We were attending the last party in Hollywood Blockbuster (2006). That’s the Reiner Knizia game of auctions and moviemaking that’s also called Traumfabrik (2000) and Dream Factory (2009) because name changes sell games. I’d finished all my movies except one, and I hadn’t started that last one, so I had no use for any of the resources being offered.
Two players were going after me, and I glanced at each of their movie boards. One had a movie that was nowhere close to completion, but the other needed just a single audio effect to finish a film. I grabbed the only audio effect chit at the party, then tossed it to the side, unused.
That was the dick move.
I felt bad about the move from the moment I made it. I was spoiling my opponent’s game without benefiting mine. I mean, the ultimate goal was to make sure that he didn’t finish a film and perhaps catch up with my score, but there was a level of indirection there. Because it wasn’t obvious that I was helping myself, the move seemed malicious.
I
felt even worse when we toted up the points at the end and he had less than half my score. I certainly could have figured out all the scoring possibilities before I made my move. I could have figured out his current score and how much the new movie would add. But I would also have had to suss out where the 50 points of end-game scoring bonuses where going. It wasn’t by any means impossible, but it was daunting, and it would have been easy to make a mistake.
So, I made the only move that could have benefited me, the one that punished my only opponent that could have been punished.
I just don’t like feeling bad about making the optimal move in a game.
Dick moves are closely related to the problem with naked aggression, a topic I’ve written about before. You have the choice to hose or not to hose, and you choose to hose.
However it’s possible to apply a bit more analysis to dick moves:
| Clear Gain | Neutral | No Gain | |
| Resource Cost | Normal Gameplay | Weird Move | Dick-ish |
| Time Cost | Good Move! | OK Move | Dick-ish |
| No Cost | Great Move! | OK Move | Dick Move! |
If you agree with the premise of my table, a dick move comes in two parts: how much it costs you and how much you gain. I think the gain part is obvious: it’s when you’re doing something that doesn’t obviously (or immediately) benefit you that there’s a problem. It makes you look, well, like a dick.
However I think that cost is important too. The more you have to put into something, the more it looks like clever gameplay rather than dickishness. If I have to spend half of my cash to keep you from winning an auction, then it’s more obvious that I’m doing something for game reasons, not for personal reasons.
By this criteria, my move in Hollywood Blockbuster looked like prime dickishness. It didn’t do me any good, since I threw out the tile, and it effectively had no cost for me. (Sure, it cost me a turn, but it was very obvious that the turn was useless to me.)
I’m working from the premise here that dick moves are bad. I don’t mean that the move itself is bad. You want people to be able to make optimal moves that better their position in a game. However, if a move makes a player feel bad about their choice and if it might make their opponents unhappy too, then there’s a design problem.
So the natural question arises, could different game design have resolved what’s essentially a psychological problem?
There are a lot of ways to approach this problem.
Most obviously, you can make it harder to see what the dick moves are. The problem in Hollywood Blockbuster is that the information is all open. You can see exactly what tiles each player needs to complete his films, and this allow for maximal dickishness. This sort of openness is a fairly important element in auction games: you need to be able to assess how everyone will value an auction item. However, it’s a design element that needs to be considered careful.
Otherwise, my chart suggests that the best way to reduce moves that feel bad is to either increase the cost of moves or to increase the benefits of moves.
Within Hollywood Blockbuster, the cost part of the equation runs into a problem at the parties. Each player gets to take one tile at no cost, in a specific order. If a player instead had to pay even a small amount (one contract) to hire someone from a party it’d be a different ball game.
Similarly, if I could do something with my tile, it wouldn’t seem like I was doing something without benefits. If I just turned it in for a contract, it wouldn’t seem quite as much like a dick move because I’d be getting a benefit.
An even better alternative: what if I could take a contract instead of taking a tile from the party? Yeah the 1 victory point from a contract is a lot less than the 20+ points I might be costing an opponent … but something like that might convince a player to do something that has a clear benefit them instead of just hosing an opponent.
I should note that I’m not actually advocating any of these changes for Hollywood Blockbuster. I’m instead showing how within that one game there are alternatives that could either keep players from making dick moves or else make them seem less dickish.
