Miscellaneous Thoughts

Miscellaneous thoughts:

How many free-to-play online games that ask players to pay for additional features are NOT avatar based? (RTS, for example, are not avatar-based.) Something between few and none, I should think. So, are players mostly paying to improve "themselves", their avatar?

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AAA video games are "Big Meals", free-to-play and casual stuff are "snacks". So how many people eat lots of big meals any more? A lot more snacking and catch-as-you-can eating happens.

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Twitter is less attractive to those who are used to working alone (tabletop game designers), more attractive to those who work in groups (video game designers).

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I tend to want to simplify games, which tends to be "anti-atmospherical." (Atmosphere is the flavor, the "chrome", but the kind that is tacked-on and doesn't alter gameplay. When it guides the construction of gameplay, it's theme.)

I make representations, not simulations.

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Mike Gray (Hasbro) says the problem with tabletop games is that someone must read the rules. The further problem with wargames is not only the rules, but that there are "too many decisions". People who are quite happy to play games that don't require too many decisions at once, are "Bewildered by wargames".

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I saw a question online, "does intuition or theory drive game design?" Neither. Playtest results drive game design, at least, the simple games that Reiner Knizia designs, and that I'm experimenting with.

Interaction in Games

Interaction in games

This arises from class discussions, and as with all such initial attempts, is very much subject to revision. Of course, there's no "right" way to categorize something this complex in such a small space.


In a traditional solo video game you're actually interacting with the designer.

In a tabletop or "newer" video game, you're interacting with other people through situations devised by the designer.

Interacting with the designer: (Often called PvE, Player vs. Environment)
Puzzles
Talking with NPCs
Collecting information
Avoiding obstacles and hazards (which may behave sentiently (with intelligence) or not)
Stealth
Con them (bluffing)
Blast/smash them
Clever other methods (drive cattle in front of you)
Dodge/avoid
(Cutscenes–but no interactivity)

Interacting with other people (part of the game, not something the game leads to):
Negotiation (persuade or dissuade)
Direct Conflict (PvP, Player vs. Player)
"Beating them to the punch" (in races, collection of objects, as well as in attacking)
Kill-crush-destroy opposing entities
Physical contests
Cooperation (typical of group RPGs)
Trading
Bidding against/auctioning
Drafting (selecting the best set of useful items, getting something before someone else does)
Anticipation of what someone else will do (could be tied to “beating them to the punch”)
"Bragging rights"
Telling bad jokes, charades, drawing pictures, and many other kinds of party game activities
Acting/pretending (lying) (bluffing)
Being annoying
Indirect interaction (you cause forces other than yours do do something to harm another player's)(e.g. via "Event cards")

Really indirect conflict--you cause forces other than yours to do something to harm other forces that might be helpful to an opponent

In a sense, a great part of interaction with other people could be characterized as “make the right choice before the other person does”.

Using the best format

When I want to learn history, I read a good book about it, I don't play a game. When I want a good story, I don't play a game, I read a novel (or watch a movie, though the stories are more shallow, less detailed, than in novels--but they take less effort). When I want an interactive and interesting conflict to resolve, I play a game.

If I want an interactive story--but I don't--then the best place might be a video game, though I would do a tabletop RPG first in that case. If I want to "make my own stories", quite a different thing than being fed through an interactive story, then I play a tabletop game.

If you want the best experiences of each type, you choose the best format.

I do the same with computer software: I don't try to do columns of numbers in a word processor (though it can be done), I use a spreadsheet program. I don't try to draw diagrams with a spreadsheet (though I can), or even with Powerpoint, I use a drawing or diagramming program. If I want to play a video game, I'm not going to find it in that drawing program. And so on.

But there are lots of people who play a game to learn history, because they don't want to read a book. And there are people who play games for stories, usually because they want to have something to do during the story. Just as there are people who make drawings with Powerpoint.

Movies from Video Games

Reading an article in the latest Gameinformer magazine about the poor record of movies that derive from games, my reaction was "that's not surprising." Games aren't a good storytelling medium, which makes a successful movie less likely to derive from a game. In essence you have to make up the story for the movie because there isn't much of one in the game--the game is more a setting than a story. Video gamers, when they say a game has a really good story, are comparing to other games, not to novels or even movies (stories in novels tend to be better than stories in film, I think--there's more "time" to develop the story). Games put the player "in" the story (ideally, though often not in practice), while movies have the viewer passively consume the story. Comics, on the other hand, ARE a storytelling medium, somewhere between novels and movies. The reader has more work to do in a comic than the viewer does in a movie, but less work to do than in a novel. While we're finally getting some excellent movies deriving from comics--it's taken a *long* time--we're much less likely to get very good movies deriving from video games.

Which hasn't stopped Hasbro from greenlighting tentpole movies for Monopoly (Ridley Scott?!) and Battleship, among others. But those are non-video games that don't pretend to tell much of a story, so I think everyone will accept that the studio has made up a story to fit the brand's vague setting. For video game movies there are the fanboys who want the movie to be "just like the game", and that's not going to work well owing to differences in the media. No movie can possibly be "just like Battleship", so "no problemo."

Having fun with a new game

Nowadays I often design games for other people to play, that I'm not so keen on playing myself. This is something that separates some experienced designers from novices, as novices usually only design the game(s) they would like to play. I tend to like games with some depth of strategy that might take several hours to play. I studied games to become a better player. I am not a fan of heavily complex rules, but neither do I naturally gravitate to simple games. Yet the market very much trends toward shorter, simpler games. And the market reflects "the cult of the new", as people don't expect to play a game more than a few times before they move on to another.

In particular, I tend to design more "filler" games and short games than I might play. Some I enjoy playing pretty well, some I'm not so keen on.

But there is one game amongst the new ones that I really enjoy playing solo or with others, though I'm not sure how marketable it is--not because people won't like PLAYing it, but it's a question of whether you can get people to BUY the game.

The game originated after a publisher talked about presenting Dragon Rage (which is in process of being republished from 1982) as an introductory hex wargame. This caused me to think about designing another introductory hex wargame, but this time with a science fiction rather than fantasy theme.

The standard scenario is brothers of a king who has died in suspicious circumstances, each proclaiming the other brother(s) to be a patricide. It's generally a two player game, but can be played in this version by more than two.

The ships set up face down, one at a time, then are revealed as they fight or move faster than one hex (revealed to prove that they can). So there's a considerable element of "fog of war". Normal forces vary with scenario, 15-25 inch-square pieces (with numbers usually going down as the game progresses). Each player has a prince and a non-movable asteroid stronghold. If either is lost, he loses the game. The prince gives a morale bonus in battle, but may have to expose himself to danger to do so.

The "board" is modular 5 by 5 large-hex sections with varying "terrain" which fit together in a great many ways ("geomorphic"). There's a separate 8" by 11" battle board for the battles, which usually involve fewer than five ships but have seen as many as 32 in one battle--nearly the entire forces during a two-player game. Combat uses the venerable "Valley of the Four Winds" method, a two-dice roll to hit, all or nothing, with defender firing first and then alternating individual ship firing (if you die before you shoot, you don't shoot). Better ships have better chances to hit, and better defense modifiers. Ships also have a range and a speed (strategic and tactical the same). Some can go into galactic dust clouds/nebulae, some cannot.

What's continued my interest in solo play is creating scenarios for the game. I have the "rebels vs. the empire" scenario (no, no Deathstar), the "Barbarians" scenario (light ships coming in uncoordinated bunches from the galactic rim), the "Annihilators" scenario (huge death-dealing machines that burn off planets), and the "Wormhole Invaders" scenario (aliens suddenly issue from Black Holes!). Most of these have a smaller version (two 5 by 5 hex boards) and a larger (four boards).

It's also interesting to watch people play, especially those who aren't used to board wargames. There's a tendency for players to sit around doing nothing, which is OK *if* they have the preponderance of economic value. It is not just a battle game, it is a war, so there is an economy, and if you control more of the valuable areas, you're likely to win in the long run.

Fundamental differences, video games and tabletop games

The two most fundamental differences--which are still differences of degree, not kind--between video games and non-electronic games are

1) it is much easier to provide a semblance of opposition with a computer than with non-electronic means, hence video games are traditionally for one player against the computer (interactive puzzles), and non-electronic games are traditionally for two or more players in opposition

2) for video games, up to a point of complexity, no one has to read the rules. For even the simplest non-electronic games, someone must read and understand the rules. (For toys, no one needs to read the rules, because there are no rules or objectives, just objects to play with. The mass non-electronic market is often called the "toy and game" market because the ideal is a very simple game with minimal rules, or an actual toy.)

Skewed surveys

So many surveys are crippled. I've downloaded some summary results for a survey arranged by http://www.gamesindustry.com/company/542/service/1762
The results are interesting, but woefully misleading because they repeatedly quote percentage of population playing games, yet limit their "population" in two ways. The first isn't unreasonable--at least 8 years old. The second is entirely unreasonable--they only count people who have Internet access. Insofar as many forms of video games do not require Internet access, why this limitation? To make the numbers sound more impressive?

Lest you say, "everyone has Internet access", NOT EVEN CLOSE. Many many people don't even own a computer, many because they don't want to, some because they can't afford it (yes, even now when computers are so much cheaper). Some of these people may play games on phones or on friends' computers/consoles, yet why they're excluded entirely is beyond me. This also skews the comparative results of this international survey, as I'm supposing the percentage of people who have Internet access varies somewhat from country to country.

So the results are interesting for comparative purposes, but the overall percentages are mostly useless.

Story-telling in history

(We'll get to history soon, but not immediately.) I've had interesting reading experiences lately. I rarely read novels any more (lack of time), but during an always-dangerous trip to the library recently I picked up two of the Dune novels written by Frank Herbert's son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson. I loved Dune, though not so much some of Herbert's sequels (in some sense, it was a novel that should not have had any sequel).

One of the post-Frank sequels was The Butlerian Jihad. What a great setting for a novel, I thought, the time when the crusade against "thinking machines" led to a galaxy without computers even as good as those we have today. Yet after 80 pages I had to give up, something I very rarely do with a novel. The story was unimaginative, lifeless, drab, just remarkably mediocre. I thought, "maybe Brian just isn't a novelist, but Anderson should do better", since he has lots of experience writing novels including juveniles and even Star Wars novels. But there was just nothing there.

So I switched to a history book, Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West by Tom Holland. This tells the story of the Persian Empire and (beginning about halfway through) its attacks on Greece. And remarkably enough, this was a much better story, much better told, than Butlerian Jihad, even though I knew the overall story pretty well. Holland is squarely in the "heroic Greek resistance to the East" faction even as he sympathizes with and compliments the Persians for their achievements. Holland is not a scholar, but this appears to be a very scholarly work. Yet he tells a great story with scrupulous accuracy. (For example, many do not know that more Thebans and Thespians than Spartans died on the last day at Thermopylae. And the story of the ultimately suicidal run by a Greek to announce the victory at Marathon is just that, a story, though the entire Athenian army got back to Athens remarkably quickly to protect it against possible Persian fleet action.)

Next I read Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. Diamond is well-known for his fascinating Guns, Germs and Steel, which attempts to scientifically answer the question of why civilization arose in the Middle East and later in other places, and why Europeans came to dominate the world. Third Chimpanzee is an earlier book that asks how humans have arisen from chimpanzees, and how humans are similar, and different, from other animals. (I often wonder how someone who rejects the idea of evolution can read such a book; such people must ignore a great deal of writing by scientists, I suppose.) Diamond is not as intent on telling a story as the author of Persian Fire, but he is extraordinarily clear and readable, taking you along with him on a journey of discovery and "ratiocination" (my word) while mixing in his own fascinating experiences in New Guinea and the South Pacific. And part of the book is the predecessor of Guns Germs and Steel, if you're not inclined to read both books.

Somewhere in there I started John Julius Norwich's The Middle Sea, a history of the Mediterranean. I enjoyed reading his history of Byzantium and history of Venice. Norwich, too, is a story-teller as well as historian (and does not claim to be a scholar), but this time there were too many factual errors (or perhaps cut corners) and I set it aside in favor of Diamond. I'll try again sometime.

One of those oddities

When I was a kid, people often said "kitty-corner" instead of "diagonal". Now you hardly ever hear the first phrase.

"Up, down, sideways" is the equivalent phrase to "kitty-corner", yet nowadays people still say it rather than the formal term "orthogonal". In fact, most people don't know what orthogonal means when they first encounter it. So in game rules I use the formal term, but explain at first use what it means, something I don't have to do with "diagonal".

Who knows why this different treatment exists. Language is funny, and lots of it is a matter of chance.

What do games amount to?

Aki Jarvinen’s doctoral dissertation, “Games without Frontiers: Theories and Methods for Game Studies and Design,” available on the Web in English (PDF downloadable via http://acta.uta.fi/english/teos.php?id=11046), painstakingly identifies and describes the elements of games, what games are composed of. This is beyond the scope of a beginner’s guide to game design, though worth reading. Instead, I’d like to try to categorize what players actually DO in games, in simplest terms. I’m dividing this into two parts, first the “system” activities having to do with the mechanics of the game, then the “psychological” activities having to do with what the mind of the player is doing in relation to other players.

Remember that one of the best guides to game design is the question, “what is the player going to do”. I’m trying to list the fundamental things that players do, both mechanically (“Systems”) and psychologically when there is more than one player.

Moreover, I’m going to restrict this to competitive games, rather than branch out into puzzles and other entertainments that are not games at all, by some definitions. Wii Fit, Wii Music, Tetris, Katamari Dimachy, and other single-player video “games” that are actually interactive puzzles or toys may not quite fit in, but I think in most cases they will.

The list includes the general activity, then some of the common variations. When we come down to it, most games are about just a few things–in no particular order.
And it must be said, there are many ways to organize this list, to choose subsidiary and not-subsidiary categories. It is certainly not definitive.
Systems
Where the mechanical systems of the game are concerned, “achieve a particular state” is the generalized version of what the player is doing. This is what the player does in relation to the systems of the game, not in relation to other players. Victory points are a generalized way of doing several different things at once. Sometimes the “state” is very simple, as in rock-paper-scissors where you want to make a pattern, such as paper to the opponent’s rock. I want to be more specific than that, though.

1. Get to a particular place (or avoid/leave it)
Get there fastest (a race) [player interaction may be missing]
Get any of your pieces to some place (Axis&Allies enemy capital)
Get a special piece there more times than opponent (football, hockey, many other team sports)
Get to end of the story (console RPGs)
Avoid or get out of a particular place
Connecting two or more points (Hex, Twixt, Attika, networking games) Could also be under patterns, below)
2. Collect something (many card games, many video games)(sometimes economic)
Find something (exploration) (Easter egg hunt)
It drops in your lap (draw a card)
Take it from someone else (Monopoly, some card games especially trick-taking)
Build something rather than get it elsewhere (the moon rocket in Civilization, or Wonders)
Don’t collect something (Old Maid, Hearts, etc.)
Get rid of everything (say, a hand of cards)
Building/construction games are a complex form of collection that some people might list as a separate category
3. Wipe someone or something out (Risk, shooters, checkers/draughts, bowling!)
Wipe out one thing—chess
Identify who or what you need to wipe out. Examples: Mafia (and any of its variants, such as Werewolf), Bang/Dodge City
Its opposite, avoid being wiped out, including defend some place by preventing an opponent from getting there (Atari Warlords, Tower Defense)
4. Create patterns in something (getting to a place could be seen as part of this!)
Patterns in piece location (this includes rock-paper-scissors, Tetris, many puzzle games)
Only your pieces (Tic-Tac-Toe), or yours plus opponent’s (rock-paper-scissors)
Patterns in relation to the “board” (Scrabble, Carcassonne)
Patterns of cards (related to sets–e.g. Canasta)
Drawings (Pictionary) and other representations such as maps
5. Recognize patterns in something
Recognize a drawing or other representation (drawing) of something (Pictionary)
6. Change something from one thing to another (could be seen as a subset of collection)
Frequently required in economic and construction games
7. Improve your capabilities. (Munchkin)
This is often subsidiary, a way to achieve something else. Common in RPGs, vehicle simulations, construction/management simulations, collectible card games. Yet in some games, such as RPGs, this is THE activity, not a means to another end.
8. Survive to keep going. Especially common in arcade games (which are generally unwinnable).
9. Design something (e.g., a warship in a 4X game)
Produce new instances of predefined objects (crafting, or "building something")
Design objects or processes (e.g., City of Heroes "Mission Architect", making choices when generating an RPG character)
10. Calculate probabilities. Can’t Stop, Cloud 9, Craps, and other “press your luck” games.
Some would say this is a natural and obvious concomitant of many other activities, but in these days of widespread innumeracy, it may make sense to list it separately.
Psychological
Now we have the human/psychological side of what the player does, the interaction with other players. In many ways this is no different than what a general does in warfare. I am not including the fundamental processes necessary to play the game (such as, “understand the rules”), instead I'm looking for what the player is doing after he understands the game and game systems, to play the game.
1. Forecasting the intentions of others (“reading” the other player(s))
2. Persuading them to do something you want them to do (usually involves negotiation)
3. Disguising one’s own intentions (could be a subsidiary of persuasion, of negotiating)(bluffing) Poker, Balderdash, Stratego
4. Establish personal relationships with other players (which can also be seen as a subsidiary of negotiating, but you often want to do this even if there is no overt negotiation)
5. Discover/deduce information (not quite “collection”)
This could just as well be under "system", but often involves some understanding of and communication with other players.
6. Understand short- and long-term relationships and processes not strictly involved with how to play the game.
With that, we're getting into the general understanding of "playing a game", so I will stop there.

The direct and indirect approach to war

We were talking in design class about how to modify Risk to make it a better game, and the following came to mind.

It was said in the WWII era that the Germans felt the Americans fought in the pattern of American football. This is the "T" era, four yards and a cloud of dust, line up a big mass and crash your way through, with occasional passes: get more of everything and smash the enemy in their strongest position. (But there WAS some passing.)

The British traditionally use what B. H. Liddell-Hart called the "indirect approach"--there's a book with that title that I read about 40 years ago--which is much facilitated from/by the sea: choose the weak points of the enemy, send a sufficient force to achieve your objective (economy of force), ultimately defeat the enemy without having to confront his strongest force.

Some games seem to encourage one method or the other. For example, Risk is the "American method of war" game par excellence.

Britannia appears to be much more the British method. When people try to play the American method, they may kill a lot of armies, but they don't win the game. Sometimes I say this is playing Britannia as though it was a conquest game, which it is not. Force preservation is very important.

I occasionally wonder if I should have limited the "unlimited" stack size to maybe 5 or 6 armies, if that would make Brit even more the "British method" game. Certainly, I limit the max stack size in all of the successor games. The two-dice combat method might help too, making some attacks less risky.

The nine structural subsystems of any game

This originally appeared on GameCareerGuide, 17 Mar 09

The nine structural subsystems of any game

(or game-like activity), video or non-video

Lewis Pulsipher

A game can be thought of as a system (as in "systems analysis", for the computationally inclined). What I'm trying to achieve here is a list of the fundamental sub-systems that are necessarily a part of any game (excluding sports such as baseball or swimming). This list may help inexperienced designers, because if they think about all nine of these systems as they rough out their game, this will help them conceptualize and arrive at a playable idea.

We could discuss endlessly what is a game and what is not; let’s just recognize that, within your definitions of “game”, you can probably find an exception that doesn’t have all nine characteristics. I think that’s a function of definition rather than a failure of the analysis, but that must remain a matter of opinion. If one of these systems is completely missing, you might have a toy or puzzle, but not a game.

There are many examples “on the edges”, such as Katamari Damacy. To me, Katamari Damacy is not a game, Solitaire (the card “game”) is not a game, because there’s no conflicting interest, no active opposition guided by intelligence–they are more like a puzzle or toy. But both of these activities fit the Nine Structures framework.

I want a framework that will help a designer think about games. Some people, in listing fundamentals of games, discuss "state" in considerable detail. I've tried to avoid "state" and "state-changes" as much as possible, simply because I don't think that an organization dominated by state is very useful to an inexperienced designer. "State-change", in particular, seems to lump an awful lot together in one pot. My ultimate goal is to have something that will be useful to inexperienced designers, and to be able to expand each category to exhaustively list alternatives within each structure. I want designers to be able to treat the extended list as a sort of checklist, to help them make sure they’ve thought about all the vital aspects of their game early in the process.

I've tried to list these subsystems in an apparently-logical order, but every one is just as fundamental as every other one.

Here is the list, followed by brief explanations and some examples:

1. Theme/History/Story/Emotion/Image.

2. Player Interaction rules.

3. Objective/victory conditions.

4. “Data storage”. (Information Management)

5. Sequencing.

6. Movement/Placement.

7. Information availability.

8. Conflict resolution/interaction of game entities.

9. "Economy" (resource acquisition).

Sometimes the system is assumed, or the choice is to have "none", but still a decision has been made about the category. For example, in Tic-Tac-Toe (Noughts and Crosses) there is no acquisition of resources, but it still has an economy of "unlimited pieces"--it could have a way to gain resources, and there are variations where you do. Another example: a very abstract game has no theme/history/story, but the designer chose to take that approach, nonetheless.

Theme/History/Story/Emotion/Image. These are listed in order of common usage, not necessarily importance. Story can be absolutely vital to a role-playing game, but is essentially absent from many games. Historical games use history to a greater or lesser extent. Many Euro-style boardgames have a theme that may or may not have affected the construction of the game. And we can still have abstract games without anything related to theme. Many video game designers want to design “an immersive experience” to elicit one or more emotions from players. And even a single image in one’s mind, a scene or “movie clip”, can characterize a game.

Player Interaction rules (and number of players). Is it a cooperative game, or a game like Doom (the boardgame) where one player controls the “badguys” and the others cooperate against him or her, or a competitive game (typical), or is there some other relationship between and amongst the players?

How many separate interests are there in the game? How many sides? Some “games” have only one and so may be more properly be called puzzles or toys. Some have several sides (many boardgames, some online RTS). Some have just two sides but several interests because there is more than one player per side (Team Fortress, etc.).

This subsystem determines how the players interact with one another. For example, in a multi-sided game, are negotiations allowed? Physical intimidation? (The answer to that is almost always "No", but it is a decision, and I have seen games that involved physical intimidation...).

Objective/victory conditions. In other words, what causes one player to win, or at least causes the game to end, or is the goal ever-pursued but perhaps never reached? The game ending can be arbitrary ("play five rounds"), yet there will usually be a way to determine the winner at that point. Role-playing games have no end, and usually don’t have winners, but do have objectives: usually to acquire experience points and (magic) items/skills/perks.

“Data storage”. (Information Management) Something has to record the current state of the game. This is often a board/map. In Tic-Tac-Toe, it's the nine-box layout. In card games, the layout of the cards on the table, and the cards themselves, store data. Pieces can store data, in particular the traditional cardboard pieces of wargames that contain movement, attack, and defense values. A detailed map stores LOTS of data. A computer can store vast amounts of data, of course, though early computers were very limited in data storage, which in turn limited the games.

Sequencing. In what order do things happen? "Simultaneously" can be the answer, but taking turns is the norm in non-video games.

Movement/Placement. The most typical “piece” in a computer game is an “avatar”, a figure/character representing the player. Players generally manipulate something, most often pieces on a board or cards in their hand or on the table. Chess and checkers have movement rules, the Asiatic game Go has placement rules. Movement/placement one at a time is the norm in traditional games, where in wargames a player can typically move all his pieces in one go. Even paper-rock-scissors has movement (as well as sequencing) rules.

Information availability. What information about the game is available to all players? In traditional boardgames all information is available, but in card games information is largely hidden. Five-card Draw poker has a lower level of information availability than Texas Hold 'Em, because in the latter you see some of the cards "held" by the other players.

