FLEXIBLE RULES: A Player Oriented Board Game Development Framework

Abstract

When comparing digital board games with their traditional counterparts, it becomes clear that certain features such as graphics, mundane task automation or saving and restoring the state of the game have been greatly improved.Nonetheless, the transition to a digital environment leads to a loss of the flexibility that makes traditional board games inherently popular. While modifying aspects of the game is straight forward in traditional board games, achieving such a level of customization in the digital domain requires deep knowledge of and access to the game source code. In this paper we focus on board games and by means of an in-depth online survey we validate our previous observation, namely that enhancements should be made to digital board games by incorporating gaming facets found in the physical environment,e.g. support for flexibility by means of house rules. To this end,we introduce a conceptual model for the design of digital board games, which is supported by a set of visual programming tools to enable game development according to the principles set out by our proposed model. The set of the tools along with the underlying intuitive model comprise the FLEXIBLERULES framework, which enables and facilitates flexible and extensible game design and development.