I actually got sort of lucky in my game of Hollywood Blockbuster. There was one and exactly one move that would hurt an opponent. I would have been in a much worse position if I could have hurt either of the opponents waiting to take their turn; then I would have been in clear kingmaking territory. And, it’s the worse sort of kingmaking, where neither move benefits me, and so I have to choose which of two players I hurt and which I don’t.
I actually have very similar problems with Reiner Knizia’s Tutankhamen (1993). I frequently arrive at the end of that game and discover that my final move can’t help me, but it will help one of two other players complete a set, which can be a big point swing in that game. I wonder if this is a result of the open, mathematical basis that Knizia often uses in his game designs.
Returning to the topic of dick moves, I ask you, my dear readers:
Should I have made the dick move?
Should the designer have allowed me to do so?
(Or required me to do so?)
Additional images are courtesy of Nico Solitander (nsolitander at BGG) and were released under a Creative Commons attribution license.They actually show the Dream Factory edition of the game,
This was a very peculiar read for me, because I often say that the potential to make dick moves is the #1 thing I look for in a game. I want to be able to directly affect not only my own position but also other players. I want to be able make someone call me a dick because I got them good. And I want them to be able to do it to me too!
The case you describe seems particularly clear-cut. There was only one move you could make that materially affected your position. I’d have made it in a heartbeat, laughed about it, and fully expected the recipient to take it in the same good spirit.
And I don’t think that makes me a bad person 🙂
I don’t either. It just made me *feel* bad, and that’s something I generally prefer to avoid.
Well that’s understandable. How did the ‘victim’ feel?
I actually dunno. He gave a sarcastic “Thanks” after the move, but seemed relatively OK afterward. But he wasn’t someone I’ve played with much.
To answer your questions:
Should I have made the dick move?
Sure, in a situation where I was confident the move would be taken in good spirits. But there are certainly circumstances in which I wouldn’t (e.g. when I play Ticket to Ride with my wife, we play ‘no blocking unless it’s a route you needed anyway’).
Should the designer have allowed me to do so?
Absolutely!
(Or required me to do so?)
No. I prefer designers to require as few things as possible – leave the choices in the players’ hands.
I don’t think I agree with the premise of your table, by the way. For me a ‘dick move’ is one that causes great harm to another player, but that doesn’t mean that it has no gain for me. In fact, in a 2p game, the two are completely equivalent…
My table might not be clear. It’s intended to show what it costs and gains the person *making the move*. The fact that you’re hurting the other player is implied (and, yeah, it’s clearly much more symmetrical in a two-player game!)
I can give you an opposite scenario. I was playing After The Flood (never a good idea, its a game that grows animosity like weeds), with 1 friend who was familiar with the game, and another who was not. The friend who was familiar with the game started trying to manipulate the friend who wasn’t familiar with the game into screwing me over (newb manipulation is much poorer etiquette than any dick-move in my book) so he was already getting under my skin. I saw a chance to make a move that would really hurt him, and I took it. It was (if I say so myself) a quite clever move he did not see coming, and he felt like I destroyed him and whined about it. I then saw the chance to follow that up with what I thought would be a real death-blow to his game. I didn’t take it. I am not sure if I didn’t take it because he was whining, whether I was overcompensating because I was mad at him for manipulating the newb, or because I am afraid of the potential for After the Flood to destroy friendships (I had two friends stop speaking to each other permanently over a game of it). He then managed to eek out an unexpected victory in the game, and I felt crappy about my choice to give him a break. In the effort to avoid handing him a illuminating overwhelming defeat, I gave him a victory I felt he didn’t deserve, given how he pursued it. So in hindsight, I regret not making the dick move.
I am not sure in your situation if you knew that you didn’t need the dick-move to be assured of victory when you made it, so its worth thinking about how you would have felt if you had pulled your punch and lost.
I definitely would have felt dumb. My suspicion is just that there are ways to design to make moves feel less dick-ish. Because we *want* great moves, we just don’t want bad feelings.
This is still really confusing me. Isn’t a better way to get round this having people learn to not let their feelings get hurt by a game, rather than designing away that potential entirely?
I mean, someone could get hurt by my kitchen knife. Doesn’t mean I want to be supplied with a blunt one.
Let’s start at what I see the core issue.
“However, if a move makes a player feel bad about their choice and if it might make their opponents unhappy too, then there’s a design problem.”
