How do you make a game your own?

Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is a foundational element for the relationship I have with two of my best friends. When we all lived together or in the same neighborhood we would get together at least once a week and play the game for hours. Years later we’re spread out over the country, but on the few precious times a year we manage to reunite, we make sure someone brings an XBox 360 with access to MVC 3. Here’s the twist: we have almost no idea how to play the game. We know a few tricks here and there like how to trigger the X-Factor powerup that makes your characters stronger for a short time and how to use a few particular moves with a handful of different characters, but if we tried playing against someone who had even a remote idea of what they were doing, we’d get destroyed. But that hasn’t stopped us from having probably hundreds of hours of unbridled fun with this game. That’s because we found a special way to play it that gives us a very different experience from what the game’s designers likely intended, and it just so happens to be a thrilling experience for us every time we pick up the sticks.

The topic I want to talk about this week is playing a game in a way not intended by the designer of the game. This is a phenomenon that occurs in both physical and digital games and can be responsible for entirely new concepts being developed in games.

When a designer is designing a game, they are, in the broadest sense, designing an experience. The Red Dead Redemption design team wanted to create an experience for players where they feel a sense of wonder with a wild West to explore and conquer. The Resident Evil 4 design team wanted to create an experience for players to feel constantly unsafe and uneasy about what new monsters wait for them. The Age of Empires II design team wanted to create an experience where players feel like a medieval king guiding a civilization and commanding an army. The same can be said of most entertainment. The director Alfonso Cuarón designed the movie Gravity to give viewers the experience of feeling isolated and like they had no control over their own physical space (it worked for me at least, I remember feeling unsure about my ability to stand-up after watching that movie in the theater). Prince wrote Purple Rain to give the listener an experience of yearning and heartache.

Do you feel the wonder? I know I do.

And just like games, some audiences will take a piece of media and enjoy it in a very different way than the creator intended, thus having a vastly different experience than the one intended. Perhaps one of the best examples of this is Tommy Wiseau’s cult classic The Room, a film that was meant to be a sincere drama that became an unintentional comedy that is beloved by hoards of fans. It’s almost impossible to say what Tommy Wiseau’s intended experience for his audience was, but most audiences have a surreal experience while watching The Room stemming from how ridiculous the movie is. Rocky Horror Picture Show is a musical romp that has attracted diehard fans that have an entire culture around the movie that includes costumes, special call and response with the movie’s dialog, and throwing things at the screen during showings. Instead of the intended experience of a wild musical for audiences to tap their feet to, Rocky Horror cultists have an experience that involves fan interaction and sing-a-longs.

When it comes to making games one’s own, there are many different ways to accomplish this, and the way one goes about it will affect how drastically the experience changes. Probably the most common way to make a game your own is using custom, or “house” rules. Monopoly provides us with a classic example of this, particularly with the Free Parking space. According to the Monopoly rulebook, if a player lands on the Free Parking space their turn is over and they are to take no further action, but somehow over the years a common house rule has evolved where players that land on the Free Parking space are entitled to money that is placed in the middle of the game board. Where this money comes from varies: some people put a flat $50 from the bank in the middle of the board and when a player collects that $50 from landing on Free Parking that money is replenished. Other players use a rule where any money a player must pay to the bank (through the Luxury Tax space or Community Chest card, for example) is instead placed in the middle of the board, making Free Parking a potentially lucrative spot to land on.

This spot can start an argument before the game even starts

Beer pong is another game where house rules are common: some people have rules that you can interfere with the ball once it’s touched a surface or you can only ask your opponents to rearrange the cups a certain amount of times.

If you are playing a fighting game on the same screen with a group of friends, you probably come up with a rule about who gets to play: most often it’s winner stays on, loser passes the controller, but maybe you introduce a rule that if a player beats every available challenger without losing then they must pass the controller to another player and wait until it’s their turn to be the challenger again.

