 Many of us, especially here at MIT, have felt the pressure to be perfect to always be at 100% to push yourself into giving your best effort again and again, even when things like this happen. We may wait for conditions to be just right, to have the best environment for the best work. And of course, this can manifest as many different things. One of them can be this drive to collect things, to preserve things, to save an expensive journal for the perfect project and then end up never using it for its purpose. We can end up assigning, perhaps, undue weight and meaning to objects, making them precious and to your beard rather than use them for what they are. Under such weight, it is no surprise that people find destroying things so cathartic and satisfying. There's a pleasure in setting yourself free psychologically while also being released physically. We burn homework at the end of the year. We smash dishes that were gifted by a toxic relative. We crush cars that seem to break down rather than victively. Humans have been using similar rituals for cleansing and transition for ages. Their physical, mental, and spiritual power have stood the test of time. Games have evolved alongside ritual and other innately human practices like storytelling. Games create this altered state of mind, a game space where you follow arbitrary rules and overcome self-imposed challenges. Often, you build this special little world with your fellow players by agreeing on boundaries and demonstrating your understanding of the world's conventions. Violating these social conventions can often be more severe than breaking a game rule. One of the more recent offerings to the game space are legacy games, which emphasize the heavyweight associated with permanent impactful decisions. Because the style of game is relatively new, the definition is still muddy, but there is a common agreement that they have multiple sessions. They demand players make impactful decisions that forever alter the game and players are unable to play the same game a second time. And then I'll get more into the specific definition that I'm using for my research a little bit later on. So for this presentation, I'm gonna hit a few key points from my research. I'll start by drawing some more explicit links between rituals and games and how rituals can inspire game design. Next, I'll move on to why explaining to why examining legacy games is becoming increasingly relevant and especially important for game design and media studies as a whole. Then I'll highlight what existing legacy games have contributed to innovation in game design as well as what is still missing. Next, I'll explore how legacy games can be brought to another level and how they can help us reframe what games and playing them looks like. Then I'll get into my playdesting and what I learned about the power of integrating ritual elements in a game and spoiler, there's fire and destruction. Finally, I'll get into the impact of the research and thoughts about the future of the legacy game genre. So first connections between rituals and games. There's significant overlap between rituals and games. Games are performed as part of rituals like the Olympic games and there are ritualistic elements to games. The rock, paper, scissors chant and its action is a very familiar ritual of faith for a lot of us. Still, it is possible to create a dichotomy by associating games with the binaries of victory and defeat and ritual with equality and wholeness. I find it more helpful for research and game design to put them on the same spectrum. It would follow that games that don't divide players into winners and losers would lean closer to rituals on this game's ritual spectrum. So why not lean into that when designing? Draw inspiration from these parallel practices. So next, why I'm looking at legacy games and why now? War games have always evolved to follow the era's and the money reflecting our values and views of leisure time. As gamers interest in tabletop role-playing games like D&D and Warhammer grew and Euro games like Settlers of Catan followed suit, the investment in game components did as well. Players could have boxes of lovingly painted, minis, detailed maps and get more bang for their buck from the same game. Especially as Kickstarter came on scene, games got bigger boxes, expensive components and demand more shelf space. For many, a board gamer is synonymous with board game collector. And for avid collectors, there can be anxiety around preserving their expensive investment. They may buy two copies, one to leave unopened and one to play with gentle, careful, clean hands. But as people are forced to move, to find work or downsize the safe money, it becomes clear that 450 pound boxes of board games is just not sustainable. Instead, when we look to the future of board games we are turned to other kinds of experimental games with fewer mechanics and components kind of like escape rooms, which are growing in popularity. Exploring legacy games is so relevant now because they reflect our current need for collaborative experiences that give us permission to play around and break things. There's something so freeing about not having to be careful to play like you did as a kid without any worry about making a mess. Next, looking at the innovations and limitations of legacy games that led to the recent surge in popularity, these vanguard legacy games have taught us a lot about striving to upset