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 round, but in the second, the score in one game was (IIRC) 248-241-238-238, very high, while the other was 232-202 and two scores below 200 (this was the lone yellow win in the heats)! I've not heard of such a high average score before (average for each nation is something like 216). Certainly, it was a polite game, lots of "sorry to attack you, but this one would starve otherwise" and "I'd be happy to retreat if you fail to kill me". And very close at the end,

One view of the difference in yellow's win in the final was Harald taking a boat trip to kill Svein in Norfolk. If I recall correctly, Barry Smith won that one, other players Rick Kirchner, Sean Smallman, and Mark Smith. (The winner of the very high-scoring game, Brian Carr, didn't get into the finals because his margin of victory was so small (over Jim Jordan).)

My roommate stayed up past 5 one night playing Robo-Rally (his favorite by far, and he won the tournament for a second time on Sunday). I was in bed before 1 every night.

On the way home we experienced heavy snow and were down to 20 miles an hour in one lane on a wide US route (two lanes each way). But we got over some kind of hump, and the weather rapidly cleared to occasional rain, with no snow in sight, just as we got into Danville. Thank heaven.

If you like playing tournament games, PrezCon is excellent, and perhaps slightly less "cut-throat" than WBC in Lancaster, PA in August.

I'll be at PrezCon

I'll be at PrezCon next weekend, thought I'd describe some of the games I've been working on, which I'll have there to discuss or play.

Eurasia--a cross between Vinci and History of the World with a little Britannia thrown in. Rise and fall of 80 historical empires, no dice, played on a a 46 area map of Eurasia (surprise!). 90 minutes or more if lots of players (2-6). Works really well. Event cards optional. There's an option to use dice.

The Rise and Fall of Assyria: History of the Ancient Near East. Sargon to the Persians. Uses many of the systems of Eurasia but much less free-form, all 28 nations must be played in roughly historical order. There's a version that, like Britannia, assigns each nation to a particular player and turn of appearance. 2 hours plus if you play the whole game, 90 minutes for shorter version. 2-6 players.

Dominance of the Old World--While Dominance is intended to be a Risk replacement, it doesn't have Risk's "purity". Risk is all about attack-attack-attack. Dominance is more about strategy, and there are things you can can that aren't just attack.

Fills the same niche as Risk in who can play, but much shorter, little chance, little downtime, no player elimination, and many fewer pieces.

No dice, but there are event cards.

Played on a map of Europe and the Med, 25 land areas, 6 sea areas. 2-6 players. 90 minutes.

Barbaria--history of Europe 406-1250, something like Britannia but much shorter, streamlined. While the first play of the shorter version takes over 3 hours, it has been played in 1:40. 33 land areas, Europe and the Mediterranean. There are actually two versions, the first (6 turns) uses "picture dice", essentially you need two hits to kill an army.; second, longer (11 turns), uses battle cards and no dice. This is the natural successor to Britannia. The problem, as always, is the damn balance.

Zombie Escape--This is a game played with cards, the cards providing the board, the "pieces", and the events and occurrences. 110 cards and one die required.

Young people (and some older ones) love zombies for some reason. This game is about escaping from a reform school building that has become overrun with zombies. Each player is a character (described on a card) with varying capabilities. As they try to escape, characters come across zombies, potential weapons, and other useful items (such as fire extinguishers).

There is no player elimination: if you lose a fight, you just retreat back toward the starting location.

Whoever finds a door to the outside, and manages to get it open (they're all locked), wins the game.

About 45 minutes for five players, works with almost any number of players up to nine or ten.

Party Nominee--a "political" game with cards, though not a traditional cardgame, but not like Zombie Escape, either. Uses one deck of cards and play money (coins). Under an hour. 2-6 players.

Electronic productions of non-electronic games

I was asked recently by someone who is VP of a computer services company what potential there is for boardgame play online, and for electronic versions of boardgames in general. In responding I’ve ended up with a fairly long disquisition, and I’m sure there are many online efforts I don’t know about. So I’m posting this on BGG and here, then I’ll revise it and send it to the VP.

So the question for today is, how do boardgames (and card games) tie in with digital, especially online, production? Is there money to be made? Who makes it, and how?

Here are some of the categories I’ve found:
• Pay to Play Existing game in online version
• Make your money from advertising
• Make money retailing the games people are playing online for free
• Board or card game playable only online, probably at just one site
• Sell a physical version of a game first offered free online
• Online play to help encourage people to buy a game first offered physically
• “Casual” games
• Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs)
• Second Life and others like it

But first, Free Play with online assist
First, though, we need to note that some games are playable by mail or email through hobbyist efforts. For example, Britannia is played by email with the help of a dice roller that has a version specifically for Brit. Diplomacy has been played since the ‘60s by ordinary mail with the help of a neutral referee, and is now played with the assistance of online non-commercial “judges”, programs that adjudicate moves. No human referee is needed. There have been two commercial software versions of Diplomacy, but I don’t know whether either was intended to assist online play, and both certainly received heavy criticism and must be regarded as failures, particularly where computer opponents are concerned.

Wargamers have Vassal, Cyberbox, and ACTS available to assist play of two-player games by email (PBEM)--most traditional wargames are two players only.

“VASSAL (http://www.vassalengine.org/community/index.php)is a game engine for building and playing online adaptations of board games and card games. It allows users to play in real time over a live Internet connection (in addition to playing by email). It runs on all platforms, and is free for personal use.”

Cyberboard (http://cyberboard.brainiac.com/) is a “PBEM Boardgaming System for Windows”. It’s individual setups are called Gameboxes or Cyberboxes. “The system allows you to easily graphically design the various parts of a board game on your computer. The players can make their moves and exchange recorded versions of the moves with their opponents. The opponent can then play back the moves. Although many types of games may be created using CyberBoard, games that use counters or chits such as war games work particularly well.” As with Vassal and ACTS, there is no computer opponent.

Both systems have been around a long time. These two involve graphical depictions of boards, hence copyright questions come into play. It can be especially touchy as we get into an era when electronic versions of boardgames may be retailed–already are through Xbox Live. What will a publisher of an electronic version think about a Vassal/Cyberboard version? If they’re smart, the main purpose of their electronic version will be a computer opponent, and facilitating online play will be secondary, nonetheless they may object to these free versions.

The Automated Card Tracking System--ACTS (http://acts.warhorsesim.com) helps people play wargames that use cards, especially “Card Driven Wargames”. ACTS only manages the cards, not the game as a whole, but it’s the hidden information on cards that prevents such games from being played by email.

None of this costs a dime; none involves making money.



In general, keep in mind that it is much easier to create an electronic game to be played by humans, than to be played by a human against the computer. The computer opponent is pretty difficult to create (as the commercial Diplomacy debacles showed us).

Pay to Play
The first thing that might come to mind for making money in this context is “pay to play” games that have a physical version, via computer online. This has been a bust. There’s a mindset in general on the Internet that most things are “free” (even though that free may be advertising supported). Add to this physical games that you can buy and play at home for free. Why would anyone pay to play online? Lack of opponents would be the only reason, and that doesn’t seem to be enough.

The most well-known of these sites is HexWAR (hexwar.com) . For several years these folks have been computerizing old out of print SPI hex wargames, which subscribers can play online ($12.95 a month or $10 a month when signing up for a year). They also do some Decision Games (Strategy & Tactics magazine in large part). I'd guess this has provided a modest income that doesn't seem to be increasing with time (remember that hex wargames aren't a big industry now, and are not growing).

Face to Face Games (http://www.f2fgaming.com/) tried this, beginning with Hammer of the Scots (Columbia Games), a well-known “block game”. (Block games, having hidden information, do not lend themselves to PBEM.) They were at WBC one year, trying to recruit business, and the next year they'd gone to free play rather than subscription but were not actually at a booth, and I'm not sure they're an *active* business now. The site has not been updated since 2006 but is still there.

Advertising
Many Web sites offer free play of games–usually Flash games, but they could be boardgames–and make a modest income. The games are often free ones that the sites have gathered from all over the Internet, not ones the site owners have created. In a recessionary economic climate, however, advertising dollars dry up rapidly (NASCAR fans really know what this means...).

Game Table Online (http://www.gametableonline.com) for several years offered online play for a monthly subscription of a selection of boardgames. They have now switched to an advertising-based model, as far as I can see. They certainly have more users online now (155 in early afternoon Sunday 18 Jan) than they did when using the subscription model (less than 10 typically).

Here is an interesting look at the participants: “According to our April 2008 user survey, our users:
• Are primarily male (81.1%)
• Between the ages of 31 and 49 (67.6%)
• Spend between $20-$50 per month on tabletop games (36.9%)
• Spend between 2-4 hours per week playing games in person (30.6%)
• Enjoy a wide variety of games (82.6%)
• Primarily come to our site so that they can fit more gaming into their schedule (75%) “

Make money retailing the games people are playing online for free
Brettspielwelt.de is a well-known site for playing boardgames online. They don’t advertise, and they don’t charge fees. I’m not sure how they support the costs, but they do offer you a way to purchase physical copies of the online games, so this may be how they offset expenses. I wouldn’t think it is a profit-making proposition.
http://www.brettspielwelt.de/?nation=en
http://www.brettspielwelt.info/ English Helper server.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brettspielwelt
It uses a download client for the graphics for all games.

Board or card games playable only online, probably at just one site
This seems to be rare. Tower Games (http://towergames.com/index.jsp) is the only site I know of using this model. They began in 2003 with an American Civil War (ACW) game with many scenarios, charging $1 per play, and attracting mostly ACW fans (such as re-enactment people) rather than typical gamers. Recently they started to offer a WW II game. Some years ago I was going to have a simple two-player boardgame of mine, The Princes, hosted on the site, but ran into terrifically unrealistic expectations of one of the proprietors. Then my programmer, who had made a brilliant computer version of one of my games in Visual Basic, wasn't sufficiently familiar with Java, which is how they host games, and so the project died stillborn. The site is still running, but clearly is not a high growth hub.

There may be potential here–think about it, MMOs are games that can only be played online at one place–but I think there’s more potential for offering a game first online, then selling a physical version.

Sell a physical version of a game first offered free online
This is a form of the next “method”. I don’t actually know of any site doing this. The difference would be to offer the game first online, later physically, instead of first physically, then online.

Online play to help encourage people to buy a game first offered physically
This is quite common. Days of Wonder, publishers of many Euro games such as Ticket to Ride, offers free online play, and TtR has been played literally millions of times online. Many people play online specifically to help them decide whether to purchase a game. From that point of view, every publisher ought to offer online play of every game they publish, but that’s an expensive proposition.

“Casual” games
In the video game world, “casual” games attract a different group than the hard-core AAA list video games. They are generally 2D rather than 3D, programmable by a small team instead of 150 people. They are sold through Web sites, usually offering a downloadable version that can be played for 30 minutes, and a $20 downloadable full version.

Some of the games are Xbox Live and competing console-based services fit in this category. Electronic versions of Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, at least, are available through XBL.

One might expect a market for boardgames in electronic form of this type. Certainly some of the “casual” games available are not far from boardgames. Lately this category has been filled with many competitors, yet the most successful casual games support growing companies (such as the company that makes Bejeweled).

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs)
This is where a great deal of money is in the video game world. These games can only be played online, there is no version a person can play without participating in some fee structure. This usually involves a monthly fee (World of Warcraft), after you buy the boxed product. Less often, buying the boxed product gets you free play (Guild Wars), and frequent expansions provide the continuing profit. (Of course, WoW has expansions as well.) In many cases, microtransactions, sale of temporary (or permanent) benefits in the game, provide the revenue stream. Maplestory, Combat Arms, and many other MMOs use this model, primarily with an Asian origin. See http://maplestory.nexon.net/WZ.ASPX?PART=/CashShop/ItemGallery for an example.

I don’t know of a boardgame-based MMO, though there are certainly massively multiplayer games played online that resemble boardgames.

In particular, I’ve not heard of an MMO that offers players the opportunity to purchase a boardgame with much of the flavor of the MMO. This is certainly possible, and I’ve done some design work for such an enterprise, but I have no idea how much demand there might be for this kind of thing.


Second Life and others like it
Some people think of Second Life as a game, and Linden Labs is certainly making money. But I don’t see any connection with boardgames. I have read that someone designed a game in Second Life that was later published in the real world because it was popular in SL, but I know no details.




So generally, people play online to help them decide whether to spend the money to buy the physical non-electronic version of the game, or they play games that they cannot play any other way.

