The Game Design of Russian Roulette
I bought the game Buckshot Roulette yesterday. It had an appealing, unnerving visual style and only costed as much as a can of soda, so I decided to pick it up. The game itself is just a virtual match of Russian Roulette with some minor modifications - instead of a revolver, you're using a shotgun, and you're allowed to point the gun at your opponent at the cost of having "buffed" the option of aiming the gun at yourself. There's items and a background narrative about god being dead (I think?), but fundamentally it's just Russian Roulette. I got about 30 minutes of play out of it and I don't think I'll be coming back to it much, but I do appreciate the time I spent playing it and would recommend it to others.
While playing the game it very quickly downed on me how this game's "fundamental rules", divorced from any real-world wins or losses (stacks of money and a quick trip to the afterlife) could have easily been replaced by competitive roll the dice; every time you make the choice of pulling the trigger, you're just playing a numbers game: I have 5 shells in the chamber, 3 of them loaded, so it's probably best to try to aim the gun at my opponent and hope it fires. You can't actually control the result, you just try to take the best bets you can. "Why am I having so much fun and excitement with this," I wondered, "but just rolling a D6 for 15 minutes sounds like a chore?"
I'm a very mechanics-centered person, so I wondered if it was merely something in the rules. Was it just the fact that I was gambling, not to mention gambling with my life, and the inherent risk/reward created this excitement? That certainly must be part, and the game manages to create the same sort of scare by making the brightest, loudest, and most jarring frame the game can make be the frame where the gun is shot, accompanied by a quick freeze-frame to help your brain process what occurred. Rather than actual loss of body parts the assault is on your senses; a jumpscare. But I don't think it was just that - again, if I played competitive roll the dice and whenever I got a 1 or a 2 I'd get a jumpscare I'd feel like it was a really cheap and boring game, mechanics-centered games can be reduced to their essentials and still be somewhat fun. The rest of the rules all just assist the main thrill of the gun's firing, so it's probably not in the added mechanics.
The mind turned to the asthetics, and the more I think about it, the more I feel like the game's main appeal comes from the social status and respect given to the game of Russian Roulette. Sure, in real life you're literally playing with your life, but if all participants involved didn't revere the game in some sense there'd be pretty much nothing1 stopping them from just picking up the gun and firing at everyone else until a bullet comes out. The players are only forced into the risk of death once they enter the game's "Magic Circle"; the mindset where everyone agrees to respect the game's rules and boundaries, moving away from "real life" to an abstract world of fantasy governed by the game. If a mob boss executed people based on what card they pulled out of a tarot deck people would think he's a lunatic rather than a cutthroat leader, despite both actions being identical from a mechanical perspective.
Evidently the thematic appeal of Buckshot Roulette is something that's very important to the developer - you open each play by waking up in a messy bathroom and passing someone in a nightclub, your lives are represented by hits of a defibrillator, you break glass and saw off the tip of the gun to improve your game. The rugged, grimy presentation is key to what makes Buckshot Roulette work, and that's inherently tied to its choice of depicting a game of Russian Roulette - it's a game we view as dark, grimy, edgy, and more "real" than some "silly" games like candyland or tetris. The reason why the jumpscare here feels earnt and not like a cop-out is because the player has, at some level, a deep respect to the game where you spin a chamber and hope your brainmatter remains inside its skull.
It reminds me of a game design workshop I did recently where we played a similarly luck-filled game: At the start each game we pulled eight cards out of a deck, each card showing a number from 1 to 8. We had a set number of dice ranging from D4s to D20s, and our goal was to assign dies to cards so that the most cards would get a die that rolled its value or higher. When described like this, the game sounds like an absolute chore, but it became a very interesting game in the workshop when it was presented within a narrative: you are a small-town doctor with a limited supply of medicine, and each die was some form of treatment. In addition, the final card represented your wife, and you wanted to save your wife as hard as you could. Suddenly the game had tension, unease, we tried to save D20s to the end of the game even when the rules didn't imply the final card had any more value than any of the rest. In fact when we had to modify the game, the mechanical rule changes added much less to the emotional response of the game than the purely thematic changes did.
It's probably a somewhat obvious statement to say that "the presentation of the game affects how it feels," but it's really eye-opening to see how much it matters to the game's experience. When we discuss games and the experience of playing them it's common to focus on what we consider to be "the true game" - its rules, the mechanics, our choices as a player - and imply that the presentation or mechanics are less important. It's flavor text, not actually relevant. However, it's always important to remember that your complex rules and mind-games are only in service of creating an enjoyable experience for the player, and it's very hard to have a memorable experience when the game itself doesn't look like it wants you to give it a shred of respect.
Discounting any enforcers that may be present.↩