Saturday Afternoon.
I’m at IndieCade East, in New York City, watching Kevin Cancienne and Margaret Robinson talk about Hokra.
Hokra is one of the SportsFriends games, a local multiplayer game funded by a joint Kickstarter. It’s like a very stripped-down digital soccer game. It’s a four-player game, two players on each team playing keepaway with a with a square pixel ball. It’s basic but holds surprising depth for high-level players. It’s hard not to get enthusiastic and cheer, watching every pass, every tackle and upset and score.
Saturday Evening.
Sitting down at a big table in a pub with some likeminded folk. The topic drifts around a lot, but, at some point, we’re talking about eSports. I like to watch people play Street Fighter sometimes. I’m not a high level player, but I understand what’s going on at the high level and the commentary makes sense to me. My friend Zenas can’t watch Street Fighter that way. He likes to watch Starcraft, because he plays it, and so he understands it. I can’t watch Starcraft. It’s all just blurs to me with bright lights and words and no meaning.
Hokra at least doesn’t seem to have that problem.
Saturday Night. Way too late.
After going into Manhattan to connect with another friend, I’m standing in a bar on 2nd Avenue. Far on the other side of the city from the IndieCade Expo, and long after it’s closed, people are playing a game.
The game is Beer Pong.
I’ve never actually played Beer Pong, and I didn’t play it this weekend either. I just watched. But the rules are really simple for a spectator to figure out. Players set up plastic cups on either side of a ping pong table. They’re in a triangle formation, like racked pool balls or bowling pins. Each cup contains about a shot’s worth of cheap beer. Players take turns throwing ping pong balls into the cups across the table. When the ball goes into a cup, the player near the cup has to drink the beer, and discard the cup. The variation we were watching was two teams of two players each. Like Hokra.
By most objective measures, Beer Pong is actually kind of a dumb game. There’s not much to it, very little depth of strategy, just a ball to throw and some cups to drink. The beer isn’t even good.
I got to thinking about Battleshots: that’s Battleship, with shot glasses instead of ship pegs. It’s a pretty simple idea for a drinking game, and I’ve seen it referred to many times as “the new beer pong.” But no one could really play Battleshots in a crowded bar space like this. Bars at night are loud. You couldn’t hear someone shouting “B2” over the deafening roar. You don’t need to hear for Beer Pong.
I thought about people playing Hokra here. It could work. But the drinking would of course be extraneous. And there is the issue of teams. When it’s loud, and you’re spectating, you can’t know who is on which team; there’s no indicator of that. It’s immediately clear who is on which team in Beer Pong.
I was a backer on SportsFriends, the Kickstarter that included Hokra along with other multiplayer games. But at the time, some were commenting on the awkwardness of their sales pitch, a sales pitch that I admit almost didn’t work on me, me, as a person who actually enjoys expo games. On Electron Dance I commented that I didn’t really feel like I was buying these games for me. I don’t think I have the hardware to actually play a single one of them. Putting aside the PS Move requirement for JS Joust, I also don’t have the four XBox controllers needed to properly play Hokra.
Kevin and Margaret didn’t either. They mentioned in their talk that when they were first learning the game – drilling it, really – they substituted two Guitar Hero controllers as their opponents.
I have three XBox 360 controllers if you count my fightpad. I guess I could ask a friend to bring another. I’m not sure how we would hook them all up to my PC’s two available USB ports. I try to Google how I might accomplish this with a string like “hooking up four controllers for Hokra on PC.” The first hit is Electron Dance again, The Hokra Problem. Which is a great examination of the problems with having such games on a personal computer, a box not usually associated with that kind of experience.
Expo games are fabulous in the atmosphere of an expo. I’ve already determined for several reasons they would not be fabulous in my home. Not just because of the problem of the context of the PC, but for other reasons such as lack of available space or hardware. Maybe the games would be fabulous in your home, depending on your setup.
But would they be fabulous in a bar?
Hokra and games like it scratch an itch that isn’t scratched by singleplayer home games, or multiplayer games played online, “alone with others.” They’re a bit more inviting to crowds and participation than a round or two of Street Fighter is, and designed to be more comprehensible for the audience.
