The Great Word Caper

A Gladwellian Approach to a Dumb Little Word Game

Authors Note: This blog post was imported from substack

4:15 AM: “I’m changing my guess of Borgchops’s word from WINGS to BITCH.”

GM: Any reason why?

Wasteland: “Well he changed my word, didn’t he?”

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of Malcolm Gladwell. In his books The Tipping Point (2000), Revenge of the Tipping Point (2024), and Talking to Strangers (2019), his ability to synthesize dozens of seemingly unrelated stories into a beautiful narrative is fascinating. The format of his books usually has a central claim or thesis, and then he supports it with what he calls puzzles. After establishing them, he holds your hand and walks you through all the pieces and the fascinations within them.

As a result, I've become really invested in this presentation style. So, in spirit, let me present you with a puzzle of my own and the story of a homebrewed game to accompany it.

Towards the end of 2023, I got very into game design. This wasn’t creating video games or putting together assets and coding, but fundamentally I was interested in what makes a good trust-based strategy game. At the time I consumed tons of media about game design just to see what made good stories. (I was absolutely obsessed with the 2013 Korean show The Genius, which is getting a US and UK version this or next year!) I started to understand the tropes like how the plot twist always hinged on a betrayal, the tension created from hidden information, and how suspicion and distrust were bred. 

This fascination lead me down rabbit holes that could only be resolved by creating a game, and subsequently a story, myself. The question I wanted to solve and the puzzle I'd like to propose to you, the reader, is this:

How do the rules of a game influence the behavior of the players?

It's easiest to analyze these sorts of questions through simple games because it is easier to trace certain behaviors to specific rules. It's the difference between figuring out why someone did something in Go Fish! compared to Settlers of Catan.

So when designing my first game, I kept it relatively easy to understand. If you’ve ever had to keep a secret from someone you've pretty much played it already.

The Great Word Caper

Who ever said anything about sticking to your word?

You are a thief who will receive a 5-letter word that you must keep secret.
You must share your secret word with at least one other person and up to three.
Failure to do so will result in a loss of three points.

You will also receive the name of a person, known as the victim, whose word you must steal.

• For every person who knows your word, barring your thief, you will receive one point. (max of three)

• Should you steal your victim’s word, you will gain two points.

• Should your word be stolen by your thief, you will lose two points.

To submit or steal a word, inform the GM of the name of the person and their word.
You will only get confirmation that your submission has been received

The player with the highest score wins (There can be multiple winners)

It is important to note that none of the above decisions are mutually exclusive. You can choose to not tell a soul your word, yet still have it stolen. This is because "Told Someone" column only means one player, other than the thief, reported your word correctly to the GM. The totals on the far right are there to indicate the maximum and the minimum score any player could receive. This was completely unintended but led to a fascinating dynamic which will be elaborated on later.

The second intention I had while designing this game was to add an "information war" dynamic. Rule 3a explains that "You will only get confirmation that your submission has been received." This means that players are unable to know if their submission about a player's word was correct and subsequently whether that player actually received any points.

The result of which is two-fold:

1) It creates a sense of distrust among the players as misinformation is easily spread sincethere is no way to prove a word belongs to someone.

2) It forces players to keep track of their own score and optionally other players' score.

The effect of rule 3a has made any and all knowledge extremely valuable. The more you can collect about who told who what words, who reported what, and what each player thinks their score is, the more accurate your own read on the situation will be. This rule incentivizes behaving strategically when collecting and divvying out information, causing what is essentially a war on information, the original goal.

The first piece of the puzzle is that every rule in a game is designed to incentivize some specific behaviors from players. In the case of The Great Word Caper, the rules I created as the designer were meant to provoke both action and distrust.

I initially posed this game to a group of friends going on vacation sometime around the Summer of 2023. During this time I gave them the rules, a victim, a secret five-letter word, and a start and end date of one week. Within this short time frame, it was shocking to see just how fast the game evolved, and rather than give you the play-by-play I’d like to present you with the outcome:

Now there’s a ton to unpack here that highlights the second part of the puzzle: the unintended incentives caused by the rules.

One of the most surprising discoveries during playtesting was that players found a major loophole: reporting a player’s word to the GM offered no direct benefit. This realization shifted the game’s dynamics entirely.

Players, when they realized this, started submitting random words to the GM for people who they had already scored for. Such as the opening of this post, where a player named Wasteland at 4:13 AM changed their submission of Borgchop's word from WINGS to BITCH to get back at a supposed purposeful mis-submission.

This caused players to lose points, since people who had their words submitted correctly now had incorrect words, which reduced the player's overall People Told score. As word spread of the ability to change submissions, it became a retaliatory measure as players' scores started to go down. The dynamic became even more complex as players could never truly verify their actual score as is the case of the opening to this post. According to the outcome table, Borgchop never even betrayed Wasteland by changing his word! Wasteland was just misled into believing he did.

Eventually, the game hit a point where everyone's word was known to each other. As one of the players described, there was a point where the game became “public” and entered what felt like a new phase. This, in tandem with the discovery of changing your submission, led to a race to the bottom. Examining the outcome table, we can see that almost every player got their word stolen. This primarily happened toward the end of the game as players were scrambling to figure out point totals and verifying information with each other.

Reflecting over what caused these behaviors to occur led me to the second piece of the puzzle: Despite whatever the game designer's rules intend, players will form their own underlying interpretations of them that will influence unintended behaviors. Through play testing, I found that a stipulation was necessary that you could only submit a word once, and that I need to rethink the payout table to reward reporting correct words.

Returning to the original puzzle of "How do the rules of a game influence the behavior of the players?" The answer is simple: The rules of a game inherently influence player behavior through two distinct types of incentives: those intended by the game creator to shape the game, and those unintended, emerging organically from the players' interpretation and manipulation of the rules.

To summarize and give one more perspective, I'd like to take the definition of "puzzle" more literally. The rules of this game, or any game, can be treated as a riddle; a puzzle to be solved.

The riddle itself are rules that are given to the players verbatim, the intended incentives created by the game designer. The solution is the analysis or the underlying interpretations the player has of the rules. The secret advantage that lies within a true understanding and emergent play that comes from what isn't said, the ambiguity. If players had done enough analysis at the start, approaching the rules as a riddle to be solved rather than instructions to follow, they could have gained an incredible advantage right away.

It's this framework of intended and unintended incentives that allow us to have more fun in both playing games with each other, and designing games for other people.