the norms of board gaming in pursuit of the ever better game. Still, they have set unnecessary limitations that have narrowed the design space and stifled the rule breaking attitude they had when first imagining what legacy games could be. First, the key contributions, legacy games started with this grand vision of blurring the line between the real world and the game world. No reset, no save, only your decisions permanently changing the game as you physically change it too. Playing in this liminal space allows designers to reorient a gameplay experience around narrative and reflection rather than winning and losing. More attention can also be paid to creating and destroying the game artifacts and we can dig into what each component truly contributes to the experience. Do we need these expensive components? How many do we need? Things like that. Early legacy games helped bring collaborative world building to the forefront and expose players to the freedom of creating a world that embraces them. And finally, legacy games grow to reflect their players recalling the nostalgia of opening an old beat up game box and being flooded with those memories. Even with all these innovations many legacy game designers hold themselves back. This can be for financial reasons. They take a long time to play test. They can require lots of narrative content and the components can be, as I mentioned, very expensive. If a customer is going to dish out 60, 70, 80, $100 for a game the thought is that they're gonna want to replay it as much as possible. As a result of this thinking many legacy games especially those from big name board game companies have shied away from true destruction. They either design it away altogether with removable stickers and instructing players to simply set aside any cards removed from the game or they include it but only incidentally. Opening sealed envelopes or boxes can feel like destruction but it's not an essential fully integrated part of the game. I could just as easily flip to the needed page on a guide instead of getting new information from the envelope. These types of legacy games simply rearrange their components, not destroy them. If we want to keep the innovative spirit that created legacy games we can't be satisfied with dancing around destruction and offering destruction light to players. We should reorient design the thought around what makes legacy games special in the first place. Choices with meaningful permanent changes to the game and its components. In my definition of legacy game these changes are the keystone of the entire genre. So how can we make destruction a vital fully integrated part of a legacy game? Well, first we should expand our idea of what games and playing them looks like. There's a sense that legacy games are destroying something and of course I use that terminology as well but I use it in the context of simultaneously creating something. The process of transforming elements of the game is the game. An act of deletion is still part of the overall story. We see this theme a lot in performance and conceptual art, media that has always inspired us to examine our idea of what art looks like. And in process art, the act of destroying a blank canvas with paint is more important than the finished piece, process over product. This idea of embracing destruction as an experience is an important but underutilized tool for legacy game designers. And while we're reexamining our understanding of destruction, we can reexamine what is meant by legacy. As I mentioned earlier, legacy games can be understood as the intersection of game ritual and storytelling. Well, legacy more broadly can be understood as the interplay of the past, present and future. Wisdom of the past is dynamic, always evolving to suit the needs of the current generation, always reinforcing a connection to what came before and how it guides us in the present to shape our future. Legacy games could do the same. They already blur the space between the game world and the real world. So why not time as well? How can we explore this concept of legacy within a legacy game? So onto my favorite part, game development and play testing. And I have a couple of materials that I do want to pass out. Just to give an idea of what I've been doing. You can kind of take them and pass them back. So I went into the design with a few goals based on my prior research, primarily examining both the physical action of creating and destroying, as well as the experiential aspects. Compared to previous legacy games, I wanted to lean into the destruction while also embracing board games shift to experiences. Secondary goals I kept in mind either because the literature suggested them like ritual and performance and discussion and reflection, or because I was personally curious about them like enduring and ephemeral artifacts and collaborative world building. And something I personally have not seen a lot in games, death not as a punishment, but as part of the process of moving forward. So a basic overview of the game so far after about a dozen or so play tests, first players pick a band of families that they will represent. Each one has unique abilities that can use to contribute to the community. Next, they create a handful of band members that represent the current leader and whoever will succeed them. Then players lay out their face down and countercards for the session, pick a unique ink color and perform