Conflict resolution/interaction of game entities. What happens when an action of a player leads to a conflict? This can be as simple as in Tic-Tac-Toe (conflict is not allowed, you can't place your mark where the other player already has one), or it can be simple as in chess (when a conflict occurs, the moving player always wins). In checkers you jump a man in a conflict. In Go you surround stones to capture them.

You might prefer to say thatTic-Tac-Toe has no conflict rules, that movement rules govern where markers can be placed; but a choice has still been made, that there will be no conflict. It is quite possible to have a game without conflict, such as a race game or many card games (Solitaire) and Euro boardgames.

"Economy" (resource acquisition). How are new pieces/capabilities acquired? Some games have no way to acquire these, but that is still a decision made about the game. Even games that don't appear to have an Economy have some elements, for example, in chess you can promote ("queen") a pawn, and in checkers you can make a king. Many modern games, especially many computer games, are largely economic/resource management games.

In video games there are very often ways to obtain new capabilities, whether it involves mining resources and building factories, or just picking up medkits and weapons that sit in convenient spots.

Am I sure there are just these nine? No, but I haven’t added to the number in more than a year, though I have revised it. I also have a list of 20 questions that designers ought to think about, but which can generally be ignored when creating the framework of a game. This will have to wait for another time.

Very useful for learners is to take simple games and change one of the structural choices. This is especially easy with traditional games that “everyone knows” such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Chess, Monopoly, Risk. For example, the well-known hidden-movement chess variant “Kriegspiel” is a case of changing from perfect information to very limited information for the players (system 7). The Monopoly variant where someone on Free Parking collects miscellaneous fees that would normally go to the bank is an example of changing the economy of the game slightly (system 9). Increase the Tic-Tac-Toe board to four by four, and let a player win with four in a row or four in a square, and you have a much better game: you’ve changed the data storage and the victory conditions (systems 4 and 3).

Now for examples.

Traditional games are almost always turn-based in sequence, with one piece moving. Think chess (including oriental versions), checkers, Go, Monopoly, Parcheesi. Certain genres of video games are almost always simultaneous movement (real-time), such as most shooters (Worms Armageddon is an exception of sorts).

How do video games fit? Most “shooter” video games follow the same pattern:

1. Theme/History/Story/Emotion/Image. Usually, the story is an excuse to get to the action, though there are shooters with deeper stories that actually affect gameplay. Many “elicit an emotion” games are at least partly shooters.

2. Player Interaction rules (and number of players). Generally these are one-person games, though now we’re getting more cooperative/buddy versions. Many have a multi-player (but two-sided) version as well. There are rarely player interaction rules other than common courtesy. Some players try to install their own rules (such as the disdain of “camping”), even though “camping” is perfectly within the rules.

3. Objective/victory conditions. The objective is usually to kill as much as possible before you’re killed, but there can be overall game victory conditions.

4. “Data storage”. (Information Management) The computer/console provides the storage and management; how the software addresses the details is usually hidden from anyone not on the production team.

5. Sequencing. Almost always, shooters are simultaneous movement (real-time).

6. Movement/Placement. Almost always, the player has an avatar that moves in ways analogous to the real world. The difference can come in whether the character can jump, swim, fly, etc.

7. Information availability. Most video games involve much hidden information–one of the great virtues of electronic games as compared to non-electronic. In a shooter, you rarely have information that your avatar cannot reasonably see or hear, though there may be scanners or other devices that detect through walls and around corners. (Exception: many games show you, after you’re killed, where your killer was when he attacked you.)

8. Conflict resolution/interaction of game entities. Shooting. And perhaps melee.

9. "Economy" (resource acquisition). In most shooters you can find food, weapons, and medical kits. In some, when you score enough you gain additional “lives”, or can purchase better weapons. You may be able to despoil the bodies or the installations of your vanquished enemies, as well.

Let’s try a simple electronic game: Pac-Man

1. Theme/History/Story/Emotion/Image. The game is often credited as the first to have a character and there is a story of sorts, though once again the story is mostly an excuse for action.

2. Player Interaction rules (and number of players). One player vs. the computer.

3. Objective/victory conditions. Make it through all the levels.

4. “Data storage”. (Information Management). The game uses a square grid, more or less, as a “board”.

5. Sequencing. Simultaneous.

6. Movement/Placement. The player has one “piece” which can move constantly. The opposition has up to four ghosts, though not always all of them at once.

7. Information availability. Virtually all information is available!

8. Conflict resolution/interaction of game entities. Pac-Man eats dots, ghosts eat Pac-man, Pac-man can eat ghosts for a limited time after consuming special dots.

9. "Economy" (resource acquisition). Score points to gain lives.

The video game Civilization IV is not much different from most board wargames:

1. Theme/History/Story/Emotion/Image. Rise from barbarism to the moon. Conquer the world or persuade it to acknowledge your nation’s superiority.

2. Player Interaction rules (and number of players). Multiple separate interests and sides. Negotiation is possible.

3. Objective/victory conditions. As with some boardgames, there are multiple ways to win, such as flying to the moon/stars or conquest.

4. “Data storage”. (Information Management). Civ uses a square grid, which a player can actually make visible, to regulate movement. The computer keeps track of many details, which of course is why Civ the computer game includes far more detail than any boardgame.

5. Sequencing. Turn-based.

6. Movement/Placement. One side moves all of its pieces in a turn, many pieces can be in one area at a time, move into an enemy-occupied area to attack it.

7. Information availability. Thanks to the computer, much of the information is hidden, though Civ provides various aids and warnings to give you some idea of your standing in the world.

8. Conflict resolution/interaction of game entities. When pieces move into an enemy-occupied area, a fight occurs. Unlike most boardgames, the combat method involves one unit at a time on each side even though many may be in the area.

9. "Economy" (resource acquisition). Much of Civ revolves around acquisition of resources that enable technological research and construction of a great variety of pieces.

What about a non-conflict game, say Tetris.

1. Theme/History/Story/Emotion/Image. None.

2. Player Interaction rules (and number of players). One player vs. the computer, which probably administers things purely at random–it is not a conflicting interest.

3. Objective/victory conditions. The objective is to score points by making rows of blocks; but the game has no ending other than ultimate failure of the player’s efforts.

4. “Data storage”. (Information Management). The square-grid “board” and the computer.

5. Sequencing. Simultaneous.

6. Movement/Placement. The computer generates pieces, you can rotate them.

7. Information availability. You can see what’s on the board, and the type of piece that will fall next.

8. Conflict resolution/interaction of game entities. This is as close as we come to the rules for where blocks fall and when they disappear.

9. "Economy" (resource acquisition). The pieces keep coming.

Let’s try a sports video game, say Madden (or just about any other football simulation).

1. Theme/History/Story/Emotion/Image. Simulates real-world football.

2. Player Interaction rules (and number of players). The player vs. the computer, ordinarily.

3. Objective/victory conditions. The same conditions as real football; even in games involving a campaign (entire season), the objective is to win a championship, just as in the real world.

4. “Data storage”. (Information Management) The computer, the virtual football field.

5. Sequencing. Simultaneous with periods of thinking in between, just as in the real thing.

6. Movement/Placement. 11 “pieces” on a side, running, passing, causing collisions.

7. Information availability. Largely available, but similar to the real world.

8. Conflict resolution/interaction of game entities. Complex rules for collisions including blocking and tackling, rules for possession and movement (and loss of) the ball.

9. "Economy" (resource acquisition). Trades, drafts, and other ways of acquiring new “pieces”; injuries.

Finally, let’s try a game that may not fit, because it uses the human body only–Rock, Paper, Scissors:

1. Theme/History/Story/Emotion/Image. None.

2. Player Interaction rules (and number of players). One player vs. another.

3. Objective/victory conditions. The circular superiorities rule determines a winner.

4. “Data storage”. (Information Management). If there is any, it’s the human brain, and only insofar as, if you play best two out of three, something must keep track of the score.

5. Sequencing. Simultaneous.

6. Movement/Placement. No pieces, nothing, really, other than your hands.

7. Information availability. Only what you can glean from your reading of your opponent.

8. Conflict resolution/interaction of game entities. Here we have the paper beats rock, rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper.

9. "Economy" (resource acquisition). No new resources, but anyone with a hand can play.

Let’s use this framework to quickly make big changes in a game. Examples here are for chess (none have been playtested...):

1. Theme. Supposedly chess once represented real (Indian subcontinent) warfare. But today it is an abstract game, and adding a story that actually makes a difference in the gamepkay is more than we have room for here.

2. Players. There are commercial chess versions for three or four players. The board is larger and not quite square; for three players the overall shape is triangular. It would be quite difficult to change the player parameters without changing the board . . .

3. Victory/Objective. First player to take at least X pieces and have two more than opponent wins the game. Or simply, first to take X pieces. (X to be determined by playtesting.) Or even more unusual and less likely to degenerate into stalemate, first to take all opposing pawns wins. In either case, checkmate of the king is still a way to win.

4. Data storage. 3D chess exists commercially. Or make some squares safe havens, where pieces cannot be captured (king cannot go there). Or add one “hyperspace” connected to all of the middle 16 squares of the board. You can move to it from any of the 16, then must stop. You can move out to any of the 16. Perhaps the most practical change is to treat the board as a cylinder, that is, the left side and right side are connected to one another.

5. Sequencing. What would chess be like if you could move two pieces at once? Probably white would move one, then movement would be two at a time thenceforth.

6. Movement/placement. There are vast numbers of “fantasy chess” variants with new pieces (and even unusual captures). What if you could move through your own pieces (the knight can do this already)? Or through your own pieces of lesser power only? Bobby Fischer advocated a variant of chess in which the back-row pieces are distributed randomly at the start of the game (and mirrored for the two players, I believe). This could be regarded as a board (data storage) change as much as a movement change.

7. Information. The 19th century game “Kriegspiel” uses three chess sets, two players, and a referee. Only the referee can see all the pieces, each player has a board showing only his own pieces. The referee let a player know when one of his pieces disappears (is captured). You can add rules for “sight distance”, of course. This is a natural for computerization (e.g. http://www.kriegspiel.co.uk/).

8. Conflict resolution. When there’s a conflict, each player rolls a die, high number wins, attacker wins ties. Attacker also rolls one die type higher (or adds one point). Pawns roll d4, bishop/knight d6, rook d8, queen d10 (or even d12). Even the king has a d4, and there is no checkmate, you must actually capture, but still warn the opponent of check.

Or make it one die per level, so a pawn rolls one d6, bishop and knight two, rook three, queen four, king one. And the attacker gets an extra die, or one extra pip per die. This variation is more practical because unusual dice are not needed.

9. Economy. Specify some squares on the board to be “supply centers”. If a player occupies such a square, he gets a “supply point” at intervals (every 5 moves?). The points can be used to buy back dead pieces, using the standard point values for pieces (Queen 10 down to pawn 1). Pieces return to play as a move, showing up in a vacant square that they would have started in.

This can be done with other traditional video and non-electronic games as an interesting exercise in game transformation. (We need more video games that let the user actually change some of these parameters to try out their own versions.) Use this framework to help you see things in a different light, to notice things you might not otherwise notice in your games, whether you’re in conception or playtesting or modding an existing game.

Getting Your Game Manufactured (Self-Publishing)

Ben Clark of Imagigrafx gave a seminar about game production costs at GenCon this year. I'll try to summarize much of what he said. While Ben represents a particular printer (which evidently prints some or all of Mayfair's games), he tried to give us some idea of what costs would be in other circumstances. Because there were many questions-and-answers, there’s not a strong narrative-line here, rather it’s an assemblage of information bits. I did not record the session, this is derived from notes I typed as Ben talked. Hence there’s likely to be an error somewhere, blame me, not Ben. Ben has blog on their Website (evidently: http://www.imagigrafx.com/gameprinter/). His August 31 post is about cards. He is happy to talk to people who want their games printed, that’s his business. Ben also has a podcast site, click on the title of this post.

Never say what your retail price is before you know the manufacturing price. The "magic number” for production costs is 15-20% of retail cost (so a $50 game would cost $10 or less to produce). In America, small print runs are going to be at 25%, more likely. So you print for no more than 20% of retail, sell to a distributor for 40%, the retailer buys from distributor at 50%, online retailers discount heavily, brick&mortar shops can’t afford to, generally, so sell at 100% of list price.

Costs can be reduced by batching several games (e.g. printing play money for several games at one time). Much of the cost in printing comes from the setup rather than from the individual copies, so unit cost goes down as number printed goes up.

He was more interested in game than text costs, but gave as an example a 128 page full color document costs just under $5 each (1000 units?). Printing text is going to be much cheaper overseas. I’ll interject that many people doing small runs of games that are purely text and art (such as RPGs) often use LuLu or another POD site that prints copies on demand.

Boardgames:
Ben was talking about a two piece box, game board, platform (insert), rulebook, cards, parts. There’s an assembly price unless you assemble yourself, and a shipping carton for shipping to retailer/distributor, 20-30 cents per game for the carton. (As I have noticed, Fantasy Flight, for example, has a standard carton that holds six of their standard boxes.)

He recommended doing a square box, others cost too much and retailers hate it. So no Monopoly-shaped boxes (even though Monopoly still does it). The standard is about 10.5 inches on a side--Wal-mart’s desire– about3 inches deep. (I’ll interject that many boxes and boards seem to be made on an 11 by 11 inch square standard, near enough. For example, the FFG Britannia board is six 11 by 11 sections.)

Print together with someone else, if you can, to reduce costs.

You need a box. Plastic bags shelved edge on (as for DeskTopPublished games), don't do it. Use a hang tag on a tuck box (box for a deck of cards). Boxes, 1000, about 2.20/box. 2,500 boxes, maybe less than $1.80 maybe even $1.50 each.

You won't save money by not printing a box bottom. The back/bottom sells the game. Always use full color.

Price has an influence on size and weight of box. Mayfair had a standard small box for $20 games, crammed a lot into same box for $25, and it didn't sell. People don’t want to pay a lot for a small or light box, they want to feel they’re getting something substantial. (Yet the heavier the box, the more it costs to ship to the distributor. You’re trying to find a good middle ground in many of these decisions.)

Many games use a sheet (sometimes even diecut sheets of card-stock) instead of a mounted game board, to save money. Traditional mounted board 20" by 20" $1.80-2.40 for 1000 pieces. There’s a 23 by 33 inch limitation on the machines that make the boards, don’t make yours larger if you want it mounted. American style boards with the “valley” are cheaper than the “Euro” style.

The platform or insert avoids shifting of contents during shipping, such as forklift movement. Molded plastic is $3,000-5,000 just for the mold, so can cost over a buck each. Cardboard 35-50 cents.

Cards are the most expensive component pound for pound. Bridge size cards: 110 is the magic number on one piece of equipment (and this could be two identical decks of 55, for example). But it varies, with another machine the number might be 60. If the number is, say, 85 for a machine, then 85 card decks might be cheaper than 83 card decks. If 5-10K units, below that it “gets wonky.” (That’s what my notes say!) (thegamecrafter.com prints cards in sets of 16, for example.)

Magic”the Gathering card stock is 11.5-12 pt. Wargame cardboard counters 40-66 pt.
Board 75-80 pt. (A point is a hundreth of an inch?)

Cheapest printing: square corner, common white border or black, saves several cents per deck. Round corners are better for shuffling and holding in hand. Round corners can add as much as a quarter to the cost of a deck. Proper playing card stock is a laminate, "insanely expensive"--1000 sheets $660; 12 pt not laminate $250-280.
Linen is very expensive, more common in Europe.

Ballpark for art $3-5000. Make sure your art is good. Don't forget you have to sell the game before people will play it. (Lew: the old guide for novels was, a good novel with a bad color won’t sell, a bad novel with a good cover will. Presumably the same still applies, and to games as well.) Art should be at least 300 dpi.

Use high-end graphics programs, not Word for rules. Your rules are art, high quality PDF or Adobe Illustrator etc. file (InDesign). Printers use CMYK color. RGB won't convert well, blacks will be 90% gray. Bleeds are one eighth inch or three, gameboards 5/8 bleed. Purples and oranges a problem. Purple changes. Oranges hard to match. Avoid.

Set type in Illustrator, not Photoshop. (Lew: Photoshop is a bitmap program, keeping track of the location of every pixel (dot). Illustrator is vector graphics, keeping track of the formulas that define the objects. This makes for smaller files, but especially good because it scales easily, the program just recalculates the formula.)


US vs. China. Print your first game in US, then look to China. China cheaper. You can sue someone in the US if things go drastically wrong. China varies a lot, not much recourse. Catalyst recently had Chinese manufacturer vanish on them.

For a million units he got within a quarter per unit for Mattel vs. China cost. (Lew: Hasbro has a million square foot factory with injection molding equipment in New England. So they can do their own manufacturing.)

US you get your stuff in 4-6 weeks, China 90-120 days.

Make sure you get a “landed” price from China. $2,500 for a half container, $5K full container.

Rulebook 22 to 48 cents (per sheet). 60 pound paper. B&W. "Color is about five times more expensive 20 times more impact". 4 pages to a sheet.

Assembly. Can do it yourself. Shrink-wrapper expensive.

Custom plastics, go to China. Mold costs $20K in US vs $3,500 in China. Small run in pewter may be cheaper. Find someone with a mold that fits your requirements.

Wood pieces don’t use molds. (Lew: I understand wood pieces often come for Eastern Europe.)

Piece sources: Plastics for Games UK. Mr Chips US.

And a bit related to publicity: a GenCon 10 by 10 booth cost $1,300. I’ll interject here that every year at Origins, and probably GenCon as well (I’ve only been there once), you see little companies selling one or two games. The next year and following they’re not there, because it in’t worth the costs of booth and personnel and travel to do it again (if it was the first time...).

Where have "American games" gone?

Where have "American Games" gone? American games have lots of atmosphere as well as theme. This is as opposed to so many Euro games that have a so-called "theme", but the theme has no effect on actual play. "Atmosphere" induces a feeling in players that they are participating in or about to see something strongly related to the theme. The atmosphere may have nothing to do with reality. For example, the game Winds of Plunder (GMT) has almost nothing to do with the activities of real pirates, but it "feels" like pirates to the players. And in the past, American games included lots of dice rolling. Axis and Allies is an example.

At least one bastion of "new" American games is Fantasy Flight Games. Their new games positively drip with atmosphere, through miniatures and boards that look like artwork and lots of illustrations (usually on lots of cards). But there are rarely any dice. In other words, the "new" American game emphasizes atmosphere, but appeals to Euro players by using no dice. Cards substitute for the chance element, just as in many Euros. The games tend to be more complex than Euros to help maintain the atmosphere ("chrome", anyone?). I don't know whether their many-pieces lots-of-rules (if you include the cards) plastic-piece-dominated games, many designed in-house, have a gameplay that will attract people through many playings, but the atmosphere is immediately attractive. And that's what is needed nowadays to sell games, an immediately attractive atmosphere embodied in the comment "that looks cool, let's play".

More on this another time.

The Nature of Games in the Twenty-first Century

This originally appeared on gamecareerguide (you can click the title of this post) on 5 Mar 09

The Nature of Games in the Twenty-first Century

Lewis Pulsipher

“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.” Herbert B. Swope

Games have changed over the past few decades, because player preferences have changed. It’s hard to say whether video games helped cause this, or merely take advantage of the differences.

If you are designing for publication, you are not designing a game for you–you are much too unusual to be representative of a large target audience. As a designer you need to be aware of these changes. If the target audience for a game is people 50 and older, their game interests will be quite different from those of the latest generation (“millennials”, born around 1980 and younger). I am going to contrast present-day preferences with those of the 1950s-80s, and you’ll see how video games fit these newer preferences.

Here is a list of these characteristics, then I’ll discuss each one:

· Positive scoring mechanisms that reinforce success/encourage the player to continue

· Disinclination to plan or study

· Players won't write things down

· Players won’t do even simple math

· Players want a reduced number of plausible choices, and not many pieces/items to deal with

· Not much "down time"

· No lookup tables

· Episodic

· Dice vs. cards

· No player elimination

· Simple; short

· Pacifism

· Sharing/cooperation

· Much stronger visual orientation

· Uncertainty of information is much more common

· Player interaction without overt conflict

· Generational differences

(These remarks address both non-electronic and video games. Most of game design is the same whether you use computers or not, and if you’re starting to learn game design, you should be designing non-electronic games because it’s easy to experiment with your results, rather than be caught in the “production trap” where you spend almost all of your time trying to get the video game to work. See"Pulling the Plug: In Defense of Non-Digital Teaching and Learning"

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/602/pulling_the_plug_in_defense_of_.php.)

Positive scoring mechanisms that reinforce success/encourage the player to continue

A great many boardgames now use point scoring to determine success, and this was adopted by video games decades ago. Moreover, have you ever seen a game take points away, or run points into the negative? The purpose of points is to immediately reinforce what a player has done, and to encourage the player to continue. In contrast, an older game like Monopoly uses money as a substitute for points, and you lose money almost as often as you gain it. Other old games such as chess and checkers have no reinforcing mechanisms–you lose pieces and rarely gain them.

Disinclination to plan or study

Games tend to be more active, more frenetic, than in the past. People want to DO more than they want to think.

In the video game world, simpler games can include the rules within the game, with minimal reading. More complex games such as Civilization IV have manuals, but few players read them, even though those who do read learn enough to become experts long before the players who don’t read the manual.

In non-electronic games this tendency manifests in “Sequence of Play” rules. In older games, rules were written to be read thoroughly before play. They were organized to be easily referenced when a player forgot a detail. Now most rules are written in Sequence of Play style, on the assumption that the players will try to play the game while reading the rules for the first time. If that’s true, then the rules must follow the order in which the players will try to do something in the game. This makes for a poor reference, unfortunately. But the fact is, most game players want to be taught how to play rather than read the rules, and if no one can teach them, they often try to learn the game as they play.

Players won't write things down

Many non-electronic game publishers want nothing that requires written records in a game, and that’s a given in video games. The typical mechanism used in non-electronic games is a scoring track where a marker indicates the current score for each player.

My boardgame Britannia, originally published in 1986, had always required use of a scoresheet to write down victory points. When the second edition was published in 2006 by Fantasy Flight Games, they did not want to require players to write anything. At first they were going to use a scoring track, but I suggested that in a four-five hour wargame, likely someone would bump the game board or otherwise foul up the scoring. So they decided to include scoring counters in three denominations. As players score, they receive appropriate counters.

Many Britannia players, given a choice, will still keep score on a scoresheet. But when players agree not to keep track of the score separately, then the counters provide some uncertainty about scores, and consequently about who might be ahead.

Players won’t do even simple math

People are now very poor at doing math in their heads–“new math” and calculators have had a lot to do with this. I’ve seen intelligent young people count up the dots on dice one by one rather than quickly make the sum. And I’ve known intelligent young people who could not figure out the amount of a 10% tip at a restaurant (let alone 15%).

If this is true, why would people want to do math as part of a game, unless it was specifically a mathematical game? Video games take care of this automatically, of course, but boardgame designers have had to adjust how they do things.

Players want a reduced number of plausible choices, and not many pieces/items to deal with

Many popular strategy (war)games of the 60s and 70s involved moving dozens of cardboard counters each turn. There were many choices, much to think about. This has gone out of style: in a sense we’re back to centuries-old traditional games where only one piece is moved at a time. This “piece”, in video games, is usually the player’s avatar.

This helps avoid “analysis paralysis”, where the player has so much to think about that he cannot decide what to do.

This is related to entertainment: fewer people nowadays regard a thinking game as entertaining. So they want a game of physical challenges, or a game with only a few plausible choices at any given time, perhaps we could even say, a game where intuition (which is quick) is just as useful as logic (which frequently is not quick).