Standalone electronic versions of boardgames or cardgames can offer a computer opponent to players who cannot find local players. Computer opponents generally aren’t as crafty or as good as live human opponents, but they can be better than nothing. I don’t know of any online games that provide computer opponents other than MMOs–and an MMO without other human players is going to have limited appeal.

So the purpose of a boxed retail electronic version of a boardgame would be first to provide a computer opponent or opponents, second to make playing online especially convenient--but a dollar cost to play online is not at all convenient.


Insofar as a big draw of boardgames is the face-to-face contact and company of other players, online already has a strike against it. How big a strike? I don’t know.

Why Design Games?

I failed to point this one out when it was published earlier this month:

"Why design games?" Game Career Guide. You can click on the title of this post.

Design lesson from Fallout 3 (PS3)

I don't often talk about specific video games here, but there are aspects of games that are much more common in video games than in non-electronic games, and one of these is the user interface. Yes, non-video games have a user interface, but it's very different from the on-screen and control interface of video games. In this case, I'm talking about the PS3 version of Fallout 3.

Fallout 3, more or less a role-playing game, is first and foremost a PC game. The PC keyboard provides far more options than the PS3 controller, hence inevitably the game will be more awkward to play on the console unless it is substantially redesigned.

I recently watched my brother play this game (on a 46" hi-def screen, no less). I can see why people might like it, though it seemed a little tedious to me (the buying and selling and walking from place to place) compared with paper RPGs, as well as lacking in the essential ingredient of paper RPGs--comradery with other players. However, I'm not here to review it, just to talk about one interface failure.

When you (your character) "talk" with another character, the game shows that other character's mouth movement and you hear a voice actor speak the words. You're then presented with three or more choices to "speak" back to the other person. Here's where the problem is. Even if there are more than three options, the on-screen display shows only three, with a little arrow to indicate when there are more than three.

My brother (and I) did not initially notice the arrow, so habitually he would hold down a button/joystick to scroll down using the PS3 controller to the bottom of the reply list, then work his way back up reading the possible responses. This was time-consuming in any case, and he was in the habit of trying to scroll down even if there were only three responses. We'll avoid the question, "why not show all the responses at once"--I'll suppose that for aesthetic reasons the designers didn't want to cover up the picture of the person you're talking with, though I personally would much much rather see all the responses at once because the graphic doesn't tell me anything I don't already know.

No, my question is, why didn't the designers put a number on that initial screen that showed exactly how many possible responses there were? This would not only have been more obvious than the little arrow, it would have carried additional information to the player. The player wouldn't have to just hold down a button or joystick to get to the bottom of the list, he'd know how far he had to go. This would have saved the player time and aggravation, in comparison with the arrow. In some way, the designers took the easy, "ordinary" way of dealing with scrolling lists in computers, instead of thinking about the specific situation.

And that was completely unnecessary. I wonder if playtesters pointed this out, or if the designers just ignored the question.

Why I "don't play"

Many people find it strange that I don't play lots of different games. This is partly a matter of time (I only have time to play my own new designs), partly a matter of interest (I don't like to play games "against" other people), partly a matter of point of view (I like to play my favorite games, and have no interest in *playing* "new" games, though I spend lots of time watching people play them.

TIME: This is my avocation, not my job (which is teaching). I try to make at least one new game a month. Each of those games must be playtested solo ("alpha test") by one person, me. On average I probably play each one that is halfway successful about four times. That's the equivalent, in multi-player games, of playing the game about 16 times. How many of you play any given game that many times?

INTEREST: I more or less quit playing games against other people when I was 25. (So I played D&D, which is not against other people, it's a cooperative game.)

POINT OF VIEW: In a sense, my favorite "game" is the "game" of designing games. For me, the interesting and meaningful challenges, in Sid's phrase, are to make games that interest a variety of people. I have had only a few favorite games over the years, and I prefer to play the really good ones rather than the "new" ones--I have no interest in what seems at times to be the "cult of the new".


I don't like to play when my games are playtested by other people. I don't play as well as I ought, because I'm trying to see how the design as a whole is going, and I don't see how well the game is doing if I'm distracted by playing it. It's widely known to those who study multi-tasking that when you multi-task, you don't do any of the tasks as well as you would if you concentrated on it. Further, the designer playing in his own game skews results, as players tend either to think "he's the designer, let's gang up on him" or "he's the designer, I don't mind if he wins" and acquiesce to this. (In fact, a designer isn't likely to be the best player, or necessarily even an especially good player, but not everyone realizes that.)

Why don't I play my games after they're published/"done"? Because I'm not designing games for me to play, I'm designing games that other people will enjoy playing. If I were just going to play a game "for me", I'd play first edition D&D. And I've never tried to design a role-playing game, because I'm satisfied with D&D--with options/house rules/character classes/monsters that I've devised, of course . . .

Community Creation in boardgames?

In video games we are seeing emphasis on games that enable community creation that in turn contributes to the enjoyment of the rest of the people who play the game. This has existed for a very long time in the form of mods and variants, but it is now "institutionalized" in games such as Spore and Little Big Planet; in fact, in the latter it appears to be much of the point of the game. The creators of these games have made it very easy for players to create additional "content" that can easily be used by others, even more than the scenario editor in Civilization games or the level editors in shooter games such as Unreal Tournament.

This is a form of "crowd-sourcing", using non-professionals to provide content sometimes as good, or nearly as good, as professionals can provide, but at no cost. Video game companies simply cannot afford to create the vast amount of content gamers now expect, yet gamers want it for no additional cost (complaints about the $60 standard price for video games are common). So they're finding ways to have the fans create the additional content.

My question is, how do we incorporate such "community creation" features like modding/creature creation into boardgames? Collectible card games have something like it except it's all publisher-created. RPGs have had it (all the D&D monsters, classes, adventures) since their beginning. Diplomacy has it in the hundreds of variant created over the years. Some wargames have it in additional scenarios created by fans. But is there a way to make it part and parcel of a game or of gaming?

How do we get something that supports the game and is created (and distributed free) by the fans, the players? BGG is as close as we get, generally, but how many players come to BGG on a regular basis? Not many, really.

Well, if I knew the answers, I wouldn't be asking the question.

More articles at Gamasutra/Game Career Guide:

More of my writing at Gamasutra/Game Career Guide:

"Opinion: Why Immersion Shouldn't Be The 'Holy Grail'" Dec 19. Not strictly of interest to board/card game designers...

"Characteristics of Successful Game Designers" Dec 23

Origins of Games

Another article on GameCareerGuide (you can click the title of this post):

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/662/idea_.php

While it's a video game site, the article applies just as much to non-electronic games.

Source for game pieces

I like to use stackable plastic pieces for some of my prototypes, and people sometimes ask where I get them. Here's a link (you can click on the post title):

http://www.eaieducation.com/530841.html

As I write, they're $9.50 (plus shipping) for 500 in ten colors.

EAIEducation is also my best source for plastic cubes, two-sided disks, one-inch plastic square counters, and other useful game components, usually in bulk.

Why We Play Games

You might want to read my design article "Why We Play" on GameCareerGuide. You can click on the title of this post.

Article on GameCareerGuide

"The Idea is not the Game", 23 September

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20356

(You can click on the title of this post.)

This should be of interest to anyone who wants to design games.

Game buyers want the advantage of your game design skills

As an exercise ("challenge") in my beginning game design class I gave each group a large vinyl chess board and some "Clout Fantasy" pieces. And I said "Make a game". I also had a great array of other kinds of pieces, in case a group just didn't get along with the Clout pieces. The vinyl boards can be written on with wet-erasable markers, so some variety can be imposed on the square array.

I was watching one group play their game, which involved troops retrieving pieces to bring back to their home spot. It was a little like capture the flag, but with multiple flags, and each side had their own set of flags to capture.

At some point I remarked that I couldn't figure out the pattern of "flag" placement, but it seemed to be working pretty well. The group admitted to me that their method of placement was to drop the pieces on the board at game start and let them scatter! My jaw dropped.

If all players started in the same place then random would be OK, as it wouldn't give an advantage to one player. But in this game, with set starting positions, a random setup could be so one-sided that there'd hardly be any reason to play the game, the winner would be fore-ordained.

Think about this. 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 chance? Furthermore, why would a player, if he or she had purchased your game, want to trust their enjoyment to chance rather than to the skills of a professional designer?

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 better game.

In other words, you're the designer, use your brain, let the buyer take advantage of your skills and smarts, don't rely on chance to make for a good game.

(If you prefer a small element of chance, you can subdivide a board into areas and randomly place (by die roll, not by dropping) the flag within the area. I have designed a game where I've done something like that. The additional variety increases replayability without giving too much advantage to one player over another.)

Speculation on Electronic Britannia

Speculation on Electronic Britannia

Some of you know that nowadays I teach in a college video game degree program (game design especially, of course). That and the recent question about electronic Britannia have started me thinking about what characteristics would be desirable in such a game. It seems very likely that sooner or later there will be an electronic version of the game (and of most well-known boardgames, in general).

So what would be desirable, what would be most important. I'll give my take, then I'm interested to hear what you think.

1. The game must be playable for one person, that is, you against three computer opponents. Or with two humans or three, and computer opponents to make four. Hence the most important aspect of the game will be the "AI", the computer opponent. The electronic versions of Diplomacy have suffered from awful computer opponents, as I recall, which is a little curious. There is more symmetry and simplicity in what the opponents do in Diplomacy than in Britannia, so I'd expect a computer opponent to be easier to write. My guess is either 1) really bad decisions by designers or 2) too much of a rush to get the game out.

2. The game should be usable for online play, whether with four humans or fewer.

3. I think it's desirable to include the shorter (6 turn) version of the game I'm working on, but this would increase development cost significantly, so it may not be practical. Perhaps it could be offered as a not-free expansion if the electronic version sells well.

Well, I've already run out of ideas. What I do know is, the "AI" will make or break the game; why would most people buy an electronic version of a boardgame if not to have computer opponent(s)?


Ken Agress has said he'd like to be able to play with four humans but have them roll the dice and input the results into the game, to display the board on a large-screen TV. (Or, I'd add, one of those table-like LCDs that Phillips and Microsoft have been working on.)


So what must the AI do? The best Brit players can look at the board, at a particular time of the game, and predict with some accuracy what the final score is likely to be. I don't know how a computer opponent is going to do that, but if it can, it should be able to play well.

Review of Britannia

I recently ran across a review of Britannia from Archair General magazine, published November 19, 2007, by Bill Bodden. http://www.armchairgeneral.com/britannia-game-review.htm

Quote:
"Now produced by Fantasy Flight Games in a stunning new edition, Britannia looks ready to continue on as one of the great titles in the world of games."

Wizards card game

Recently I played the card game "Wizards". I'd heard that this variation of the traditional game "Oh hell" had sold millions of copies. I played a German edition with strange pictures and symbols, which to me only made the game harder to play. Two suit colors were red and green, indistinguishable by the two color-blind players in the game. So we had to use the weird symbols that don't even have obvious convenient names. The designer is Canadian, and I suspect most editions are closer to normal cards.

We were using a weak translation of the German edition of the rules, so conceivably we did not play everything correctly.

I don't play cards much, and the only traditional card game I play is Oh hell, with my wife and in-laws. H is a trick-taking game, dealing increasing and then decreasing numbers of cards in each hand, trump randomly determined, must follow suit. You bid how many tricks you will try to take, and fail to score if you do not get exactly what you bid. You score 10 plus the number you bid if you're successful. Hence the game removes some of the chance factor, if you have poor cards, you bid low. I tend to bid rather low because it's easier to avoid taking tricks than to take them. "Quack quack" is often my bid (a duck, meaning a bid of zero--ducking).

This game is a "randomized" version of OH. There are four "Wizard" cards that beat all other trumps and can be played out of suit. There are four jesters that are "nothing", but can change the suit that must be played in the rest of the trick (I may not be recalling correctly) in mid-trick. I suppose that by taking some of the skill out of the game, you make it more "family-friendly" for kids.

Further randomization comes from playing hands of up to 15 cards. You can't do much to plan with such large hands--I'm used to playing up to 7 cards, then back down to 1--so at that point you bid something a little below average, say three out of 15, and hope you can manage it. Of course, if you have a couple wizards and good trumps you'd have to adjust.

The scoring is different from traditional OH scoring. You score 20 if you make your bid, plus 10 per trick, and lose 10 per trick by which you miss a bid. This rewards trick-taking (as opposed to bidding zero) more than the traditional version. (I still played the Duck most of the time, and won the game.)

There were other variations, such as forcing bids in the round of two cards so that someone will miss their bid. There was something about, when you have one card, you hold it in front of you so everyone else can see it, and then bidding occurs; but this is so randomly unfair we canned it (you don't know what card you've got, so how can you bid intelligently except in obvious instances?).