But does Hokra scratch an itch that isn’t scratched by Beer Pong?
On the way to the Expo my husband and I were talking about Monopoly. Monopoly changes one piece in its set, and it’s national news. Monopoly is played all around the world, and in America at least it’s a household name. Monopoly is not really a great game in a lot of ways. Even if it were, most people who play it alter its rules for the worse without realizing it.
I could go into people’s houses and try to explain this to them. I could drop on their tables a dozen or so board games are are empirically “better,” sometimes by orders of magnitude. I could say “look, you are playing Monopoly wrong, which is why it always makes you miserable, I’m educated and I know these things, stop it, STOP HAVING THE WRONG FUN GUYS.” I could imagine that this would open up their horizons and improve their lives and experience but in reality I believe it would make me a snob.
So a game developer walks into a bar. And says, “hey, I have this really great experience for you. It just requires four XBox 360 controllers and a PC and a big enough screen. And would it kill you to drink some decent beer? And why are you ignoring me?”
The real punchline. If you count the version originally played with paddles, before those were abandoned, Beer Pong is fifty years old. Beer Pong is older than… well… Pong.
Video games have a preservation problem. Can you imagine people still playing Hokra in fifty years? As a game, as an idea, it’s good enough to last. But again, those damn controllers are a problem. Or the PC itself is the problem, a device whose form fifty years hence we can’t even begin to imagine. Meanwhile, you can find the original local multiplayer video games if you look hard enough, but essentially… they are relics, fit for a museum.
So Sportsfriends is Important because Local Multiplayer Is Important because… why? I’m genuinely not trying to be an ass because the experiences of these games are great and the social atmosphere is great. Everyone is having fun. But in the cold light I can’t say for sure that something important is happening with expo games. Important to whom? Are we really all just making games for each other, enthusiast to enthusiast? How far can we truly take this and for how long? Whose hearts can we touch?
In a crowded room, is it enough for a game to be great?
This coming Saturday night, at the Museum of the Moving Image, there is no IndieCade Expo. No one will be standing in the museum at night, playing Hokra.
This coming Saturday night, in a bar on 2nd Avenue, people will be standing around a table until well in the morning hours, playing Beer Pong.
And fifty years from now…
Email the author of this post at aj@tap-repeatedly.com
Great piece Amanda and cool to know you met up with Joel. Hope you gave him a hug for me! I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t get a word in edge-ways with him, non-stop chatter box he is…
I haven’t downloaded any of the Sportsfriends games yet but Mat C, Lewis and I should be having a games night soon with another as of yet undecided friend so hopefully that’ll be the right time to give some of them a whirl.
I see where you’re coming from with the accessibility of Beer Pong and I can only stand guilty as charged if I say ‘That doesn’t sound as interesting as Hokra’. Enthusiast to enthusiast you say? And think of the beer going everywhere — not good at home! I’m a country bumpkin and only know so many people who also game (most of them are mentioned in the paragraph above) so my options are limited but I’d like to think if I had a larger ring of immediate gaming friends these expo games would find their rightful place. Perhaps they’d go down well with some of my non-gaming friends, who knows?
I think one of the biggest obstacles is the general perception of video gaming in most public places, not necessarily their accessibility. I mean, various coin operated bandits and jukeboxes and arcades and TVs are installed in pubs and bars the world over so I don’t see any reason to not have a bunch of controllers and a system hooked up to one of the big screens. It would be a one-off purchase too for a potentially limitless number of similar games. I think in time, as video games become more accepted in public arenas, screen games could be as pervasive as traditional pub and bar games like pool, snooker, darts, dominoes, cards, table football etc. I miss table football.
And thanks for the Monopoly article link, I’ll have to run that by Hailey who regards Monopoly as the worst game in the world. Of course she probably played it wrong, as did I when I used to play it many moons ago.