Not much "down time"

Players are less content with “waiting for their turn” than in the past. They want to constantly participate in a game. There is much less interest in patience, or in downtime that enables one to plan one’s next move.

Boardgames and card games can achieve downtime reduction with constant trading of resources (Settlers of Catan), with simultaneous movement, with small partial plays during an overall turn so that there’s less time between each part of a player’s turn, with interrupts (such as event cards) that a player can execute while another is playing. Video games are frequently simultaneous, all players playing at the same time, so the problem is rarely an issue.

No lookup tables

Lookup tables, such as dice-roll combat tables, were common in boardgames of the 60s and 70s. Now, players don’t want to look anything up. Often, cards are used to supply the rules/tables needed at a given time. In video games, of course, the computer keeps track of the tables and the rules.

Episodic

People have shorter attention spans, perhaps because there are so many distractions, so many ways to spend one’s leisure time. In any case, games tend to be more episodic these days. Many boardgames are a limited number of turns: you don’t actually play to completion (where one player predominates), you play for a while and then rely on the score to determine who won. Many card games are naturally episodic, as you play one “hand” after another. In video games, the entire concept of “levels” is a way of making a game episodic. The end of each level is a natural point to pause or even to save the game and stop playing for a while.

Dice vs. cards

This is not something strongly related to video games, but is obvious in boardgames. Many people nowadays do not like dice rolling in games. The preferred method of introducing a random element is cards. Cards are more manageable than dice, and much nicer to look at as well. Yet there are still many popular games, such as Risk and Axis and Allies, that are “dice-fests.” In video games the action of “dice” (random chance) is hidden away, but it’s often there; nonetheless, many players don’t like to feel that what happens is randomly determined.

No player elimination

In most video games, a player is never eliminated; he can go back to his save game, or he simply “respawns”. In older non-electronic games, players were often eliminated, knocked out of the game, as they are in Monopoly. Of course, in a two player game when one is “eliminated”, the game is over; here I’m talking about games with more than two sides. Today, player elimination in boardgames is quite unusual.

Players may have an inviolate area to survive in, or the game may simply have a time limit that will be reached before anyone can be eliminated. Moreover, in many cases, the game is designed so that most players have a chance to win at the very end of the game–do you want to continue to play if you have no chance at all? For example, there may be a progressively increasing scoring scale, or some mechanism allowing a "surprise" win. Insofar as the popular “Euro” boardgames have grown out of family games (some people refer to them as "family games on steroids"), it is not surprising that there is no player elimination, as that would leave someone out of the family fun.

Simple; short

Games tend to be simpler and shorter. “Simpler” is related to a dislike of reading rules (many teenagers skim almost everything they read, rather than read it thoroughly). “Short” is a matter of attention span. This sometimes means games that rely on intuition rather than logic, as intuition comes quickly, while logic generally requires information-gathering and long thought (sometimes resulting in "analysis paralysis"). Many people simply won't play a long game, or think they won't. (They often find that if the game is satisfying, they'll play two or three hours, at times; but many aren't willing to try.)

The trend in video games toward short experiences (“casual” games), and towards episodic play, reflects these changes.

Pacifism

This can be quite surprising for the “hard core” video gamers, who tend to prefer games where things blow up or die. But remember that half of game players are women, and the great majority of female game players are not interested in violence.

It is quite easy to find gamers who just will not “attack” other players. Games that are essentially multiplayer solitaire are fairly common in the boardgame world–you can’t do anything to harm or much to hinder the other players’ situations. “Euro”-aficionados might put this differently, saying that the games use indirect means of influencing other players rather than the direct means common in wargames.

The extraordinarily popular boardgame (and now video game) Settlers of Catan includes the “robber” in order to give players some way to negatively affect other players; yet this can be seen as a kind of kludge, perhaps added on when the game was otherwise too much like multiplayer solitaire.

Sharing/cooperation

The millennial generation is known to prefer sharing and cooperation more than preceding generations did. Competition is sometimes frowned upon by parents and teachers. We also now have a higher proportion of adult women playing games than in the past, who tend to be less interested in competition and more interested in cooperation.

People are much more interested in games where you build up things, than games in which you tear down an opponent. (Yes, the hardcore video game players are an exception–they often like to destroy.)

Perhaps the popularity of the Wii and Wii-like games reflects this change. Dislike of player elimination is another indication. The out-and-out pacifism of some players is another symptom.

Much stronger visual orientation

In the age of color television, of computers, of the Internet, this is hardly surprising. Inasmuch as people are less likely to read, they are more likely to be interested in images and good looks. Just as some players will criticize a video game for “outdated graphics”, players will criticize boardgames for “boring bits” (components). One reason why cards are much more popular, and dice less, in non-electronic games is that cards can include colorful, varied, interesting illustrations.

I’ve even heard a teenager say that music “isn’t real” until he sees something to go along with hearing the music. Hardly any older person would have that point of view (except, perhaps, for opera?).

Uncertainty of information is much more common

Traditional games, even commercial ones such as Monopoly and Risk, have “perfect information” or nearly so. On the other hand, card games were the bastion of hidden information. Early video games provided perfect information, as nothing was hidden from the players. Now hidden information (“fog of war”) is the norm, thanks to the power of modern processors. In boardgames, too, the use of cards and upside-down tiles is much more common, introducing uncertainty.

Player interaction without overt conflict

In wargames the inevitable conflict results in constant and strong interaction between players. In traditional commercial games not about war, such as Scrabble and Monopoly, some interaction exists but is not based on violence. Interaction in card games can vary a great deal from one design to another. Modern boardgames have many ways of encouraging interaction that were uncommon or unknown decades ago, such as auctions and trading. Early video games, almost always one player against the computer, technically involved no player interaction at all, though there was plenty of interaction with the computer opposition.

Much of the interaction in video games is still based in warfare and violence. But we have seen an increase in non-violent games, as in The Sims, in resource management games such as Settlers, in “casual” games such as Bejeweled and Diner Dash, and in a great many games made for the Wii. You could argue a case that the “real future” of interactive video entertainment is in games with more than one player and with lots of interaction among players, often of a non-violent nature.

Generational differences. I have already described many characteristics that differ between generations, here I’ll try to generalize about them. Some people prefer to think that everyone is the same, but employers and researchers have seen that there are definite differences between generations, and have described how this affects game preferences. Entire books have been written about generational differences, this is only a taste that will help you be aware of how differently people think about games.

The “Baby Boomer” generation (before “X”) is highly competitive and willing to forego immediate gratification for future reward. They don’t need constant encouragement to continue playing, in contrast to much younger people who do expect immediate reward for any accomplishment. “Gen X” (born around 1964 to around 1980) tends to be the generation of the lone hero, in game terms, while “Millennials” or Gen Y (born around 1980 and later) tend to think in terms of sharing and of groups accomplishing tasks. The MMO is the new face of video gaming, then, because it can accommodate both, in the individual adventuring that appeals to “X” and the multi-player raiding that appeals to millennials.

As you can see, modern video games reflect most of these changes very well, though early video games often did not. I’d guess that the changes came first, and video games reflect them, but video games have certainly reinforced these differences as they’ve become part of the national and international consciousness.

More about Patents

Yehuda B. has tracked game patents for some years (example: http://jergames.blogspot.com/2008/10/september-board-and-card-game-patents.html). The obvious and often impossibly useless nature of these patents only reinforces the idea that the patent office is incompetent, and that patent lawyers prey on the hopes of foolish inventors every day. I think most would fail in court because they're too obvious, or because or "prior art" (the "product" already being in use for a considerable period before the patent was filed).

Yehuda is doing a great service. I've read some patents and know how confusing and obscure they can be. He often cannot figure out just what the heck the filer is talking about.

Owing to limited time I only read two blogs regularly, both by video game designers now in academia who understand the value of using non-electronic games; yet I know that Yehuda's blog is very worthy of your attention.

Patents and games

Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Non-electronic and video games are rarely patented, both because it is expensive ($3,000-$10,000) and because a patent only protects a particular expression of an idea. Ideas alone are not patentable, though a business process may be. At least, that's how it is supposed to work. Patents are supposed to protect inventors from predatory companies who steal their product (not their idea) and mass produce and undersell the originator--something that used to be quite common long ago. Patents protect a particular expression of an idea in a product. Further, you're not supposed to be able to patent the obvious, because it's obvious. But somewhere along the line the patent office in the USA lost track of what it was about, and started to let people patent ideas, sometimes obvious ones, rather than particular products. One well-known game patent is for "tapping", turning a card sideways, in Magic: the Gathering. TAPping probably shouldn't be patented, and I don't think it would stand up in court because it's so obvious; further, other CCG makers seem to get around it, probably by giving it a different name.

So the telephone patent, if it had not actually expired, could not be used to stop Skype. BUT if the patent office had acted then as now, the patent would be for any long-distance communication over a wire (even though it was already done with the telegraph, of course), and would interfere.

I read some time ago that the patent office was going to allow someone to patent a particular plotline for a story. The patent-holder was then going to require royalties (in the manner of "patent trolls") from anyone whose story vaguely resembled that plot. This would be a true disaster, as well as just plain stupid, but I've heard nothing more about it so maybe the patent office had an attack of sanity.

Here is where the bull-in-a-chinashop behavior of the patent office has interfered with games. At GenCon Mike Gray of Hasbro pointed out that the big problem with non-electronic games, especially in the mass market, is that someone has to read the rules. I myself have advocated including a DVD in the game box with a video that is, for all practical purposes, someone teaching the game owner how to play the game. Publishers (including Hasbro) don't want to go for that, because of the expense. But Mike told me that the idea of someone calling an automated phone number to be taught how to play a game had been patented! This is a patent of an idea, which should not be allowed (especially because it is obvious), not a patent of a particular product; but the result is that anyone using this method would be required to pay royalties. And game players (and designers) suffer as a result.

I have tried but failed to find this patent through Google. What I did find was pretty interesting, some game patents that I'd say are "really strange", or really obvious.

Why Design Games?

A form of this article appeared on gamecareerguide, January, 2009. You can click the post heading for the original.

Why design games?

“I’m going to make a lot of money designing games”. This is a common notion, but rarely true in practice. Even in the video game industry, few game designers “get rich”. They usually work for a game developer full time, work fairly long hours, and aren’t paid particularly well (there are exceptions), because so many people want to be game designers. In fact, on average they’re paid less than the programmers, and no more than the artists! They are not paid royalties, though they might get a bonus for a game that sells very well.

Moreover, in the video game industry, people are rarely hired off the street as game designers. Instead they must serve an apprenticeship of many years as testers or (if they’re lucky and good) as level designers, or in other non-designer positions. Is the money they might eventually make worth it?

In non-electronic games, most designers are freelancers (like novelists) and barely make a profit. A few of the most famous, such as Klaus Tauber and Reiner Kniza, can actually become millionaires as freelancers. A few work for big companies such as Hasbro (which owns Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley, Wizards of the Coast, and Avalon Hill amongst others). The typical boardgame, card game, RPG (role playing game), or CCG (collectible card game) does not bring in the revenues of video games, and royalties are low, so most freelance designers have a “day job” just as most novelists do. Amongst novelists, Glenn Cook, most well known for the “Black Company” fantasy novels, wrote while commuting to his day job at a General Motors assembly plant, a job he retired from. Alan R. Moon, a very well known boardgame designer who has won two of the very important German Game of the Year awards, has said he would have had to get a part-time job if not for his second win with Ticket to Ride.

One observer suggested you could spend the time you use to design games, and instead pick up cans and bottles for deposits and recycling fees, and make as much money.

In other words, don’t design games in order to make a lot of money, because you probably won’t. You may not make any money at all.

But please, if you're going to call yourself a "game designer", then design seriously. Don't be a dilettante, don't dabble in it rather than do it half-heartedly. Or design just for yourself, but don't call yourself a "game designer".

Game designers as a group suffer from people who call themselves game designers, but work on just one game, produce a weak (though possibly pretty) prototype, don't alpha test it, and then inflict it on volunteer playtesters who walk away with the opinion that so-called game designers are "amateurs", or that "heck, anyone could design a game that weak". If you can't play your game solo, why expect anyone else to play it? Get your game to a decently enjoyable state before you inflict it on others, or you'll give game design a bad name.

Recognize also that in the "outside world", you won't get much respect. People who don't play games, or who only play traditional games on holidays (as many older people who aren't into video games), tend to assume that game design is easy, that it's "kid's stuff" that any adult can manage to do. So why respect someone who designs games? Or worse, they may wonder why any adult would be "playing with games" instead of doing something productive with their lives! (My 80-year-old English mother-in-law cannot understand why I spend my time teaching young people how to design games--though I'm paid to do it. To her it's just not an adult occupation.)

Even if you do well, you won’t be famous (again with a few exceptions). Yes, we know who Sid Meier is, or CliffyB (but that’s because he blogs), but mostly we know designers by their works. How many know who Carmack and Romero, or Will Wright are? But mention their works (Doom and Quake, The Sims) and they're recognized. I’m lucky to have a very unusual name, but more people know me through games, especially Britannia, than through my name. A game designer may be the “least unfamous” person among his friends and acquaintances, but he’s not famous the way an athlete or actor may be famous.

So if it’s not money or fame, what is it? Why design games? There’s the thrill of making something out of nothing, as an artist does with pen and paper, a composer does with music, a painter does with canvas and brush, etc. It may not be quite like what a woman feels when she bears a child, but it can be something like it.

Perhaps you’re driven to do it, the way some people are driven to write novels even without an expectation of publication. Perhaps you enjoy being creative, and this is your chosen field. When I came back to designing boardgames as an older person, after being “away” for twenty years, it was the realization that this was the best way I had to touch a large number of lives, if only through entertainment. Or you may love the thrill of seeing your game on the shelves, or of being asked to sign a copy of your game. It can certainly be a rush.

At Origins Game Fair 2008, as I was sitting at a booth talking to a boardgame publisher, someone walked by, evidently saw my name tag, shook my hand, said something like "Britannia is an excellent game, thank you for getting it back into print", and walked off. There's no substitute for that, folks, or for hearing someone say “I love this game”, when they’re talking about one you designed, or to hear someone say they’ve played your 4-5 hour game more than five hundred times. Not many people get to experience that.

You can love game design for many reasons. For me, it is truly fascinating to play your brand new prototype for the first time, not because it will be all that much fun (at this point it probably won’t be), but fascinating to see how things work or don’t work the way you expected, to “see what happens”, to puzzle out how to improve it. It’s also fascinating to watch the first time other people play, and perhaps see how different the game works than when you played it solo. Design because you like to design games, and like the “incidents”. It’s rarely a living, but it’s cool.

Game Crafters (POD games)

Recently a POD (print on demand) game producer came online, thegamecrafter.com (you can click on the title of this post). I wondered whether they were actually legitimate, but at GenCon I found the company booth and spent some time talking with them.

They are still experimenting and figuring out how to make their business work efficiently. One of their problems is in sending games to individual consumers. They have a more or less industry-standard size box (10+ by 10+ inches), but have been relying on the box as a shipping container, and UPS has been clobbering many of them. They have a small sturdy box for games that are primarily or entirely cards, but it's much too small to ship safely via UPS. They are thinking of shifting to US Postal Service for shipping to consumers, which will certainly be better for the small boxes and might work better for the large ones. (Among other things, the games can be insured and fulfillment of insurance would be someone else's problem, not Gamecrafters.)

I learned from Ben Clarke of ImagiGrafx in GenCon seminars why games have an insert (which Gamecrafter has not used): to prevent the pieces shifting around inside the box during shipping. TGC has indeed seen some problems because of shifting, and may have to use an insert, which will of course raise their prices some.

I referred them to EAI Education online for pieces in general and the lovely stackable pieces that so many players like. I also suggested they do something like what Lost Battalion does (they also use POD machines): offer to print "pieces" on stickers, and include some kind of blank piece (Lost Bn uses wooden disks) so that player can stick the stickers on the pieces. This would allow them to do games with more complex piece assortments than pawns.

They use JPG or PNG, converting them to PDF so that they can avoid problems with so many different PDF formats. This contrasts with traditional printers, who usually use PDFs.

Their card printing is in multiples of 16, so the magic 55 card rule does not apply.

And I never did ask where they're actually located . . .

WBC 2009

I was at WBC (World Boardgaming Championships) Thursday through Saturday in Lancaster, PA. It seemed to be as well attended as last year, one fewer person participating in the Britannia tournament, for example.

Some of the best Brit players tried out Barbaria (the dice version) and Frankia. These two games have elicited interest from publishers, perhaps I'll say more later.

I talked about getting into the game design business at a seminar that was surprisingly well attended, about 20 people. There were so many questions I didn't get very far into my spiel, but the slides and a recording from last year at Origins are on my Web site (pulsiphergames.com).

Don Greenwood (convention director) reports: "Attendance was up for the convention as a whole and that was reflected in tournament participation as well with 17 events drawing triple-digit participation and the average attendance for the 151 events increasing 2.3 to 49.4, buoyed by 230 players for Dominion and 220 for Ticket to Ride." That average is probably a mean, I often wonder what the median was in these kinds of stats.

In the Brit tournament, red did very well early on. Blue did poorly throughout. This is fascinating because, in playtesting before this edition was published, blue was best and red worst. And in a past year the wins were very, very even. In games with inexperienced players, red tends to do better, but there aren't many inexperienced players in the WBC Britannia tournament. There were lots of green-yellow deals that left the Welsh unscathed--a stronger opponent for red, and letting yellow charge northward to keep down the Picts. Perhaps that was part of blue's problem. OTOH I saw Mark Smith suffer in a game where all his opponents (he was Roman) refused to submit, even the Belgae! I wasn't able to stay for the final, but I ran into Jim Jordan at GenCon and he said Rick Kirchner (I hope I'm spelling that correctly) had won with green in a close three-way game. He also won his semifinal as green. Rick is a matter-of-fact fellow who doesn't try to BS anyone and just does his thing with a combination of cheerfulness and resignation (see quote below). He has no enemies. Green works well him because it is, most of the time, "on the sidelines", just trying to survive. In the semifinal, for example, Mark Smith and Nick Benedict (Nick was yellow, I cannot recall whether Mark was red or blue) wore each other out while Rick took advantage.

I finally remembered to count king survival in the four semifinal games: 3, 2, 2, and 1, out of the four candidates.

Some notes: Nick Benedict: "Use a scalpel, not a bludgeon." Rick Kirchner: "I'm fighting with butterknives!" (bad dice rolls in the semis). Scott Pfeiffer would like everybody to have boats all the time. This would make for a more interesting game thanks to increased mobility, but would not be historical at all.

Impressions of GenCon

I attended GenCon Indianapolis for the first time last week. I'll have many comments and reports over the next couple weeks, but in the meantime here are a few observations:

It's Big. The convention center is larger than the Columbus center used for Origins, and there are many events in several hotels as well. I think the event count is over 6,000, compared to 4,500 for Origins, but I suspect the events tend to be smaller at Origins.

The exhibition hall dwarfs the one used at Origins. $1,300 for a 10 by 10 foot area. There were even a couple of companies (video game related, it must be said) that had "booth babes". (I talked briefly with one, dressed to be a character from an online trading card game related to Everquest, who travels with the company all over the nation, though she actually comes from California. Big bucks involved here.) The wargame-only publishers such as Clash of Arms, Avalanche, and GMT and others did not exhibit.

Pre-register. When I arrived Thursday about 1, an enormous line of hundreds of people snaked along the sidewalk, all waiting to register. I just walked in to pick up my pre-reg, no line at all at that point. There was another long line Friday.

Seminars. GenCon puts their guests of honor to work. And the results are good panel discussions.

The proportion of male and female appears to be about the same as at Origins (a quarter female). And as at Origins, there are very few black or obviously Hispanic attendees.

A lot more costumes were in evidence than at Origins. One hotel hosted the costume events, I didn't get over there.

One exhibitor mentioned 28,000 attendees, in ads prior to the convention the aim was evidently 30,000. Origins maxed at 15,000 two years ago, and was 10,000 this year.

"Everyone plays video games"--NOT!

I occasionally read someone write that "everyone plays video games now". I suppose this is to contrast with "the old days" when video gaming was unusual, and the players felt they were somehow exceptional.

But it's the long-time video game fans writing this stuff. Even now, "everyone plays video games" is not even close to true. The Entertainment Software Association's own promotional literature says 68% of US households play video games. That leaves 32% that don't. And that's in the US, still a relatively rich nation where people can "waste" money on game consoles and PCs-for-leisure.

Not so many years ago, it made sense to say "half the people in the world have never placed a phone call". They might have talked on the phone after someone else placed the call in some village out in the sticks. I suspect phones are much more common now, but game consoles and PCs are still expensive luxury devices in much of the world.

So, while we probably can no longer say "half the people in the world have never placed a phone call", I'd guess that far more than half the people in the world rarely, if ever, play video games.

Even in the US, probably a third to a half the population rarely, if ever, play video games. The ESA quotes CBS Evening News as saying "A new study found that more than half of adults play video games, about one-fifth play daily or almost every day.”

Sorry, more than half isn't anywhere near "everyone". Get a grip on reality, get out of your insular point of view.

Going into the video game business as an independent company

I know of video game creation schools where students are told, "the game companies will just enslave you, start your own company." (This tends to happen at schools that are located far from video game companies.)

In any case, some people have an entrepreneurial frame of mind and want to start their own companies rather than work for someone else.

Also you may at some time have reason to deal with a small or startup company. At that point it's your duty to yourself to "scout" the company and find out whether they seem to understand their business, or if they're in cloud-cuckoo-land.

I have a few observations about starting a company.

First, a viable business plan is absolutely necessary. You do not want to just stumble into conducting a business the way you might stumble into playing a game. There is no "save game", no "start over"--if you fail, you're done. Many times, if you diligently research a business plan, you'll find that what you thought was reality, isn't. That may or may not change your mind about starting a company, and certainly may change how you go about it, but it's always better to have the option than to blindly go forth.

Even if circumstances change, you can adjust your plan as you go. The most important thing about planning is that it makes you think about what's supposed to happen and where you're trying to go. If you don't know where you're going, how can you ever get there? "Dumb luck" is not a business plan.

When you deal with a small or startup company, if they say something like "business plans don't matter because so many things change so quickly" or "business plans don't matter because no plan survives first contact with the enemy", RUN, don't walk, away from them. In effect, they're hoping to fight fires as they arise, rather than engage in fire prevention. They're hoping rather than planning. They're in cloud-cuckoo-land.

Second, "passion" and "hustle" and "hard work" are not going to magically make you succeed where others have failed. Do you think other startup companies didn't have those characteristics? Especially in the game industry, doesn't everyone who starts a new game company think he's passionate and a hustler and a hard worker? Don't even the big game companies expect people to work ridiculous hours and be very passionate? ("Ridiculous" hours because it's been well known for decades that after several weeks of working, say, 60 hours a week, you'll be no more effective than you were when you worked 40 hours, despite spending more time. This is one reason why most industries have 40 hour workweeks.)

If the small or startup company you're dealing with says they succeed on "passion" or "hard work", most likely they're hoping to succeed, not planning to succeed. Somehow "a miracle will occur". And you know, occasionally it does--but mostly not. If they tell you they're going to succeed where others have not, because they're so passionate about games and they're going to hustle so much, maybe you should find someone who talks business instead of football pep-talk.

Finally, know what business you're in. If you intend to make video games, make sure you behave as though you're in the entertainment business, not the technology business or some other business. There are exceptions, but most of the time video games exist to entertain. See my earlier post "what business are you really in?"

Conventions and writing

I'll be at GenCon for the first time this year. The next two years it is at the same time as WBC, which I prefer for various reasons. And usually it is too close to the start of the college semester (I teach for a living).