All of these custom rules can change the experience of the game. By making Free Parking a lucrative spot to land on in Monopoly, players that find themselves short on cash can suddenly become quite wealthy with one roll of the dice. By allowing players to interfere with the ball once it’s touched the table or a cup in beer pong, the defending team must play with an alertness they wouldn’t need to have if they were not allowed to impact the play physically. And by not allowing a dominant player to continue playing after they have beaten all of their challengers in a fighting game, other players get a chance to test and hone their skills. However, the overall game experience is relatively unchanged: Monopoly is still a social game about amassing a real estate empire and bankrupting your friends, beer pong is still a social game and skill challenge of getting a ping pong ball into a cup, and no matter how you decide who plays next, a fighting game is still a skills challenge that tests memory, timing, and input speed.

Another way to make a game one’s own is to bring outside elements into the game to create new mechanics entirely. While there are many ways to do this, one of the most popular ways to add a new mechanic to an existing game is to just add alcohol. Taking existing games and turning them into drinking games is a treasured pastime of game players everywhere. One example I’ll take from my college years is a game we called Drunk Mario Kart. The rules were simple, you open up a beer and start a race in Mario Kart, but you can’t finish the race before you’ve finished your drink, and you cannot drink and move at the same time. This mechanic adds a few new challenges to the game: you need to drink your beer as quickly as you can and you need to choose the best time to stop playing and drink. The experience of Mario Kart isn’t changed that dramatically: it’s still a lighthearted driving game with obstacles and weapons, but by adding the new mechanic of not being able to drink and drive at the same time (a good rule to live by in and out of the game world) you add an extra frenetic layer to the experience.

This was hard enough sober, who's idea was it to add alcohol to the mix?

Alcohol isn’t the only outside element one can bring in to change a game, smart phones have been used to huge success by Jackbox Games and combining them with pretty straightforward games such as Pictionary, Trivia, or Balderdash. This technological integration may seem like a simple quality of life improvement, but it allows Jackbox to provide an experience that is actually significantly different from the boardgames that inspired them. Using Drawful (Jackbox’s version of Pictionary) as an example, having players use their fingers and phones as a draw pad levels the playing field for artists as even the best drawers can struggle to convey some of the prompts that they may receive in the game. There’s also the component of players seeing their doodles on a TV or computer screen which gives a much greater sense of their creation being exhibited rather than having several players stare at a hand-sized piece of scrap paper.

Some games with dedicated fan bases will see the assets and mechanics of their game utilized in a new way by fan made games that sometimes wind up spinning off into entirely new franchises. One example of this is Valve’s Dota 2, the massively popular MOBA game that is the descendent of a game first created as a fan mod of Blizzard’s Warcraft III. This mod was called Defense of the Ancients (or Dota for short) and was created by one Warcraft III player that would later make his map code open source, allowing other players to add to and improve the fan-made game mode, with the “head of development” title being passed from person to person as the mod continued to build in popularity. This fan mod took assets from Warcraft III and used them to make an entirely new genre of games, a genre that wound up becoming so popular that some of the most commercially successful games of today are based upon the original Dota. League of Legends from Riot Games, Heroes of the Storm from Blizzard, and of course, Dota 2 from Valve all owe their success to the dedicated fans that volunteered their free time on the passion project that was Dota. These players didn’t simply create a new experience when they created Dota, they created an entirely new game.

Another fan made game that has taken on a life of its own is the Pokémon battling game Pokémon Showdown. As opposed to the licensed Pokémon games where players must catch, raise, and battle Pokémon, Pokémon Showdown takes out all the leg work of catching and raising Pokémon and simply lets players pick from all existing Pokémon and customize the Pokémon using all the legal moves, abilities, and stats as determined by the governing body of the game, another fan community called Smogon. This game mode attracts players who love the strategic elements of Pokémon battling but want to skip the narrative elements of training your Pokémon as you collect gym badges and challenge the Elite 4. Thousands of Pokémon fans play this fan game and give feedback that helps Smogon keep the game balanced and fun. By utilizing all of the assets the Pokémon world has created over the years but taking out the narrative and streamlining it for easy use with internet browser technology, Pokémon Showdown creates a unique experience different from the licensed Pokémon games that still allows fans to connect deeply with the world of Pokémon.

All the Pokémon flavor with half the calories!

