My very first article I wrote (and second I published) was about something I felt very strongly about: alpha players. I talked about how I think it’s an issue that game designers need to plan around, not something that players need to deal with. However, a recent discussion in a Discord thread has brought some things to my attention that have made me rethink my stance. While I still believe everything in the first article, there’s some additional things I have come to believe.

You Can’t Stop Being an Alpha Player

I have realized that being an alpha player is a player problem, but not a playgroup problem. And individual player (myself included) will simply play like an alpha player when the situation arises. When this happens, everything I stated in my original article holds true. Players don’t feel like they have impact, they listen to what the alpha player has to say out of fear of losing, and everyone has a bad time. So the answer to some is “don’t play with alpha players,” which I originally took as ignoring the problem at best and mean-spirited at worst.

What I realize now is that there was a piece missing from that analysis. If a player can’t stop being an alpha player, then we should treat it like any other trait a person can’t change about themself. Don’t kick them out, let them play.

Designing with Alpha Players in Mind

A player who’s color-blind will not enjoy playing Uno. A player with memory issues will not enjoy playing Hanabi. A player with ADHD will not enjoy long games. While “being an alpha player” is not a condition, it is a trait players have that designers can address. If a game can be designed such that alpha players can still play it, then you should do what you can to make that happen. I think one of the big difficulties with this, though, is that in other cases the player who has trouble with a game is both aware of it and is the one not having fun. Your colorblind friend will tell you no if you ask them to play a color-centric game, and if they play anyway, they’ll be the one upset about it. Meanwhile, a lot of alpha players don’t realize what they’re doing. Even the ones who do sometimes don’t think about how much fun they’re sucking from the game. And since they’re not the one being adversely affected by it, it’s a lot harder for them to notice. They need to be very aware of who they are and what they are about to do in order to say no.

No Game is for Everyone

All of the sudden “don’t play with alpha gamers” goes from a mean, exclusionary concept to a suggestion about knowing your audience. In general, asking/telling players not to play a game is not fun if you’re a player and a bad idea if you’re a designer, but it happens all of the time. Games with narrow player counts, solo games, or games targeted at specific audiences are always going to be at least a little exclusionary. If you want to design a co-op game that ignores the alpha player problem or cannot be enjoyed when one is present, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed to make a successful game, it just means your game is going to appeal to a smaller audience. While publishers aren’t a fan of that, there’s nothing wrong with it. Design away!

However, the problem then comes in how to market it. If your game is only fun when there are no alpha players, how do you say that? It’s a relatively rarely used term, and outside of deeply ingrained board-gamers no one is going to recognize it. Even if they did, as previously mentioned, it’s very hard for a player to recognize they are an alpha player. Well, I wish I had a good answer for you, but currently I can’t come up with anything great. Most players like this will avoid co-ops anyway, since they don’t enjoy them much and can’t figure out why, so that’s lucky. Sometimes themes and mechanics help, since alpha gamers are very numbers-oriented, so having a game with a lighter, softer theme and mechanics based more around feelings and intuition may scare them away as well. If you wanted to be blunt about it, you could even mention in the introduction something along the lines of “no player should talk over or command any other player, and any suggestion made by a player is merely that, a suggestion, and should be ignored if desired.” This doesn’t really solve much, since as my earlier article stated, players will feel pressured to follow anyway, but it can at least let players who are playing correctly point to the rules in a way that any alpha player will have to respect.

Conclusion

This article was a little more personally focused, and I do apologize for that, but hopefully anyone that I have convinced in my first article I have re-convinced now. I am happy that I have found a way to let free-for-all co-ops and limited communication co-ops co-exist peacefully in my mind. Design whatever you want, everybody.

Special shout-out to the Break my Game Discord, and Diana Crow especially for helping me reach my conclusions here.