I'll also be at WBC (World Boardgaming Championships). I'll be offering my talk about getting into professional game design (same as one of the two I do at Origins).

I am a contributor to Family Games: the 100 Best, which will be published later this year.

I've been asked to contribute to another anthology, a book about non-electronic game design, to be published next year by ETC Press.

My book "Get it Done: Designing Games from Start to Finish" is at 115K words. I'm trying to cut it down because the original aim was 100K.

The 400 Project

Video game developers have created a list of game design tips and maxims called the 400 Project. The original idea was to come up with 400 entries, I think, but the project apparently went dormant in March 2006 at 112. Contributors include some very well-known video game designers.

These are available at
http://www.theinspiracy.com/Current%20Rules%20Master%20List.htm (You can click on the name of this post.) There used to be a downloadable spreadsheet, but I don't see the link now.

Some of the entries are more or less repetitions of others, some are specific to video games, but this list is good food for thought, especially if you want to design standard video-games-as-interactive-puzzles.

What business are you really in?

An example I used with computer networking students about "what business you're really in" is the failure of the great railroad companies (Santa Fe, Union Pacific, NY Central, etc.). The great railroad companies dominated late 19th century business; past the middle of the 20th, most were bankrupt. This happened because they thought they were in the railroad business, when they were actually in the *transportation* business. When the transportation business changed (trucks and good roads, airplanes) and railroads became much less important, they lost out. My point to networkers is that they're in the communication business, not the networking business.

How does this apply to games? Some video game companies apparently think they're in the technology business, when they're actually in the entertainment business (even the ones making "serious" games will prosper if those games are also entertaining, as for example "America's Army"). I think this can be applied to the Sony vs. Nintendo console competition. Sony thinks technology, Nintendo thinks entertainment (also applies in handhelds, it appears). (And this should have been obvious to Sony, because the *really* good technology, PCs, doesn't make it as a major game platform compared with the whimpy consoles.) As another example, many people called "Crysis" a technology demo, but a poor game. The management of the company decried piracy for a failure to sell the game in expected numbers, but the real reason might be that it wasn't much of a game.

To move down one level of complexity, some video game companies think they're in the story-telling business, or even more specifically in the movie-making business, when they're really in the video game business. Video games are not like movies, and stories are not the most important component of most video games. (See http://www.costik.com/gamnstry.html) At one time in the video game industry, film-maker wannabes published "games" that were more cinematics and cut-scenes than games, and that turned out to be a failure.

So we see proposals to treat video games, and video game production, the same way films are treated. I think this is a mistake. Every industry finds its own way of doing things. Trying to pretend you're something else is very likely to end badly.

This is the difference between saying "we should do such-and-such because that's how the film industry does it", and "the film industry has a different way of doing such-and-such, and we can adapt it this way because it makes sense." If it makes good sense, do it. If it just happens to be how some model does it, forget it.

Comparing video game and non-electronic game conferences

Some people might be interested in the contrasts between video game conferences and non-electronic game conferences. In this case I'm drawing primarily from Origins Game Fair (Columbus, OH) and Triangle Game Conference (TGC) (Raleigh, NC).

TGC is a relatively small, new conference, somewhere over 700 attending this inaugural year, but almost all of those people are either industry professionals or students who want to be in the industry. There is virtually no game playing at the conference.

Among the 10,000-15,000 at Origins, most are consumers, gamers, although there are plenty of industry professionals. (The variance in attendance reflects the effects of the recession: 15,000 two years ago, 10,000 this year.) Playing games is a big reason for people to attend.

At Origins the focus is playing games just for the heck of it, with a few prize tournaments such as the U.S. Yu-Gi-Oh championship. At TGC the focus is giving and receiving information about video game development. This reflects the non-technological nature of non-electronic game development and publishing, and the highly technological nature of video game publishing. Non-electronic games is a much smaller industry than video games, even though we can point to one freelance designer who makes over a million dollars a year (Reiner Knizia) and one huge American company (Hasbro and its subsidiaries) along with some very large German companies. Yet one of the larger American companies, Fantasy Flight Games, has smaller annual revenues than the budget of many AAA list video games.

As a consumer-oriented affair, Origins charges just $60 for up to five days (and free to teachers), though playing in many of the games and attending the historical seminars is an additional cost per event. Game playing at Origins fall into categories, boardgames, role-playing games (including "LARP", live action role-playing), collectible card games, and miniatures games. There are also seminars at Origins, many about history, many about games. TGC was $100 per day, $25 per day to students, for a two day meeting. Origins also has a $10 ticket for people who just want to go through the vendor hall and art show.

I can't say how much deal-making might occur at a conference such as TGC, but one of the reasons for a professional designer to attend Origins is to talk with, and perhaps demo a game to, publishers. I personally don't feel a need to travel 500 miles just to play games, but evidently many people do.

Origins is also more celebrity-oriented than TGC. There are several guests of honor who conduct events during the week, and the venerable "Origins Awards" are voted on and awarded to the best games in various categories. Yet there's very little of the "rock star" or hero worship I've heard happens at GDC, but which I did not see at TGC.

There are smaller conferences comparable in size to TGC, such as the six day World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, PA (1,500 attendees) and four-day PrezCon in Charlottesville, VA (4-500). Families often attend these events. These affairs are even more consumer-oriented in the form of organized tournaments, with few seminars and not many vendors. The tournaments are for bragging rights only (plaques awarded for best players) rather than prize money; there are also team competitions and other competition-oriented features. An award is given to best tournament referee ("GM"). There are about 125 tournaments at WBC, in both board and card games (most of them extending over several days). These can vary from simple games like "Liar's Dice" to big 4-5 hour contests such as my game "Britannia," to epics that take 6 hours and more to play (e.g. Advanced Civilization--the boardgame that preceded the computer game). Both conventions are board and card game oriented, with virtually no RPGs or CCGs.

In the unlikely event that video game production comes to use standardized methods, perhaps the conferences will become more consumer-oriented.

Games of strategy--seeing the possibilities

Some people play games like some people "sound bathe", that is, have music playing but don't really pay attention, don't really LISTEN. They're not particularly interested in exactly what they're doing, and they're not putting much effort into it.

In many Euro-style games (and let's realize that this is such a large category that there are always many exceptions to any generalization), players WANT just a few choices, and then the play of the game revolves around which choice to make. The "best" choice depends on the situation, and the better players recognize which is the best choice in given circumstances, though generally there is no choice that will always work out best in a given situation.

In other games, including many "old" games and some of the new ones, there are many choices, and one of the skills is seeing all the possibly-good choices in a situation. Better players will not only see those additional choices, they may be skilled in influencing the course of the game so that those choices are available when they next play.

A sure way to spot this point of view is the gamer who plays a game once, then criticizes it for poor play balance or too few choices. While the game may indeed have those characteristics, it can also be the case that the player has assumed he's recognized all the choices, and all the balance possibilities, the first time he played.

I recall a young player at the WBC Britannia tournament (his first Brit game) who, when he finished, said he couldn't see how he could have done anything differently (no, he wasn't near winning). It was only after some expert players talked with him a while that he realized there were large choices he hadn't seen, and also, that even small choices made a difference in the long term. Perhaps he wasn't accustomed to games that did not reveal the choices immediately.

We have an essential difference:
"It's important but I haven't figured it out yet."
or
"I haven't even realized it's important."

So the expectation in those Euros that are essentially "family games on steroids" is that the first is the typical situation after one play, yet in many strategy games there will be a strong element of the second after one play.

Perhaps this is a reason (not a sufficient reason or necessary reason) why there is the emphasis on multiple ways to win in Euro games: so that the players will easily see at least one way to win at first playing.

I'll take an example from my own experience. Here's a comment I ran across about Britannia. "Innovative, but only interesting once. After that, it's just rolling dice for 6 long hours, very boring. Green is horrible. Purple is a one shot wonder also." Here's a person who thinks he can see all possible strategies the first time he plays a game. Is that because he plays simple (shallow?) games? This player clearly didn't have a clue about many of the strategies in the game. I'm curious if he wondered what the people who've played 500 times were doing? I suppose he didn't know how intensely the game is played, how (as Tom Vasel says in his review, it "may satisfy the itch in players looking for a deeper encounter, an epic game that is all about the experience."). Rather than consider the possibility that he'd missed something, the commenter dismissed the game. (Btw, there are lots of perfectly reasonable reasons why some people do not like Britannia, e.g. the length, the dice rolling, the "scripting", the need to plan well ahead. Poor play balance is not one of them, clearly.) This is the kind of comment I'd expect from a "shallow" player, perhaps someone who plays shallow games, though maybe just someone who doesn't easily see strategic possibilities in this kind of game.

I'm afraid there are a great many players of this kind nowadays, which may be one reason so many games are only played a few times: either they are shallow, so there isn't much there, or the "shallow" player isn't going to play any game many times because either he gets it easily and exhausts the possibilities, or he doesn't get it at all.

Is this "bad?" I suppose that's a matter of opinion. Designers need to recognize it, in any case.

Miscellaneous info and observations

Another of my articles (not directly relevant to game design) on GameCareerGuide (you can click the title of this post):

"Industry Hopefuls: Prepare Intelligently" 7 July 09 http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/757/industry_hopefuls_prepare_.php

==

When it comes down to it, should a designer in playtest stages do what he wants with the rules of play, or what the playtesters recommend? Or what works out for the players in play, which may be a little different than the recommendations he gets?

I believe I'm very receptive to what players suggest (or what I see that they would prefer, as they play). If people take the time to play my game, I ought to be receptive, else why bother? I think playtesters may be more likely to offer suggestions if they know the designer is receptive to them.

I'll contrast this with, say, Microsoft's attitude that they really do know what's best for people, even when people say otherwise. I'm sure they often ignore the computer equivalent of playtesting input. The original huge controller for the XBox is a famous case. So is that Paperclip help in Microsoft Office that drove so many computer users right up the wall--they finally stopped making it the default.

I'll say this: if you're not willing to change your non-electronic game, you're more likely to end up with a "developer" who will change it as he likes regardless of your preferences.

==

Video game designers tend to say "I know what people will like". Non-electronic game designers tend to say "maybe people will like this, let's see." A harsh person might say that this the difference between the person who thinks he knows and the one who recognizes that wisdom comes from knowing what you do not know. More likely, though, it's a matter of necessity, the video game designer must plan all the details of the game before there's a game to play; the non-electronic game designer can make a playable prototype while still hazy about many of the details.

Origins follow-up

Origins follow-up

Origins says over ten thousand gaming enthusiasts enjoyed the 2009 show, down 18% from 2008. 2008 was itself a down year owing to very high gas prices; the previous year the count was around 15,000. (This is unique attendees, if someone is there five days he counts as one attendee.) Day-pass tickets (instituted in 2008) were up 16%; the total includes those folks. So in contrast, 2007, which did not have the inexpensive day pass, approaches double the attendance of 2009!

They also say "more vendors"; whether that is in comparison only to 2008 I don't know. But I am sure that the square footage is way down from 2006-2007.

Trying to balance the colors in Brit-like games

I recently played the Diceless Barbaria prototype solo, as well as several scenarios of Frankia (also diceless).

I used to try to play early prototypes as though each nation was independent. I wanted to see what were the most natural moves for each, and try to arrange the game so that the most natural moves matched what they did historically. But I found that this didn't work out when the influence of colors was introduced. So now I always keep in mind the colors I've selected.

I still want the most natural play to be the one made historically, but I have to be aware of how an unnatural play by one nation may help another so much that the game will be skewed.

I'm not really worrying about how strong the nations were historically, I'm worrying about how strong (or weak) they need to be to make their most natural moves match history.

I know that in any game, unless I put a real straitjacket around the player, as in many of the SPI games from back when, the game is rarely going to follow history. What I want is one where I can say, after a player has moved, "yes, that's just what they did historically". I am striving for effect, largely, relying on cause only in the very largest sense--because designing games for cause is a chimera (barring, perhaps, highly-detailed tactical games where you use made-up scenarios rather than known historical battles).

In Frankia, which is a fairly small game (around 30 pieces on the board at any time), I have taken to counting pieces of each color, and areas occupied, after each turn. I'm trying to be aware of what it would be like to play a color: are there times when a color has few pieces and little to do? Sometimes there's nothing I can do about that (as when yellow in Britannia have only the Scots and R-Bs), but I can try to avoid it as I try different nation combinations.

Origins Game Fair 09

I was at my sixth consecutive Origins Game Fair last week, and I have to say that it has "diminished". Where it really hit was in the lack of exhibitors and apparent lack of attendees. The auction appeared to be in a smaller area with fewer items and fewer bidders, but that's hard to judge. Smaller booths for companies, or no booths at all for hobby game mainstays (Days of Wonder, GMT), were the order of the day. I was told GAMA raised the booth prices, but other folks didn't seem to think that was a sufficient explanation. Matrix Games, the makers of electronic wargames, were not there. Those "Really Big Show" booths that used to dominate the floor from WotC, WizKids, AEG, and so on were all gone. The aisles were all wide, the area at the end of the hall where the larping practice took place was even larger than in past years. We still had the slightly pathetic little booths of self-publishers who have one or two games and were trying to drum up interest. They usually find it isn't worth the cost, and aren't back the next year, replaced with another set. I admire their moxie, but maybe not their business sense.

FantasyFlightGames was there but no Britannia copies were in sight (they could have sold out, they had two days before I got there).

The economy is clearly part of the effect. Avalanche had a booth but sent only one person instead of three. The attendance seemed to be down, and certainly judging from attendance at seminars, there were fewer people at Origins this year. (Official attendance may look better because this is the second year for the $10 ticket that is only for the exhibits and such.) I talked with someone who'd just been to an engineers conference where attendance was 40-60%, and he said others there had told a similar story about other conferences. Who knows what it will be like next year? I expect the recovery from this debt-based recession to be very slow and limited, as we're not willing to stop going further into debt as a country.

The usual Chinese companies trying to drum up business manufacturing game parts seemed to be missing. Someone told me that the minimum order from China had risen from $5,000 to 10,000 PIECES of an item. Though I talked with someone else who had found a Chinese producer of nice plastic parts willing to make just 2,000 of each.

Some companies are doing well. Decision Games is growing in their magazine production. "Strategy & Tactics" has a 15-20K circulation altogether, more without the game. They emphasize analytical articles and maps maps maps. But their "Fire & Movement" magazine was not mentioned in the Decision Games update, so it may be that magazines about games rather than about history aren't doing well.

Attendance at Monte Cook's seminars--admittedly, they weren't in the convention book, but were listed on easels in main thoroughfares--was quite low, considering how well-known he is in RPGdom (wrote the 3rd Edition Dungeonmasters Guide, among many others). Attendance at my seminars was way down from the past two years.

I have always disliked the money aspects of Orgins: you pay extra to play games, even open gaming! You pay extra for a lot of the seminars ("Origins War College"). Mine are free, btw. WBC is a MUCH, MUCH more friendly environment for game playing, but as it's limited to boardgames (which are a stepchild at Origins, I think), the minis guys and CCGs types and RPGers aren't at WBC and probably wouldn't be welcomed in large numbers.

There wasn't much opportunity for business from my point of view, and I'm not sure I'll attend next year.

I did my usual survey, counting people walking past a particular main thoroughfare. The result (out of 200, counted in two separate sets of 100) was 45 women out of 200, and only three black people (all males). This fits with previous years, relatively many women, very few blacks. I saw no one who appeared to be Hispanic, but I think that's too hard to notice in any case. There is definitely a cultural difference when it comes to attending non-electronic game conventions. (I'll have to count at the next video game convention I attend, but I think the proportion of blacks is higher.)

Ways to reflect the "fog of war"

This originally appeared a couple years ago in "Against the Odds" magazine.


Ways to reflect the "fog of war"--
designing in uncertainty in conflict boardgames

Lewis Pulsipher

(All game titles in the following are trademarks of their respective designers or publishers.)

I want to discuss how uncertainty can be introduced into wargames, uncertainty about an opponent's location, his strength, or his goals, uncertainty about timing and the actions of non-player forces, and uncertainty about the outcome of combat. This uncertainty is often called the "fog of war", and is one of the major influences on warfare, and sometimes in classic games. (In card games such as Bridge and Poker, for example, you don't know the opposition's strength--though you learn their strength when you win the bidding round in Bridge.)

The original Avalon Hill commercial wargames such as Tactics II, Afrika Corps, and Stalingrad provided complete information about the opponent's strength, goals, and location--the major uncertainty arose from combat. Risk and Diplomacy, dating from the same period, similarly provide complete information, except that in Diplomacy the movement is simultaneous, introducing a considerable element of uncertainty.

Nowadays in most video games we have a variety of "fog of war" levels, as in general the nature of a computer game makes uncertainty the norm. Even if the manual tells you how combat is conducted, it may not be entirely clear what makes for success and failure. You rarely see the opponent's moves, unless the units are near your own. And you may not even know what the opponent's objective is. Unfortunately, this level of uncertainty is not easy to reproduce in boardgames, and some would argue that it isn't necessarily desirable.

The major source of uncertainty in ANY multi-player game, of course, is the intentions of the players themselves. What I'm discussing here is uncertainty that's built into the game by the designer.

Uncertainty about strength (and location)
"Block games", in which a player can see the strengths of his units on the back sides of the small blocks, but an opponent can only see the blank side indicating that a unit is present, but cannot know the type or strength of the unit until a battle occurs, are very popular in the hobby nowadays. They are, practically speaking, a development of Stratego (my original Stratego set actually used wooden blocks). While in this country we knew only Stratego until recently, in Britain there were several games using this principle. These games are quite old in origin, before World War One for the first (I strongly suspect this is the game from which Stratego is derived). The titles included L'Attaque, Dover Patrol, and Tri-tactics, and the publisher was H. P. Gibsons, as I recall. My own game Swords & Wizardry, also published by Gibsons, used the same method, but was more complex than Stratego and introduced a die roll into combat to increase uncertainty.

R. Knizia, the famous "Euro" game designer, produced a Lord of the Rings game that resembles Stratego in some respects. The German title is "Der Herr
der Ringe - Die Entscheidung" (Lord of the Rings--the Confrontation, I think).

In block games we usually have uncertain strength, but not uncertain location. However, it is always possible to have a piece represent no units at all, should the designer prefer it. You can be faced with a long line of pieces, not knowing which might represent powerful forces, while others are decoys representing nothing.

Unfortunately, the nature of any block game is that you can have only two opposing sides. It's very difficult to employ three sets of blocks such that the backsides of two sets are hidden from each opponent, and the problem is progressively worse when there are more players.

About 40 years ago I owned a naval game, ordered through a comic book, from Helen of Toy Company that featured hidden strength in modified form. The hundred or so plastic ships had different forms, so that you could tell a cruiser from a destroyer from a submarine from a cargo ship; a cruiser could always defeat a destroyer, a battleship would always defeat a cruiser, and so on, but a strength number on the bottom of the ship determined which destroyer was strongest within the destroyers group and which cruiser was strongest amongst the cruisers. We could do the same in a Stratego-like block game if the blocks indicated which type of unit they represented.

I designed a multi-player space wargame many years ago that used upside down pieces to conceal strength (and sometimes existence) of units from the other players. Block games use the four sides of the block (other than the front and back) to enable an individual unit to have varying strength. This is not possible in games that use upside down units; on the other hand, a piece in an upside down game can represent no force at all, or can represent a VERY powerful force. It is particularly good for representing ships (naval or space). While an individual ship is either at full strength or destroyed, a group can vary in strength, from one "scout" to four (or more) "dreadnoughts" in one piece.

A drawback of upside down units is that the owning player cannot easily see what he's got. Some players strongly dislike the need to manipulate a pile of pieces to see what's there. Another drawback is the cost of coloring the backside of each piece.

Hidden units, of course, had been used in other wargames long before I tried it. Sometimes it is implemented simply as "you can't look inside a stack of opposing pieces", sometimes as actually placing the pieces upside down. Another method is to use numbered counters or distinct figures, by some means hiding the units represented by each counter. Nowadays, you may have pieces that represent the location of units, and those units are represented by cards laid out in some manner. You don't actually have military unit pieces, just the cards themselves. And if those cards can represent several units, different types of units, or no units at all, you have a strong "fog of war" element.

The hidden strength aspect can be taken further. Nathan Kilgore pointed me toward his game Iron Tide: Panzers in the Ardennes. It "has a built in semi-fog of war system using random chits for the combat strength. The fog of war aspect is strengthened by the inability of your opponent to inspect stacks and the hidden chits. Also, because of the complete random chits, the owning players don't even know the exact strengths of their own units until the first time they engage in combat."

Entirely hidden location dates back to Kriegspiel chess (neither players sees the other player's pieces, referee required) and traditional Battleship (originally a graph-paper and pencil game, no referee required because there is no movement). Many computer conflict games (most real-time-strategy games, for example) use hidden location of all but nearby opponents.

Uncertainty about capability
What can the enemy do? In some games this involves more than just unit locations and strengths. I suspect one of the attractions of the "card-driven" wargames is uncertainty about the opponent's capabilities, because you don't know what cards he has drawn. Hammer of the Scots, a popular block game, uses cards as well as blocks. Many of the "card-driven" games provide much of their detail and "chrome" (historical feel) via the various cards and what they allow the player to do, and what the player cannot do without the appropriate card.

Jonathan Hager says "In Memoir '44, each player has a set of cards. Each player may even have a different number of cards indicating how prepared the forces were when engaged. During play, there is some uncertainty to where the player will attack next. A player must have the correct card in order to move units in a given area."

The recently-published War of the Ring game uses special dice instead of cards to generate uncertainty about capability. Each dice face enables a different action by a player; players can see the dice rolls of the opponent, then play their actions one by one, but before the dice roll they cannot be sure what their opponent will be able to do, let alone when.

Event cards are a popular way to represent uncertainty of capability. Does my opponent have a card that will increase his movement rate? Can he cause a plague in my homeland? Will he be able to counter my Famine card with his Good Weather card? Can he force a dynastic marriage alliance on me at an awkward juncture? And so on.

In some sense simultaneous movement can be seen as representing uncertainty about enemy capability. Unfortunately, simultaneous movement either requires computer assistance, or a small number of pieces (as in Diplomacy, where a player starts with three or four pieces and wins at around eighteen). In a game I'm playtesting now I use a mechanically more practical approach to this. Each player has a standard set of Action Cards representing various sets of activities. He places five of the cards face down on a layout; then each player in turn plays the first card, and acts accordingly, until all #1 cards are played, then the second card is played, and so on. Each card offers the player a restricted set of choices--for example, you can't move fleets or armies when you play the "Trade" card. Brian Leet calls this "committed intent", and says Wallenstein and Roborally use similar methods. I have not played these games, but understand that choosing the cards in Roborally is a little like procedural computer programming.

A problem with the block game Pacific Victory is that too much uncertainty is introduced, as all units look the same whether land, sea, or air. It's pretty unlikely in the real world that these unit types could be confused.

Uncertainty in combat
Dice are the traditional method of introducing uncertainty into combat. Avalon Hill used the old D6 combat table. Other games such as Risk, Axis & Allies, and Britannia use a dice roll for some or all units involved in combat.

In some games the cards govern what a player can do, but in others they affect combat. Germania uses "Battle Cards" instead of dice to introduce uncertainty in combat. Players have more control over what card they play than they would over dice rolls, sometimes knowing that a particular attack would be unwise because their hand of cards is poor, or knowing that they can try an even-strength attack because their cards are so good.

Some games such as Stratego or Diplomacy have no overt chance mechanism in combat, but guessing still comes into play at times owing to hidden strengths or simultaneous movement.