I’m pretty sure this is either a psychological or a social problem and is thus to be solved by appropriate tools/approaches – social skill or psychological inquiry.
“So the natural question arises, could different game design have resolved what’s essentially a psychological problem?”
For me the natural question is “should”, not “could”.
I.
The issue of feeling bad is a personal issue of any individual player who feels this way. They have actively (even if not consciously) produced this feeling in a collective situation which doesn’t have to be interpreted in a way to produce such feelings. These feelings were awoken by a specific interpretation, which might as well be a shared interpretation (thus linked to specific social customs or specific interpretation on the nature of the boardgaming which a group or a gaming scene can share).
There are many unconscious “self-evident” presuppositions here which, if we would look at them would reveal the shaky ground of “the move made me feel bad” situation.
A – Firstly the idea of playing a game having something to do with winning the game.
B – Secondly the idea of winning a game having something to do with earning this win.
C- Thirdly the idea of earning the win having something to do with a sort of Calvinistic economic endeavour not unlike building a business all on one’s own.
D – Fourthly the idea of interfering into another competing “business” being unethical, unsportsmanlike or in some way asocial and thus creating “bad feelings”.
I can show any of these 4 stages to offer more than just the interpretation you imply. Let’s go in the opposite direction:
D – If winning is what matters, you don’t need the most points to win, you just need more points than anybody else at the table, even if that is a negative number. Playing a game even for competitive reasons is a collective endeavour and thus it’s the relative difference which matters, good (win oriented play) tries to enlarge or control this difference, not their individual play.
C – There’s this weird idea developed in eurogames of the recent decade that players are supposed to do something on their own in a game and then compare (scores or money or whathaveyou). It’s this really odd idea of removing tension from a competitive game, without ever touching the origin of the tension. Which is: competing is unfair, not nice and totally discriminatory – one person wins by making every other player lose. All this “doing stuff on your own” tries to make this completely discriminatory act as conflict free as possible, which is kinda odd. This “movement” also hides the nature of boardgaming which is a collective, shared experience, not a solo endeavour which just so happens for all participants to be doing behind the same table.
B – The oddest thing about this article is this “solution” that a move seems less personal if it’s somehow tied into the economy of the game and thus has a price. What? So, the move is less personal if neoliberal economy made me do it? Isn’t this actually worse? Instead of me doing a move into an interactive space the players share, now I can “defend myself” if I actually paid a bill to be able to do it. “Oh, it hurts me as much as it hurts you, because I paid 50 usd”. This implies players are or should be more tied to economy than to one another, more linked to systems of capitalistic exploitations that to the shared ground they share with other people next to them. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m a slave to the wage.” This is just wrong on so many levels I have a hard time wrapping my mind around without being flabbergasted. I instead would prefer honesty – if you want to interfere/interact with me, have balls and do it and be responsible for it. This then becomes personal and playing boardgames with people behind the same table instead of playing some online multiplayer things should be personal, at least I see it this way.
A – Winning a game is just one of possible motivations for doing this thing which is basically a collective activity with rules, while sitting at a table. Besides winning other two popular motivations are:
– playing for a story/narrative/thematic immersion
– playing for interacting with co-players (getting re-action from them)
Both motivations are focused on experience (social, or narrative) and “the ride” instead of focusing on the result. This is for me more “primal” as it’s focused on the being in the now of boardgaming, instead of focusing on the future (the result, the achievement).
So instead of questioning oneself “how to bring gamey solutions to the problem of feeling bad while gaming” I’d suggest adressing the core issue.
Which is: Why do “I” game? What do I expect from gaming? What to people whom I game with expect from gaming?
Asking these question offers appropriate solutions – namely social and psychological ones.
II.
How to solve the issue 1 – Social skills.
The simplest way to solve problems arising is social situation (which boarDgaming is a subcategory of) is to deal with it on the group level.
– talk to people about it and resolve whatever there is to resolve
– ask people beforehand how do they feel about such issues.
There’s this thing which is absolutely crucial to gaming and is one of foundations which make gaming gaming and no something else.
It’s not for real.
The idea of play(ing) and game(ing) is linked to a specific place in which play and game take place. Something is playing if it has no real-.life reprercussion, negative or positive ones. A game happens in a special reality which is separated from “real life”. It’s fiction, it’s acting, what happens in a game doesn’t happen “for real”. I’m just playing a role interacting with other people playing a role. This is what makes playing playing. “As if” reality.
