms folded across her black dress while observing, at times looking slightly uncomfortable herself.
A debate ensued, before Zimmerman and Pozzi put it to a vote. Beginning with arms crossed had three times as many votes as beginning at arms at the sides first, but almost half the players were agnostic.
“How often do you want people to win?” Greg Trefry, a tall man in a Mets T-shirt who teaches with Zimmerman at the N.Y.U. Game Center, asked.
“Rarely,” Zimmerman said.
“Maybe nobody ever wins,” said Trefry. “Aesthetically, isn’t that what you’re going for?”
That a game can have aesthetic ambitions is an assumption in the Tisch basement tonight, not something to argue about with Roger Ebert. Still, Zimmerman seems to feel the weight of bringing one of his games to the temple of modernism. “We’re trying to make an elegant game, a refined game, but also a cool game,” he says at a nearby bar after the playtest.
Zimmerman teaches now, but for years he has made his living designing games; his most recent release is a Kinect game for Deepak Chopra. Pozzi is an architect who didn’t think about games before dating Zimmerman, but, she said, “The way to be a partner with Eric is working with him.”
Pozzi pulled out a loose-leaf notebook with her blueprints for the board. She sees parallels between architecture and game design: creating a structure for people to inhabit. “The structure that you set makes possible an experience, but you have no control over that experience.”
“Architecture doesn’t have to be art,” she adds. “Some of it is, some of it isn’t.”
Photographs by Blake Eskin.