Combat methods involving no uncertainty at all are common. Vinci and History of the World use them, for example. It is also possible to devise a "combat table" that extracts losses exactly in proportion to forces (so, for example, in a 2-1 fight, the smaller side always loses twice as much as the stronger side).

Simpler and more "classical" games often completely avoid uncertainty in combat. Chess, checkers, Go, all do this (and in fact avoid all elements of uncertainty other than intentions of the opponent). This absolute certainty in combat is not usually what historical gamers are looking for, though it is popular in Euro-style games. In fact, you could make a case that one impetus toward Euro-style games has been dislike of dice-rolling in conflicts.

Uncertainty of Timing
One of the biggest problems of historical wargames is that most players know when some major event occurred that made a big difference in the outcome of a battle or campaign. For example, when playing a game about the ancient Near East, you know when the Hittites or Persians appeared. In Britannia, everyone knows that, in Turn 6, the Saxons are going to swarm into Britain in a major invasion; and players prepare for it.

This is a tough nut to crack, and forces a designer away from simulation toward representation if he wants to reintroduce uncertainty. For example, in a Near Eastern game I'm working on players roll a die to determine whether an historical group appears or not. In the turn before it actually appeared in history, a roll of a 1 or a 2 causes the group to appear early. In the turn of actual appearance, a 1 through 4 will do it (if it didn't appear in the previous turn). In the turn after historical appearance, the group will certainly show up. Then we have something that can make for a better game, but is less true to the details of history (though arguably it is truer to the spirit of history . . .).

Event cards can introduce uncertainty of timing. Cards may require certain conditions to be met before they're played, but until someone plays the card, the "Big Event" does not occur. In War of the Ring, it's likely that some events of great advantage to one side or the other will occur during the game, but not until the appropriate card is played.

Brian Leet points out that "in many war games there are tracks that represent certain inevitabilities that are impacted by the player's actions. Elements such as discontent, moral or political will all may have a certain outcome, but uncertain timing (or be potentially avoidable altogether with careful play, perhaps allowing the Roman Consulship to survive is
a good historical possibility)."

In some "sweep of history" games uncertainty can be introduced at the end of the game without detriment to historical fact. Multiplayer games that don't include uncertainty about the timing of the end of the game can suffer from "ganging up on the leader" and bizarre moves, simply because players know the game is about to end (History of the World and Vinci can have this problem). I counter this by introducing a chance element (die roll) in the game ending. The roll needed varies with other conditions in the game, but in any case players can never be sure the game will end in a particular turn, and the roll comes after the turn is over. This tends to eliminate the end-of-game shenanigans that are often so unlike historical reality.

Uncertainty about Non-player Forces
Often in wargames, if there are any forces not directly controlled by players ("neutrals"), they are usually completely passive. In other words, players face no uncertainty about the actions of neutrals. In Germania, some invasions come at set junctures, while others occur when appropriate Event cards are played. Players temporarily control the invaders, who are anything but passive; in some games there may be more invaders on the board than player pieces.

Frequently there's a political dimension to non-player forces. Will they join the war or will they stay out? Often there are ways to introduce uncertainty to these questions. A draw from a deck of cards can be used to "control" non-players (this can even be seen as a form of programming), and if nothing else, a dice table can remove any certainty about what the non-player forces will do.

Uncertainty of Objective
Finally we come to uncertainty of objective. In war, you generally know the overall objective of your enemies, so the uncertainty is in how they're going to achieve it. But at times, especially in tactical as opposed to strategic situations, you may not even be sure of the objective.

I don't recall seeing uncertainty of objective much in wargames. The obvious method to produce it is an "objective card" selected by each player (perhaps at random) at the start of the game. Another method is to offer several ways to win. Players can disguise which method they're actually pursuing, possibly introducing an element of surprise into the game.

I once wrote a D&Dish tavern scenario in which each character, played by a player, chose a random objective. This was published in White Dwarf over 25 years ago and folks at conventions are still playing it, evidently enjoying the additional uncertainty. I suspect uncertainly of objective appears more often in Euro-style games than in wargames, frequently reflected through several ways to win the game. Opponents know what those ways are, but cannot know which way an individual player may be pursuing.

Peter Riedlberger points out that versions of standard Risk for the past 20-some years have included "order" (objective) cards, something I've not seen as my Risk-playing days go back to the late 60s. These cards are included in the latest American edition. Unfortunately, he says, the objectives are not equally difficult to achieve. Torben Mogensen says that this imbalance relates to the number of players, as some objectives may be easier or harder to achieve depending on the number of participants Too bad the developers didn't have multiple objectives on the cards, one for each possible number of players, so that they could be properly balanced.

Torben also points out that the family game Careers let players secretly choose to allocate his goals amongst three objectives (fame, happiness, and riches). I had forgotten all about this game (which originally appeared in the 1950s), one of the better family games I can recall, perhaps in part because of the hidden objectives. I am experimenting with a variation of this in Seas of Gold, in which players secretly allocate victory point weights to each of three objectives (territory, culture, and gold), or in which each player draws a card that secretly allocates weights for him.

There certainly have been wargames that used uncertainty of objective. Peter Coles says this "was used brilliantly by WRG in a 1970s Naval wargame called 'Sea Strike'. Each side drew an envelope containing a card detailing force size (in points) and objective." I'm sure there are others.

I'm told that GMT's Ardennes '44 has four different ways for the German player to win, all in effect. The German player practically can attempt only one, and must try to mislead the Allied player about which he is pursuing.

Jonathan Hager says that in Memoir '44, "the overall objective is clear - obtain X medals. But how those medals are obtained could be by killing units, exiting the board (for some scenarios) or taking a critical location."

Brian Leet suggests that Illuminati should be in the list, with one participant having a secret objective. And "'Shooting the Moon' in hearts is a classic example from traditional card play."

Who is Uncertain?
It's worth pointing out that in most of the cases I've described, only the opponent is uncertain about something. But in a few cases (as in Iron Tide: Panzers in the Ardennes), neither player is certain.

Is Uncertainty Good?
Is uncertainty a good thing? "Classical" game players prefer as little uncertainty as possible in their games (chess is an example), while "Romantic" players like a considerable level of uncertainty as it helps them pursue the "Great Play". Peter Riedlberger comments that "you can have an undesirably dense 'fog', to keep the metaphor. All Stratego-likes I know are mostly about bluffing. This can be fun, but is quite different to other, more tactical games." I wonder how much of good generalship in the real world is about bluffing; look what the Allies did in 1944, convincing the German high command that the Atlantic invasion would be at a location other than Normandy, even after the landings began . . .

Students of history know that real warfare can be a very uncertain activity. Amongst wargames, uncertainty is seen more in "simulations", less in "representations", and yet less in "semblance/theme" wargames. Looked at from another point of view, if you want a good game, the level of uncertainty must be kept in check, or in the end you have nothing more than a game of chance (as in traditional Battleship).

Characteristics of successful designers

This is another article that appeared on GameCareerGuide some months ago.

Characteristics of successful designers

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Mark Twain

"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." Calvin Coolidge

Game designers must have a productive orientation in life. Game design is not something you turn on and turn off daily, it’s something that must be with you all the time, that you must make an effort to pursue. Persistence is more important than "creativity".

Many novelists write all their adult lives, even from childhood; most game designers design games from an early age, most artists draw from an early age. But some come to it late and are still good at it. Most of the people who write novels or design published board and card games have full time jobs. For example, once-profilic SF/F novelist Glen Cook never gave up his General Motors assembly line job, writing during his commute.

Freelancing is much less common in the video game industry, which is where most full-time designers work for a particular game development studio.

Many people involved in publishing non-electronic games work part-time, relying on a “day job” for their living. Most game publishers, even in video games, originated as self-publishers, distributing the "dream game" of the people who founded the company.

If you read good advice about breaking into the game industry, that advice will include "read as much as you can" and "educate yourself as much as possible", even as the advisors suggest that a bachelor's degree is a good idea. For example, everyone interested in "breaking in" should read the wealth of advice on Tom Sloper's Web site (sloperama.com) and his monthly IGDA column. I’ve used a book by Ernest Adams, Break into the Game Industry (http://ernestadams.com/), now a bit long in the tooth (2002) but still available. His advice is well worth reading (especially about getting a job and how to keep a job), and amounts to the same as Tom's.

“An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.” Anatole France

In general, game designers must have an “educated” attitude, even if they have no more formal education than a high school diploma. Let me hasten to say that "educated" refers to an attitude, not to earned degrees. Fortunately for us, the game industry does not yet have the "degree-itis" that is invading all walks of American life, as though the only way you can learn something is to get a degree in it. The industry is a "meritocracy", where you are valued and hired for what you can do and what you can create. "Educated people" doesn't necessarily imply academic degrees, it implies a certain attitude toward life. It's that attitude that the game companies want and need to succeed. So I am not talking about the classic idea of the "well-educated" person, which relates to particular things like knowledge of the Classics.

No, an "educated person" is a person with a certain attitude toward life, not necessarily one who has a degree. There are people with legitimate Ph.D.s who could be called uneducated (though this is unlikely). There are certainly many people with bachelors degrees who are essentially uneducated. And there are 17 and 18 and 19 year-olds who clearly are educated people, though they haven't had the time to accumulate a wealth of experience and knowledge that is associated with being educated.

So what makes someone "educated"? An educated person wants to KNOW, and will make an effort to find out things. An uneducated person will tend not to bother. Here's a simple example. An educated person, confronted with a word he doesn't know, is likely to look it up. He wants to improve his understanding (of language, of the world). An uneducated person isn't going to bother.

Further, an educated person teaches himself or herself when necessary, from books or otherwise, rather than wait for a class. The uneducated ones will frequently whine "I haven't been to training for that". Not surprisingly, educated people tend to read a lot, and uneducated ones don't.

In my classes I assign students the "task" of maintaining a notebook or other "data store" in which they record game-related ideas as they get them. It's a habit they should get into on their own, and I try to teach attitudes more than "facts". The "uneducated" attitude surfaces soon: "how much do I have to include in this?" The student wants to know the minimum, rather than take the educated attitude that this is something he should do anyway, that is worth doing, and he should put some time into it.

Educated people like to use their brains in top gear; uneducated people prefer to run in "idle" or first gear. The old-fashioned "thirst for knowledge" is what I'm talking about. This is part of a productive orientation.

What's important is what you know and what you can do, not what classes you took or what degrees you have. Good classes help you learn much quicker, as you take advantage of the experience of teachers and authors, but good classes are not always available.

Characterize what a game designer does in one word

There are lots of choices. I’ll describe each, starting with the most important first:

· Think

· Communicate

· Innovate

· Control

Think

The game designer needs to have his brain in gear all the time. When playing games, he should be thinking about what works, what doesn’t, and why. He must keep his mind open to ideas at all times. He must think about how to improve his game even when (if) he enjoys playing it. The game can always be improved, we just come to a time when the improvement we can get isn’t worth the time it will take (the law of diminishing returns).

Most important, the designer must think critically. “Fanboys” (or girls) will never make good game designers, as they typically praise a game or genre uncritically. Self-criticism is especially important. If you can’t recognize that your favorite mechanic just doesn’t fit, or just isn’t needed, then you won’t design good games. Self-indulgence is “verboten”.

Communicate

This is much more important for video game designers than for non-electronic game designers. Most video games require a team to produce. The game designer must communicate in writing and orally everything about his game in a manner that enables the artists and programmers to reproduce it. This is really hard to do!

Non-electronic game designers can make the prototypes and write the rules themselves, but still must communicate well with playtesters to improve the game. Moreover, since the rules are not enforced by computer, it’s especially important to write rules that are clear, concise, understandable.

Finally: if you haven't written it down, "it doesn't count."

Innovate

While game design is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration”, that 10% is important. It’s not hard to “design” the next shooter clone. Finding that spark to make it more than a clone, more than just a shooter, separates the most successful designers from the rest. Too many designers design the game they want to play, which is almost exactly like some existing game that they love to play. “Think outside the box” applies here.

Control

Game designers do not need to be "control freaks", but they need to carefully control everything in the design of the game. People who buy games want the designer to make every effort to produce an enjoyable game. They don't want to depend on random this or that unless the designer has decided that randomness will create the best game experience.

Example: students making a form of "capture multiple flags" boardgame dropped the flag markers on the board to create a random distribution. My jaw dropped.

If you're the professional designer, you should work out a set of excellent and interesting positions for the flags, rather than depend on chance placement. Why trust enjoyment of your game to unnecessary chance? Yes, it's more work for the designer, making up and recording the patterns of placement, playtesting each one multiple times. But the result will be a fairer and better game.

Do I have to be an outstanding player?

Being a “dynamite” game player, whether it’s in Halo 3 or Mario or Command & Conquer or Axis & Allies, does not translate to being a good game designer. The skills and points of view are very different.

On the other hand, if you have played Tic-Tac-Toe (Noughts and Crosses) some, and have not realized that it is always a draw when played optimally, you have a mountain to overcome, because you’ll likely not see the optimal strategies in more complex games.

In other words, you’ll help yourself a lot if you’re a good enough game player to quickly see the best strategies and tactics in a game. You can avoid dominant strategies and other pitfalls that otherwise your playtesters will have to reveal, at a cost of time and frustration.

You needn’t be an outstanding player, but it helps to be a good player.

Game Origins

This originally appeared on GameCareerGuide, 9 Dec 08. For the diagram refer to the original (click on the title of this post).

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. —C. S. Lewis

Game-related ideas come from many sources and can be in many shapes and forms. At some point, ideas coalesce into something that can become a game. Usually there is some immediate stimulus, some spark, involved.

I want to discuss the kinds of sparks that are common to new games, that is, where and how do games originate?

Ideas for new games usually come from one or a combination of several aspects of games. These are:

• theme (story, title, image)

• mechanics

• a particular game, a game system, or a genre

• components (mostly, non-electronic games)

• constraints.

The occult-looking lines in the diagram are meant to indicate that a game may have more than one kind of origin.

Let’s describe each in turn. In most cases, only the designer will know the origin of a game, so our examples will be limited.

Theme: Story, Title, Image

The theme is some set of circumstances, usually a story, that can affect the game’s mechanics, appearance, and gameplay. It may be as simple as a title or an image, in the imagination or in a tangible form, of some event or activity.

Most Star Wars games have a theme deriving from the original Star Wars films (1977-1983), Civilization has a theme of the rise and development of civilization. Age of Empires is a more consistently military approach to the same idea. Britannia is a board game where the theme is a thousand years of British history (after all, “story” is integral to “history”).

In general, any history, real or imagined, as the Star Wars history is imagined, is a theme. There are many board games based on (that is, borrowing the theme of) video games, and vice versa. For example, Civilization the computer game, though not directly derived from Civilization the board game, is certainly related to it, while Starcraft: the Boardgame is clearly derived from the computer game.

Sometimes the story is very simple, as in the board game Dragon Rage: attacks by monsters, sometimes dragons, on a city. The title alone helps characterize the game. At least one game’s theme comes from a story that was written to support a set of commercial miniature figures (Valley of the Four Winds).

Many European-style board games have tacked-on themes that don’t affect gameplay or mechanics at all, though they affect the appearance of the game. Despite the name, the gameplay in the board game Ming Dynasty has exactly nothing to do with China, though the artwork is vaguely Chinese. Some stories are merely excuses to blow things up, as in many shooters. In these cases the game probably originated somewhere other than through the theme.

Many AAA video games aim at “dream-fulfillment”, a subcategory of theme/story that some might list as a separate kind of origin. What kind of hero, or “star”, or expert, or even god, do you want the player to “become” through your game?

Mechanics

The non-electronic version of Dungeons and Dragons can be seen as a game originating in mechanics. There were many fantasy games, but the role-playing mechanic, which more or less began the role-playing game genre, is the defining characteristic of the game.

Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero can be thought of as games that likely originated in mechanics. In a postmortem of the latter game published in Game Developer magazine (February 2006), two of the developers from Harmonix, Greg LoPiccolo and Daniel Sussman, said Guitar Hero was really designed around letting the player feel like a rock star, rather than a game designed around a new controller. The peripheral device came about as a result of giving this rock star feel to the player.

In both Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution, we have an unusual mechanic, the flow of directions that the players follow to make certain physical moves.

A Particular Game, a Game System, or Genre

A “system” is a case where a set of mechanics has become so well-known that games are made using most or all of the set. Many historical board games begin with a system, such as “block games” (Hammer of the Scots), “card-driven games” (We the People), Risk-like games (Risk Godstorm), Britannia-like games (Italia, China: The Middle Kingdom), and “committed intent” games. Video games, apart from obvious sequels, very often adapt a system, and video game genres themselves tend to involve challenges to players that are common to most games of the genre.

Many video games originate with a genre. “We want to make a real-time strategy game,” or “let’s make a shooter.” There are genres in non-electronic gaming, but they tend to be broader (RPGs, collectible card games, war games). The genres in video games are quite specific, tending sometimes to straightjacket the designers’ efforts.

Often the genre goes hand-in-hand with a theme or system. Battle for Middle Earth is a Lord of the Rings themed RTS. LOTR Trilogy Risk is a “Lord of the Rings” themed Risk-like game.

In the end, many games derive directly from specific other games. In the video game world, the “safe” way to go is to design a game that is much like an existing successful game, but just enough different to be unique and to be perceived as an improvement. While derivation from another game is probably the most common method of origin, it is also probably the least successful, because too many resulting games suffer badly from being “too derivative.”

Components (primarily non-electronic games)

On the non-electronic side, components can be at the origin of a game. In my own experience, Law & Chaos originated because I wanted to make a game using the “jewel-like” glass beads that have become popular for plant displays, and another game originated in a desire to use stackable plastic pieces from an educational supply house.

A component could be a special controller, such as one allowing the video game player to “drive a car” in a natural way. It’s possible that Dance Dance Revolution was derived from components. I don’t know whether the mechanic or the component came first -- or maybe they came together.

Constraints

I’m going to discuss constraints at some length, as this is where the greatest variety and the greatest limitations can come from.

Are you a person who works better when faced with a deadline? I believe that many people do better work when faced with constraints, whether deadlines or something else. This is particularly true in art, but likely true in most walks of life.

In effect, everything a designer does is considered working within constraints. The answer to the question “Who is the audience” provides constraints. If your audience is preschool children, you can’t design a game that requires a lot of math (or reading). If you know your game will be a first-person shooter, your design choices have been heavily circumscribed.

When you playtest your game, the constraints are more specific. “Is this enjoyable” for my target audience? Is that too complex, or too simple? Does this element contribute to gameplay, or shall we “lose it?” Instead of that, what I’m talking about in this “origin” are additional constraints on the kind of game you want to make, imposed as part of the process of conception. I think that a good choice of constraints -- choosing more limited goals than “let’s make a shooter” -- will lead to a better game.

Let me generalize. In many fields of art, periods of fairly clear “rules” for how to create art (for example, the sonata form in music or the three-movement form of a concerto) are followed by periods when there are no rules, until new rules are established. The greatest art comes from the periods when there are established rules. My example is primarily from music.

In the Rococo period following the Baroque, Johann Sebastian Bach’s sons and others made good music, but not the great music we saw before and in the succeeding Classical era as defined by Hayden and Mozart. In the current era of “modern art” (painting) there are no rules. Not everyone thinks modern art is rubbish, but I think it won’t get much respect in the future.

Yes, great artists often break some of the rules -- Beethoven comes to mind -- yet even they follow most of the “rules.” When all the rules are swept aside, people grasp for new sets of rules (Schoenberg’s 12-tone music?), but for a time the chaos results in little that is later recognized as great art.

Consequently, a designer usually benefits from additional limitations, whether imposed by a publisher or studio (“no foul language”), or by himself (“I want a one-hour trading game”). Even though a self-imposed limitation may ultimately be abandoned in the interests of making the game better, initially it focuses the designer’s efforts and is likely to provide better results. There are always self-imposed limits, because you have your own preferences. And if you work for a game studio or publisher, you might find that you have to jettison some preferences: If they say “make such-and-such a game,” you’ll do it or you’ll be out of a job.

In other words, self-imposed constraints are “rules” you use to try to help yourself create a better result, just as the “rules” for the various arts tend to yield better results.

In any case, be sure your idea origin isn’t simply based on the game being “just like I’d like to play.” You are not the audience. You are very unusual or you wouldn’t be designing games. And the game you’d like to play has likely already been designed. My favorite game for 20 years was Dungeons & Dragons, but I have never tried to design a role-playing game. I like D&D -- why would I want to design something just like it?

It’s too much time and effort to design a game just so you can play it. Game designers should design games that other people will enjoy playing. Most of the time, you’ll like to play them, too.

Let me quote Sid Meier (Civilization, Pirates) from Gameinformer 182, June 2008:

“[T]here's a danger with some of the newer designers, a tendency to design the game you like to play. That game has already been designed -- we need new games. There's a loss of a little bit of that ‘sky's the limit, anything's possible’ approach we had in the early days. We have these genres -- we have first-person shooters, we have real-time strategy. If you've played games all your life you've gotten these certain styles really beaten into you. To get people to think out of the box is a little harder these days.”

On the other hand, do not design a game you dislike to play yourself, at least not until you are very experienced. If you dislike it, why would you expect anyone else to like it? As you get more experience and understand players better, you may be able to design a game that appeals to a certain segment, even though it doesn’t appeal to you. At some point this may be worth doing, to get you “out of a rut,” to “think outside the box,” but it’s not something to be done lightly.

In any case, write down whatever you come up with. This is not naturally what younger people do, but you’ll forget many details if you don’t. The famous writer and director Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove, 2001, Eyes Wide Shut) is said to have distrusted anyone who didn't write things down. Where games are concerned, I feel the same way.

The "heart" of different media

The heart of a novel is characterization, though there's more to it than that (such as plot, dramatic tension, etc.). The heart of a game is gameplay, though there's more to it than that (interface, appearance, sometimes story, etc.) (And I might add here, the heart of an interactive puzzle (one-player video game) is challenge, though there's more to it than that. A considerable part of gameplay is challenge, but the challenges tend to come from other players, whereas in the interactive puzzle the challenge comes from the computer (and ultimately, from the designer).

Trying to use a game primarily to tell a story is like trying to use Excel as a word processor. You can do it, but it's awkward.

Just as, if I want to learn history, I read a good book rather than play a game, if I want a good story, I read a good novel (or watch a movie) rather than play a game. Playing a game is for gameplay, not story, not history.

But I know there are people who won't read a history book (though they'll watch History Channel). There are those who won't read a novel (though they'll watch a movie). And there are those who will play a game, but not for gameplay, for story.

Camping, realism, failures of game design

I'm always amused when my game design students complain that someone is "camping" in a shooter game. (They play at the game club, not during class!) They're trying to enforce some kind of standard of "honorable" behavior through peer-pressure, it seems. Yet I always tell them, if the game allows a player to do something that is a good strategy, some players are going to do it--I would. (In the same sense, "turtling" in a boardgame might be frowned upon, but if it's the best strategy for a player, some are going to do it.)

In other words, if the game fails to make camping (or turtling) an impractical strategy, yet the result is undesirable, there's a defect in the design.

The bigger problem, in shooters, is that camping is a reminder of the real world. In the real world people don't run around like crazy hoping to get two kills before they get killed! They camp and let the other guy get killed. In other words, camping is a reminder of the real world, a breakdown of the suspension of disbelief or or what academics call the "magic circle". It reminds players how utterly ridiculous and unrealistic shooters are--because there's no fear or death.

Shooter designers try to stamp out camping by showing someone who has just died who killed him, where they are, and what they've been doing. I'd think this is even more a breakdown of the magic circle, but since it helps players reinforce by celebration that they "pwned" the just-killed character, people don't seem to mind.