a fingerprinting ritual. They take turns trying to touch as many of the cards as possible one hand at a time. It then stack the cards and start their journey by dripping water and paint on the starting spot and swirling it around to make a path. Their next location is anywhere on that path. Each new location flips an encounter card which presents a community and leader challenge. Everyone's abilities contribute to the community score, but only the leaders with their fingerprints on the back of that card contribute to the leader score. So we have an emphasis on community as well as your individual contribution. If they succeed in both challenges, they fill out the card to name and describe the place, creature or event that they encountered. If leaders fail a challenge, sacrifice themselves or die for any reason, the card is immediately burned on the pyre. After this funeral rite, that leader's band will have access to the abilities gained over their lifetime, passing the wisdom onto the next generation. Critically, there's no way to level up your abilities without a leader first earning them and then dying in order to guide the band from the beyond. The community is only as strong as its collective ancestral wisdom. At the end of each session, players perform a tattooing ritual by etching a design onto their scratch offs to the legs. Usually the symbols only had meaning for the tattooer, but some players really enjoyed fully drawing out the funniest moments on the back of their card. They also contribute to the community chronicle, which is an at a glance summary of what they did in that session that they can look back on as players in days or years. I had a really great time with all of my players and I think their quotes are a very good illustration of whether I'm hitting my design goals so far. My first primary goal, having a product-focused aspect that is both enduring and ephemeral. Players really loved having permission to be playful, looking back on the mess that they'd made, keeping some components and burning others. There was especially a concern about whether they could actually destroy things, which I constantly had to reinforce that, yes, this is the point of the game, please destroy things. My second primary goal, a process-focused experience. A big chunk of the interviews players devoted to describing the feel of the game and the emotions it provoked. They talked about freedom from perfection, permission to perform badly, and questioning what we think of as the right way to play a game. For many of the players that weren't already avid gamers, they admitted letting themselves just play was stressful in a way, but as the game went on, they were able to let go of some of that anxiety. Then my secondary goals, ritual elements. Players absolutely loved the fingerprinting ritual and especially the funeral prior. Discussion and reflection. Reviews were mixed. Some really liked having deep conversations with each other, while others opted to kind of give a joke answer and keep the game moving. Death is not a punishment. One thing that kept happening was players just falling over themselves to die and get their ability points, which was always a hilarious conversation to listen to. And collaborative worldbuilding. Like the discussion prompts reviews varied by group. Some liked taking the time to create a rich world, while others wanted to quickly get back to the action of challenges, burning things, and swirling paint around, which I can't say I blame them, but pacing is definitely a big part of what I'm gonna address in the next iteration. Finally, impact and looking to the future. I find that the key impact of this work falls into three categories. Reframing, redefining, and retracing. I like alliteration. So first, reframing. This calls attention to where the future of board games is headed, away from expensive, clunky, revered, Euro-style games and towards games that center on the process of playing, emphasizing the experience. For many, when they hear board gamer, they hear board game collector, and they imagine competition, victory points, long hours of intense strategy, and intricate rules. Legacy games instead ask us to imagine games with fire, with painting, with community worldbuilding, with lasting artifacts that reflect every hand that touched it. We can think more deeply about the purpose of games, what we want from them, and what they give to us. Next, redefining. Like any emerging term, the legacy game definition is nebulous and gets tweaked as more games enter the space. And I want the term to continue evolving so it can stand independently as its own genre, not settle into a rut as a sequel to or reskin of another game. When we redefine legacy to be the ethos the game is built around, designers are invited to explore the liminal space created by blurring the boundary between the real world and the game world. My hope is that this more philosophical definition of legacy keeps the design space open-minded and inspires more meaningful game experiences. Finally, retracing. Even when looking to the future, when we're focused on the cutting edge, it's important to draw inspiration from our history. There's a reason certain practices have withstood the test of time, and drawing from that wisdom can make our games more impactful. A legacy is active. It's how past wisdom is adapted to help us in the present, and legacy games ask us to look back on our history, find