The critical thing about ur-games, is they are tools for analysing RPGs based on the very skills you use when playing and designing RPGs. In essence, you encapsulate your design into a metagame, which is more able to answer your questions. Rather than treating the players as copies of you, the designer, or as complete unknowns, an ur-game instantiates the players of your game into something more manageable: an algorithm, a set of values, or a role that can be played.
By doing this, you turn your RPG with all of its unknowns into a large number of possible ur-games, each with an approximation of the unknown that is your players. By exploring a sample of these ur-games you can start to see how your game might be received by different players, and that can help predict what design decisions you should make to meet your goals. It might even tell you what to seek in terms of playtesting groups and goals.
A Brief History of Ur-Games
In many ways, ur-games are a natural idea, but they usually only appear in narrow situations. For example, I want to know if a game will appeal to my friend Shawn, who I've played with enough to have an idea how he plays. I can instantiate a player in my ur-game as Shawn, and roleplay him playing the game. This is not as good as getting him to play, but it is a pretty typical approach to thinking about how a game will be received by other people.
Many typical analyses, from power balancing to estimating reward rates are often implicit types of ur-games. Any power balancing carries assumptions on the players, whether these are the level of competitiveness or the perception of what being powerful might be. And reward rates are often based on a concept of an ideal group and campaign.
So in some ways, ur-games have been a staple of RPG design and analysis for decades. What makes an ur-game of particular interest is that you make the assumptions about the players explicit, justifying them with theory and/or experience. This means you can avoid the pitfalls of implicit assumptions, you'll have a good idea what your assumptions are, and when they don't apply you can try a different test, rather than sticking with an incorrect one.
Big Model Ur-games
Back when I discussed different theories of player, I mentioned the Big Model, a theory of RPGs and groups of players founded at the Forge. The crux of the theory of player groups is that a functional group of players has a shared aesthetic sense for the decisions during the game. This gestalt aesthetic doesn't typically reside with one player, and it may not even be explicit.
This theory doesn't talk about groups without this shared aesthetic nor does it concern itself with individual players. This means, while we may find it easier to roleplay a single player which we can label Gamist or Narrativist, the proper thing to instantiate is an entire group of players, as a whole, currently playing in Gamism or Narrativism. Each of these is a different ur-game, built from a different group aesthetic.
Another limitation to our ur-games is that aesthetics are not generally things that act on the game over a single die roll or other comfortably small mechanical pieces. There is a need to abstract to broader events during play. Fortunately, Homeworld Project has a fairly comprehensible dynamic, which makes it easier to examine at that scale. After all, we know that a turning point will happen periodically, that consequences from failed actions will accumulate, and that players can strategically bring in other characters and events. All of these matter aesthetically, even if the underlying die mechanic may be largely irrelevant.
The last concern is to understand how a shared aesthetic works. In essence, you have three types of behaviors arising in play, as evaluated by the group as whole. The majority of those behaviors will be neutral. They are important, but they exist as a baseline, Some behaviors will be favored by the group. Others will be rejected by the aesthetic. Both are dynamics that emerge from the player's decisions, it is only the judgment of them that differs. So, if that aesthetic rejects little or none of the dynamics, then the RPG doesn't block it, and if there are dynamics which are favored as well, then the RPG actually supports that gestalt aesthetic.
Different Agendas
Narrativism is focused on the story of the game, in a literary sense of conflicts of values and the playing out of moral and ethical struggles. Narrativism, like all creative agenda, is really a collection of aesthetics, but for our purposes I'll pull out two basic ones: hardcore (focusing on rapid successions of hard choices and their outcomes) and long term (more relaxed consideration of the moral and ethical aspects of character's decisions and lives).
Dipping even slightly into the role of hardcore narrativism suggests that Homeworld Project doesn't support it, while characters don't have easy ways out, it is very difficult to make them face a specific hard choice in the short time frame. Long term narrativism, on the other hand gets some support from the capacity to link a positive character grain to a negative reflection, leaving a more contemplative choice: give up your strength or let your opposition grow strong. It's not a strong support, but there is some.
Simulationism is focused on the exploration in the game, the building and expanding of a communal shared space. This can be broken down into various different kinds of exploration including character, setting, system, and situation. Each of these has a somewhat different aesthetic built from it. Using these roles, we look for things that would block the exploration. For character and setting, the very common outcome of changing a grain causes a serious block - the setting and characters can literally change out from under you.
On the other hand, situation exploration, is strongly supported by the action and turning points, which keeps new situations building out of old. Also, due to the intermarrying of system and the events in Homeworld Project, system exploration is also strongly supported, without any breaks in system to block it.
Gamism is focused on competition, whether between all players or as teams. The exact nature of the competition is variable, from concrete goals to more ephemeral goals based largely on social status. In this case, without concrete goals, Homeworld Project immediately blocks gamism which relies on concrete measures of success. As far as more social gamism, Homeworld Project has little to support or reject intra-player competition. Between players and the GM, the balanced resources of each side makes competition between them strongly supported, albeit in a social sense.
In summary, we expect Homeworld Project to work well for groups doing player vs. GM competition or exploring situation or system. It may also work well for long term narrativism. We expect it to cause problems for hardcore narrativism and groups exploring character or setting. Beyond that, there are some gray areas.
Now we've not only identified what sorts of group aesthetics might work well in Homeworld Project, but what aspects of the game are responsible. This can then translate to further design decisions, especially if we had a goal to support a creative agenda that we currently neglect.
But there is more to RPG theory than the Big Model. What happens when we look at other theories of players? Join me next month when we find out.
Next Month: Metagames of Astral Space II - Sockets and Learning
