[Jeanne Boyarsky]

I think the GDC has a touch challenge in mixing explainability, scoring and challenge.

As someone who did crowd control, breakway was not as easy to explain as lunacy. "robot soccer plus try to hang the robot at the end" is easy enough to explain. Then the scores came out. Penalties affected the scores so much that it confused people. With lunacy, there were penalties, but they weren't such a significant part of the score. Bringing the score down from 5 to 0 is harder to explain.

I think other games are easy to explain. Like next year could be "collect groups of oversized cards to get 21". It's a concept people have heard before - from gambling. And Lunacy wasn't hard to explain - "try to get the balls into a trailer while the other robots try to stop you." Not a sport, but an easy concept.

Basically, I think explainability is more important than a sports analogy. The environment itself provides the link to sports - cheering in the stands and the like.