Amanda, I disagree very strongly about Monopoly. If you go around telling people how to play Monopoly so that it does not make them miserable, or even introduce them to Ticket To Ride or something, you’re not (just) a snob, you’re actually improving their lives. Because Monopoly sucks, not in the way that Beer Pong sucks, but in the way that it actually makes the people playing it unhappy. It’s the game that teaches you about the grinding misery of slowly seeing your finances slip away, hoping against hope for some lucky break, putting your only potential source of income in hock even though you know it’ll cost you more to get it back and even if you can scrape the money together you’ll be back where you were with none of your debts — it’s not fun, it’s FUCKING CART LIFE.
Our copy was “accidentally” left with a kid who at least can use it to learn to add.
I agree about Hokra etc. though — local multiplayer videogaming* has had nothing to do with my life since my brother and I were playing Combat. If I have someone to play with I’ll usually be doing boardgames, just fun ones (like Scrabble or Boggle Co-op).
(I should mention that, though I have never played with the Free Parking lotto rule, I was playing Monopoly with two people which eliminates auctions and trading. But part of the problem is that gathering more than two people to play would be an effort.)
*I hate dangling asterisks, sorry! That was going to go to something on the question of whether those handheld electronic football games counted as video games, but of course they weren’t really multiplayer, they were alternating soloplay at best. At least the one I had.
If you go around telling people how to play Monopoly so that it does not make them miserable, or even introduce them to Ticket To Ride or something,
Which is exactly what I’d do, in this imaginary scenario. I’d first get them to understand the Monopoly problem and then I would give them Ticket To Ride.
I see where you’re coming from with the accessibility of Beer Pong and I can only stand guilty as charged if I say ‘That doesn’t sound as interesting as Hokra’.
It isn’t. It’s a completely daft game. I want to imagine a world where everyone is playing the great games. But the accessibility hurdles are great.
I mean, I guess if people like Monopoly that’s fine for them. I’m sort of envisioning people who already know that they aren’t having any fun playing Monopoly, so you could just say something like “Do you want to try a boardgame that’s actually fun?” Beer Pong is probably actually fun if you like that sort of thing, so it doesn’t have that issue, and absence of deep strategy is probably a benefit.
The real problem would be explaining why you broke into their house.
There is a small chain of bar/restaurants in Minneapolis and St Paul called The Chatterbox that feature a giant shelf of board games for patrons to play, as well as a few tvs with Nintendo’s hooked up to them surrounded by ratty couches from your grandma’s basement. The vibe of the place if very laid back and caters to smaller groups of friends. In that setting I think a game like Hokra could be very successful, but head over to the busier bars in another part of the cities and you’d most likely find an environment that’s far more conducive for games like beer pong. Beer pong or card games like P&A are far more successful in the loud busy bars because they are dumb games. I can be half in the bag chatting away to someone standing next to me, oblivious to what is happening to the game at that moment and still be involved in it.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the environment that a social game is introduced into will affect its reception. It may be fine to play a few rounds of Catan early in the evening with friends but once the party gets going we are quickly switching to something that requires far less attention and brain power. Never underestimate the entertainment that can come from a few rounds of drunken flippy cup.
Great article Amanda, and I’m jealous that you got to hang out with Harbour Master while I remained trapped in – as he described them – the “swamps of Michigan.” I should’ve just sucked it up and driven.
I have never played Beer Pong, though I am a veteran of many other drinking games (most invented spontaneously). As to Monopoly, the only game I find less pleasant is Clue. Hokra, on the other hand, sounds like a lot of fun if you can get the right environment for it. Bars like the ones Joel N describes are too few and far between, though similar ones they have around here are always missing important things from their games, like instructions. Still, it does seem like a good way to keep your clientele there drinking.
[…] digital sports game that’s being released with J. S. Joust in Sportsfriends. Others question whether games like this will have any real place outside of public events like this one. Since […]
I’d like to add a few comments:
Steerpike: you suck. Go watch Clue the movie (with Tim Fucking Curry!) and tell me you don’t have the slightest inkling to play Clue the board game.