Games are made up of "building blocks"

In a sense a game is a set of building blocks (or tinkertoys or whatever) put together in various ways. Some blocks are standardized (at least, from your personal point of view, stuff you've used before). But every once in a while you come up with a new block, different color, shape, connectivity, etc., or you find a new way to connect blocks.

So an experienced designer may be putting together known blocks in different ways, and maybe (or maybe not) adding something completely new.

Think of all the things that can be made with standard blocks. Lego? Click the article title for a photo of the Space Battleship Yamato, from the anime, made out of legos...

This idea of building blocks is a common one, and some people like to try to categorize the blocks used by a particular designer.

I see games as using both building blocks and systems. I do have several systems I use (Britannia is the obvious one), and there are building blocks I use often (such as Action Cards for "committed intent", either one card at a time or 4-6 at once per round). If it works, why not use it again? There's almost nothing completely original in games, but the combinations, the execution, create the unusual game.

The Impact of Reviews on Game Development

(This was originally posted as an "Expert Blog" on Gamasutra.)

At the Triangle Game Conference April 29, Julianne Greer, editor of Escapist magazine, moderated a panel discussion titled “Teaching to the Test: The Impact of Reviews on Game Development”. To explain the title, K12 teachers tend to teach what is on end-of-grade tests to the exclusion of almost everything else. The panel considered how much game development studios and publishers create games to meet the “test” of reviews.

Panelists included Juan Benito (Creative Director, Atomic Games), Eric Peterson (CEO of Vicious Cycle), Dana Cowley (PR Manager, Epic Games), and Shaun McCabe (Production Director, Insomniac Games east coast).

Their answer to the main question was “definitely not,” though they do pay attention to what individual game fans say on forums and email. The only exceptions would be a sequel, especially if another studio did the previous game, or a licensed property, where reviews of past games for that license can give clues to what needs to be changed or added.

Benito saw fan opinion as more "pure from the heart" than the reviews, which led into a discussion of whether reviews are influenced by manufacturers. This can be overt, through junkets or other “bribes”, or through the influence of advertising money. (Consumer Reports magazine refuses to accept advertising to avoid any appearance of influence by manufacturers.) While the panelists had heard of this kind of shady dealing, only one knew of it happening (from his days at Microprose); however, Greer stated that Escapist magazine had received such influence offers (which they rejected).

Yet there’s a danger of shutting out the non-hardcore audience if you base your decisions solely on feedback from the minority who express opinions online. McCabe said listening to players is so important that some companies have changed their marketing department name to something like “community relations”.

How much do reviews affect sales? I was surprised that no one cited any survey, as surely someone has investigated this question; panelists speculated that reviews have a strong influence on hard core players, but virtually no influence on casual (e.g., Wii) games, as those are impulse buys. Greer showed slides from research company EEDAR showing that certain categories of games (RPGs, Music & Rhythm, Sports) received consistently higher aggregate review scores than others, with some lagging far behind (Arcade, Skill & Chance, General Ent (such as Wii Fit), and Narrative). We have no way to know whether this is a bias from reviewers or an actual difference in game quality, though I’d suspect it’s because most reviewers are hardcore players.

Another interesting slide compared scores for 360 and Wii versions of the same title; the 360 scores were much higher than Wii for “hard core” game categories, much lower for “casual” titles.

Benito looks at the Wii as a "critique-proof platform". Another panelist joked that if you put the word “Party” in a Wii title, it will automatically sell at least 200,000 copies as parents want their children to be playing “party” games.

Peterson cited the Wii-exclusive game Madworld as a game that has very good reviews, but poor sales (180,000 according to VG Chartz, only 66,000 in the month of release according to Wikipedia). And his company has a children’s game with two and a half million sales but reviews in the 40s.

This was part of a discussion of the quality of reviews. Panelists clearly did not care for reviews in general, probably because they felt so many were poorly-written and often contained mistakes. One panelist specifically referred to the reviews on IGN and Gamespot as “white noise”, and all panelists clearly felt that reviews are often “subjective” rather than “objective”. Of course, “subjective” can be just as accurate (in fact, more accurate) than objective, depending on the situation, the problem is that reviewers don’t explain their biases and why they feel as they do, so readers have no basis to judge the opinions.

Moreover, with a single numeric rating, reviewers are going to go with their personal preferences, so, for example, a shooter fan reviewing a children’s game isn’t likely to give it a high rating (which is likely what happened with the children’s game Peterson mentioned).

The discussion was not intended to be a critique of reviews, but I’d make a number of observations. I used to be paid to review board- and RPG-related materials for TSR’sDragon and other magazines 25-30 years ago, but I’d not write assigned video game reviews, as a proper review requires playing through the game, a much larger time commitment for video games. Someone pointed out that film reviewers commit only two or three hours to watching a film, quite a contrast. Panelists had seen reviews where they knew the reviewer had barely played the game. In fact, this has influenced some companies to make sure the first few minutes of a game are exceptionally engaging, a good idea in general but especially good for the “snap reviewers”.

Magazine and Web site “exclusives” tend to be more favorable than reviews, as the writer knows the studio-publisher has done his company a favor by granting the exclusive. "Maybe that's why previews are so different from reviews.” This comes back to the nature of the fans, who go to the sites with the “newest news”, who want to see the latest artwork for the Zerg (in a recentPC Magazine) or see the latest screenshots. In my opinion this is a major reason why video game magazines are having a difficult time surviving: they can’t be as up-to-the-minute as the Web sites.

The “cult of the new” also tends to drive reviewers to snap decisions and sloppy behavior; if the review comes out too late, it’s no longer “news” and is ignored by many.

Some reviewers clearly don’t understand how reviews, of any medium, work. They should answer three questions:
• what were the creator(s) trying to do
• how well did they do it
• was it worth doing

To answer these questions they must explain “why”, not merely say “this is a piece of junk” or “I don’t like the graphics” or “what a dumb idea”. But this makes reviewing more difficult, more work.

If the reviewer separates these questions sufficiently, a reader can see that the children’s game was well-done, even though the reviewer thought it wasn’t worth doing because he isn’t interested in children’s games.

One panelist suggested reviewers ought to “take a step back” and watch others play the game, in order to acquire more than one point of view. They also need to put themselves in the shoes of a person who’s saved his pocket-money to buy a game, as opposed to reviewers who have piles of freebies to try out.

Reviewers who assign an actual numeric evaluation should provide several scores for different types of players, e.g., hard core, casual, RPG fans, shooter fans, whatever is appropriate to the audience.

Aggregation of reviews, and use of the aggregates in contracts, touched off a lively discussion. The personal preferences of the reviewer means a lot when he or she assigns only one number, not numbers selected for different kinds of players. Yet the numbers are now used in many contracts to govern the royalty received by a studio–the higher aggregate score leads to higher royalties. Panelists felt this was a poor way to do business, and that it was being used to take advantage of inexperienced developers to trick them out of some of the profit. Possibly it was also an excuse for a publisher to save marketing money, yet “you can't sell games without marketing” (Cowley). The panel did not officially include audience participation, but one beside-himself audience member finally asserted that the panelists were dead wrong (I can’t say his actual words!), that if the developer has confidence he should take the opportunity to make more with a high aggregate. Clearly this is a contentious issue, and with that we ran out of time.

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Law of Gaming Panel at Triangle Game Conference

(This was originally posted as an "Expert blog" on Gamasutra, not long ago.)

At the Triangle Game Conference on April 29, Alexander Macris, CEO and president of Themis Group and a graduate of Harvard Law School, moderated a panel discussion titled “The Law of Gaming: Legal Protection, Perils, Pitfalls for Game Developers.”
Panelists included Steve Chang (“the IP lawyer”), Zack Bishop (“the corporate lawyer”), and Jeff Young (“the trial lawyer”). All are involved in game-related practice.

I am not going to describe the five types of intellectual property protection, partly because I’m not a lawyer, partly because any serious game developer should already be familiar with them. Instead I’ll briefly report the answers to several of Macris’ questions.

Define important current legal issues in games:

IP lawyer: The scope of what you're allowed to patent on is changing. Business method patents used to be very broad, now the patent office is being much more cautious.

Corporate lawyer: Use of open source software (OSS) in games and the licensing consequences. Can all your proprietary code become subject to an open source license because one of your coders puts a bit of OSS into your game?

Trial lawyer: There is so much discussion via Internet (email, forums, etc.) that there are many more rocks to turn over to find that "smoking gun" bit of information that could make or break a lawsuit. You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or more collecting electronic material. Hence lawsuits become more expensive to pursue.

The most dangerous legal pitfall you've seen a company fall into:

Trial lawyer--lack of clarity in the contract and agreement between studio and publisher.

Corporate lawyer--Not thinking far enough ahead in case a game is a huge hit. For example, you may not think your game will ever be turned into a movie, and you’re very likely right, but occasionally it happens. If the developer has not been careful, conceivably they would have no rights to the movie and its profits. Another example, what if your game is published by a small or foreign publisher, and then one of the largest companies wants to buy the right to publish? How much of the money involved in the transfer will the developer receive?

IP lawyer--not giving yourself enough credit for the IP you developed (such as tool software). Or, say you have a philosophical objection to patenting software, recognize that you may cost yourself a lot of money by being unable to exploit a patent.

I’ve decided to use middleware to help me produce my game. Is this practical?:
Corporate lawyer--Yes with care. Is there a royalty for the software, or a flat fee? You could be paying millions in royalties in extreme cases. Think ahead.

One thing to know about the law of games:

IP lawyer--know what rights are available to you, so you can decide rationally what to do rather than stumble into something.

Corporate lawyer--protect your IP at all costs and expect success, look forward to big payout, make sure others can't get in the way. For example, a contract may include a "change of control provision," that you can't change who controls your company without breaching the contract. If EA buys you for $100 million, you breach that contract. Keep an eye on the fine print.

Trial lawyer--Hire people to make sure you get tight agreements to begin with so as to avoid litigation.


Some specific points came out during audience questions:

Trial lawyer–in an MMO people were conducting a funeral for someone who really died (the player, not the character); someone disrupted the funeral; they were sued for "intentional infliction of emotional distress."

NC Soft (City of Heroes) was sued for copyright violation by Marvel because people used the character generator to make the Hulk and other Marvel characters. Marvel lost the suit because they couldn’t prove NC Soft encouraged this; nor did it help that a Marvel lawyer had made one of the characters!

Who owns user generated content--be sure your agreement is clear.

Non-compete clauses (e.g. you can’t work on (such-and-such genre) games for a year after leaving out company) are very state-specific.

Trial lawyer--Every day, people with vague patents demand money from companies for alleged violation; often the company will pay the money rather than go through the time and expense of litigation. That’s the way it is.

IP lawyer--Typical cost for a utility patent application is 3-5 years, $10,000 to file, another $10,000 later. Design patents are much less.

They think EULAs (the contracts you must agree to when installing software) are becoming more enforceable in the courts over the past 10-15 years.

Trial lawyer--When will a video game company be sued for having “caused violence” in someone. This has already happened to Judas Priest and Ozzy Osborne for their music.

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What do the systems of games amount to?

What do the systems of games amount to?

The goal here is not to list what the objective or victory condition is in a game, but to say “what the game amounts to” or “what is actually happening”, “what is the player actually trying to do?”

The biggest problem with this list is whether to include the psychological or just the “physical”. Poker is about bluffing, about reading the other player, yet what the game amounts to in each hand is a form of pattern-matching plus collection (of money). I think I’ll leave the psychological out of this list, and stick to the systems.

At some point another problem is, what is a game? For example, I’d say most single-player video games are actually interactive puzzles, not games, but we call them games. Fortunately, the list below also applies to many if not all puzzles.

“Achieve a particular state” is the generalized version. Victory points are a generalized way of doing several different things at once. Sometimes the “state” is very simple, as in rock-paper-scissors where you want to make a pattern, such as paper to the opponent’s rock.

The list includes the general activity, then some of the common variations.
When we come down to it, most games are about just a few things–in no particular order:

1. Get to a particular place
Get there fastest (a race) [player interaction may be missing]
Get your any of your pieces there (Axis&Allies enemy capital)
Get a special piece there (football, hockey, many other team sports)
Get to end of the story (console RPGs)

2. Collect something (many card games, many video games)(sometimes economic)
Find something (exploration) (Easter egg hunt)
It drops in your lap (draw a card)
Take it from someone else (Monopoly, some card games especially trick-taking)
Don’t collect something (Old Maid, Hearts, etc.)

3. Wipe someone or something out (Risk, shooters, checkers, bowling!)
Wipe out one thing—chess

4. Achieve patterns in something (getting to a place could be seen as part of this!)
Patterns in piece location (this includes rock-paper-scissors, Tetris, many puzzle games)
Only your pieces (Tic-Tac-Toe), or yours plus opponent’s (rock-paper-scissors)
Patterns in relation to the “board” (Scrabble, Carcassonne)
Patterns of cards (related to sets–e.g. Canasta)

5. Improve your capabilities. This is often subsidiary, a way to achieve something else. Common in RPGs, vehicle simulations, construction/management simulation, collectible card games)

6. Survive, Especially common in arcade games (which are generally unwinnable).
I’m not sure about “engine” games, where you’re trying to make the right moves to take full advantage of an often economically-based system. In the end, you’re likely doing one of the six things above when you make a “right move”.

So what have I missed?
I’m sure other people have made such lists, but I need references to such.

North Carolina’s Research Triangle–“the hub of East Coast video games?”

This originally appeared as an "expert blog" on Gamasutra quite recently. The conference was held 29-30 April. Someone tells me next year's conference will be April 7 and 8, 2010

North Carolina’s Research Triangle–“the hub of East Coast video games?”

This past Wednesday and Thursday saw the inaugural edition of the annual Triangle Game Conference (TGC) in Raleigh, NC. Inspired by the success of GDC Austin in positioning Austin, TX as a video game hub, TGC is noteworthy as much for what it represents as for what actually occurred.

According to Alexander Macris, CEO and President, Themis Group, Inc., and President of the Board of the Triangle Game Initiative (http://www.trianglegameinitiative.org/), the conference is another step in the growth of video games and simulations in the area. “It’s worth noting that the seeds of the game development industry in the Triangle area go all the way back to the graphics programs at NCSU and UNC in the 1960s. Those graphics programs created talent and companies that focused on computer graphics. Several of those companies, such as NDL (started at Chapel Hill) and Virtus (started at NC State), saw an opportunity in video games. They were early innovators in 3D graphics and game tools.” With more than 1,200 employees at game-related companies, the area has reached "critical mass" as the pool of workers and expertise grows, and the new conference is an expression of that growth.

The Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, known as the Research Triangle, is now home to more than 30 game development companies. The Triangle is also home to the most commonly used video game engines, Unreal and Gamebryo. Recently announced company expansions and relocations include:

– Destineer Studios

– Electronic Arts

– Emergent Game Technologies

– Epic Games

– Vicious Cycle Software

– Insomniac Games

– Spark Plug Games

"The Triangle region has an ongoing supply of entry-level staff available due to the local colleges." said Macris. "What it does not have is a large surplus of highly experienced game industry vets. Experienced game developers generally become available when a game studio lets them go. That works when some studios are growing and some are shrinking. But since all of the local studios here in the Triangle are growing and none are letting people go, the area is importing talent. We’re adding about 200 jobs per year." I've found only one Triangle company that has recently laid off employees, Funcom, but that resulted from the lack of success of Age of Conan, and they are now hiring again.

Why has this growth occurred?

A couple years ago Jerry Heneghan of Virtual Heroes explained a major advantage: he can hire someone for less than they might make in California, but that person can buy a house in the Raleigh area rather than an apartment in California. Companies have been moving to the South for decades to take advantage of lower costs of living and labor costs.

Many people from the eastern US also prefer to live in the east, nearer to relatives, than in California. Consequently it’s not uncommon for west coast game developers to move to the Triangle. Further, the area is often cited as one of the best places to live, and to conduct business, in the United States. (See http://raleigh-wake.org/games/ for Wake county's recruiting pitch and specific examples.)

And those who have tired of making "entertainment" can work on games that matter, "serious games" and simulations. Ft. Bragg, near Fayetteville and about 50 miles south of the Triangle, represents a big consumer of computer simulation capability, the US military. Heneghan's company Virtual Heroes is the major support for the well-known "America's Army" game. Fayetteville Technical Community College has established a simulation/virtual reality facilities and programs for training "simulation technicians".

The Triangle is home to three major research universities and 15 other post-secondary schools, and support specifically for game development is coming from local community colleges and from NC State in Raleigh. The NC State computer science and industrial design departments have "concentrations" in game-related topics, and host the Digital Games Research Center. Duke University has the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE), the Southeast’s only fully enclosed virtual reality environment. UNC's computer graphics program is renowned. Several community colleges offer art, design, and programming instruction in a two-year "Simulation and Game Development" degree. The School of Communication Arts, a trade school for games and other media, has over 500 students enrolled.

Meetings of the Triangle IGDA chapter (http://www.igda.org/nctriangle/ ) are usually attended by more than 200, which causes venue problems–not many company premises or schools can cope with such numbers.

This growth in games occurred despite an absence of tax incentives to game companies moving to the Triangle; a bill is in the legislature to provide such incentives, but is unlikely to pass in the current economic climate (the NC constitution requires a balanced budget).

Quality of life is an important part of the Triangle's attraction. This is a continuation of what has been happening in the Old South for decades: costs of living are lower in part because labor is less expensive (and there are almost no unions), there's lots of room for those who want to live "in the country", and the very warm climate is attractive thanks to that blessed post-WWII development, residential air conditioning. In the larger cities of North Carolina you're as likely to hear some variety of Northern/Midwestern accent as Southern accents.

When I first came to the Triangle (from Michigan) in 1973, the quality-of-life advantages were obvious, though the area population was about half the current 1.5 million. Area college basketball boasts three NCAA champions this decade alone. The NC Symphony, based in Raleigh, is one of about 50 full-time symphony orchestras in the US. As a rule-of-thumb measure of growth, since 1973 the area has acquired a AAA baseball team (the once-low-minors Durham Bulls of movie fame) and one major league sports team (2006 Stanley Cup Champion Carolina Hurricanes), with the Carolina Panthers and Charlotte Bobcats less than three hours away in Charlotte. Raleigh has also unfortunately become large enough to suffer the blight of the commuter, regular rush-hour traffic jams.

Although NC is the tenth most populous state, there is plenty of room. The ocean is three hours to the southeast, the mountains five hours to the west. It’s possible for a person who is willing to commute for an hour to the Triangle to live in a large house on several acres, on one of the many man-made lakes, for less than a quarter million dollars.

It's easy to see why area leaders believe the Triangle will continue to attract video game creators, and become the "hub of East Coast video games."

To return to the conference, TGC was preceded in recent years by NC Advanced Learning Technology Association’s (http://ncalta.org/) annual conference and Walter Rotenberry/Wake Technical Community College’s annual Digital Game Expo. Macris said, "there are certainly close ties between Wake Tech, Walter Rotenberry, and TGC. Walter is a member of Triangle Game Initiative and has been one of a handful of leaders who has guided Triangle Game Conference forward . . . the show would not have happened without Walter and DGXPO."

The two-day conference included two keynotes and 40 presentations/panel discussions, with an overall theme of “Innovate or Die.” The conference temporarily outgrew its Marriot/Raleigh Convention Center facilities as the Wednesday keynote by Dr. Michael Capps of Epic was “standing room only” for perhaps 250 listeners, with more watching an external feed. We'll report on two of the panel discussions separately.

You can view a map of the area game development companies at http://www.trianglegameconference.com/media/misc/TriangleGames_Map.pdf

Why We Play Games

The original version of this appeared on GameCareerGuide. (Diagram missing for now...)

Why We Play Games

At some point designers should know why people like to play games. Yet if anyone truly knew this, he or she would become rich as a consultant.

No one can exactly describe why people like to play games, though many have tried. If an author can spend 80 pages just trying to define what a game is (Rules of Play), how likely are we to define why games are enjoyable? Entire books have been written about this subject -- in this article, I summarize the less philosophical reasons people have suggested, and add some from my own experience.

Game designers make their best judgments about why people like to play, and then design accordingly. Yet there are many examples of software entertainment that surprise most experts. Why is The Sims so enjoyable for so many people, or Katamari Damacy? In the end, a simple answer to this question is “What matters is what happens when a large and diverse set of people play test your game.”

No matter what you think about enjoyment of games, no matter whether you enjoy your game, the play test reflects the reaction of a wide variety of players. If enough of them like it, you probably have something worthwhile. If not enough of them like it, you need to change it.

Unfortunately, in the video game world it costs so much time and money to get to the point of playing the game that we really need all the help we can get while doing the preliminary design. A practical discussion of why people enjoy playing games is therefore a worthwhile endeavor.

Notice I haven’t used the word “fun” -- that’s because many people who enjoy playing games would not call them fun. Take chess as an example. It can be interesting, even fascinating, but many chess players do not describe it as fun.

“Fun” usually comes from external factors, from the attitudes of the people you play with and the environment, not from the game itself. People can laugh and shout and have a good time when playing an epic board game, even though most wouldn’t describe the game itself as fun.

There are certainly games meant to be “funny,” but not every gamer enjoys playing a funny game. Some think they’re silly and boring.

What is Enjoyable?

Some authors have made lists of the kinds of enjoyment people can have while playing games. Such lists are useful to remind us of the details of enjoyable gaming.

The most well known is from Marc LeBlanc (source 8kindsoffun.com)

Sensation Game as sense-pleasure

Fantasy Game as make-believe

Narrative Game as unfolding story

Challenge Game as obstacle course

Fellowship Game as social framework

Discovery Game as uncharted territory

Expression Game as soap box

Submission Game as mindless pastime

At Origins Game Fair 2008, Ian Schreiber (co-author of Challenges for Game Designers) gave his version of kinds of fun (enjoyment):

• exploration

• social experience

• collection (collecting things)

• physical sensation

• puzzle solving

• advancement

• competition

Ask a group of game players to list ways that people enjoy games, and many of the above will come up in one form or another.

Raph Koster (Theory of Fun in Games) has brought to our attention research by Mihaly Csikszentmikalyi into “optimal experience.” The Chicago-based Czech researcher applies his ideas to life as a whole, in a series of books, but we can apply them to games. Csikszentmikalyi is interested in “the positive aspects of human experience -- joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life I call flow” (Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), p. xi).

For game purposes it amounts to this: People have an optimal experience when they are challenged, but not challenged too much. In other words, if something is too easy, it becomes boring. If it’s too hard, it becomes frustrating and causes anxiety. The ideal game experience, then, is to challenge the player at whatever ability level he has reached, that is, keep increasing the challenges as the player becomes a better player. This keeps players “in the flow” (see the diagram).

Video games can be particularly good at managing the level of challenge, either through adaptive programming, via the difficulty setting, or through increasingly difficult levels in games that use levels. In non-electronic games, the level of challenge tends to change because your opponents tend to become better players just as you do, or you find better players to play against. In a non-electronic role-playing game such as Dungeons & Dragons, the referee (Dungeon Master) manages the challenge. Novice characters don’t meet fire giants but often encounter orcs, while very powerful characters may occasionally go up against an ancient and terrible dragon, but orcs aren’t worth bothering with. This is in some sense artificial, but it makes the game more enjoyable.

Enjoyable to Some, Yet Not to Others

While these schemes and categories are all useful ways to think about games, I think game enjoyment often involves spectra of factors, with some people at one end, others at the other end, and the majority somewhere in the middle. Many of these spectra overlap, or are different views of what may be a more fundamental factor.

