Bar Codes — The Name of the Game

I admit it, when I chose the name “Bar Codes” to build a design challenge around I had at least some idea about what I wanted to do. I mean, the name was pretty clearly a double-entedre of barcodes, like UPC codes, and something to do with codes in a bar.  The idea just seemed ready to go as is.

But, that was before I started to ideate in other directions.

One of the main reasons I wanted to do this design challenge was to see how creative I could be within a scope I defined for myself. 

I knew I wanted to create a game that would be easy to play in a bar, and that set some specific limitations. Limitations, though, only set the boundaries for my creativity, it’s like finding the edges of the playing field. Knowing that means I can get comfortable with testing the limits of what’s inside those boundaries.

This is the first time I’ve done a design challenge like this for myself, so I had to define some sort of system I was going to use. Since the thing I like the most about the name ‘Bar Codes’ was the fact that it could be an unexpected double meaning, I decided to start there, and explore what else the name could mean.

The Bar Codes Game Constraints

Before I go into the ideation, let’s set the size and shape of the field I decided I was playing on.  This game had to:

• Have a small footprint, so pocket-sized with minimal components.

• Be tactile over visual, to work in low light and possible loud sound.

• Be a quick multiplayer game, built for casual, interrupted play.

• Be made of wet-resistant or damage-tolerant materials.

The ideal players would be a group from 3 to 8 players, and the main settings I aimed at would be bars, restaurants, backyard gatherings, and similar places where alcohol could be consumed and people could be reasonably expected to get a little loud and have fun.

That’s it! That left a huge range of possibilities, but I know I also put another restriction on myself that I didn’t really think about until after I’d gone through ideation — cost.

This one was a bit insidious because I never really tried to explore ideas that would require a large expense, like in technology or large-scale data use, or in development of devices custom made for this game. Going in that direction would have opened up concepts from so wide a range of possibilities as to almost have limitless possibilities.

The constraints, including my unintentional one, were aimed at getting me to a producible game that was fun and interesting…and being producible was a critical component of this project.

The Name Ideation

I’m not going to go through every idea I came up with, but I will summarize my approaches. And there were several of them.

First, it was easy to begin with the name “Bar Codes” itself. I created a list of definitions of both words to see what other ideas came out of that. Bar had, by far, the most variation of definitions. It’s a terrifically flexible word, but I was pretty sure that one definition in particular was going to be kept as part of the game — the watering hole or pub.

Code, though, turned out to be the real limiting factor in this direction, since there really aren’t more than three or four true uses of the word, and they don’t vary that much. A code is about communication, plain and simple. 

This was kinda fun, though!  A bar game about communication! This exercise gave me one really key insight, and that is this game needed to get drunk people communicating in weird ways. It’s always fun to see drunk people doing unusual things.

One exercise I did was to pair up a random definition of bar with a random definition of code. This actually generated some odd insights, my favorite of which was any pairing of code with “bar of soap.”  I mean, come on, a bar of soap in a game in bar?  That’s just too much fun!

I explored other directions with the words bar and code — alternative spellings, homonyms, antonyms, other ways to pronounce the words (bark odes, anyone?).  

Once I felt like I had generated at least a couple of decent ideas amongst the thirty or forty options, I set to work figuring out how they could be used in a game.

The Mechanics

The next step for my ideation process was to take my favorite concepts and try to create game mechanics that would make them work. This, on its own, is an entire ideation process. Here’s a brief overview of some of the concepts and the mechanics I attached to them:

• UPC or QR code and behavior codes in the bar — players control who is affected by the codes by building the pieces of the scannable code.

• Unbreakable codes and actions that might break them — players are given actions they must maintain, all while trying to break other players from their actions, all facilitated by a deck of cards.

• A bar of soap and codes of ethics — Players must use a wet bar of soap on the table as a way to cleanse themselves of ethical misdeeds they are committing.

• Color codes and the law — A rule is set and players are tested to see if they can hold it up by being challenged with variable color codes.

• A bar of entry and a signal or pattern — A zine is used as a guide to a digital story the players explore to get past obstacles on each page, using cards with color transparencies to reveal scannable codes.

Next Steps

There were several other methods I used to ideate for this game, including looking at other bard games and exploring tech and piece options, which I discuss in another blog. Follow along with me on this prototyping journey this week.