I'll stick with the traditional form, though the scoring is worth considering.

The Mecca of Competitive Boardgaming

While I wrote this for a different venue, I may as well put it here...

At the Mecca of Competitive BoardGaming
Lewis Pulsipher

Early August in Lancaster, PA is the time for the “World Boardgaming Championships” (WBC), the Mecca of competitive boardgaming. Unlike Essen, the Origins Game Fair, or GenCon, WBC concentrates on tournaments in about 150 board and non-collectible card games, ranging from:
• simple games like Liars Dice (as seen in the second “Pirates” movie)
• complex 8-hour games like Civilization (the boardgame that preceded the computer game)
• two-player wargames
• well known “Euro” games such as Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, familiar to some video gamers through Xbox Live

There are relatively few exhibitors, who are there Friday through Sunday morning, though the convention begins Tuesday. There’s also the traditional game auction on Tuesday.

WBC was originally “AvalonCon”, in Camp Hill, PA and then Hunt Valley, MD (a suburb of Baltimore). It was started for Avalon Hill, the big board wargame company that was bought by Hasbro in the late 90s, and the convention is now run by the Boardgame Players Association and Don Greenwood, who was “Mr. Avalon Hill” to most of us even though he did not run the company. It is now at the Lancaster Host convention center that also hosts Historicon, the big miniatures wargaming convention, a week or two before.

Don told me that WBC emphasizes community rather than the commercial side of gaming, hence its concentration on organized tournaments that consistently attract reasonable numbers of players. This contrasts with conventions such as Origins, where an “event” can amount to a few people playing one session of a game. Further, you pay one fee (similar to the Origins or GenCon fee), then play in as many events as you can manage without further charge. In effect, WBC offers highly organized play, where other large conventions can be seen as “open gaming” cons with a few well-organized tournaments.

WBC has a core of 100 “Century” tournaments, modified each year by vote of the members of the BPA and a formula involving number of participants and hours played. A tournament such as Britannia, with more than 35 people playing in up to three 5-hour preliminary rounds, is solidly ensconced in the Century, though there are larger tournaments. There are also trial tournaments (again subject to vote), and tournaments organized by sponsor members or by game manufacturers, adding up to 150 to 160 tournaments each year.

To enhance the competition, not only are small prizes such as plaques and T-shirts awarded to winners, there is an overall winner for the entire convention, the “Centurion”, and a team competition. These awards depend on very successful participation in several tournaments.

Many of the players have been attending since the 90s, and are middle-aged, but there’s a strong proportion of younger players as well, and perhaps 20-25% of the attendees are female. There is much more a sense of community, of “coming home”, than at the much larger non-electronic game conventions, as many of the 1,300 or so competitors return year after year to play in their favorite tournaments.

This year’s convention was from August 5 to 10, next year will be August 4 to 9.

For information about the BPA and next year’s WBC, see http://www.boardgamers.org/. PrezCon, at the end of February in Charlottesville, VA, is organized much like WBC, but smaller: http://www.prezcon.com/.

Article on GameCareerGuide

My article "Pulling the Plug: In Defense of Non-Digital Teaching and Learning"

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

was published 2 September on Game Career Guide, the major Web site for people wanting to learn video game creation. This is an edited version. My title was "Why we use non-electronic games to teach game design", they wanted something more provocative.

Do designers know how good their games are?

How well do designers understand how good their games are, or how well they will sell (which is two somewhat different things)?

Reiner Knizia (over 200 games published) recently said that his game Pickomino has quite surprised him. Pickomino is a dice game with scoring tiles that's fairly simple, but has become a big seller.

In my own case, 25 or so years ago, after I had had some games published, I had four that I felt were "my best". One of those was Britannia, and it *has* turned out to be a "classic". The other three have not been published. I've revised one quite a bit, that a new publisher appears to be interested in, another has been played a few times recently but I haven't submitted it anywhere, and the fourth is "old fashioned" in a way that might not work well nowadays, but it's only been played once or twice in 25 years. I don't work on the three much, because I have several games designed recently that I feel are better. But do I really know? No. Only repeated playing by lots of groups can tell you how good the game is, and even that won't tell you how well it will sell, as there are many factors in selling other than the quality of gameplay of the game.

Personal Impressions (NOT a review) of China: The Middle Kingdom

Personal Impressions (NOT a review) of China: The Middle Kingdom (Decision Games, designed by Tani Chen)

This is not a review because I have not, and likely will never, play this game (I only play my own unpublished games these days). You can't review a game without playing it several times. So these are impressions and comments.

As the box says, this is based on the Britannia system, old-school Britannia right down to half victory points and half increase points, and "Highlands" instead of "Difficult Terrain". As the designer of Britannia I'm especially interested in such games, and of course I hope they are well received, since I'm working on lord knows how many more of this type.

I'm especially interested because I've used my reduced-scale "gateway" system recently for Chinese history, and because I have one of the few copies extant of the original China Britannia, The Dragon & the Pearl (now out of print), which covers about 200-1300. I am by no means an expert on Chinese history, though I have in fact read something as obscure as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so I'll have some comments on the historical aspects of the game.

(By the way, it irks me when I see it phrased "Avalon Hill's Britannia", as it is here. As Avalon Hill rejected the game initially ("games of that era don't sell"), and H. P. Gibsons published it first (and provided the board and piece artwork to AH), and AH's main contribution to the game was to screw it up a bit, you can understand why I'm a little annoyed by the phrase. Why not "Lew Pulsipher's Britannia"? Meh.)

But most of my games now go toward simpler and shorter (1 hour 40 minutes for one played recently), not to larger, and this game is Larger. There are 46 countries and 24 turns (12 in each of the half-games). Time to play is listed on the box as 4-10 hours, which sounds about right from my experience (4 would be a quick half-game). It's the number of countries more than the turns that lengthen the game, which is why I try to keep the number of nations (as I prefer to call them) low in my shorter games, as well as down to 6 or 8 turns.

The game ambitiously covers Chinese history from 404 BC to 1949. I don't think the Britannia system suits the age of gunpowder--it was made to reflect gradual barbarian migrations--but only playing the game can reveal how well it works with European intervention and 20th century realities.

The unmounted 34" by 22" map strikes me as slightly garish. There are 46 areas, though 18 are "foreign" areas that only serve as jump-off points for invaders (for comparison, Britannia has 37 areas, more than this game's 28 in regular play). It is colored like a map in an atlas, with several different colors scattered about for areas (think of a map of US states), rather than like a map for a game, where each terrain is a different color. It's not a big deal, but seems a little odd, and contributes to a slightly cartoony or artificial look to the map as a whole.

Apparently the designer, who I'm told is a Chinese graduate of MIT, now a lawyer, decided to use only areas of modern China as in-play areas of the game. There are "foreign" areas along the borders, where invaders start, but they must leave those areas and get into China during their turn. This decision doesn't make sense historically. It means Taiwan and Tibet are in play, though for most of ancient and medieval times they were not part of China, but Vietnam and Korea are not in play, even though the former was held by the Chinese for many centuries, and the latter played a big part in the fall of the Sui and Tang--as it stands, no unit can enter Korea. Either all the adjacent areas should be "in play", or all (including Xinjiang, rarely occupied by the Chinese but part of China in the game) should not be. My solution in my game has been to use the heart of China (including Vietnam and Korea) and show a small part of Tibet and Xinjiang "in play". The other published China Britannia game, Dragon & the Pearl, shows the larger geographic area of this game, but all of it is "in play".

The 456 cardboard pieces are bigger than standard "wargame ghetto" half inch counters, perhaps two-thirds of an inch square. They are thinner than Britannia pieces, but fairly substantial. The wording on the counters is fairly hard to read, unfortunately, but there is a big colored banner with a number on most of the pieces that helps differentiate them. Everyone prefers larger pieces, but there are so many here that pieces the size of the new Britannia edition aren't practical.

The nation cards are very nice, five inches tall and three inches wide. If I were to use nation cards (I have a different system now), I'd like them to be this size and shape. They list appearance, movement order, sequence within the color, and point scoring. My wife observed that the thin font, over a light red background symbol, is difficult to read. There are 50 nation cards (four nations have two players controlling them, one after the other on the same turn), four special cards, and a sequence of play card.

The special cards need to be cut in half to provide two cards for each player. They are usable once per game. One card gives a +1 in one battle, the other causes a battle to be refought. These are like the cards I've used in Epic Britannia, Britannia Brevis (expansions that FFG is not interested in printing, at last report), and especially Frankia. They are tied to a color in Frankia, as they are in this game, whereas in the other two they're tied to a nation.

There are minor production glitches. Zhuge Liang, a famous general of the Three Kingdoms, is referred to thus in the historical booklet, but on the cards and in the rules he is incorrectly shown as Zhu Geliang. The Grand Canal, said to be red in the rules, is actually blue. And there's one place close to a 'four corners' where the map is clearly wrong in its connectivity compared with the rules (Henan-Jiungsu). I assume the rules prevail.

In general, the rules are easy to read (both in flow and in font size) and appear to be comprehensive, but that's always hard to tell until you actually play, isn't it?

A 15 page historical article (evidently from S&T magazine) by the game designer is a generally good introduction to Chinese history. I haven't figured out the author's assertion that the country has never been entirely ruled by foreign powers. I count both the Mongols and the Manchu as foreign powers, and if there was any part of the country not under their rule I can only think of Formosa (referred to by the modern name of Taiwan in the rules), though at one point it says at least one of these invaders controlled Formosa. Until fairly recent times I wouldn't even count this as part of China, and of course from 1895 until present it has been Japanese or Nationalist Chinese (Taiwanese), not part of mainland China despite the claims of the communists. There are no comments about the style or weapons of warfare, other than a sidebar about gunpowder. There are a few other inconsistencies in the historical notes. For example, the author says "the [Han] Chinese military was not powerful enough at that time to deal with the raiders because of the rebellion against the Qin dynasty and later due to government corruption", but from what I've read, the Han did more to crush steppe opposition than most empires, penetrating deep into the north on several occasions and reducing the powerful Xiong-Nu to tributaries for most of the Han period. The normal relationship was "Chinese bribe barbarians with tribute", but the Han reversed that.

The game uses the relatively new Pinyin translation of Chinese to English, rather than the older Wade-Giles. This is why "Peking" became "Beijing". I dislike Pinyin, because it isn't naturally pronounceable for an English person (I wonder if it was made for French?). Chiang Kai-shek becomes Jiang Jieshi in the new system! Tsao Tsao (which is pronounced with a ts sound) becomes Cao Cao in the new system. Bah. But I suppose use of Pinyin is inevitable. Modern names of provinces have been used in most cases.

The game is arranged very much like Britannia. There are very few starting armies for some nations, as few as two. It appears that there will be a lot of attacking, since many nations score for killing others, and since the attacker has the advantage. And a lot of nations may disappear quickly. Ten of the nations have an army maximum of 10 or more. 16 nations have a max of four or less. Five European nations do not get Increase, and four of them have no more than 3 armies. But these hit on a 3+ and are hit only on a 6.

Combat resembles standard Britannia except that attackers have one better chance of hitting than defenders. Highlands reduce chances by TWO. Europeans and Mongols (during the invasion) hit on a 3 and are only hit on a 6, and Mongols can overrun at 1:1 during the invasion instead of 2:1.

Increase of Population is the same as Britannia. There is no stacking limit as such, but overpopulation is applied by area, three for clear, two for highlands, after combat, any excess dying. This is the brake against huge stacks.

There are a few double moves (including a second Increase, however), and one triple move, the Mongol invasion.

Leaders are called "emperors" (which include Mao and Chiang), and there are only ten in the game. Unlike Brit, leaders cause the enemy to attack at -1, as well as the other usual leader effects on combat and movement.

One of the problems I've had in my China game is how to reflect the rapid fall of a major dynasty, possibly followed by fragmentation, possibly by another dynasty. This game uses a clever method for rebellions that is unfortunately rather random. I think it reflects history pretty well, but might be frustrating for players because of the dice rolling involved. A rebellion starts in one or more areas, determined by regional dice rolls (each of the areas of the main part of China is numbered for the rolls). Then adjacent areas roll to see if they join the rebellion, with the major dynasties having a "power factor" of 5, which means on any roll but a 6 the adjacent area joins the rebels!

This power factor is also the number of points scored if you wipe out a nation, and the number of armies you get as reinforcements. So this becomes very important, and is also an incentive for nations to wipe out other nations and so avoid the "Belgae survive all game in Lindsey" syndrome of Britannia. With 46 nations this might be needed. Clever.