the fun in our practices, and reflect on what builds connection in a shared world. Looking to an idealistic future for legacy games and games as a whole, I'd like to really further explore the psychological, spiritual, and transformative power of games. Anyone who has played a profoundly moving game like this War of Mine knows how deeply a game can affect you. How can we harness this medium's grip on us to improve ourselves and our communities? There's this emerging idea of game designers playing a contemporary soul-guiding role, more deeply intertwining games with ritual practices and storytelling's role in preserving culture. Games can allow us to test out different identities, play with our roles in society, imagine fantastical and more equitable worlds, and bring to the forefront parts of ourselves we might not otherwise thoroughly examine. This type of very purposeful game design is critical to me, and it gives me hope for the future of games, and especially the people who play them. And thanks again for sitting with me. I hope I gave you good reasons to think a little differently about board games, legacy games especially, and their crossover with other media, and I can take some questions. So Rick's question was about how do, like what sort of distribution would this game have? Who's the audience, and how do they get started playing? Basically, so this type of game, of course there are some mainstream legacy games like pandemic legacy that people play, but as I said, it's kind of this legacy light sort of thing. Whereas I think a game like this that's a little bit more experimental, a little bit certainly more niche, I think would first have to go through a lot of like indie game sort of players who are already, they have an expectation of this is gonna be weird, we're gonna embrace the weirdness and we're gonna see how it goes. Me personally, I wouldn't be necessarily looking to design the game for a larger distribution. I think players of this kind of game will self-select in a way in that I'm not trying to appeal to them more, they know what they're looking for, and then they can find all of those things in this type of game. I hope that addresses your question. Right, so just kind of, is there a group that exists and then what sort of space is it trying to fill? So yeah, definitely there are the space that is currently being filled, a lot of strategic players who like these really long, intense sort of Euro style games, they kind of drift towards like pandemic legacy, risk legacy, things like that. But I do think that there is people who have this idea of like D&D and other kind of campaign style games and not really seeing that as much in four games themselves. So these people who, they want their decisions to matter, they want things to persist, they want the world to change, they want to see if I come back to this town, there's that barkeep who was really nice to us and she has a kid now and now we've built this world together and it's actually evolving with us. And I think that capturing that idea into a board game where you're blending the, I am changing the game world, while also I am physically changing these components, I think is where this crossover happens. And those people who are looking or between D&D and like pandemic legacy, this is where they would find a game that hopefully they would enjoy. Yeah. So we have a question online from Michael Jacobson. He says, great talk. Can you reflect a bit on the tension between levity and gravitas in relation to the death is not a punishment design idea? Yeah. So kind of like making sure I'm understanding this question, kind of the lightness of our regards to death as opposed to like the heaviness of death. I think that in this particular game, I am trying to keep a reflective sort of attitude but then Claire's can kind of take that in as light or as heavy of a direction as they want. So I did have players who they've built up this character. They're really attached to this character. They end up having to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. And everybody pauses. Everybody just kind of stands in silence for a moment. They kind of gather everybody around their little candle and they have someone will say a few words and that's the more intense side of some of the players that I tested with. Whereas I had some who was, oh, I died. How did I die? I don't know. A bee stung us and now I'm dead. And here's my knowledge about not being stung by a bee. So they can kind of choose a little bit more whether they want to take death in this very powerful, deep sort of reflective way or if they want to take it as more, oh, it's interesting that most games, when you fail, you die. Whereas this is I need to fail and or die in order to progress. So as Miquette says, right, the falling over each other. Yes, absolutely. Yes, falling over each other to die. Always an enjoyable part of the play test. And I was thinking about that by police, you know, government. Yes, definitely. Definitely I understand what you're saying about this idea of, you know, if people are playing a game, they're not used to destroying games. They kind of look to the designer because I happen to be there for reassurance. And yes, please destroy this. This is the point of the game. And then what happens when I'm not there, when I step away and I give this out to people, only the instructions that are given them in the box and whatnot. So