Aspiring Game Devs to 'Make Monopoly Fun'

GameCareerGuide.com, Gamasutra’s sister site for aspiring game developers runs a weekly Game Design Challenge; this week, readers have just a few days to invent three new rules to make the board game Monopoly more fun. The challenge, which appears each Wednesday on the site, this week points out the three most commonly noted flaws of Monopoly: the game has a very large amount of luck involved; games go on for a very long time; and once a player has lost the game, she or he has nothing to do while others play. For more details on this particular challenge, and how to submit an entry, see the complete GCG.com article on the challenge. Professional game developers are welcome to compete in the friendly game, or offer advice to inexperienced game makers via the community forum. And late last week, the site published the three best entries from a previous design challenge about writing RPG mini quests. In the quest-writing challenge, the readers were given a loose setup: a fantasy role-playing game with all the likely creatures, a man with a cane, and a fetch quest in which the player had to collect 20 dwarf beards. It was left up to the respondents to make sense of all those pieces of information and elegantly, but concisely, write them into a brief story quest. Casey Dockendorf, and animator/artist at Global Gaming Group, submitted one of the winning ideas, in which the player helps the old man without becoming too involved in his backstory so that there’s no emotional attachment when the old man meets an untimely (and harebrained) demise. In another of the recognized submissions, The Hair Club for Dwarves, Christopher H. Abeel writes a scene that could have been used in The Princess Bride. He uses two themes – redundancy and a spoof on the “Hair Club for Men” – and weaves them together in a creative and amusing way.