There is no indication of the typical score for the game, so I can't judge how important the points for eliminating a nation may be compared with other ways of scoring. Scoring, by the way, is every third turn, except for such things as kill points (which are common). A scoresheet is provided.

Uprisings, not the same as rebellions, occur in empty provinces. But the rules don't appear to say what happens if there are no empty provinces.

The Three Kingdoms nations, successors to the Han, are all depicted, something I could not do in my smaller-scale games with relatively few nations. Yet the Mongol invasion is all in one turn, rather than in two turns! (The Mongols finished the Jin, in northern China, in 1234 seven years after Genghis' death; they conquered the southern Song 45 years later.) Insofar as I think it's important to show that the Mongols were not invincible or unstoppable, I'm puzzled by this choice.

Another oddity is the Great Wall. Any attack over the wall FROM EITHER SIDE gives an advantage to the defender. The Great Wall was a turf wall, like Hadrian's Wall in Britain, until the stone fortifications built in the 17th century. There are actually fortifications like this all over Europe. I have a map that shows the ones in Britain (Offa's Dyke is the obvious one after Hadrian's and the Antonine walls), and I've seen them marked southeast of the Caspian Sea! These walls were too long to be fully manned (even Hadrian's, far shorter than the Great Wall, only had a garrison at intervals). They were more a discouragement for cattle rustlers and the like: "how do I get the cattle back home with this wall in the way"? In China, the question was "how do I get my horse over this wall", even though armed men could get over fairly easily. Against a real invasion, the walls weren't worth much. Giving a +1 doesn't make sense historically (especially to those going from south to north!), but it's a way to emphasize one of the most famous man-made landmarks in the world.

I was puzzled by some of the nations included and not included. The Tungus, who I thought might be Tanguts of Xi Xia, turn out to be (Wikipedia) "Evenks", a nation I have never heard of but which is included in the game for 517 and on. They start with a very substantial five armies in Kazakhstan. I thought these might represent Celestial or Blue Turks. Well, no the Tujue (another name I didn't recognize, but which Wikipedia says is the name in Chinese sources) are in fact the GokTurks (another name Celestial/Blue Turks). They are in the game from 557, and are one army weaker than the puzzling Tungus, whereas in fact the GokTurks had a huge Central Asian empire that at one time dominated the area north of China.

The Nan Zhao (usually shown the old way on maps, as Nan Chao) are a Thai people who later migrated into Thailand. For some reason they start in Vietnam instead of Thailand or Myanmar. (By the way, why use this recently-adopted ethnic name instead of Burma or Pyu or another older name? I think using modern names for a sweep of history games is a poor choice.)

The Xiong-Nu are called Huns in the game, which I think is a disservice to players. Scholarly opinion has fluctuated on this question, beginning with the incorrect notion that there is considerable similarity in the two names (this is primarily in the transliterations). Similarities between Hun and Xiong-Nu culture can be found. There are no written records for these peoples, and we know virtually nothing about their languages. No one knows for sure, any more than we can know that the Rouran became the western Avars.


Finally, here's a very interesting note: playtesters are listed separately for the author and for the publisher. The author lists two [sic] playtesters, so do we conclude that he had three people including himself to playtest a four player game? The publisher lists seven playtesters. Perhaps they only listed the major players?

I'll be interested to hear how the game plays. After all, that's what counts in the end. Game balance is very difficult to achieve in these games, and harder here in the two smaller versions of the game, yet experienced players can provide the "invisible hand" that results in balance because they know what imbalances need to be rectified. I'd like a dime for every person who says Britannia is imbalanced, yet the current results database shows virtually perfect balance. You certainly cannot play these kinds of games once or twice and think you understand all the strategy or balance. Another reason why this is NOT a review.

It would be really interesting to hear comments from someone who has played both this game and Dragon & The Pearl, but the latter had a very limited distribution and is not, as far as I know, in print. (See http://www.spiritgames.co.uk/gamesin.php?UniqueNo=1969.)

(Note for completists: there was also a very, very large Brit-like China game, Mandate of Heaven (120 BC-1949), being playtested by mail through a Yahoo Group: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/MandateH/?v=1&t=search&ch=web&pub=groups&sec=group&slk=17. Members only, and judging from the number of messages, the game is over.)

Lew Pulsipher

4D&D Impressions

4th Edition D&D is out, and I've read some of the Player's Handbook.

First Edition (second was not much different, so I discount it) let you play "wargame D&D" or "story D&D" as you liked--D&D as a competition or as an entertainment. Family games tend to be entertainments. Party games, ditto. Euro games, often. Wargames, they're usually competitions.

As Desslock, the well-known PC Gamer reviewer of RPGs says, recent versions of D&D were too "Crunchy", that is, the barriers to entry are too high because generating and understanding a character takes so long. In First Edition you could get players going in 10 minutes, if you needed to. And there are barriers in the play, as well, which tends to become too complex for many. In 3.0 or 3.5 it takes closer to an hour. It is also much more "fiddly" to devise adventures. I've played 3.0, and refereed from modules, but I never made up a 3/3.5 adventure owing to those fiddly barriers (primarily the skills, feats, and ability modifications).

I've always treated D&D as a wargame that's entertaining--we ALWAYS have used a square grid board. 3/3.5 emphasized wargame and (at least insofar as it's "Crunchy") lost track of the entertainment. 4th edition appears to have recast D&D as an entertainment--something like a movie--rather than as a strategic game, by eliminating most of the more difficult decisions such as when to use a very limited set of spells.

First Edition is long gone. Hackmaster revived First Edition, but with its own complications and an annoyingly foolish notion that the referee and the players are actually competing with one another. (Any referee who can't kill off players EASILY, if he wants to, is incompetent.) Castles and Crusades seems to be the spiritual descendant of First Edition D&D.

4th edition appears to be an attempt to go back to the simplicity and non-crunchiness of First Edition. But the uniformity of it is very striking, and I wonder how that will affect long-term enjoyment. There are not prestige classes and skills and feats galore to unbalance the game, nor does it appear that this is wanted. Instead, every class has several powers (at-will, once per encounter, once per day). And the powers tend to read with a remarkable sameness regardless of the class. Even the wizard is no different, in melee, though at other times he is more likely to use rituals (equivalent of spells that take longer than a round to cast).

Some commentators have remarked that this edition is an attempt to turn D&D into WOW. I don't know about that, but when characters always have something they can do, can heal themselves many times, when characters rise in level rapidly, there is more WOW than in any other version of D&D. It is intended to be easy to play and easy to succeed at, I think, which also characterizes WOW, an entertainment, a "grind-fest for noobs" is how I've heard WOW described. What appears to have happened is that the competitive aspect of D&D, which was too much emphasized in 3/3.5, has been quashed in favor of the entertainment aspect. First Edition balanced the two, those who wanted to play it "competitively", more or less as a wargame, could do so, while those who wanted entertainment, as though the game were a story, can do that. 3/3.5 was almost all wargame. 4 appears to be almost all entertainment. (I should clarify here that when I say "competitive" I'm talking about players against the monsters with the referee as neutral; it is still a cooperative game where the players are concerned, one of its greatest attractions, I think.)

Competitions require planning and difficult choices, whereas entertainments reduce the number of choices to several plausible ones, and tend not to require planning. Family/party games are at the extreme of entertainment. 3/3.5 was aptly described by one speaker at Origins as "Fantasy Squad Leader", at the other end of the spectrum where wargames live. It was designed to cater to players who wanted to find the most powerful combination of rules and skills and feats, and worse, it was designed so that vast numbers of additional skills, feats, and prestige classes became available to players, so that it wasn't even a self-contained wargame but an evolving one, kind of like a collectible card game where the rules must be broken every year so that the best combinations change over time.

I remember advising First Edition referees that players do all they can to find unearned advantages, and the referee's role was to quash that. But 3/3.5 enthroned it as a virtue. There is little of that extreme min-maxing in 4th edition, and that should be an improvement for most players.

But I need to read a lot more of the Player Handbook before I can say these things definitively. At present it appears it would be an interesting game to try, but I wouldn't referee it. And while it's a fantasy role-playing game, and might be a good one, it isn't D&D any more.

Origins 2008 unscientific survey

While at Origins I try to keep an eye on the age, gender, and race of the attendees. My impression this year was that there were more women than in the past, and more young people, and about as few blacks as usual (very few). Now given that I don't ordinarily notice the color/race of folks in a crowd, I once again did my unscientific survey, sitting in the same very wide connecting corridor I did in 2006 (I didn't count in 2007 for some reason), and about the same time of day, but on Friday rather than Sunday, and counted people who passed by. I didn't try to count Hispanics as I can't reliably recognize all Hispanics just from looking, but I saw few if any that were "obviously" Hispanic. Nor did I try to judge age, of course.

There were 6 black amongst :
127 male
42 female
for a total of 169:

3.5% black
24.8% female

This compares with zero percent black in 2006, and 28.5% female. So it seems the numbers of females weren't actually higher than two years ago (which is why I count), and I have no figures for last year.

Comments at Boardgame News

Boardgame News posted a notice/link about my "What's Important" post a few days ago, that elicited a few comments (one an ad hominem attack, my thanks to Christopher Dearlove for answering that better than I could have).

I do not have a $25 per year membership to BGN, so cannot post any response there to the following:

"And I’ll disagree with one of his statements. DO design for yourself. Not only do you have to take enjoyment in testing the thing to death, but you have to beleive in your own product if you are going to attempt to sell it."

Posted by Jeff Allers

I understand Jeff's point of view. However, to respond to it I'll resort to a designer more well-known than anyone in boardgames: Sid Meier (Civilization, Pirates, etc.) in Gameinformer 182, June 2008, he is quoted:

"...there'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."

Granted he's talking about videogame designers, and it certainly applies strongly to video game design students, but the point applies to non-electronic game designers as well, I think.

Initial impressions, Origins Game Fair

Last week I attended Origins in Columbus Ohio for the fourth or fifth time in a row.

Origins changed their name to Origins Game Fair, a very good idea intended to attract a more general clientele. They also instituted a weekend-only $10 admission so that "the unwashed" could come into the exhibit halls and buy something, and watch all the gaming. But the attendance in the vendor hall, except on Saturday, was significantly less than in the past. Even in the gaming halls there seemed to be considerably less going on, despite the Pokemon National Tournament and a record number of events. Last year there were something like 15,000 unique attendees, likely fewer this year.

It's easy to attribute the attendance dropoff to the price of gas. What concerns publishers is whether people will buy fewer games because of gas prices and general uncertainty. Conventional wisdom is that when the economy is poor, people steer their entertainment dollars toward the less expensive (per hour) forms of entertainment, which includes games (especially non-electronic games). One vendor pointed out that games are now cheaper, in comparison with gas and other necessities such as food, than they used to be. But another worried that when it came time to buy a game, a person would need the money for gas.

I go with the conventional wisdom. The people who came to the convention were willing to spend money, it's just that there weren't as many people as in the past.

Nor were there as many exhibitors--or maybe I should say, the exhibits occupied less space--especially the huge exhibits we used to see. Why? Let's speculate.

At a remainder vendor I ran across a box of 12 starter sets (30 chips in each) of Clout Fantasy. Clout was heavily hyped at last year's convention, originated by a company involving Peter Adkison, founder of Wizards of the Coast and owner of GenCon. It is a collectible throwing game. You throw the equivalent of high quality poker chips with color illustrations on them into an area, and rules plus measurements govern what happens. I confess last year I didn't think it would appeal to many people, and this box may well confirm that. Clout starter sets were $14.95 at Thought Hammer (knocked down to $8.97). So my $8 box retailed for $180 at one time. The principal publisher, AEG, used to have enormous layouts at Origins, but had a tiny booth this year.

But this was not as striking as the absence of WizKids for the second year running, after they had brought enormous setups to past Origins. Wizkids made their fame with Mage Knight, HeroClix, and the like. Mage Knight figures were at the same remainder vendor, as well as Navia (chesslike game using collectible figures, also pushed heavily at the convention in the past). I couldn't resist, and bought a dwarven steam behemoth (a tank, more or less) for $4 (original price $34.95 in 2001). There were even some D&D miniatures sets in the lot.

Of course, another vendor had literally thousands of RPG books at $5 apiece. This only confirms what we all knew, that the RPG market is in the pits, though the advent of 4th Edition D&D (which renders all the D20 Third Edition stuff obsolete) may have had something to do with this particular display.

