The Captain’s Costume Contest

I created this design as part of a “White Elephant” exercise that provided random constraints for genre (battle royale), audience (generation alpha male extrovert), fiction (space opera), and tone (hilarious). While the tone and fiction seemed complementary, the genre and audience seemed at odds so the first knot I unraveled was how to construct a battle royale for ten-year-old boys. Many modern battle royales rely on gun violence (e.g., Fortnite, Apex Legends, COD: Warzone, PUBG, etc.) which hardly seemed appropriate given the audience. This encouraged me to get more creative with my definition of the genre and consider ideas such as a joke competition (leaning into the tone) and spaceship racing (leaning into the fiction). Eventually I formulated the costume contest premise which seemed to offer the most flexibility while maximizing the impact of each of the constraints. Players would still compete to be the last “man” standing but do so by causing others to laugh via eccentric, space-themed paraphernalia. After establishing the context, I used the audience profile (extrovert) to flesh out the rest of the design leading to the emphasis on social play, voting, opportunities for sabotage, and the nickname system.