definitely that is going to be something that I'm going to have to either, what I would like to do is I would like to make sort of a blog around it where I kind of have an introductory video and like show a lot of the action of people burning stuff and having these really intense conversations and making their map especially. People were less averse to making the map because I already had them with like watercolor paper and everything. So they kind of had this opening of this is art, this is allowed, it's on watercolor paper. Whereas when I got to burning things and like, oh, can I mark up my character sheet? Can I, you know, write notes on it? It was a little bit more unclear because there wasn't as easy of an in into the art sort of world. So I definitely have to have either of these videos that really show this is the fun of the game, this is the process of the game. You're not destroying the game, you are playing the game that happens to also be destroying things that's an important part of the game. So I can either do that, like I said with the videos or if I can really get my words together and write something awesome for the, you know, the booklet inside the box, there might be possible but I'm definitely more leaning towards this demonstration of the experience to close that gap. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about how the length of the game intersects with, like, if you see there being issues where either the positions that you made or if you didn't have a few designs in which case if it's a long game, you feel like your current actions were not very impactful or you are able to meet the legacy aspects. Why do you think about that? Yeah, definitely. That's a great question. Kind of this idea of thinking about the length of the game. When do you show players the effects of their choices? How do you make them understand that each decision has an impact, both in that moment and, you know, 10 sessions later when they realize, oh, because we did this, this is also happening. Or even in that case, we did this, we had no idea that this was an important decision and now we're stuck and can't finish this game. I had a lot of people who mentioned pandemic legacy two where this would happen a lot, where they would make an early decision about like the military route and then realize many sessions later, we can't really win the game at all because we made this decision at the beginning. And of course it's very frustrating and something I want to avoid. And in that sort of sense, the looking at the length of it, I've kind of broken it down into the complete 10 cards per season and then, you know, they walk away and go play again for another season. So you kind of have this progression of years and seasons. But also at this point, this current design, I don't have anything that would surprise, I guess would be the word of players where I'm not gonna pull a twist or I'm not gonna, you know, give them a sudden, you know, like, LOL, you picked the terrible choice and now you're all doomed. Like, I don't want to do that. I want them to feel like the decision they made. For example, there's a card that's basically two choices. Do you want to get one increase to your coinability now or do you want to get two increases to your coinability in two sessions? So kind of giving them a choice of, yes, we could have this immediate sort of benefit and we need to tackle this one card just right now. So that's the choice we're gonna make. And then maybe in a couple of sessions, they're gonna realize, oh, actually it would have been nice to have that two coins but that's not gonna stop them either. They just, okay, we need two coins. Let's go back to a Swords card. Let's go back to a Cups card. And when we're strong enough again, let's go do that coin. So at least right now, the effect of what you've chosen should be clear both in that moment as well as later on. And hopefully nothing that stops the game plays. That's, of course, what I want to avoid above all else. Yeah, absolutely. Talking a little bit about this relationship between losing and legacy games and that's definitely a space where I think there is an issue of, there are these legacy games that exist that kind of went this direction of, we're still gonna divide you into winners and losers. It's not me against you, but it's you against the game. The game can be the winner, you're the loser. You can be the winner, the game's loser. And that's a very fun type of game. A lot of people enjoy that. And then I'm kind of looking at how do I make it so that there aren't these winners and losers? You're all kind of building this game together. You're fleshing it out together. And you're not, you feel, you don't feel a loss necessarily. You feel maybe some disappointment of, oh man, I wish we had thought that, but hey, we're moving forward. We've got the guidance of our ancestors and we're gonna keep moving forward. And then same with like this winning idea too. Is this not necessarily a point where you feel like we won? You feel we've made progress. I can see this progress, both on the map of all the colors of this ever-growing larger deck of cards that we've filled out, in the fact that we have higher abilities and now we can tackle these higher level cards. So I'm, but this design kind of trying to move away from that binary of a winner and a loser and kind of reframe what that looks like for the LAC games. Hope that helps.