RPG market: Andy Hopp, a guest of honor artist who works in the RPG industry, gave another illustration of the collapse of the RPG market. When he started about seven years ago, he could get around $80 for a black and white illustration in an RPG book. He doesn't work in that segment now, but understands people are lucky to get $10 for the same thing. That's because, outside of the main vendors such as Wizards of the Coast, companies can's sell much RPG material, so they can't pay much for art.

I didn't notice Wizards of the Coast, whether they were there or not.

We had the usual contingent, perhaps more than usual, of little companies with a few new self-published games pushing them at Origins, companies we won't see back next year, as usual, because it won't have been worth the cost/effort. But hope springs eternal in the human breast, as they say.

I didn't investigate, but a game that caught my eye was a spiral array printed on black cloth, with two different colors of dice (not d6) layed out on it. As a result I'm thinking about using dice as pieces for a game, but D6, not the more expensive stuff.

The little companies, the boardgame companies, that have been around for a long time were still there (most of them), but the big companies were not as much in evidence. Perhaps WizKids and Wizards of the Coast will be at GenCon, which is more fantasy-oriented than Origins.

According to the organizers there were 4,527 events at Origins--tournaments, role-playing/miniatures/bardgaming sessions, seminars. One of the oddities of Origins is that you pay quite a hefty fee to get in--up to $70--and then you're charged to play the games, and even some of the seminars that you attend. (This in contrast to WBC, where you pay one fee and then can play in any tournaments, and play anything else.) At Origins there's even a fee for playing in the open boardgaming area. But the result is LOTS of events. I did my usual two free seminars, how to get your game published and how to design a game. (Slides and MP3 recordings here, including also Ian Schreiber's "Game Design for Teachers", http://pulsiphergames.com/teaching1.htm.) I had more than 25 at each session despite choosing slightly odd times (9 AM and 3 PM Saturday). As seminars go, this is very good attendance. Listening to myself, I seem to have been in good form, and I'll use the recordings to help me write the book.

Why did I buy the Clout set? For pieces for prototypes, I get outstandingly made "poker" chips in four colors for two+ cents each, and can ignore the illustrations. But I realized after I'd bought, I can use these for game design "challenges" in class. I'll give student groups a starter set or two, tell them to use one of the three sets of numbers on the chips, and make up a game (most likely with a square board, but that's up to them). Unfortunately, the other set was gone when I thought of this and wanted to buy it as well!

(Oops: added the URL)

What's important in breaking into the (non-electronic) game industry?

Sometimes I try to summarize the most important things about some topic or question in one page--a useful exercise. Here's the latest:

Don't think you're going to make a lot of money. Very likely, you'll spend a great deal of time for little return. Non-electronic gaming is "small potatoes", not a big source of money. "How do you make a small fortune in the game industry? Start with a big fortune."

Publishers want games, not ideas. Ideas are cheap, a dime a dozen; recognize that your "great idea" is not that great, not that original, not that interesting to others. That's reality. (How often do we get a really extraordinary new idea? D&D, Magic:the Gathering, maybe Mage Knight?)

You have to DO something to give yourself some credibility, before publishers are likely to look at your game. If you're a complete unknown, why would publishers deal with you?
● Volunteer at cons
● Write articles
● Make variants/mods and publish them
● have a decent Web site
● GM at conventions

Sorry, folks, while you're really important to yourself and your family, you're nobody to any publisher.

Don't design games for yourself, design for others. They’re the ones who must enjoy it, your enjoyment in playing is unimportant! But don’t design something you expect you’ll dislike.

If you're only working on one game, or a few, you're not likely to end up with a good one, AND you identify yourself as a dilettante, an amateur. Pros are working on many, many games.

Patience is a virtue. Britannia existed in fully playable form in 1980. It was first published in 1986. In 2008, one publisher told me, "it's a good thing you're immortal, because it's going to take a long time" to evaluate and publish one of my games.

So if you're the "instant gratification" type, recognize your instant gratification will be in seeing people play your prototype, not in the published game.

Self-publishing is practical, if you don't mind losing a lot of money. Moreover, at some point you become a publisher/marketer, not a designer. What do you want to do?

Playtesting is sovereign. You have to playtest your game until you're sick of looking at it, until you want to throw the damn thing away. Then maybe you'll have something. But you have to be willing to change the game again and again: listen to the playtesters, watch how they react, recognize your game isn’t perfect and won’t be even when (if) it’s published.

When your game is rejected, there’s a good chance the rejection had nothing to do with the game’s quality. Be persistent.

Chess and chance in Britannia

In describing Britannia to potential players, I often say it has a chess-like quality. You have to pay attention throughout the game, as losing out on a few points in the first few turns can mean the difference between winning and losing many turns later. It is a game that rewards some planning, though owing to the variability of combat, you also have to react to surprises from the dice as well as from the players.

In chess you can survive going down a pawn early in the game, but if you really screw up and go down a rook or queen, you've had it. Similarly in Britannia, if you make a big error--say, as the Welsh, fighting the Romans to the death instead of submitting--then you can't win the game, and face hours having to deal with that.

While some people play games to enjoy the process, the journey, some play to win, and don't care to play when they feel they cannot win. In chess you can resign (surrender) and play another game, not easy to do gracefully when there are three other players instead of one.

This chess-like quality is quite in contrast to many Euro-style games, where you can more or less foul up throughout the first half or more of the game and still have some chance to win in the end. Insofar as many Euro games are "family games on steroids", this characteristic is to be expected.

The presence of chance, variability, in the combat, takes Britannia away from the chess analogy, thank heaven. (For me, chess is "too much like work".) Whether there's "too much luck" is a matter for disagreement. In my online survey, about 75% of players think the amount of luck is OK, and most of the rest think there should be less. In my prototypes I generally have adopted methods with less chance, some of them diceless though not deterministic. I hardly ever consider using the original combat method in new games. (Then again, I was known to say 30-some years ago "I hate dice games", but then I came onto D&D and designed Britannia and other games that use dice...)

I think expert Brit players would say that bad luck can be managed, as long as there isn't a really long run of bad luck. Less expert players often think the game can revolve around a few rolls. To my mind, most rolls in Britannia are not important out of proportion, unless someone is desperately trying to kill a rival king in the endgame. Dice can be managed in Brit just as they can be managed in D&D. "What?" Yes, in (first edition) D&D you can try to minimize the number of times you MUST get lucky. This is the same as how you ought to manage life, trying to avoid times when you MUST get lucky. So smart people wear seatbelts, some people don't. Smart people exercise, some people don't. Smart people don't smoke, some people do. And so forth.

I have changed the combat methods in prototypes in part because I want to reduce chance, but also because I tend to aim at shorter games with fewer pieces. This means less fighting, and each fight is magnified in importance, so I want to reduce the effects of chance on each fight. I've devised a number of 4-8 turn Britannia scenarios, and it's noticeable how much more important the dice rolls are in these much-shorter games, simply because there are fewer rolls over the course of the game. (I've never quite actually counted, but IIRC there's something like 800 dice rolls in a Brit game.)

Example: players who do lots of one-on-ones with the Romans are taking unnecessary risks, I think--living on borrowed time. I try to avoid it. I think a conservative Roman can still score his 80 by round 3, and have more Roman armies left to defend his holdings. Yeah, "fortune favors the bold", but sometimes you don't have to be bold and can still get the job done.

There are three prominent alternative methods: one uses battle cards to add to the strength of combatants, and each player has an identical deck of 25 cards (five in hand). Over the course of a game, then, the "luck" each player has will be about the same, because they have identical decks. A second method uses "picture dice" (which are really just marked with the equivalent of 4, 5, and 6 when you come down to it), each army rolls two dice, and two hits are required to kill an army. The third method uses a table. One table "evens out" luck quite strongly, another not as much. The first cross-references the number of armies and a die roll, the second uses odds (but all possible odds are listed on the table, so that players don't have to figure out odds--people aren't used to doing division in their heads any more). People like picture dice and cards. Wargamers are more used to tables. All of these methods have been extensively playtested, and all of them work, but accomplish somewhat different objectives and have different expenses (200 cards, for example).

Three player difficulties

I am working on the "Gateway" version of Normannia--have played twice, seems to work despite being on a larger board (33 areas) to accommodate the bigger diceless version. Now I'm looking at a three player version, but whenever I do this I seem to run into problems with nation interaction. It's very difficult to avoid strange interactions with three players. It reminded me of the "four color map" problem.

"The four color theorem (also known as the four color map theorem) states that given any plane separated into regions, such as a political map of the states of a country, the regions may be colored using no more than four colors in such a way that no two adjacent regions receive the same color. Two regions are called adjacent only if they share a border segment, not just a point. Each region must be contiguous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiguity): that is, it may not have exclaves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclave) like some real countries such as Angola (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angola), Azerbaijan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan), Italy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy), the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States), or Russia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem

I'm trying to do the same to accommodate just three players, and it's very difficult to do. Even without the "petty diplomacy problem"--that one player, if he decides he cannot win, can determine which of the other two can win--it makes three player strategic map-based games difficult in general.

There are ways to overcome the petty diplomacy problem, and if you have just three nations you can have three players, but when you start trying to use many nations, it becomes really difficult to do well.

Ruminations

I've just realized a difference between electronic games and non-electronic games: if you design a really good non-electronic game, there's a good chance it will still be played 20 years from now, might even still sell 20 years from now. In the video game world, games become obsolete because of advances in the computational platforms. A game might be played 20 years after it was released, but it almost certainly won't sell 20 years after.

Here is an expression of why I prefer in-person gaming: "There is nothing on the planet more entertaining than other people." Jordan Weisman

That element of "other people" is partly or entirely lost in electronic games, even MMOs.

Avoiding piracy and effects of technology

I've been reading about the conventional reason given for publishers' lack of interest in PC video games. They believe that piracy is so rampant that they can't sell many games, compared with console sales where piracy is much harder (and I'd add, many users are much less technically adept). However, some people think the real problem is that many PC games require such high-end hardware that the actual pool of potential buyers is small, and there has to be some truth in that. And the people with the high-end systems are usually the ones most capable of pirating the software.

Boardgames have faced the problem of piracy--I've heard of hand-made and photocopies of stuff I've published, and Diplomacy was pirated in Brazil wholesale at one time (they added a supply center in Tunisia, otherwise the same game). In the modern era of scanning and digital cameras it becomes relatively easy to make copies of boards and rules. So how have boardgames changed to make this less of a threat? First, the games provide lots of "bits" (pieces) of thick cardboard, but often 3 dimensional wood or plastic, sometimes even plastic figures. In Euro-style games the boards are often mounted. There are even gimmicks such as spinners and dice towers that cannot practically be pirated. Finally, flashy color art is less easy to pirate than old-style black and white.

In wargames there are fewer protections, but the pool of wargame buyers is so small that the typical hex historical game sells about two thousand copies, and piracy is uncommon. "Block games" have become popular, and they have the 3 dimensional block pieces and the stickers for the blocks, all being more difficult to pirate than ordinary cardboard counters.

At the same time, most game companies post game rules online. The rules become an advertisement for the game, not a piracy threat. Usually the cards, which are common, are not posted online by the publisher, though there are exceptions. The Britannia nation cards are not on FFG's Web site, but photos might be found at places like Boardgamegeek (copyright violations overlooked by the publisher)

I'm going to bring in another comparison at some length, books and textbooks. It is only a matter of time to scan a book to an electronic copy. Scott Adams (author of Dilbert comics) complained that one of his books was available in pirated electronic version the day after it came out, and so he never pursued sales of an electronic version. As students more habitually carry laptops or "e-readers", the electronic version of a book can be used in class as well as outside of class.

However, as a college teacher I see students either not reading the textbook, or not even bothering to buy it. To folks of my generation a book was a treasure trove of information about a topic. Now we have the Internet, and hundreds of channels on cable and satellite. (I was lucky, I had three TV channels instead of two, and learned a lot from "20th Century" and "Mr. Wizard".) These provide information for "free". Want history? There's the History Channel and its competitors. Want science? Discovery Channel and many others. A lot of the information is pretty shaky these days owing to sensationalism and a lackadaisical attitude that turns fiction into truth, but there IS information. So why bother with a book, younger people ask.

Textbook publishers generally have depended on the structure of the business, that is, the teacher chooses a textbook, and the students are required to purchase the textbook, and then the teacher tests the students on the content of the textbook.

But we've reached different days. Even when typical students KNOW that by reading a textbook they can do much better on a test, THEY DON'T BOTHER by and large. Heavens, even when a practice test is available that will almost assure them of getting an "A", they don't bother to take it! And in the past year I've seen students not bother to buy a textbook, not because they have a pirated edition, but because they don't feel it's worth the money. (Students at elite schools like Duke still read books most of the time, but they are very much the exception.)

