Moralityball Rules & Description

Synopsis

Moralityball is a tongue-in-cheek physical game that mixes sports gameplay and moral dilemmas into a mischievous concoction. Inspired by the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the game challenges players to cooperate while simultaneously incentivizing them to turn on each other. The game master acts as the devil on everyone’s shoulder, tweaking the rules to taunt the players and nudge them into betraying the better angels of their nature.

Background

Moralityball started out as a short project for Mary Flanagan’s “Values at Play” game design course at Dartmouth College. Years later, it was reworked for the DCGames Festival 2012, where it was played by the public for the first time (see here for my thoughts and videos from that event). I have since revised the game further.

Setup

A game master is put in charge of the game. Four players are selected to be “Defenders”, a special role. Up to 24 other players are divided into teams of two (up to 12 teams). These numbers can be adjusted to accommodate different numbers of players.

Each team is assigned a base (a hula hoop or other marker). The bases are arranged in a C-shape about 20 yards in diameter, and a large pile of about 40 balls (I recommend wiffle balls) is placed about 20-30 yards away from the open end of the bases. Each player is given a flag football belt.

The First Round, and Basic Gameplay

The first round of the game lasts for 2 minutes. During the round, each team is tasked with grabbing balls from the pile and placing them at their base. The Defenders try to stop the teams by ripping the flags from their belt (when a player loses a flag, they must drop any balls they are carrying, pick up the flag, return to their base, and re-attach the flag before resuming play). Players may only carry one ball at a time and may not kick or throw the balls. Players *may* steal from other teams’ bases and rip flags off of other players. No blocking or other physical contact is allowed.

The game master acts as an observer, referee, and timekeeper, and may end the round early if the game stagnates. At the end of the round, the balls are returned to the initial pile, and each team receives a prize (I suggest a small piece of candy) if and only if ALL of the teams have at least two balls at their base by the end of the round.

The Real Game

This first round is designed to cause the players to cooperate, by giving them a fairly easy collective goal, a common enemy, a small extrinsic reward, and no incentive to betray each other. However, the game master is charged with making small changes to the rules in each subsequent round, with the intention of keeping the players right on the edge of cooperation and self-interest.

The first, critical change is to add another victory condition: each team gets an additional prize for every 2 balls in their base at the end of the round. This gives a basic incentive to steal from other players, which sets up the basic conflict, while retaining a more optimal group outcome (i.e. the best group outcome comes from an equal distribution, while the best individual outcome is simple maximization).

To cause players to turn against each other, the game master could:

Convert some or all of the Defenders into extra teams (to deprive the players of a common external obstacle).
Change the collective prize victory condition to require more balls per team, or make the individual prize condition easier.
Remove balls from the initial pile, so that the collective prize condition becomes harder to reach.
Change the time that the round lasts.
Verbally egg on the players.

Similarly, if the game becomes too unbalanced toward selfish play, the game master can change the rules in the opposite direction or try to verbally challenge the players to cooperate. The game can devolve into purely selfish play very quickly; within the magic circle of the game, it’s permissible and often more interesting to be the villain. (This is why the game starts with so many elements pushing toward cooperation.) The game master should be slow and careful about pushing the players toward selfishness, and pull back quickly if the players start to give up on cooperation en masse.

The Meta-Goal

When the game master changes the rules, it is done with the explicit purpose of encouraging the players to turn on each other, even though everyone knows that this would be bad for the group. The rhetorical framing of the game (“Moralityball”) is meant to point toward the higher challenge: staying cooperative despite incentives to be selfish (which are introduced, hopefully with theatrical enthusiasm, by the game master).

Put another way: the game master is the real villain, the devil in the morality play. The teams are all playing against the game master, who is mischievously trying to tear them apart.

For a grand finale in the last round of the game, I recommend that the game master add a large handful of dollar bills into the prize pool. Admittedly, this emphasizes the distastefully extrinsic nature of the prizes, but it also changes the players’ perspective by breaking down the magic circle, making the game’s central conflict much more contentious and real.

Final Thoughts

When Moralityball debuted at DCGames Fest 2012, it did not yet have the clear “game master vs. players” structure, and instead pit the players against each other from the start. As a result, each of the four rounds played at the festival ended in a flurry of stealing and betrayal. That said, there were some encouraging attempts at cooperation, including calls for an “alliance” or “government” in the first round, a team choosing to play as “police” later on, and a valiant group effort to cooperate in the last round. (Also see the discussion afterward.)

While that was fun, I decided to change the rules/structure of the game in an attempt to give cooperation more of a chance and to explicitly frame Moralityball as a “designer vs. player” game (inspired by Bennett Foddy’s 2012 IndieCade talk). Since the game is difficult to run, I have not yet playtested these changes, which leaves some risk in the new design.