For that reason I’m never a dick to somebody inside a play or a game as long as I abide by the contract of supporting the fictious, as-if nature of the situation. It’s only a game.
But probably through their social conditioning or upbringing, or social environment or whatdoIknowwhat some people have a problem is maintaining this border between gaming and reality which is constitutional for the gaming experience as such. Which is why I will avoid playing confrontational games with such people as they can turn it into something much more serious and un-game-like than I would prefer. Playing “dick games” is fun to playing with relaxed, chilled bunch of people, who don’t take things personally and thus can enjoy the interactive space this game can create and laugh while playing in this way.
What makes it really a hard situation to deal with, is that some people feel actually threatened and don’t realise they’re themselves creating these feelings of being threatened by taking a playful situation as something more serious than it is or should be. I speculate their daily lives are so deeply drowned in competitiveness (their jobs, maybe even their private lives), they cannot step out of them. As oddly as this seems for me. Which brings us to the next point:
III.
How to solve the issue 2 – Psychology.
The heart of an issue, which turns out to be a jumping board back to the surface.
Why did you feel bad about doing a “dick move”?
Because you interpreted the situation in a certain way.
Which isn’t the only way, let alone the necessary way, to interpret it.
One path to remove all potential dickishness from boardgaming for all the eternity is simply by removing the origin of dickishness – competition as such. Cooperative games offer one way out as all players collectively win, or lose, but one can go further and remove winning or losing altogether and the game just being a rule structured activity players play as long as they like.
There’s also another way.
Talking once to friend of mine about this issue he told me really likes playing boardgames with people who engage in recreational sports (of the competitive variety – he plays badminton). Playing a sport as a recreation means what you want out of it is exactly what you get either you win or lose at the end of your training session: namely both parties are tired and sweaty. Thus the result doesn’t matter.
This is also for me the only attitude towards boardgaming I’ll tolerate at my gaming table. The point is that we share this collective experience together and at the end what we have is that we went through it together.
Which means that the solution to your question – how to solve (or maybe: save) people from feeling bad about a move they made while gaming is: emphasise the shared part of the gaming experience. Emphasize what brings people together, not what brings them apart.
Now you’re probably confused – by aren’t dickish moves those that push people further apart? But I respond to this by saying – because they were too far apart to start with. When we were talking with my badminton playing friend we realised we don’t like playing games with people who take them too seriously – this is how I see it. If I made a “dickish move” I wasn’t actually aggressive, I simply performed a move withing the playful performance called the boardgaming experience, it was performed as if in a character. However, when a person reacted to this “dickish move” with feeling actually endangered (and later angry or hurt) this feeling crossed the horizon between the gaming “as if” reality and actual real life. And because this person’s feeling of upset has pushed the artificial gaming experience into a real experience it is them who are aggressive as they have framed situation into being real and that turned them into an aggressor. This is the “softer” equivalent of flipping the gaming table – suddenly a child-like creative situation is turned into something which is for real.
So in order to remove the interpretation which sees certain moves as dickish we have to embrace what all people who play a game together share. They share a collective experience, they are together, everything collectively experienced there will be inscribed into each of their memories.
So we go back into A, B, C and D.
– We promote games where the gaming situation is collective, and not everybody doing something in their own little corner
– We promote games where gaming situations are co-created by players, their interactions and their relations.
– We promote games where people are awarded also by other things than just by winning – by coming out of them with memorable experiences, stories. And we do this by giving players more power to co-create the gaming environment and interact not only with other player’s game positions, but with the personalities of players themselves. (like in games with lying).
– We promote “fun” over “winning” – because fun is shared and winning is solitary. Shared journey over solipsistic achievement.
– As weird as it sounds, we promote games where people who won didn’t totally deserved to win, maybe it was luck, or randomness, or chaos, or they just happened to win – people seem to care less about winning in such games, but also less about losing in such games, instead the unpredictable nature of the collective experience is enhanced (and a chance winner is a constitutional part of such an experience)
The trick is in embracing playing boardgames as a place of playfulness, a place of coming together, not a place of singular players achievements – as this is the core of what is bringing us apart. Let the winning be just a part of the playfulness, not a replacement for it.