If I were a textbook company I'd be worried, even though, thanks to essentially monopoly pricing, a company can charge well over $100 for a widely-used (and consequently high print run) book. As I often say, if you put a textbook in a bookstore hardly anyone would buy it; which is why I try to use class books that DO sell well in bookstores, they are not only cheaper, they are usually more interesting.

Of course, what the bookstore books are missing is the paraphernalia of teaching, the questions and reviews and case studies and other pedagogical material that often isn't worth much anyway, in my view. But textbook companies are smart, they market to the teacher, not to the students, because the teacher selects the book (and can get a free copy of the textbook, but not of books sold in ordinary bookstores, mind you). In the end, teachers want books that will teach the class for them. (Not surprisingly, I am very much NOT that sort of teacher.) This is especially important for online/distance ed classes, which consist largely of learning from a book, not from a teacher. (And which I do not teach.)

Despite this, and despite the bizarre but increasingly common notion that people must take classes to learn things instead of reading books--usually not textbooks--I think the textbook companies are in trouble. But they may not quite know it.

Some people in the industry are experimenting with ways to make piracy a virtue rather than a problem. One company (freeloadpress) is putting advertisements in textbooks and distributing electronic versions for free. These are full-page full-color ads, usually in unobtrusive locations. The books can be purchased at reasonable prices in paper, I presume via publishing-on-demand technology. For example, the 140 page book I downloaded was less than $10 in paper. These folks are already in business and have some impressive title in their catalog.

Another company plans to sell the homework assignments, and hopes instructors will enforce the idea that if the student hasn't bought the homework assignments, the student cannot get credit for homework. I don't think they have a prayer, teachers aren't going to care about this.

Another company expects to sell ancillary products that support the books, such as study guides. Again, I don't see how this can work, and surely the ancillary products, if written, will be pirated.

This brings us back to video games. You may know that some games already have in-game advertising. If this becomes the primary support of a game, then the more copies made of a game, the better for the publisher. Also, some online games have gone to a modified free model. It's free to play the game, but there are ancillary, in-game benefits (such as cooler costumes for avatars) that cost small sums, and those small sums add up to large ones. There's no analog of "sell the homework", or I'd expect PC games to have experiments there.

Consoles in the long run may be susceptible to piracy, too, especially the computer wannabes (XBox 360 and PS 3). Once you have a DVD drive, you have the possibility that someone will figure out how to copy console games either on a modified console or on a PC.

Computer technology and the Internet have changed many business models. Some businesses have contracted mightily (travel agents, e.g.), some have appeared from nowhere. The boardgame business has changed in another way, because the competition from online game retailers makes it tough for many local game shops to continue, yet publishers don't sell enough online, by and large, to wish to see retail distribution from brick-and-mortar stores disappear (as it is slowly doing).

Chris Anderson argues that "the long tail" (the name of his book) means marginal/niche products will be more successful, yet others believe the "short-term mega-hit" phenomenon means those same products are less viable, not more. I understand that retailing of games changed with the collectible card games, because stores got used to products (CCGs and expansions) that sold very well for 90 days and then sold very little. Boardgames, especially wargames, sell via a different model, but stores aren't interested in keeping inventory of less-than-brand-new games in stock because of the CCG phenomenon. I think this is one reason why we see so many new boardgames, but most don't sell a lot or make much money (though a few mega-hits do). Something about the new edition of Britannia that really pleased me was the continued good level of sales (until it was sold out): one way or another it seemed to avoid the 90-day-wonder phenomenon.

Memorization

Young people seem to think it funny when they ask about a rule in one of my prototypes and I say "I don't remember". "But it's your game!" they say. Yes, but I have dozens of prototypes going, and I see no reason to remember all the rules--that's why I write them down. Further, if I rely on what's written, then I'll know that the way we're playing matches the way other people will ultimately be playing.

I have to remember as much as I can about the games that only have notes, not full rules--I don't write full rules until the game has been played several times. And at my age I have a lot more to remember than 20-somethings do. So I save my memory for what's important!

I am always a little fascinated by "designers" who say they're working on just one game. That certainly allows for full focus and full memorization of the rules, but given that the majority of games don't work out well, the more you work on, the more you're likely to have some that will "rise to the top". I try to approach it in a businesslike manner, the folks who design only one at a time certainly appear to be hobbyists only.

Favorite games--generational differences

I often attend the NC State Tabletop Gamers meetings, where everyone else is age 25 and under, making me incredibly old. Recently I asked the players what their favorite game is. With one exception (who heard my question and asked me to ask him), not a single one could name their favorite game. I've found this is often the case with game development students, too. As new games come out, they get interested in the new ones and lose much of their interest in the old ones. So they don't really have favorites. It's unusual for the same game to be played twice at the meetings (partly a matter of time), unusual for a person to play a particular game a second time in an evening. And most of the players are willing to "have a go" at games they have never heard of, let alone learned to play before the meeting.

This only shows once again that there is a big difference between generations. I can name all my favorite games from the time I started playing strategy games: Conflict briefly, then Broadsides, and at age 12 Stalingrad (and others from AH, though SG was "the" favorite). Age 18 introduced me to Diplomacy. Age 24, D&D. I played D&D for 29 years, then took three years off, and got back into designing games. I'd have to say my favorite now is Britannia, though I've never played a published version, always preliminary versions or variants.

My second favorites tended at one time to be video games, Empire Deluxe, Total Annihilation (played at SLOW speed!), Civilization 2, and Heroes of Might and Magic 2. Lately I haven't had much time to play video games. My second favorite now would be D&D (after Brit).

And like many people my age, I want to study the rules and the game before I play; I dislike being taught by another person how to play a game, because it's so likely that confusion will result.

I suspect the "cult of the new" has something to do with these differences between me and the NC State gamers. Nowadays people, especially young people, assume that whatever is newest is usually best. Older generations (and perhaps anyone with a lot of experience) realizes that "new" is not necessarily a recommendation.


Here's a question: if I have always had these favorite games, why do I design new ones? Some designers may design games so that they can enjoy playing them, but that's not my motivation. I design them first so that other people can enjoy playing them, and second as interesting intellectual exercises. I came back into designing games after a 20 year hiatus because I realized that of all the things I had done, the one that provided the most pleasure and stimulus to the most people is Britannia. And I wanted to do more. But as I design a ridiculous number of games, I find I'm doing it to "solve a problem", sometimes a problem related to history, sometimes a problem I manufacture, that is, to meet self-imposed constraints. For example, Law & Chaos is likely to be a very popular game once published, probably more popular than Britannia ever was, yet it began as a simple desire to make a game that uses glass beads for its only pieces.

I don't actually play the games, once published, so I clearly don't make them in order to play them myself. I don't even play them in playtest sessions, if there are enough other players, because I don't want to skew the results. Nonetheless, it's music to my ears to hear someone say "I love this game" or that they've played Britannia five hundred times (I sure haven't), or that Swords & Wizardry is their favorite boardgame.

Having said that, there's rarely anything so fascinating as playing a game I've designed for the first time. How will it work out, what will I need to change, will there "be anything in it"?

I have to confess that there are a few I've designed that I don't particularly enjoy playing, but other people do. That's partly a consequence of experience, partly of designing by constraints to see what I can work out. Game design is a vocation for me rather than a living, so I can do what I want, how I want it.

Gamasutra has an article discussing how much video games cater to "cult of the new" (not their words) rather than favorites to be played again and again:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18301

Playing vs. Watching

I am known to some as a person who doesn't actually play boardgames, other than his own--but I do play the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. I don't even play my games once they're published, though I'll play variations. Except for D&D, I'm always interested in the design aspect of playing a game, that is, improving the designs I'm working on.

Moreover, playing a game that is less than top standard is too much like work. And some games (like chess) are too much like work in any case. I am much happier watching or reading the rules than suffering through playing.

When I used to play boardgames, I played "for blood", to win. But about age 25 I got to where I disliked the competitiveness, what it did to me, so I stopped playing competitive games. D&D is a cooperative game, at least the way I play it.

D&D is an aberration in other ways, too. The games I design tend to be grand strategic, often covering long periods, or they are abstract. In either case, there is no "role assumption", the player does not think of himself as a single individual. And I don't feel a need for role-assumption. Yet D&D is often highly tactical, and players represent single individuals. I hardly ever design a game like that. (It has to be said, when I got back into designing games I stopped playing D&D, and only recently started again--but that may have been a matter of availability of players rather than distraction of boardgames.)

At Rick Steeves' Game Night recently, I played my new dice game that uses Law & Chaos principles, to make up the numbers; I didn't play Warhamster Rally but learned a lot from watching and reading the rules, yet I didn't have to concentrate on it. (I'm designing a "Rocket Rally" game, sort of broad market using RoboRally principles, so I was quite interested in WHR.) I also watched part of a Forumula De game, very clever yet not offering something I can use in any game I'm working on--not yet, anyway. I also had a look at TransAmerica. I'm always looking for methods and ideas that might help me, yet most of the games played at Rick's are Euro types rather than wargames, and most of the games I design are at least in part wargames, certainly conflict games.

Where variability comes from in a wargame

I've been thinking about where variability comes from in games, especially wargames.

Obviously, much of it comes from people, that is, from the opposition. And when there is more than one opponent, the variability becomes much less predictable. Some computer games try to reproduce some of this kind of variability, for example Civilization. In Civ IV the different "personalities" of the opponents are supposed to influence how they play.

It often appears to me that expert "Euro" game players are playing the players more than the system, though some of the more intricate mechanics mean the main point of effort is understanding and "controlling" the mechanic rather than understanding and "controlling" the people.

At any rate, here are some wargames and sources of variability:

Britannia--the combat system, that is, the dice rolls. In many of my Brit-like prototypes I'm trying to cut down on the randomness of the combat. Though 75% of the players think the amount of luck is OK, most others would like less luck. I laugh at people who say Brit is "too scripted", there seems to be great variation in what happens owing to both differing strategies and dice rolls. Freeform would make no sense in an historical game (note that Vinci and Risk, below, both freeform games, have NO element of history in them, absolutely none).

Vinci--the chit draws for the civilizations provide a random element. It is also very freeform. But mostly it is the people.

Risk--the combat system is the obvious variable, but even more, the territory cards and increasing reward for turning in sets; also there's the extremely freeform structure (you can go anywhere).

Diplomacy--there is occasional guessing in the tactics, but this game is almost entirely about people. Someday I may do a version of Dip stripped to its essentials, where there would be little or no tactical element, or perhaps a kind of a "Euro" version of Diplomacy (this might end up being two different games).

In most wargames, the dice rolling in combat is the main variable other than the people themselves. And that makes sense, combat is a very chancy business no matter how well-prepared you may be.

In many other games, especially those with little or no luck in the combat system, the Event Cards provide the variability. (E.g. Germania, Seas of Gold, Law & Chaos (yeah, that's not a wargame), etc.

Some games become "predictable" for lack of a random element other than the players--chess, checkers, Puerto Rico, etc. Yet when they are complex enough, there's still a lot of unpredictability. Checkers has been brute-force solved by computer, but that doesn't prevent people from playing.

I'm not sure where that gets us, but there it is.

Keep it simple

While at PrezCon I saw many games, even many "Euro" games, with hundreds of bits, lots of different kinds of bits, and wondered why anyone wanted to try to make sense of all the cardboard chits and cards and money and... My friend Rick played an eight hour Axis & Allies game, with vast numbers and types of pieces. (I played A&A a lot solo at one time, the computer version, where I didn't have to mess so much with vast numbers of pieces.)

I realized then that I never have been much interested in games with hundreds of pieces. My early favorites were Milton Bradley games like Broadside, then I discovered Avalon Hill games but preferred such as Stalingrad (100 pieces) and Arfika Korps (likely not many more). Then I went on to Diplomacy (34 pieces), and finally D&D (a dozen pieces). Britannia and the other games I had published in the early 80s and earlier had fewer than 200 pieces, often less than 100. And even those games don't have more than an average of 55 or so pieces on the board at one time (Britannia).

Of course, I like "grand strategic" games, not tactical games (D&D is the aberration there), and at that level a lot of different categories of pieces doesn't make much sense. Maybe a game with hundreds of pieces but few categories would be all right, but I'd then say, what can we do with hundreds of pieces that we cannot similarly do with dozens? The A&A game reminded me of my stillborn WW II strategic game intended to provide the strategy of A&A without the length and number of pieces. So I may go back to that.

