The Game

Following up the success of Bite Me, Gamelab returned to the 2002 Game Developers' Conference with Leviathan, a massively multiplayer board game. The game was hosted by the International Game Developers Association, and conference attendees played by moving their pieces on the map when it was time for their team to move. Teams scored points for capturing territories, and the team with the most points at the end won. An experiment in social dynamics and strategic play, Leviathan continued Gamelab's tradition of innovative GDC games.

The Design

In this massively multiplayer board game, players could only make one move per hour. Since individual agency was relatively low, players within a team had to coordinate their actions to get ahead. Leviathan saw the emergence of a social ecosystem of players, with more casual “browsers” of a game being directed by fanatical team “generals.” This pattern surfaced in most of our GDC social game experiments.