Here’s a list of some of the factors (certainly not definitive) that I’ll discuss:

• role-fulfillment vs. emergence (story dominant vs. rules dominant)

• story/narrative vs. what happens next/emerging circumstances

• classical vs. romantic

• long-term planning vs. reaction/adaptation to changing circumstances

• socializing vs. competition

• entertainment vs. challenge

• fantasy/relaxation vs. urge to excel (“gaming mastery”)

• the journey vs. the destination

Role-Fulfillment vs. Emergence (Story Dominant vs. Rules Dominant)

Many people have suggested that video games are dream fulfillment: What is the player’s dream that the game designer wants to help them experience or fulfill? Yet in many games the dream, if it is there at all, is quite obscure. What is the dream fulfillment in playing chess or checkers, or any other abstract game, such as Tetris? Is there anything personal (other than a desire for immortality?) in controlling a nation for a thousand years, as in History of the World, Age of Empires, or Civilization?

Certainly many video games put the player into a position the individual is unlikely to experience in the real world, or which they wouldn’t want to experience because it’s much too dangerous. Living out fantasy is an obvious part of shooters and action games, for example.

This kind of game can also be called “story-dominant.” If there’s a dream to be fulfilled, it likely involves a story, and the game is an expression of that story, however simple (just as dreams can be simple or complex).

The other end of this spectrum is the “rules-dominant” game, which includes many traditional games such as chess and go. Gameplay emerges out of the rules, not from following a story (hence, it is sometimes called “emergent” gaming). The game has a set of rules, and the course of the game emerges from the rules in a great variety of ways, depending on the players. Board games and card games tend to be rules-dominant, while many of popular video game genres -- and role-playing games of all types -- tend to be more story-dominant.

We might further say that the rules-dominant games are often for more than two sides, whereas the role-dominant ones tend to have just two sides, the player(s) and the computer (or referee, in Dungeons & Dragons and similar games).

Video games, especially the AAA variety, are much more exercises in role-assumption than non-electronic games. The player is enabled to do something he'd like to imagine he could do, but he can feel as if he's really doing it in modern AAA games. The feeling of verisimilitude must be there. On the other hand, "casual" video games tend to be more rules-dominant, like board games and card games.

Sid Meier recently described what amounts to an "emergent" view of games:

"It's important that the player has the fun in the game," [Meier] said, noting that there is a temptation for the designer to steer the gameplay too much. "It's definitely our philosophy to keep the game designer in the background and let the story emerge from players' decisions."

The next question discusses other aspects of these two contrasting approaches.

Story vs. Emerging Circumstances

Some game players like to follow a story, while others hate to be led around by the nose. Yet they’re talking about the same experience. This is usually expressed in the contrast of “linear” games with “sandbox” games.

It is much easier to produce a powerful story through linearity (as in a book or movie), so the strongest (in terms of story, at any rate) of the story-dominant games are linear.

Sandbox games have greater replay value than linear games (other things being equal) because there is only one or a few stories in the latter. Of course, if the linear game is very long, will people miss a lack of replayability?

Sandbox video games such as Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed are a return to the older video game style, where specific narrative (linearity) is less important or non-existent.

The role-assumption game isn't necessarily strongly linear or story-dominant. The ancestor of many video games, Dungeons & Dragons (paper version), can be played either way. The dungeon master can conceive a story and set up an adventure so that players are forced to follow through the story (linear method). Or he can set up an appropriately challenging situation, not trying to predict how the players will approach it and not trying to lead them from a particular point to another, and see what happens (sandbox method). In this case the players make their own story. And each group confronted with the same adventure will contrive a different story. It’s easier to do the sandbox in a paper game than in a video game, because a good human referee is more capable than a computer of adjusting the game as it is played.

I always hated storytelling D&D as a player, because it meant the referee forced me to do things I didn’t want to do. But other people much prefer the story-driven style. Of course, there is story in the emergent style, and there is strategy and tactics in the story style. I’m talking about what’s dominant.

What seems to be certain, however, is that many players lean strongly to one side or the other, and don’t like games of the other type most of the time.

Classical vs. Romantic

Two basic game playing styles exist among those who are interested in winning a game (not all players are, of course). Harkening back to the well-known 19th century distinction in music, painting, and other arts, I call the two basic styles the classical and the romantic.

The perfect classical player tries to know each game inside-out. He wants to learn the best counter to every move an opponent (or the computer) might make. He takes nothing for granted, paying attention to details that probably won’t matter but which in certain cases could be important. The classical player does not avoid taking chances, but carefully calculates the consequences of his risks. He dislikes unnecessary risks. He prefers a slow but steady certain win to a quick but only probable win. He tries not to be overcautious, however, for fear of becoming predictable. He tries to maximize his minimum gain each turn -- as the perfect player of mathematical game theory is expected to do -- rather than make moves and attacks that could gain a lot but which might leave him worse off than when he started.

Some people call this the “minimax” style of play. I am not sure that “minimaxer” and “classical” mean quite the same thing in game contexts, but they are close. Certainly, the minimaxers are usually going to be classical types.

A cliché among football fans is that the best teams win by making fewer mistakes, letting the other team beat itself. So it is with the classical gamer, who concentrates on eliminating errors rather than discovering brilliant coups.

The romantic, on the other hand, looks for the decisive blow that will cripple his enemy, psychologically if not physically on the playing field. He wishes to convince his opponent of the inevitability of defeat; in some cases a player with a still tenable position will resign the game to his romantic opponent when he has been beaten psychologically. The romantic is willing to take a risk in order to disrupt enemy plans and throw the game into a line of play his opponent is unfamiliar with. He looks for opportunities for a big gain, rather than maximizing his minimum gain. He loves the brilliant coup, despite the risks.

Chess lends itself to classical play, poker to romantic play. But each one can be played with the opposite style.

Because so many video games let you save your position and experiment with different strategies, the romantic style may be more common among video gamers.

(Much of this section is excerpted from the much longer article “The Classical and Romantic Game Playing Styles,” originally published in Dragon Magazine #65, September 1982. A recent version is online .)

Long-Term Planning vs. Adaptation to Changing Circumstances

Some people like to plan well ahead, to consider the options and choose a best course for each. Others like to react to circumstances as they occur, to adapt. Chess and checkers encourage long-term planning. Monopoly, thanks to the random move mechanic and more than two players, is more adaptive. Having more than two players introduces additional uncertainty to any game; uncertainty is at the heart of the adaptive style. Poker involves adaptation in each hand, but in the long run, the best players may be able to plan their bluffs (and non-bluffs) so as to take advantage of the characteristics and personalities of the other players. Card driven war games put an emphasis on adaptation: you can only do what your current hand allows you to do, you never know what cards you’ll get, and you don’t know what cards your opponent holds.

In general, perfect information games encourage planning, while as uncertainty increases, adaptation becomes more important than planning. For a variety of reasons, adaptation is probably the more common preference among video gamers.

Socializing vs. Competition

Party gamers are the epitome of the socializers. Many Euro-style board gamers and casual video gamers are of this type, to the point that they refuse to attack someone even when playing in a competitive game. They play games to enjoy being with and interacting with other people of similar interest, and have little interest in dominating or beating someone. I don’t think we need to discuss the competitive gamer much. We all know people whose main gaming objective is to win, to outdo everyone else.

The availability of a social experience is important. Non-electronic board games and card games are generally social experiences; electronic games are becoming more social (MMOs, Wii), but are still predominantly solitary, a player alone with his own thoughts and dreams.

Non-electronic RPGs are often social, as the games are usually cooperative rather than competitive.

Entertainment vs. Challenge

Traditional thinking about games sees them as competitions or challenges, where players play against one another. Dungeons & Dragons changed that, as players played against “the bad guys” with the Dungeon Master as neutral referee. It is a cooperative game, though there is still an unending series of challenges.

Some video games have gone further by leaving competition entirely out of it and reducing challenges. Games have become entertainments, not competitions. (Of course, many family games were played as entertainments even though they were ostensibly competitions.) Many people pay their 60 bucks (or 20 bucks, or 5 bucks) and want to be entertained, not challenged. Yet there are still competitive players and highly competitive games. Spore is reportedly "too easy" for hardcore players, yet challenging enough for the much larger market of more casual players. Evidently it is an entertainment rather than a challenging, competitive game.

In a sense, any game can be played as an entertainment or as a competition, but design will make some much more suitable as one than the other. Insofar as people often "don't want to think" when playing games, many video games substitute "physical challenges" (such as jumping in platformers, or shooting accurately) for mental challenges. The physical challenges can easily be modified to entertain or to challenge, as the player wishes.

Playing against people online tends to be challenging. Playing against people in person tends to be entertainment, perhaps because we’re more likely to know the other people involved.

Some writers on this topic speculate that socializing and entertainment tend to be more important to female players, whereas challenge and competition are more important to males.

Relaxation vs. Mastery

A variation of the above is to play a game as fantasy fulfillment, or to play the game to fulfill the urge to excel, to demonstrate gaming mastery. The latter helps the player feel important, capable, powerful, hence its great attraction to teenagers. A game can often provide both, if only through different difficulty levels.

Unfortunately, the urge for gaming mastery, when taken to extremes, results in players willing to cheat or behave in unsocial ways that can ruin everyone else's enjoyment.

Some people just don't see the point of excelling in a video game. What does it matter? A player's attitude can change over time, likely moving more toward relaxation as the player becomes older and encounters more real-world challenges and responsibilities. Mastering a game simply becomes less important.

The Journey vs. The Destination

Older generations want to enjoy the entire game they are playing, even when their main objective is to win. Young people seem to be more interested in the destination, “beating the game,” than in the journey. Obviously, it’s necessary that a game have a sufficient level of challenge that the “destination” player feels he’s accomplished something.

This can also be seen as “what happens” versus “what is the end.” Some people play games (and read novels, and watch movies) to find out what happens next. Others are only interested in the final result. They might skip ahead in a novel and just read the end, or skip ahead in a game (often with "cheats") and just play the end.

I once listened to a young man who had written two books about generational differences say that his generation (gen Y or millennials) were quite happy to get a cheat code, go to the last stage of a game, “win” the game, and be satisfied. “I beat the game, didn’t I?” I, a baby boomer, was astounded. “Why play if you’re going to cheat?” He smiled as he said, “We’re just gathering the fruits of our research.” I shook my head. To this day I cannot understand this emotionally, but I understand intellectually that many game players feel this way -- that the destination is all that matters. And a game designer must be aware of it.

The following is another observation of this phenomenon:

“The fact that there's no ending [100 levels repeat randomly], however, points out a very important difference between Atari's view on video games and the current perception. Atari saw Gauntlet as a process, a game that was played for its own sake and not to reach completion. The adventurers continue forever until their life drains out, their quest ultimately hopeless.

... in games of Gauntlet I've had with other people in the past few years … their interest tends to survive only until the point where they learn there is no ending. Times have certainly changed."

Game Design Essentials: 20 Atari Games, by John Harris, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3679/game_design_essentials_20_atari_.php?page=20

I’d speculate from my experience with game design students that, for whatever reasons, females tend to be more interested in the journey, males more interested in the destination.

We might speculate also that MMOs with level caps (which is typical because it’s hard to design a MMO without a level cap) suit the destination folks, because there is a destination: that maximum level. Similarly, RPGs such as Final Fantasy are attractive to destination people because there is an end to the story. In older RPGs, both the original non-electronic ones and some of the older video games, the game is open-ended. There is no particular destination.

I find it instructive that the latest version of non-electronic Dungeons & Dragons (fourth edition, June 2008) has a definite end. Characters retire, one way or another, when they reach 30^th level, and that level is practically reachable, as opposed to a tightly run first edition game where no human character ever got to a maximum level (and certainly not 30th!).

I’ll end with a couple of additional observations.

Escapism?

Dream-fulfillment is close to escapism. Like it or not, many games have a strong escapist element, and it seems strongest where dream-fulfillment is strongest. It is especially important to non-adults. Consider, say, a favorite adolescent male pastime, shooter games:

• The player can be the star, “da man,” which is generally unlike the player’s real life

• Players can experience thrills (even death) without risk of being hurt

• There’s always a way to succeed -- trial and error can work, because it doesn’t matter if you get killed

• Competition is not only permissible, but encouraged

• There’s a structure to everything; most of the uncertainty of real life is not there

• Young people control what happens, and attitudes can be confrontational, edgy.

For a frustrated teenage male who's been told too often what he can and cannot do, this can be a kind of nirvana. Game designers must be aware of the escapist elements of gaming, even if they’re designing a serious game that has few or none of these particular characteristics.

Personalities

Game players have different kinds of personalities, just as the population at large. A fairly common taxonomy divides people into 16 personalities, as reflected in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (www.myersbriggs.org) and in the writing of David Keirsey and others (e.g., the book Please Understand Me). These are often derived from the work of Carl Jung, and even back to the Greek idea of the “four temperaments”. (A good practical Jung Typology test of personality type is at http://humanmetrics.com/.)

The major point to recognize is that different personalities have different preferences, different ways of collecting information, different ways of reacting to challenges. These personalities are established in childhood and do not change. For example, some people feel better before they make a decision than after, so they tend to gather more information and delay decision-making. Others feel better after they’ve made a decision, so they react to decision-making quite differently. The former may learn to make timely decisions, but to a considerable extent it is against their nature. Similarly, some people rely heavily on logic, others on intuition. Such differences are going to strongly affect their tastes in games, or even whether they play games at all. Keirsey suggested that certain occupations tend to attract certain personality types, and we can wonder if game playing attracts only some of the 16 types.

The major point for inexperienced designers to take from this is you are not like your audience, and you need to decide which kinds of preferences and which ideas about enjoyment your games will target. No game can begin to cover all the bases because there are so many different reasons to like to play games.

"Digital games" are most games, not just video games

Many people use the term "digital game" to represent what I call electronic or (for convenience) video games (technically, there are electronic games that have no video component, certainly not in the accepted sense of video). Sometimes "analog" is used for non-electronic games. I used "digital" for a while, but the problem is that digital means with discrete steps that have nothing in between: Yahtzee, Craps, and other dice games, Tic-Tac-Toe, all of those are digital in this broader sense, as are most "traditional" games. I sure don't like having to type "non-electronic", but that's much better than "analog" or "non-digital". And "video" works better for me than "digital", because it is closer to what I usually mean.

The system and the psychological in games

I've come to some sort of epiphany about a fundamental difference between video games, *as they're thought of by the hardcore and by game developers*, and non-electronic games. I've only worked my way partly through this (the final version will be on Gamasutra/GameCareerGuide, I expect), but here it is so far.

There are two parts to playing mainstream board and card games. One part is figuring out the system, learning how to manipulate the game mechanics to achieve the ends you desire. In poker this is very simple, in chess very difficult. So in chess, some people become competent with the system, many fewer become experts, and there are several "levels" of expertise; in poker a great many people are experts in the system. In general, card game systems are much simpler than boardgame systems, and boardgame systems are still simple compared with many video games.

In most non-electronic games, figuring out the system is straightforward, though in more strategic games, some people never figure it out. And others quit before they figure it out. Many contemporary Euro games cater to the latter players, by ensuring that, after one play, most players have (or think they have) figured out the system fairly well.

Contrast this with chess or a game with chesslike aspects such as Britannia. Few if any people become competent with the Britannia system in one play. The rules are not complex at all, but the strategy is, and that is part of the system. Many players come to be competent with the system after a number of plays. Few truly figure out the system in Brit--become experts--so that they can look at the board, know what turn it is, look at the points, and know who is ahead and why. In this respect *I* am competent with the system but have not truly figured it out (then again, I never play it as published).

The second part to playing games is understanding how the players interact with the system, learning how to recognize what the players are trying to do, and finally figuring out how forecast and to manipulate the other players. We might call this knowing the psychology of the game, as opposed to knowing the system.

Let's go back to Poker. The system is simple; what makes someone an outstanding poker player is ability to play the other players, to be good at the psychological component of the game. People who merely understand the system of probabilities may do well at Poker, but won't be outstanding, because the bluff is what makes the game, and the bluff is all about people, not probabilities.

Minimax players, who more or less follow game theory and try to maximize their minimum gain, may not feel they need to understand the psychology, especially in two player games. I'm a minimax player, so not surprisingly, I don't care for Poker.

Even in a chesslike game such as Britannia, at the highest level, players are playing the other players, not the system.

In an interactive game, the more players, the more the psychological part of the game matters, the less the system part matters.

Yet here's the kicker: traditional one-player video games have no psychological component, only a system component. In a sense, they are puzzles more than games. Once you figure out the system, that's all there is.

This point of view was brought home recently by two articles. Leigh Alexander wrote a piece in Gamasutra ( http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23322 ) reporting Warren Spector's point of view, that he is the author of a game, he provide the experiences, and a game that relies on other players to provide the experiences is "lazy".

My reaction: he's completely misunderstood what "real" games are about, because the great interest in games is *in the other people.* Interaction with a computer cannot compare to interaction with other people, especially with GOOD players. In effect, the traditional one-player video game is a kind of puzzle, with the computer providing a semblance of intelligent opposition, an entity, as opposed to a game like card Solitaire (or Tetris!) where there is no organized opposition: a puzzle, not a game.

Another article brought this home more strongly. Larry Songtag in the first IGDA Magazine writes an article titled "Challenge." He is characterizing what challenges ought to be in games, with the common and reasonable assumption that a game is about challenges. He's frustrated by challenges that can change, it seems. "Once a player gains the skill to get through a level, they can then do it every time barring a mistake on the player's part. Players become frustrated when a twist of luck causes them to fail a challenge even when they had the experience and skill to overcome it in the past."

My reaction to this was, WHAT? This isn't a game, this is a puzzle! He also believes that luck should not be part of the situation. Yet even when players of a game with no luck, such as chess, play a series of matches, every game is different; why should the video game be the same, or so effectively the same that it can be overcome every time? The author evidently likes the "game as a puzzle," not a game with intelligent opposition, ignores the effect of people as opponents!

Whether you call it a puzzle or a game, it's definitely very different from a game that has both system and psychological components.

Think about it. A person doesn't play a multi-sided game like Diplomacy or Britannia five hundred times to figure out the system. They play to enjoy the interaction of the system and the players, to learn how people think and how they can be persuaded to think in certain ways. And this may explain why so many of the traditional video games have so little replayability. Once you figure out the system, and exhaust the alternatives provided by the designer (such as optional avatars), what is there to do? *You stop playing.* I think back to when I played Tetris. There is, of course, no ultimate solution to that game, you're going to lose sooner or later. But one day I "got in the zone" and doubled my score, and thereafter I rarely played. I'd figured out the system as well as I expected I ever could, so there was really no reason to keep playing.

What's happening now in the gaming world is that video game creators are gradually figuring out that they need the psychological component in their games, they need more than one person playing--and now it has become practical technologically. At the same time, boardgame designers have gone the other way with the many multiplayer solitaire and "engine" games coming out: games where the psychological component does not exist, or barely exists, and the game only has a system component as though it was a traditional video game.

As you might guess, I find those multiplayer solitaire and engine games absolutely uninteresting. Even though I'm a minimax player, and might be expected to like the process of figuring out the system, I hate puzzles. (Maybe when I was a kid I would have liked such games, who knows?) Nowadays, when all there is is a system, I don't want any part of it. Which is probably why I prefer D&D and multi-sided board and card games, where the psychological component is strong.

Even in paper D&D there's a psychological component, both the other players and the referee, even though there's not "an opponent". You don't have to have an opponent to have a psychological component to a game, but you need people. Someday the computer will be able to pretend to be "people" enough that it can provide the psychological component, but not yet.

Edit: I added two paragraphs about Larry Songtag's article in IGDA Magazine. 3 May, morning Eastern Time.

Why we use non-electronic games to teach (and learn) electronic game design

The following appeared (in slightly different form) on GameCareerGuide.com

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/602/pulling_the_plug_in_defense_of_.php

Why we use non-electronic games to teach (and learn) electronic game design

Introduction

Teaching game design with non-electronic games is a much more efficient use of the students' (and the instructor's) time that also teaches students more about game design than if they struggle with programming and art to produce electronic games. Learning game design with non-electronic games is much more effective for beginners than trying to produce electronic games. I’m here to explain why.

I'll summarize the reasons first, then discuss each in turn. Then I'll describe what happens when beginners learn using electronic games. (Henceforth I’ll use “students” and “beginners” interchangeably.)

! It's much more practical for beginners to make non-electronic prototypes--specialized skills such as programming and digital artistry are not needed.

! Much of successful game design is iterative and incremental; this is much easier for students to understand when they can quickly make and modify playable prototypes.

! Non-electronic games force students to concentrate on gameplay, not looks/slickness/coolness that have no staying power.

! Much less time is wasted on poor ideas–and most ideas are poor ideas.

! The greater simplicity of non-electronic games forces concentration on good gameplay.

! Students cannot "hide behind the computer" (the "easy button").

It's much more practical for beginning students to make non-electronic prototypes--specialized skills such as programming and digital artistry are not needed.

Less time is required for preliminary design of the non-electronic game. By their nature, non-electronic games are simpler than most video games, if only because there is no computer to control complexity. Moreover, you can reach the point of playing a paper prototype when you haven't figured out all the details, while an electronic game requires more detail before a playable prototype can be constructed. With a non-electronic game, if the designer is present he can make a ruling anytime a question arises that isn’t covered in the rules–the rules may not even be written, yet. This cannot be done with electronic games, the program must be fully functional, which means the "rules" must be complete and detailed.

A usable playable prototype of a non-electronic game can be made in an hour or two. A playable electronic prototype, even a simple one, will take new game design students dozens of hours on average for relatively simple video games.

If you’re familiar with how movies are made in the 21^st century, think of the storyboards and “pre-viz” electronic versions of the movie that are made before actual filming. These are all prototypes, in effect. But it is much easier, cheaper, quicker, to make storyboards or even the pre-viz, than to shoot the actual movie. The same is true for non-electronic games, they are much easier, cheaper, and quicker to make. (Many designers recommend making non-electronic prototypes to test ideas for electronic games, just as storyboards test ideas for films.)

For tips for making paper prototypes read:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050913/sigman_01.shtml

Much of game design is iterative and incremental; this is much easier for students to understand when they can quickly make and modify playable prototypes.

The playable prototype is what really counts; I tell students, “playtesting is Sovereign." The problem with any electronic production of a game is that it takes SO long, compared to making a non-electronic prototype, that students fail to do the most important part of design: repeated testing, and modification in light of that testing. They get a working prototype, play it a few times, and think they're done, instead of just getting started. Unfortunately, the emphasis in the video game industry, and in video game design books, is on planning a video game, in order to obtain funding to produce the prototype. This obscures the primacy of testing once you have that prototype. NO prototype is a really good game when it is first played.

The refinement process mainly consists of playtesting for modifications, not for bug finding. It’s important to “lose” any feature of a game that doesn’t contribute to good gameplay. A non-electronic game designer can simply wave his hand and change a rule, or remove a feature, of a game, whereas the video game designer faces a lengthy period of software modification–and tends to be reluctant to make changes.

The "natural" way to design a game used to be pursued in the video game industry, and may still be done for small games. A playable prototype is produced as soon as possible. It is played, revised, played, revised, played, revised, seemingly forever, until a stable "good game" has been produced. Sid Meier did this with Civilization. He programmed, he and (mostly) Bruce Shelley played, they decided what needed to be changed, Sid programmed, they played, and so on.

More recently, Sid Meier said on slashdot, "My whole approach to making games revolves around first creating a solid prototype and then playing and improving the game over the course of the 2-3 year development cycle . . . until we think it's ready for prime time. My experience in this area helps me to know what to do and where to start. I definitely spend a lot of time playing the game before I let anyone else look at it."

In a classroom we don't have the time (or the skills, usually) to create video games rapidly. But it's easy to create non-video games rapidly.

Furthermore, in a classroom context, it's easy for students to "redesign" traditional games like chess, perhaps one feature at a time. Because the games are quite simple, it's easier to discuss and predict the actual result of the changes. Most important, you can actually play the changed versions and see what happens.