I have already played the "broad market" Brit (which is really a gateway Brit, not broad market, that needs to be a game with cards). And miraculously, I've already written a full set of rules. Followed by a full set for Frankia. Maybe I'm finally "off the snide".

Gary Gygax R.I.P.

Gary Gygax, one of the inventors of D&D, died recently.

I'd call Gary the developer of the game for sure, I know Dave Arneson originated the idea of having individuals interact with fantasy miniatures battles (which became Chainmail), as Dave wrote me a letter about it when I was editor of my Supernova fanzine. I don't know how it got from that to strictly individuals as we see in D&D.

I first corresponded with Gary in 1966. He was a leading light in the International Federation of Wargamers club, and about all I recall of that exchange is him saying he was too young to be called "Sir". And he was, then.

I only met him once or twice, at conventions, and had had no contact with him for many many years, but something like this is much like the feeling when sports heroes of your youth die (Micky Mantle!). You feel old.

Someone whose brain temporarily ceased to function at Boardgamenews wrote the following disrespectful if not plain stupid headline:
"Where’s a Cleric When You Need One? – Gygax Dies at Age 69"
They need to find a new headline writer.

D&D, the older, simpler version, is still my favorite game, and I recently started playing--well, reffing--again after a three year hiatus.

Why I'm not an electronic game designer

Why would I want to design electronic games? I'm better off as is.

• The "AAA list" electronic games are really designed by committee. When I design a game, it is almost all MINE. (The rest is playtesters and publisher.)
• For most of the age of video games, you had to work full time in the industry, yet the pay was and is poor. I'd rather help young people as a teacher, get paid at least as well, and have lots of time to design games.
• The working hours are bad. "Crunch time" (unpaid overtime) is common, though designers are not involved in that quite as much as programmers and artists.
• Fighting with the electronics obscures the purity of design. You worry about what the computer can do instead of what the players can do.

PrezCon 2008

I attended the 15th annual PrezCon in Charlottesville, VA 21-24 February. Rick Steeves and I arrived later Thursday evening, PrezCon is a miniature WBC (World Boardgaming Championships), with the focus almost entirely on board (and card) game tournaments. Registered attendance was over 550. Justin Thompson, who runs the con, says it has grown larger every year.

PrezCon is purely boardgames and non-collectible card games--no role playing, no Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh, no "pure" miniatures (there was a Star Wars Minis tournament), no electronic games.

I don't go to conventions to play games, and I don't have much luck getting people to playtest because they're so busy with the official tournaments. Players pay a single fee and play as many tournaments as they can fit in, with wooden plaques for the winners. Most tournaments have two or three heats or rounds, then the most successful players play in a final.

GMT, Mayfair, Z-man, Cafe, and other game companies were there, but the vendors are a minor part of the convention compared with Origins. It really is a miniature WBC.

I've been at PrezCon every other year since 2004. I noticed this year that there seemed to be more kids (under18), and more folks in their 20s and 30s, and more females, though the most common demographic was still a gray-haired male. Some of those kids are offspring of the older folks, but the increase was certainly noticeable.

Early Friday I talked with Jason Hawkins (co-designer of Parthenon) at length about his elaborate but quite clever prototype game of Alexander's successors. I'm afraid Jason thought I was a curmudgeon with my questions about the complexity of it--I seem to be more and more into simple games these days rather than ones with a lot of detail. I also watched a bit of Richard Berg's prototype Dynasty (China) game being played, and skimmed the rules. Berg was also playing a cowboy game that he called a "growth game"--someone asked what had happened to him, as he's very well known for nuts-and-bolts wargames--but there was some gunslinging in it. Dynasty also appeared to be more about about growth than about war. Evidently Richard likes to write a full set of rules fairly early on, rather different from my typical practice (though I write the first-draft rules for quite simple games pretty early in the process).

The most useful thing I did was talk with Ron Magin of Cafe Games about my prototype Law & Chaos. He, Rick, and I played, and he then recommended to Pete, CEO of Mayfair Games, that he should try it. Pete talked at some length about where he has games printed (US, Germany, occasionally China, depending on what needs to be printed). The US has become cheaper than Germany owing to the high value of the Euro (or low value of the dollar, depends on how you look at it). Mayfair is one of the larger US publishers, in particular having the US franchise for Settlers of Catan, which sells in enormous numbers (six figures).

There was a small Britannia tournament, two rounds and then a final board, won again this year by Mark Smith in a tight game. About a third as many people participated as at WBC, which fits the attendance numbers (WBC is 1,500+ attendees).

Though I don't play at conventions, I look at lots of games in progress and talk with various people, and get a lot of good game ideas at a con. One in particular (using techniques from Law & Chaos) is likely to turn out well. Another is a space-themed, broader market, analog to Robo-Rally, my friend Rick's favorite game. Rick also played an eight hour Axis & Allies game, which reminded me of an old project I had to try to make a two hour WW II game that concentrated on the virtues of A&A (strategy) rather than its "unvirtues" (lots of dice, economy-driven, LONG). Many notes and much discussion took place, but I don't know if I'll get any further this time than last.

At the con I heard about a "broad market" (as opposed to mass market) version of a famous gateway game. That gateway game is quite simple, but this version is MUCH simpler, to appeal to a broader market--people who don't normally play boardgames at all except for Monopoly and such (I think), and who might buy them in places like Target or Macy's.

Just for the heck of it, I'm trying to develop a "broad market" version of Brit (the kind of thing that would sell with Risk and similar games). History may be too serious for a broad market, especially medieval British history, but it's an interesting exercise. I already have a "Brit Lite" version, and that can be played by casual gamers and video gamers, but I'm aiming at the sort of folks who might play Risk and Monopoly and checkers or chess, but not much else. I'm doing this for my own amusement, not with the idea of ever having it published.

"Broad market" Brit

At PrezCon this weekend I heard about a "broad market" version of a famous gateway game. That gateway game is quite simple, but this version is MUCH simpler, to appeal to a broader market--people who don't normally play boardgames at all (I think), and who might buy them in places like Target of Macy's.

Just for the heck of it, I'm trying to develop a "broad market" version of Brit (the kind of thing that would sell with Risk and similar games). History may be too serious for a broad market, especially medieval British history, but it's an interesting exercise. I already have "Brit Lite" version, and that can be played by casual gamers and video gamers, but I'm aiming at the sort of folks who might play Risk and Monopoly and checkers or chess, but not much else.

The game would have to have many fewer units than Brit, and many fewer areas (my first cut has 14 instead of 37 land areas). Six turns perhaps, 8 nations. I'm afraid that with the limits required, the Roman conquest must be left out. Non-gamers might not care for the one-sidedness of it, but more important, it will tend to go the same every time, so let's not bother.

Obviously, there should be plastic figures for pieces.

Leader pieces? No, I think the way to introduce historical flavor (and some variation) is with cards. Those cards can include leader cards that the player will always get on certain turns.

Possible timeline:
400-525 A-Saxons, Scots come w/Fergus
525-650 Badon etc. stops A-S, then win by A-S (577 especially)
650-800 A-S clean up, Heptarchy
800-925 Vikings. Kenneth McAlpin
925-1025 Viking renewal, Cnut
1025-1100 Four Kings

My first cut with nations was 12:
R-B
Angles
Saxons
Scots
Picts
Brigs
Welsh
Irish
Norwegians
Normans
Danes
Norse-Dubliners

But that's too many, so I tried for 8

Britons less Welsh (R-Bs and "Brigs")
Welsh
Angles
Saxons
Danes
Norse including Dubs & Norwegians
Scots & Picts & Irish
Normans

Four players:
Angles--Normans
Saxons--Scots Irish Picts
Welsh--Danes
Britons--Norse Dubs Norweg etc.
So the British get Vikings to play with. Angles (who get stomped) get the eventual historical winners (Normans)

I have a system for possible double occupancy of areas that works very well in Frankia (and Brit Lite), but it's a little complex. So I'm waffling between having more areas than the 14 I came up with, or 14 and double occupancy, or more areas--but that might mean empty areas, and might require more pieces. Dunno until I try something.

Or maybe more areas to avoid double occupancy? But then areas might be empty, that's the problem.

The Brit combat system has far too much variation to be used at this scale. But dice rolling is fine for this market. Right now I'm thinking roll one die for each army, higher total kills one army of other side and pushes them back. Cards might modify this (e.g. leaders add one to each die roll). (Variation: one die plus one per army, helps the defense a lot.)

That's all for now. I have many other things to work on as a result of PrezCon contacts, I'm glad to say.

Analysis of Some Traditional Games

This is written with my students of electronic game design in mind, but should be of interest to boardgamers. The best way for students of digital game design to learn game design is with non-electronic boardgames and card games. This kind of game can be brought to playtest stage far more quickly than electronic games, and by their relatively simple nature they reveal the essence of gameplay much more quickly and clearly than electronic games. However, my students are rarely familiar with non-traditional boardgames such as Eurogames, and the traditional ones offer many “false lessons”, that is, what has worked in traditional games is often not good game design.

Put another way, game design students often adopt characteristics of traditionally popular games in their designs. Part of the reason for discussing traditional games is to point out that they are not necessarily designs worth emulating.

So I’ve tried to write a brief analysis of what is wrong with (and right with) some of these games. Sometimes I’ll use the following questions as a framework, after a general discussion of the game.

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face?
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges?
3. What can players do to affect each other?
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over?
5. Is the game fair?
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type (consider "take that")?
7. What is the "essence" of the game?

General comments about “traditional” games

There are two types of “traditional” games, the public domain ones that have come down to us over centuries such as chess and pachesi, and those that are commercially-produced games that have become habits with the buying and playing public. The former tend to be for two players only, while the latter are often for two or more players.

I must say I am NOT a person who thinks that recently-designed games are necessarily better designs than “old” games. I am definitely not into “the cult of the new”. But I do believe that the really old traditional games often benefit greatly from the lack of competition when they were first devised/published. Most “traditional” games are played because “everyone knows how to play”. They are bought because “everyone is familiar with it”. They are not traditional because they are particularly good game designs, in many cases. They have attained a place in contemporary culture, have become “a habit”. When you ask boardgame fanatics how well such games would fare if published today, the response is often something between “a dog” and “just another game”.

I have one general comment about the “roll dice and move accordingly” mechanic used in many commercial traditional games. This mechanic gives a player little to no control over what happens. It is almost universally despised by experienced boardgamers. I pose it to video gamers this way: “if you were playing a video game, and your avatar suddenly slowed down for a while, and then sped up for a while, and periodically changed maximum speed at random, wouldn’t that annoy the heck out of you? And what if other player’s avatars were moving at different speeds than yours? You’d hate it. So why would you want to do that in a boardgame?” Yes, it’s easy randomization, but there are better ways to randomize, and in any case don’t we usually want to make games of skill, not games of chance?

I may as well dispose of a class of traditional games here: Bingo, Candyland, and Chutes and Ladders are all entirely random games. This is OK for little kids, who don’t recognize the randomness, and who aren’t up to “strategizing” to beat older players. It’s OK for gambling, too. But it’s worth nothing to people who like games involving skill, who want to take actions to overcome meaningful challenges.

Another point worth discussing is player elimination. Insofar as multiplayer (more than two) traditional games tend to be family games, the possibility that players can be eliminated is undesirable. The argument runs, when a player is eliminated, he’s no longer part of the fun. The counter-argument is, why stay in the game when you don’t have a chance to win? My response is that in family games the purpose is not to win but to enjoy socializing with your family, and there is more interaction if you’re still in the game even if there seems to be little chance that you can win. Some games, such as Careers (one of the best traditional games, but evidently out of print), do not include player elimination, but some do, including our first subject.

Monopoly

As this is the game people often think of first, I’ll discuss it first. Monopoly is a “family game” with a leaning toward adults. It is an average game at best, though quite despised by many boardgame experts. The “roll and move” mechanic is the first point of complaint, but there are others.

There is a dominant strategy--buy everything you land on, if you possibly can, early in the game. This leads to the strong possibility of stalemate, as players may choose not to trade properties to make the sets that allow house building. Consequently, there is a strong possibility that the game can go on for many hours with experienced cutthroat players. In any case, it is a long game–-my students often say they’ve never actually finished a game.

Further, the game works poorly with fewer than four players.