House rules, introducing outside elements, or using game elements to create an entirely new game are great ways to make a game one’s own, but to radically take and mold a game to one’s desired image, players must get radical with how they reshape it. Let’s go back to how my friends and I play Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The first thing we do that makes the game ours is we always pick fully random teams. Each team gets three characters, and each character has 3 variations for their special assist move and 6 different costumes (which might not seem very important, but it is to us and I’ll get to why later), all of which is chosen at random. The next step is that we turn off the match times instead of leaving it at 99 seconds which is the standard way to play. We also choose random stages which most of the time has very little impact on the experience except in a few cases. Then the match starts, and the button mashing begins. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, we have very little idea of how to play this game beyond how to pull off a few moves with a few characters and how to use the X-factor, but other than that the game is largely out of our control. What occurs over the next few minutes more resembles people watching a superhero movie with an outcome that is truly unknown until it’s over, which is a very different experience than players who know what they’re doing have. We don’t know what characters match up well against one another, we don’t know how to time our combos or even perform combos, we barely know how to choose which special moves we do if we manage to do them at all. This game isn’t about strategy or timing for us, it’s a narrative game and the harder we button mash the more exciting the story is. We have special phrases we say when different characters perform different moves (Frank West’s shopping cart special is called the Sandy G in honor of my grandmother who is apparently famous for shopping, we say “Tiny temper!” when a smaller character like Viewtiful Joe or Rocket Raccoon is popping off, or we say “Hollywood Swingin’” when Spider-Man, Taskmaster, or Hsien–Ko use their swinging move), we have affinities for certain character costumes like Chocolate Chun (a very dark skinned version of Chun-Li) or Deadpool’s X-Men variant. If we have three X-Men characters in a match (including characters that appear in the background of the stage such as Professor X in the Danger Room or a Sentinel in Days of Future Past) we play a club remix of the X-Men cartoon theme. Once a winner has been declared we frequently fall into the couch exhausted from the mashing and the excitement and recap what we just saw, crucial moments in the match, incredible counters, and we come to a consensus on what the story of the match was. Sometimes they’re ass kickings, sometimes incredible comebacks, sometimes absolute nailbiters that come down to the last hit, but we find them thrilling regardless of what they are, and that’s why we’ve been playing this game this way for almost a decade now.

Phoenix Wright is one of the most legendary characters in our version of MVC 3

But we aren’t the only gamers who have taken a game and radically changed the way it’s played to create a new experience. The Pokémon community has done tons of stuff with Pokémon to make it their own including fan games, rom hacks, and self-imposed challenges. One of the most popular alternate forms of enjoying a Pokémon game is by playing it utilizing a set of rules known as a Nuzlocke Challenge. You can click the link to get the full bredth of rule changes, but basically these rules make any Pokémon game (which are usually pretty easy to beat) much, much more challenging. The two chief rules are that players need to release Pokémon that faint in battle and they are only allowed to catch the first Pokémon they encounter in any region. This makes players need to battle with much more caution and their teambuilding options become limited based on which Pokémon they catch. Other rules include not being able to use items in battle, not being able to use level boosting items like rare candy or exp. candy, and only being able to use the same number of Pokémon as the gym leader when challenging a gym. These self-imposed rules don’t simply make the game harder, however, it also causes player’s to build a stronger attachment to their Pokémon. Knowing that a fainted Pokémon will no longer be usable for the rest of the game makes players fear for the wellbeing of their Pokémon in a tough battle and make them think twice about sacrificing a Pokémon in battle. In fact, one of the other commonly used rules in a Nuzlocke Challenge is that players must give all of their Pokémon custom names in order to form a deeper sense of attachment. I’d argue that the Nuzlocke Challenge changes the Pokémon experience to more closely resemble the core fantasy of the Pokémon games, one where every battle feels like life or death and your bond with your Pokémon is paramount.

By creating an alternative way to play a game players don’t only create a different way to enjoy the game, they create a deeper emotional relationship with the game and other people who play it the same way they do. Games are already something that brings people together, but when you can find a group of people who enjoy a game in the exact, specific way you do, that’s when you can build a truly special community around the game.

Do you have any games that you play in an alternative way? How has that affected your attachment to the game?