Amanda: I love your article on Monopoly. I started a zillion games with my parents and/or friends when I was younger and never finished a single one without at least implementing some false rule forcing the game to immediately end because it had become so terrible. The lasting legacy of Monopoly in my family is that the board we used was a very old one– from the 1950s or so– passed down from my great grandmother, and one day from the game’s box I unearthed a paper bill of Brazilian currency with a value of 10,000 something-or-others; this was quite amusing to a child of course. In reality it was some kind of defunct currency worth nothing at all, but it made for a good story!
Aside: Balderdash is the greatest game ever invented, provided everyone playing the game is, at that time, operating at the same intelligence level, whether it be PhD or intoxicated, the playing field simply must be even. As long as that condition is met Balderdash is empirically the best game ever. No future events or past discoveries can ever change this. Even if in the future someone invents a version of Balderdash that comes with a food replicator that can create infinite amounts of quality craft beers and cans of original Pringles. Or even if we discover that Balderdash was invented by a cloned robot Stalin and every time someone plays it a kitten goes to Cat Hell where catnip and balls of yarn are always just inches out of paws reach. Or even if for every copy of Balderdash sold ten-million years get added onto Chad Kroeger’s hideous life. Or even if for every Gregorian Calendar year, if at least one game of Balderdash is played anywhere on the planet, then the afterlife will remain a realm of torment where every waking moment (which is every moment) must be spent watching new films directed by Ed Wood. Balderdash is still king. Fact.
“Suck” is Latin for “awesome.” It’s true!
I will admit to a weakness for the Clue movie, but it’s never made me want to play the game. That house is just too damn big.
The huge divide between “casual” board game players (Monopoly, Clue) and “core” board game players (Arkham Horror, Dungeon Lords) is even more significant than the gulf between casual and core video gamers. In the world of tabletop games, those who play Monopoly are often not even aware of the hours of friends and fun that just a little more complexity and patience can get you. I recently received a copy of Lords of Waterdeep and the gang’s been playing quite a bit of that. More complex than Monopoly? Yes. More fun than Monopoly? Hells yes. It’s sad that the complexity of some games drive off players who’d love them… think of all the people who play Bridge. That’s complex. If you can learn that you can learn Arkham Horror.
I feel like I should play Beer Pong, too, just to get the cultural experience.
Anyone play Settlers of Catan? I own it, but don’t ever play. I’ll have to wait for my kids to get a bit older I suppose.
Or how about Pit? Fast paced, fairly chaotic, and loads of fun if memory serves. Haven’t played it in forever.
I guess I’ll have to agree about Monopoly. It’s just not that fun, although someone recently gave us a copy as a gift and he accidentally got the Spanish version, which sort of made it more fun than it deserved to be.
@Synonamess
Yup, I like Settlers! We have a mini version here.
@xtal
Ha, great to see another fan of Balderdash. We played that game a lot in our house! It’s surprisingly fun for even kids as long as adults are patient with them. But I do think that, because it requires some creativity and bluffing, it’s a little bit outside some people’s comfort zones. Which is of course a shame.
Clue haters should try Kill Doctor Lucky – it’s reverse Clue. 🙂
xtal: “Or even if for every copy of Balderdash sold ten-million years get added onto Chad Kroeger’s hideous life”
Is it really that good? I’ve never played it unfortunately.
Is Clue ‘Cluedo’ as it’s called over here? Hang on, let me ask Google… ah! Yes, yes it is. I loved Cluedo! I haven’t played it in years but I remember Lewis and I having to write all the evidence and suspect lists up again (with illustrations!) and photocopying them because we ran out of the originals. I was always Colonel Mustard.
@Steerpike: That’s a fair point. I was asked last night if I want to go to a games night next week at some of Hailey’s friend’s house and I do wonder what games we’ll be playing. Monopoly will be totally off the cards but I’d love to think that it’ll become a regular thing and perhaps one day we’ll be playing some of the more unusual tabletop games out there. Some of them sound really exciting but you need the people for them.
@Amanda: I’ll make a note of Kill Doctor Lucky, thanks!
We now own Balderdash! Taboo and Scattergories are on the way too!
[…] be posting more about that here later, but first let me direct you to Tap-Repeatedly where I posted an editorial about the idea of the Expo Game. This was specifically in regard to Hokra, with a detour into Monopoly and Starcraft and a final […]