IIII.
Further materials:
https://aeon.co/essays/children-today-are-suffering-a-severe-deficit-of-play
This article compares children’s free play which is today nearing extinction with achievement oriented activities for kids. Free play is run by children and thus they learn how to live in a group, how to negotiate and utilise social skills. But free play was brushed aside as it’s “unsafe” and replaced by ac
tivities which are run by adults and thus don’t grant children authority nor autonomy and thus they never learn them, plus they push children into striving for achievements in order to impress the adults who have set these goals (hm, no wonder many a eurogame has a theme of impressing a monarch with a load of points). As a result these kids are taught to be selfish, caring only about results and achievement, but not being socilised and adept at social skills, subsequently they’re also more emotionally fragile and easily upset if they don’t achive the prescribed goal.
This is the wider social frame inside which I read the current boardgaming situation and boardgaming design and inside which I see you voice your “problem” about a dickish move. Another way to look at this issue is that your dickish move is done out of egoism – you only care about winning and thus you’re motivated by selfishness. I, on the other hand, perform a dickish move out of desire to see the reaction of the other player, to create an intensive, memorable and funny movements we all will share in our memories. Your dickish move is driven by ego and fears hurt ego reaction, but my dickish move is made out of LOVE, it’s made out of being together. 🙂
You pose an interesting question. I do not see anything wrong with what you did. If you did that to me I wouldn’t be bothered by it because it seems like it was the best move and your attitude isn’t spiteful (it’s remorseful which lessens the dickishness).
But I would not have done that especially to someone I don’t play with that often. I am more likely to point out that “I could do this, but I’m not going to because that just seems mean . . . let’s compare point totals at the end and see if it would have made a difference.” I can then see if I lost by an amount that could have been overcome by the dick move which is easy to see if it happens in the last turn and I can then take a silent victory. Good enough for me and no hurt feelings.
Hm, if the question is “what I could have done so I don’t feel bad about it” the answer is:
The author of the article should have spent the entire game before that moment building the camaraderie and feeling of togetherness between all the players playing the game. Then anything he could have done would be done in the context of this togetherness, so it would be at the best very funny in “ha-ha, gottcha” way.
If one spends the whole game maximising score and caring about their win, instead of enjoying the time together with people and putting effort into them enjoying time playing games together with them, that is the real reason why they should feel like a dick. 😉
So: talk with people, have fun with them while gaming, make jokes, bring drinks, share chocolate, drink what they have shared with you to drink. And so on.
I think the issue lies in the game play and the social expectations.
The social expectation is that players will not maliciously attack another player, or a player who is not a threat. For me, the cost has little to do with it. In fact, I think a move that has no benefit to the original player and has a cost is a bigger Dick move, because you are making an effort to set the other player back.
The other social issue is a matter of German Style game play. Many if not most Euro games shy strongly away from direct aggression and instead rely on ‘denial’ as the source of conflict. Taking a limited resource, such as a card, token, or board space is essential to euro-game conflict. This will inevitably put someone in the position of being the Denier. When you deny for no apparent benefit, it can raise eye brows.
Mechanically the issue is created/facilitated by the lack of real-time info. I like this mechanic alot, but it does lead to this issue. I am guessing, if you had known the actual score of the player, and could see if he was not a threat to your victory, you would not have made the move.
This also exposes that you had an action that could not help you, only deny others. Again, this was a play choice the designer made or maybe just an assumption that taking a tile would always be a benefit to the active player.
I would argue that you did not make a Dick move. Strategic denial is a part of the game as well as optimization of actions. If you had done something innocuous, that would not have been strategic.
It sounds like this was not a true auction. Simply taking a tile from a pool is drafting, not auction. In an auction game like Modern Art, you are able to set the value of something, but someone who values it more is free to out bid you. That is the balance.
You’re right that the parties in Hollywood Blockbuster are actually drafts, the rest of the game is auctions though.
Thanks for the extensive thoughts!
The part in this article that gives alternatives is fantastic.
I don’t think you would make that dick move again, as it also hurt you. I prefer games that don’t do that so I would prefer if the design did remove or disguise it. This is not right or wrong it is just what I prefer. I’d guess most people prefer to stab you in the back, which says something about modern city dwellers (civilized people).