You can "redesign" electronic games, but you can't put the redesigns into practice to see the results--it would take too long even if it was otherwise practical. Students tend to miss the point that design almost never turns out the way you intended, when you actually play the game.

Non-electronic games let students start out with small steps rather than attempt a big project that may fail for many reasons other than poor design.

For more about iteration see this recent article: http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/577/iterative_design.php

Non-electronic games force students to concentrate on gameplay, not looks/slickness/coolness that have no staying power.

Many students equate good looks with a good game. If they’re making electronic games, they’ll spend a lot of time trying to make them look good, trying to reach AAA list quality even though that’s impossible in any reasonable amount of time.

With non-electronic games students quickly see that there’s no point in wasting time worrying about slick looks until the game is actually “done.” Paper game designs are, by their nature, utilitarian, though published paper games can be full of eye-candy and slick parts.

Students nowadays often have only played "traditional" non-electronic games such as Monopoly and Game of Life that are, in fact, somewhere between mediocre and downright bad game designs. Discussion of traditional games opens their eyes to what good design really is, and helps them think critically about gameplay.

Much less time is wasted on poor ideas–and most ideas are poor ideas.

Students tend to think their first idea will be "the best game ever." And if that doesn't pan out, the next one will be "great." Experienced designers know that they should have many, many designs "in the works" at any time. And they know that to get a few really good ideas you need to generate a great many ideas altogether.

Furthermore, there's no reason to expect students to come up with excellent game designs when they're starting out, any more than writers or artists or composers start out with excellent ideas or results. John Creasey, who ultimately published more than 600 novels (mostly mysteries), was rejected more than 700 times before he made a sale. Science fiction novelist (and Byte magazine computer pundit) Jerry Pournelle says you must be willing to throw away your first million words (about 10 novels) if you want to become a good novelist.

Why let students waste huge amounts of time producing an electronic game that is a fundamentally bad design? When they design non-electronic games and very soon thereafter play their prototypes, they quickly discover that their "great ideas" are not very good, in practice. This helps them learn to critique their ideas at an early stage, and discard the obviously bad ones before spending a lot of time on them. In a sense, it teaches them humility, something that every designer must learn.

These are especially important lessons for the "millennial" generation in the “age of instant gratification.” Some people think they’re in “The Matrix,” where a quick pill is all they need to be an expert. Starting out with electronic games obscures the nature of these illusions.

The greater simplicity of non-electronic games forces concentration on good gameplay.

Students tend to identify "games" with AAA list games, rather than with much simpler casual games or games of 20 years ago (e.g., Tetris, Space Invaders). These AAA games are often terrifically complex. This is the kind of game most students want to produce, though as a practical matter most of them actually won't work for companies producing AAA list games, nor in an educational setting can they make such complex games requiring dozens of man-years of professional effort.

All this complexity obscures the actual game design in the games. That obscuring complexity rarely exists in non-electronic games; furthermore, the students aren't likely to design complex non-electronic games because they cannot expect the computer to take care of the details. Gameplay is a much more obvious element of non-electronic games than it is of video games. The result: the student is forced to concentrate on the most important part of the game, gameplay.

For example, beginners designing electronic games tend to concentrate on story rather than gameplay, usually a big mistake. When there's no computer, they're less likely to do this, because they don't have a computer to "describe and depict the world" for them.

Students cannot "hide behind the computer" (the "easy button").

Students tend to design an overly-complex electronic game and assume "the computer will take care of" problems that are, in fact, game design problems. I call this "hiding behind the computer." Unfortunately this is easy to do, because only at the end of a very long design and modification cycle will it become obvious that the computer cannot solve the problem, that it's a design problem.

People make computer games complex . . . because they can, because the "computer will take care of" things that would never be possible or tolerable in a non-electronic game. Often, the resulting game is too complex despite the computer.

Designers, especially novices, should live by the following: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery (French engineer and early airman).)

It's much easier to learn to do this effectively with non-electronic games.

With non-electronic games, there's clearly no "easy button"; when there's no computer, there's nowhere to hide. When you design something that results in a crappy electronic game prototype, you can blame it on the programming, or the art, or the sound, or something else. When you make a crappy non-electronic game prototype, you're out there on your own, it's your fault, so you are forced to figure out what you need to do to get better.

Designing non-electronic games is actually more challenging, for most people. And more educational for beginners.

Having described these reasons, now let's consider two important questions.

What happens when you start to teach (or learn) with electronic games?

If you begin with electronic games, in the end, you never actually teach or learn game design, you teach or learn game production, which is quite another thing, and you teach or learn it in an exceptionally half-baked way.

If the class uses a simple game engine, even something as simple as Gamemaker, this not only severely limits what games can be made, most of the effort goes into making the prototype work, not into the design and testing/iteration phases.

When you create electronic games for learning purposes, you’ll spend almost all of your time on game production elements that are not game design.

How IS electronic and non-electronic game design different?

Many video game experts say "game design is game design" whether electronic or not (e.g. Adams and Rollings, Game Design Fundamentals). This is a topic for another article, but I can point out the most important difference.

The obvious difference is scale, but this isn’t so much a design difference as a marketing difference. “Big time” video games are produced by dozens of people, cost millions of dollars, and in rare cases sell many millions of copies. “Big time” non-video games are produced by a few people with budgets in the thousands, with only a few titles such as Settlers of Catan and Risk selling as many as a million copies.

More important from a design perspective, electronic games tend to be one person (or group) versus the computer; non-electronic games tend to be two or more people playing against one another. “Multi-sided” games–more than one conflicting human entity (individual or group)–are the norm in the non-electronic world, the exception in the video game world. (Except where PvP is allowed, even an MMO is not multi-sided even if there are 70 people in a raid.) We are seeing more multi-sided video games, and there is a lot to be learned from board and card games. I’ll address that another time.

Idea Origins, originally on GameCareerGuide

I've not written much here lately because I'm working on a book and contributing articles to Gamasutra and GameCareerGuide. I'm going to put some of the older ones here. This one was "Idea Origins" 9 Dec '08, http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/662/idea_.php. The following has been revised a little from that original version.


The idea is not the game

"Strictly speaking, there's no such thing as invention, you know. It's only magnifying what already exists." Allie Fox, character in the film The Mosquito Coast

How important are ideas?

Most novice designers think that their main task is to come up with a great new idea. They think a great new idea will necessarily become a great game. Also, to them an idea must be new to be great. You can see folks like this asking in online forums for help in turning their idea into a game; they almost never find a collaborator, because ideas alone are nearly worthless.

As Allie Fox says, the reality is that there is hardly ever a new idea--"nothing new under the sun"--rather there are new ways to use old ideas.

Furthermore, for every person who gets an idea, there are usually dozens or hundreds of others with the same idea.

Think about the category of novel writing. Almost all novels are variations of ideas used in novels published in the past. It's how the writer presents the ideas that counts, plus a dollop of luck. There is nothing notably new in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, but it has sold over 60 million copies. The same can be said about movies, hardly anything is new.

How often do we get a really extraordinary new idea in games? In non-video gaming, we have Avalon Hill'sStalingrad/Afrika Korps/Waterloo, TSR's Dungeons and Dragons, Wizard of the Coast's Magic:the Gathering. A game as successful as Trivial Pursuit or Settlers of Catan is a simple variation on games that came before. In video games, there have been many technical advances, but few really new games. The Sims comes to mind, but it was preceded by a game called Little Computer People which Mobygames calls “the mother of The Sims”; have you ever heard of it? A new idea does not guarantee a highly successful product, and highly successful games usually have no new ideas.

It doesn't make sense to try to come up with a "great idea": your chances are worse than one in a million of coming up with one. And if you did would you recognize it as a great idea?

Because ideas on their own count for so little, publishers want games, not ideas. Ideas are cheap, a dime a dozen; everyone in the game industry has ideas. Recognize that your "great idea" is probably not that great, not that original, and not that interesting to others. Virtually everyone thinks their game ideas are extraordinarily good, and everyone is wrong almost all the time.

This is hard for beginners to accept, partly because it’s easy to come up with a few ideas, so it’s nice to think that you only need to come up with a great idea to make a lot of money. No, there’s a lot of work in making a successful game, beginning with generating LOTS of ideas. The more ideas you have, the more likely you’ll have a few really good ones that can become really good games.

There’s a “pyramid” of game design (see illustration) that goes like this:
• Lots of people get ideas
• Fewer successfully go from general idea to a specific game idea
• Fewer yet produce a prototype
• Fewer yet produce a decently playable prototype
• Very few produce a completely designed game
• And very, very few produce a really good complete game

As we progress in this chapter I’ll talk about how to get ideas, what to do with those ideas, how to turn those ideas into specific game ideas, and so on to reach the prototype. Everything applies equally to video games and non-electronic games.

(For more about the worth of ideas alone, see Tom Sloper’s advice at http://www.sloperama.com/advice/idea.htm.)

How many ideas?

“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” Edward de Bono

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” Linus Pauling

“Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginning.” Robert Collier

If you have no ideas, you’ll never have a game. How many ideas do you need? The more the better. Most of them will never become games, let alone good games. It’s another sub-pyramid as show in the accompanying illustration (which ought to be much wider than it is tall, but is a conventional pyramid for the sake of clarity).

[Illustration miniature included here, larger version attached separately]




If all this is true, then you know you need to generate a great many ideas in order to have a few that might ultimately reach retailer shelves. Remember the conventional wisdom that upwards of 90% of the video games that are initially funded–that’s the plans that are good enough for someone to be willing to pay to have them developed–never reach the public. At some stage they’re canceled or the studio fails for other reasons. One of the more well-known boardgame designers estimates that 60% of his games will not be published. And for every idea that is good enough to try to turn into a game, there are many, many ideas that don’t make it.

You want to get to a point where you have far more fruitful ideas than you can possibly turn into games even if you live to be a hundred. Ideas beget ideas, so the more you come up with, the more you get. As novelist John Steinbeck said, “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” But this means you need a great many ideas.

There are creators who write just one novel, have just one hit song, publish just one game. In a few cases they may have had just a few ideas, though more likely, they had lots of ideas but only one “panned out”. If you want to be a professional designer, who publishes game after game, you need to be working on many games at once, and that means a very high volume of ideas.

How do you get ideas?

People ask novelists, “where do you get your ideas?” The answer is usually, “everywhere”. But what they don’t think to say is, they get lots of ideas because they’re working at getting ideas.

This is exactly the opposite of the common notion of creativity as “it just happens” or “it’s Art”. Creativity is partly inside a person, but most of it comes from working at it. For every genius like Mozart, who wrote music without thinking about it (“I write music like cows piss”) there are dozens of outstanding and great composers who work hard at getting ideas and revising those ideas. Beethoven filled notebooks with musical ideas. He wrote four different versions of the overture to his only opera, Fidelio. Yet both of these composers wrote music to make a living, not because of “art” or a high-falutin notion of “creativity”. "You can, for example, count on the fingers of both hands the number of musical compositions Mozart didn't write for money, and negotiating with Beethoven was like trying to take a steak away from a hyena." (Prof. Robert Greenberg in recorded lecture, "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition", Teaching Company) If even the extraordinary genius treated his creativity as work, most other “geniuses” as well as ordinary mortals work at creativity.

In my own experience, I used to get lots of ideas for games and game articles, and much was published. Then for 20 years I decided there were more important things to do (learning computing and networking, and making a living), and those ideas stopped coming. Several years ago I decided to get back into game design rather than write computer textbooks, and now I have a vast collection of ideas and more to do than I have time for. That’s because now I work at getting ideas and developing ideas.

In other words, there’s a way to push forward with ideas, rather than wait for them to come to you. Don’t waste your time! Like many other things in life, getting ideas is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

Hence the number two lesson in ideas, after “you need a lot”, is that “you have to work at getting them”. You have to keep part of your mind aware of your search for ideas, so that everything you see and hear and smell and touch is examined as a stimulus for game ideas. You may even sit down and say, “I’m going to come up with more ideas,” or “I’m going to think up a new game.” It won’t always happen, but often it will, and the more often you do it, the more often the ideas will come.

[game design game example – finally cracked it driving to Jim’s]

Game ideas are often generated by association with something that isn’t obviously about games. This is why game designers benefit from a broad education, from diverse reading, from multiple interests: they have more to associate with than the narrowly-defined “gamer” (or “fanboy/fangirl”).

Game ideas come from asking questions. They come from reading of all kinds, history, fiction, science, etc. They come from looking at pictures and maps. They come from talking with other people, even from using everyday things. They come from reading game rules, from playing games, from reading game reviews, from reading postmortems by game designers, from reading books about game design. Yes, there’s a lot of reading there, because when you read you’re often exposed to a lot of ideas in a short time, and the association may generate game ideas in your mind. Finally, ideas come from thinking about the ideas you’ve already had. Often a designer will have an idea for a game, get stuck on some problem for which there’s no evident solution, and years later associate that idea with another one generated at another time. These will combine to solve the problem and push the game forward. Almost anything can give you ideas. I’ve designed boardgames by starting with a particular kind of piece in mind. (More about this later in this chapter.)




Record Your Ideas

“Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.” Hector Berlioz, composer of Symphony Fantastique
“Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” Howard Aiken

I firmly believe that some ideas will come to me only once, and if I don’t record them, I’ll never get them again. Even if you don’t believe something similar, you’ll admit the inconvenience of having an idea, forgetting it, and having to wait until it comes to you again, perhaps years later.

Trying to keep all your ideas in your head is “a fool’s errand”. The only way you can do it is if you have so few ideas that you’re most unlikely to be productive.

You should carry a notebook or other recording device with you almost everywhere, and when you get an idea, write it down (or record it by voice). I carry an HP PDA (personal digital assistant) that has one-button voice recording (not all PDAs do). I can record while driving because all I need is that single button on the side of the device. I can press the button, talk, and when I let it go it stops recording–a reasonably safe way to record things while driving. My cell phone can record, but this requires several steps, and I won’t divert my attention like that while driving. Moreover, my PDA goes into a cradle that automatically transfers my voice notes to my desktop at home and my desktop at work, so soon I have three copies. It’s easy to type the idea into my main idea database as I listen to my voice notes.

Students think I’m strange to occasionally talk to my PDA in the middle of class, but they soon realize the purpose. I call it “my memory”.

Don’t leave an idea as a voice file. Writing down ideas forces you to actually figure out and understand what you mean; many novice designers have "ideas" that are only in their head, and when they're asked to articulate them, they find out that there's a lot they haven't figured out (or have forgotten).

Aside from the PDA, I have a paper notebook in my “game box”, the box that carries games I’m playtesting. When I’m at game sessions, I can write more extensively in the notebook than I would record on the PDA. (And if I forget one, maybe I’ll have the other.)

Finally, I have a light laptop/tablet computer, and an even lighter, 700-hours on 3 AA batteries, solid-state storage, specialized word processor (an Alphasmart Neo) for note-taking when at game meetings. (You can’t type on a PDA, not with speed.) I don’t intend to lose any ideas.

I ought to have a recorder (such as my Olympus voice recorder) by my bedside for middle-of-the-night ideas, but I don’t want to wake my wife by talking, so I have a clipboard. And I’ve been known to get up in the middle of the night to write idea details into my computer.

In the 1970s and 80s the "data store" for ideas was notebooks and pieces of paper, sometimes typed (with carbon copies, if you were smart, as backups). In the 21st century the data store may still be notebooks, but preferably it will be electronic, whether word processing, or a specialist note program such as Info Select or OneNote, or voice messages to yourself, but it's got to be something that can easily be searched electronically and copied (backed up).

Computers are cheap and plentiful, and you should use some kind of free text database. A free text database has no fields such as you define in Microsoft Access or Oracle or (in older days) dBase. You type data in however you like, and the search facility of the free text database does the rest. Any word processor can be used this way, but specialized programs will be faster. Some designers prefer to use a spreadsheet program extensively, but I prefer the superior organization and searchability of a specialized program.

I have used one of the first free text database programs, called Info Select (www.miclog.com), since the 1980s. It is my “desert isle” program, the one I’d use if I could only have one piece of software. It is fast, easily allows subcategories, and offers many ways to search. (It can also be word processor, email program, Web browser, etc.) It not only allows me to organize information, it allows a full text search in the blink of an eye (because all the stored information is loaded into memory). Unfortunately it is pretty expensive.

Microsoft One-Note is another program of this type, somewhat expensive unless you’re properly associated with a school that subscribes to Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance (which makes it free). A very simple free program of this type is Memento, the equivalent of post-it notes, and there are many other freeware programs that can serve.

Or you can use a word processor or spreadsheet, and organize your ideas by file. Most computer operating systems allow you to search through files for particular keywords, or the word processor itself may do this. The trick in any of these programs is to have those keywords in the notes you’ve typed. If you have an idea for a first person shooter, be sure “FPS” is there with the details of your idea. If you have an idea for a card game, be sure “card game” is in the file. Otherwise, when you try to find ideas you won’t find all that you should.

You might think this would take a lot of memory; no, an entire novel is roughly one megabyte of text, so as long as you don't store a LOT of graphics, it won't put much of a dent in your RAM, let alone your disk space.

If you don’t work well from a computer screen, you can print out your ideas and put them in a binder using sheet protectors. Or just have them in a pile. You definitely want to periodically look through your old ideas, as this is one of the best ways to get new ideas.


Storing drawings and pictures results in slower searches, because graphics take so much more space than words. Often a program will only search the name of the file, so you need to use long descriptive names. You can use a photo-organizing program such as Picasa (free from Google), or use a database program that handles graphics well.

If you speak to groups, as a teacher or as a proponent of games, be sure to record yourself. An MP3 player with voice recording, such as the Sansa e250, makes this easy to do, and with free software such as Audacity you can turn your talk into a podcast.

In any case, BACK IT UP. All your work will do you no good if your hard drive crashes or you lose a notebook that is your only copy. If ideas are worth generating, they’re worth backing up.

You can get along without using computers to record your ideas, as we all did 35 years ago, but you’ll save a lot of time in the long run by using computers.

Organize Yourself

I play about 30 of my game designs in the course of a year, and there are many more than that in some stage of work. Some organization helps keep everything straight.

When you have video games as your ultimate goal, the purpose of the ideas you generate is to contribute to marketing documents, and later to the large game design document that fully describes the game. You will be writing a plan for your game, so the more you write and the better you write it, the easier your future tasks will be. For non-electronic games where the immediate goal is a playable prototype, less formal notes are adequate. As long as you can understand what you mean, you can tell someone how to play your prototype when you make it. Keep in mind, six months (or six days!) after you write a terse note, even you may not understand what you meant, so try to be clear.

When I'm to the point of organizing ideas into a semblance of a game, or a game design for a video game, I make a separate note for each category of rules or mechanics (such as sequencing, movement, fighting, economics). For non-electronic games, I usually print these out to help me when I'm playing solo or in early playtests with other people, write further notes by hand on the sheets, then make changes on the desktop computer. (If I were a little more organized I'd probably have a laptop with me when I playtest, but that's one more thing to carry and secure. So I don't. However, sometimes I use the much more convenient Neo.)

At some point for a non-electronic game, often after playing a prototype a few times solitaire, I try to write organized but rough rules, as opposed to notes. I can color code the notes to show me which ones will “translate” into directly into rules sections, as opposed to others that are comments or more ideas. For a video game, the game design document describing the mechanics of the game is a more extensive version of a rules set.

I write the full documents in a word processor, WordPerfect. Much of the preliminary writing is done in Info Select, then transferred. But there are many, many revisions to a set of rules or a game design document, and those are done in WordPerfect, including revision dates. I am not fanatical about it, but I usually save each significant revision as a new file, so in the course of designing and developing a game I might end up with 20 versions. Microsoft Word is a more commonly used word processor; Open Office is a free substitute for Word.

WordPerfect makes it easy to make usable cards for games. I print on business card stock using the WP template, then put the cards in protectors for collectible cards (which can be had pretty cheaply, on sale, at Dave and Adam's Card World on the Internet, or at conventions sometimes). The protectors make the cards easy to shuffle, the card stock gives them sufficient stiffness. These are usually text-only cards; I've seen many prototypes with beautiful graphical cards, but I am not interested in spending the time needed to do this, preferring to concentrate on gameplay. Moreover, if I did spend a lot of time to make a playtest prototype, I'd be reluctant to change it, and that is truly a Bad Thing. Change is the norm when designing and developing games.

I am not an artist or a graphics person. I draw maps in CorelDraw, which does a fine job except that I haven't yet figured out an easy way to shade things. CorelDraw is a vector graphics program, not bitmap, and while this makes printing very flexible, it seems to make shading elusive, at least for me. So I export to PhotoShop, add shading, and import back in. You can see some examples on my Web site at www.pulsiphergames.com/projects.htm

I get base maps from the Internet (out-of-copyright historical maps are available, especially at the Perry Castaneda Library (google it)). CorelDraw usually won't autotrace them satisfactorily, so I laboriously trace (with a mouse) what I need. This is not fun, but is quite practical. (Tracing with a tablet PC or Wacom tablet is easier, because you're using a pen, but I rarely use my wife's tablet laptop.)

Online (unpublished) boardgame

Those who were interested in my discussion of connections between online games and boardgames might want to look at War of the Realm, a free online "boardgame".

http://waroftherealm.com/About/PressReleases.aspx
Or click the title of this article.

I haven't figured out how they're going to make money, yet. Advertising, I'd guess.

ADDITION: I've now read the rules for the game. While I have only read the rules for A Game of Thrones: the Boardgame (FantasyFlight), War of the Realm reminds me *very* much of that game. This is perfectly legal, mind you (you cannot copyright ideas), it's just an observation. And the most remarkable part of that is that AGoT:tB was designed specifically to mimic simultaneous movement as much as possible without requiring anyone to write down anything. (I've heard someone call AGoT:tB a Diplomacy variant, though I'm not sure I'd go that far.) Yet for online computer-refereed play, simultaneous movement is no problem at all. But in going through the many phases of the boardgame online player by player, you slow everyone down!

Why not devise a game with simultaneous movement? Perhaps the company expects to retail the game as a boardgame at some point.

I also see that the company offers memberships, about $5 or $7 a month, that provide various perks (such as being able to play more than 4 "casual" games (play once a day rather than play real-time) and no ads). These memberships emphasize the community. It would be really interesting to know how many people (what percentage of player) will go for these memberships.

PrezCon

PrezCon in Charlottesville, VA late in Feburary appeared to be somewhat smaller this year. Two people who might know said 20%, but I don't know if that was from pre-registrations; the organizer himself said he didn't know the attendance. Attendance last year approached 500. This obviously is an effect of the poor economy. I was told the prices at the auctions were lower this year, as well.

PrezCon is a mini-WBC (World Boardgaming Championships), with the main activity being lots of tournaments with multiple heats and a final played Saturday or early Sunday. Many people don't stay around for Sunday, or leave quite early in the day. There are vendors selling games, both independents and publishers, but that's not the focus of the event, though my focus was talking with some of these people, of course.

I don't play in tournaments at conventions--I can play published games without traveling 250 miles and spending lots of money. I like to talk with people (publishers and players) about games, and I watch some of the Britannia tournament, as well as watching people play many other games. Sometimes I'll read rules to a game that looks interesting. Sometimes I'll play one of my games solo and talk with people as they come by.

I did get Eurasia played twice. It is hard, at a small tournament-oriented convention, to get people together to playtest. Several people offered to play Barbaria, but I couldn't get all together at the same time.

There were five boards of Brit in two rounds, which is a good turnout for PrezCon. Oddly, blue won four of the five, yellow the other (and the final as well). So NO wins for red or green. I wasn't there for the first r