May Miscellany

Sometimes I have observations that don't require a separate post. As below...

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I have been reading about the "Lone Wolf" series of books, which I had not heard of, which were the same kind of thing as "Fighting Fantasy" and "Choose Your Own Adventure".

These books were interactive puzzles, not games. There was no semblance of intelligent opposition. And it's not surprising that the authors of Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy have gone on to be prominent in video games: Joe Devers designing them, Steve Jackson co-founder (with Peter Molyneux) of Lionhead Studios, Ian Livingstone Life President of Eidos. The puzzle-books led naturally to video gaming.

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I am working on a couple "block games" at the moment, and am... well, *astonished*, that in none of the existing games I've seen have I found decoy blocks, that is, blocks that don't represent anything at all and are there to confuse the enemy. The more blocks a game uses, the more you'd expect this. I allow decoys in my space wargame that uses face-down pieces (more awkward than, but much cheaper than, blocks). I have to limit the number of decoy pieces or they would be all over the place.

I suppose one or more of these games must use decoys, but I haven't found one yet.

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"Skills" in video games are often nearly unique to video games. They are improvements in small-movement coordination, sight, quick reactions, perception of things on a screen. Sometimes this translates to real-world applications, usually it doesn't.

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Tabletop gamers pass the time with friends (acquaintances, family). Traditional video gamers pass the time with a computing device. Jakob Nielsen (guru of Web usability) notes that killing time is a "killer app" in the "mobile space". When I play a game, I ask myself "is this worth my time?", not "is this a good way to kill time?". Many video gamers apparently ask the second question, though often not consciously.

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To me, social network games are a reversion to early days of video game development, when the typical single player video game was an interactive puzzle, not a game. *Intelligent* opposition has been a hallmark of games for centuries, but in those early video games there was no semblance of intelligent opposition.

Social network games are usually very simple puzzles where the solution is obvious, but where (in many genres) you need to do it just about every day with considerable repetition in order to succeed long-term.

Furthermore, a significant part of video (and to a lesser extent tabletop) game playing is "killing time". It's really EASY to kill time with simple puzzles like Farmville, and you can do it in little bits of time at a sitting.

Many social network games are the new form of solitaire. ("Hold 'em" is an obvious exception.) The "game" solitaire (cards or video) has very little to recommend it, a very simple, mindless puzzle, yet some people play incessantly. A lot of game playing is habit, which sometimes includes playing what your friends are playing.

I hope that over time we'll see "social" video games mean the same thing that is meant by the phrase in tabletop gaming, that is, friends (or people who may become friends) playing a game together at the same time in the same "place", perhaps as much or more for their friends' company as for the game.

(By the way, I try not to call them "social games", because they are usually solitary, and are rarely social.

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Social network games also appeal to programmers, because they are simple enough that "designers" may not be needed. Just like the old Atari/arcade days when the programmer was also designer and (sometimes) artist and sound person.

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It would be interesting to know what proportion of new tabletop games do NOT have cards, and what proportion have out-and-out Event Cards.

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As a game designer you want to make sure (as much as you can) that your game design works when the players are not really paying attention. Because "not really paying attention" is quite common in the days of MP3 players, smart phones, iPads, and so forth. Playtesting with ordinary players should help you test that.

At the extreme, I recall reading one player's comment that he wanted to be able to not really pay attention for half or even two thirds of a game, and still have a chance of winning. That's a characteristic of many family games, and of some Euro games (insofar as many Euros are "family games on steroids").

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The whole idea of "play a game to completion" and "beating the game" (in video gaming) is foreign to what games have been for thousands of years: something you play again and again and again, not "beat", something that "of course" you play to completion, how else would you do it?

You can beat a puzzle, and then there's no reason to keep doing it. You can also quit a puzzle before completing it.

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Why do Wii owners buy fewer games than 360 and PS3 owners? Perhaps it's because Wii games, at least the ones that are designed to be played by several people in the same room, do not "wear out", they continue to please, so the Wii owners don't need to buy more games. Whereas the hard core games, which are more like interactive puzzles than like multi-sided games, tend to "wear out" because the puzzles have been solved, so the players must buy more games in order to renew their enjoyment.

Or to put it another way, Wii games, insofar as they are multi-sided games, have much higher replay value than solitaire interactive puzzles.

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A comment to the beginning designer: "Patience Grasshopper". Most of the time, it takes years to get a tabletop game published. I tested a huge "Barbaria" (all of Europe) game in 1980, when Britannia (then called Invasions) was far along. So I started Britannia around 1979. It was first published, in Britain, in 1986. And while that original Barbaria was much too large (90-some spaces, took 12 hours when we first played it), I have two made-from-scratch games on the same subject that might someday be published.