Let’s examine the questions:

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face? The player must get sets of properties, construct buildings to raise the rent, and avoid big payouts.
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges? Not much. Movement is random, and decisions are fairly simple. Trading is a major action, as is management of funds (how much to spend on buildings, how much to hold against the possibility of paying large rents).
3. What can players do to affect each other? Trade properties. Otherwise, next to nothing.
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over? Replayability is low, I think. The game quickly becomes repetitive. Few people actually play Monopoly a lot in a short stretch (say a year), but they may play a lot over a very long period, where they will forget how repetitive it actually is.
5. Is the game fair? It’s symmetric, and the advantage of moving first doesn’t seem to make much difference in the long run. There are no “take that” cards to drastically change the game, though a bad roll or two can be deadly.
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game? It’s a family game, and there can be big changes in fortune depending on the dice rolls, but it seems appropriate to a “game for all ages”.
7. What is the "essence" of the game? Theoretically it’s a real estate trading and development game, but the emphasis is on the chance of movement rather than on the trading, unfortunately.

There are many variations of Monopoly, in fact most people don’t play according to the rules. I’ve never thought about how to “fix” the game, but one notion that comes to mind is this: instead of playing through rolling around the board a few times, why not allow players to choose some properties to start with? This could be arranged to remove the advantage of playing first, as well. So players might write down a list of five properties (no two from a particular group such as the red properties or the railroads). All are revealed, everyone pays for their first choice (or next, if there’s a tie), etc. until all have three (not five). Then play proceeds.

An interesting variation from Boardgamegeek is, every unowned property landed on is auctioned! The “lander” does not get an opportunity to buy before the auction.

As with most traditional games, Monopoly has a very poor score on Boardgamegeek: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/1406.

Tic-Tac-Toe

Here is a traditional simple game popular with kids. It is so simple that it has been “solved” by many, and it’s easy to write a set of instructions to follow that will result in a draw every time, or a win when it’s available (I have done so). The problem is that there’s a dominant strategy, which amounts to “occupy the central square whenever you can”.

A major advantage of the game is that there is no chance, other than the big difference-maker of who plays first. The major value of the game is to teach kids that they can play a game and not understand its strategy, but as they get older they can learn to be a perfect player in its context.

A much more interesting variation on this game is a four by four grid. You win with four in a row or four in a square.

I am not going to ask the seven questions, which would be overkill here. BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/11901.

Pachisi/Parcheesi

I have not played this game in 40-50 years, but it is simple enough for limited comments. It is a race game dominated by chance (roll-and-move again). It does have the virtue that more than two can play. There is some strategy in the use of blockade, either to stop opponents or to clean up behind the blockade by “hitting” stopped opponent pieces. The frustration factor can be high when you’re the one who’s blockaded.

The seven questions would again be overkill. BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/2136

Chess

Next I’ll turn to the ultimate Western traditional strategy game, Chess. Chess rules are fairly complex for a traditional game, though it’s really quite simple to learn and play. The play is very complex and highly strategic, of course. Theoretically the game may represent Indian (subcontinent) warfare, but practically speaking it is abstract.

Also unlike most traditional commercial games, there is no chance element other than who moves first. As with Tic-Tac-Toe, a perfectly played game will always have the same result, but because no one has specifically “solved” Chess, we don’t know which result it would be, white win, draw, or black win. In practice, as played by experts white has a significant advantage, and draws are common (55% of top-class human games, 36% of top computer-program games (Wikipedia)).

One of the flaws of the game is that a big advantage accrues to those who know “the analysis” of certain situations, such as the openings. Chess has a vast literature, and the solution(s) to certain situations are known, but only to those who learn the literature. In effect, other people have done the thinking for you. Yes, this is a possibility in any game, but other games have not been intensely studied for centuries.

For most people, there are too many possibilities to calculate once the game gets going. This can lead to what is called “analysis paralysis”: people cannot decide what to do and take a long time. Even when played by experts, chess can be a very long game, hence the artificial limitation of two hours for 40 moves imposed via chess clocks.

Finally, many people would say there are too many draws. In a game designed today, the designer would try to find a way to avoid draws; though given the advantage of moving first, perhaps it’s best that draws are possible.

I’ve read that former champion and famous recluse Bobby Fischer advocates a variation of chess that would remove the “prior analysis” advantage, at least for a while (Fischer was one of the best at knowing prior analyses when playing). IIRC, he suggests scrambling the order of pieces in the back row, imposing that order on both players. So from one side of the board you might have bishop, queen, knight, rook, rook, etc.

Despite all of the above, chess is obviously an excellent game. But would it stand out among other games if published today? In an era that values short games, simplicity, and “that was easy”, perhaps not. Let’s consider the questions:

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face? Deploy pieces in a superior arrangement in order to take more of an opponent’s strength than one gives, and finally to capture the king.
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges? With perfect information, it’s all about looking ahead, anticipating your opponent, finding ways to make your opponent feel that he is defeated even if, in reality, he is not. Everything revolves around the moves of the pieces.
3. What can players do to affect each other? Player interaction is very high in a two-player, eliminate-enemy-pieces game.
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over? History shows that it is, despite its fundamental simplicity.
5. Is the game fair? Symmetric, but significant advantage to first mover in expert play.
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type? Yes.
7. What is the "essence" of the game? Movement and position.

BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/171

Battleship

This is a traditional game popularized by Milton Bradley’s boxed plastic version. It is largely a guessing game, though some would call it a “deduction” game. As with any game, you can “play the player”, predicting what your opponent will do. For example, a colleague of mine has noticed that his sons will not place their ships in the outer rim of squares. Consequently, instead of 100 squares to shoot at, he has 64. Chance should tend to award him the game most times.

Beyond simplicity, there isn’t much to recommend this game.

BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/2425

Scrabble

An excellent word game. I would eliminate two-letter words from the game, or at least many of the 101 “official” two-letter words.

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face? Make words from random letters, and find places on the board where those words can be placed and score well
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges? Very much a thinking game.
3. What can players do to affect each other? It may be possible to block occasionally, but in general, not much.
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over? Given the complexity of language, yes.
5. Is the game fair? There may be a very slight advantage to playing first.
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type? Evidently.
7. What is the "essence" of the game? Creation of words preferably using uncommon letters.

BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/320

Checkers (Draughts)

This is a simpler-than-chess strategy game. The game is sufficiently simple that it has been “solved” by computer using brute-force (trial and error) methods (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6907018.stm).

As with most of the public domain traditional games, this one is only for two players.

BGG: http://boardgamegeek.com/game/2083

Risk

Game design students who have played hardly any commercial games, have usually played Monopoly and have often played Risk. Risk is very simple to learn and to play, with so little real strategy that there is rarely “analysis paralysis”. Although the theme is world conquest, it has abstracted the world so heavily that few players will feel like there’s a real war going on.

However, Risk is a weak strategy game, and a “dicefest”. There’s a heavy dose of luck in combat and in the cards. It is a long game with player elimination, a poor combination in today’s terms.

The turn-in-cards-for-armies mechanic is necessary to end the game in a few hours, but fairly random.

The “Mission cards” victory condition introduced “recently” mitigates some problems, but unfortunately the missions aren’t tailored to the number of players in the game.

As with Monopoly, most experienced boardgamers dislike, if not despise, Risk.

1. What are the challenges the player(s) face? Management of resources to end up with more armies than the opposition; there’s a little strategy involved in acquiring armies; and choosing the right time to try to wipe out an opponent and obtain his territory cards.
2. What actions can they take to overcome those challenges? Choosing where to attack, with how many armies. Choosing where to defend with more than one army.
3. What can players do to affect each other? When it is not a player’s turn, he is usually inactive except when attacked. However, every move affects at least two players.
4. Is the game replayable many times without becoming "just the same" over and over? Strategies are limited, but there’s a fair bit of variety.
5. Is the game fair? Symmetric, but there may be a slight advantage to moving first.
6. Is there an appropriate mixture for the audience and game type? Well, lots of people fondly remember playing it as kids, so there must be something to it.
7. What is the "essence" of the game? Some would say “interminable dice rolling”. Choosing where to attack is probably the essence.

http://boardgamegeek.com/game/181.

Game of Life

This game appeals to younger people, and actually has more choices than Monopoly. However, it is strictly a family game, and players have little control over what happens. It does have the appeal of a partly three dimensional board, and a spinner instead of dice. There’s a story involved (the story of life), and that is nearly unique to traditional games.
I remember it as one of the worst games ever, but this may be too harsh. It is very positive–nothing really bad happens, everyone succeeds in life–but it may teach the wrong habits for the 21st century.

http://boardgamegeek.com/game/2921

Go
The Chinese/Japanese game of Go, the analog of chess in East Asia, is an outstanding abstract strategy game. It is played on a 19 by 19 line grid, with black and white stones places on the intersections of the lines rather than in the squares. The rules are very simple, though I find them slightly difficult to grasp. The strategy of controlling areas is very deep, even compared with a game like chess. From a game design perspective, the game is so unusual that there may not be many lessons to learn.

http://boardgamegeek.com/game/188

An "unbalanced" symmetric game

I've observed in various forums that symmetric games are usually perfectly balanced, except that there may be an advantage in order of movement. This is why, in many of my symmetric boardgames and card games, I've tried to eliminate order of movement or at least associate it with some factor that players have a chance to control.

Chess, for example, is a symmetric game with a big advantage to first-mover (white). Other games may have an advantage for last-mover. When I playtest a symmetric game with a set turn order, I try to record the score by move order so that I can look for patterns of advantage.

Recently playing a four player Wii game involving Olympic events (I don't recall the name of the game), I saw a symmetric game that gave a big advantage to later movers. This is not so much inherent in the game as inherent in the situation, where none of the players had played before, and some had not played the Wii before. So as we played we had to figure out the different controls for each event, and how we could succeed. Those who played early in turn order were disadvantaged because they had not seen as many attempts by all the players as those who played later.

The solution would be to randomize turn order. So the player who goes first in the first round of an event, might go third in the next round, then second, and so forth. I'd suspect, though, that Nintendo would respond that this would confuse the players, so just go with the disadvantage.

Once the players are familiar with the event's controls, the advantage is still with those who go later, as they have some idea of how much they have to do to win the event, which tells them how much risk to take. Here I might decide that in each round after the first, the players play in order of the standings, so at least the last-mover would be the player in last place.

Victory conditions summary for boardgames/cardgames

For the benefit of my digital game students, I'm trying to summarize/categorize the many victory conditions available in games (especially board and card games).

Achieve a Position
Occupy a location--e.g. Stalingrad, Axis & Allies require occupation of certain cities
Occupy a lot of territory--go, Carcassone, Blokus, many others
Make a pattern of pieces--Tic-Tac-Toe, my Law & Chaos
Move off the other side of board (or the end of the track, as in race games)
There are many other variations...

Wipe out/destroy something
Wipe out everyone--checkers/draughts, Risk [this could be called "last survivor", too]
Take a piece (chess, the King)

Accumulate something or get rid of something (possibly all your assets)
$$$$ (Monopoly)
sets of cards (many card games)
use up all your cards (many card games)

Deduce/find answer
Clue/cluedo
if no deduction is required, this is a form of accumulate (as, sets)

Use up all your assets (be eliminated) either last, or first--can be seen as a form of accumulate something or get rid of something.

Scoring the most points at the end of a set time, or a set number of points, is very common (Settlers of Catan, Brittania), but this is an intermediate step to the achievement of some other goals--money, territory, whatever. Points are used when multiple victory conditions are wanted. For example, Britannia points include holding territory, temporarily occupying territory, killing enemy units, capturing certain locations, and more.

I am going to include "choose own objectives" separately. In the classic game Careers, players secretly allocate 60 points amongst Fame, Happiness, and Money. The first to achieve his objectives wins the game. While it is an "accumulate something" condition, the strategic variability provided by choice is exceptional and notable.

Finally, some games have "Missions" (newer editions of Risk). This is another form of points, that is, each mission is one of the other kinds of victory condition.

I don't consider sports to be a form of boardgame/cardgame, but even sports can be considered in these terms. For example, in baseball, you get points by achieving a position (getting around the diamond to home plate).

Lew Pulsipher

Some additional notes about multiplayer games

In a multiplayer boardgame or card game, the focus is on who (which player) you're going against, not on how you're getting there (maneuver). In a two player game, the focus is on how you're getting there, not on who you're going against, because there is no choice of the latter (you have only one).

In general, in non-electronic games, in multiplayer games you're playing the player much more than the "system". In electronic games, even multiplayer, you're playing the system first, then the other players. You can't "look them in the eye", you can't see body language. Yes, you can use Skype or some built-in system to talk to your opponents, but you may not KNOW them, and you won't see them. It makes a difference.

Do people who play as opponents in online multiplayer electronic games become friends? I'm not talking about co-operative games like Everquest, where they're in the same party/guild. I think the answer is no. Do players of multiplayer non-digital games face to face become friends? Often, if they aren't friends already.