I’ve been thinking a lot about player incentives in Plutocracy lately. At Metatopia I got similar feedback to what I have been getting from my local play tests. The core of the game, players not controlling a single empire, grabs people’s attention. This part of the description was the reason some people chose to try it out. The mechanisms work well, at this point they are pretty streamlined. But players continue not to care about any of their actions. It becomes a repetitive slog of “what is the most beneficial move on this turn?”
I’ve written about player incentives a few times before and specifically in Plutocracy where it has always been a problem. I believe this is the secret to getting Plutocracy to the next level.
Unique hook that goes against traditional game systems + Actually making it work when people play = Success. The question is, how can I get people to care?
A question I have heard asked about many games is “who are you?” Who are the players in the game? This is an integral part of building immersion and key to having players care about their actions. If they have an avatar in the game that could succeed or fail, they are more likely to care about the consequences of their actions than if they are just a decision making entity removed from the narrative.
In Plutocracy I’ve always known who the players are. They are powerful influencers working from the shadows to sway the fate of empires to their own benefit. It sounded great in my head, but when people sit down to play, they are just a decision making entity removed from the narrative. They have no representation of themselves in the game, and as a result don’t have an emotional connection to the events. The strongest attachment I saw was a player that liked blue, so they worked to improve the blue empire. This was not ideal.
So my next step is to put the players in the game. They will lose their current godlike powers of manipulating the galaxy. Instead, they will have much more restricted influence over a smaller area of the game based on the location of their character. They will need to make more personal decisions for their character in order to influence the galaxy.
Hopefully this can start to make the connection with players that the game is missing.
When it comes to player incentives, it seems that winning the game is too abstract of a concept to build engagement. The way you win the game needs to be thematically linked to who the players are and what they want as characters. So, define who your players are then define what those characters want. Only then will you know what incentives you need to use.