November 2011 Miscellany

Miscellaneous thoughts:

There is a longer version of my blog post "Too Many Choices?", called "How Many Choices are Too Many" on Gamasutra.com.  http://gamasutra.com/blogs/LewisPulsipher/20111025/8731/How_Many_Choices_is_Too_Many.php

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Dragon Rage was recently near the top of "The Hoteness" on Boardgamegeek (#3 that I saw), MUCH to my surprise given the niche nature of the game.  I was even more surprised, when I switched to the "Thematic" sub-section, that it wasn't in The Hotness at all.  If Dragon Rage isn't a thematic game, what is?

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A lot of game design amounts to project management.  Here are a couple of Lew's Laws of management:

The level of chaos is proportional to the square of the number of people involved.
The level of chaos is proportional to the cube on the number of people in charge.

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Can we please stop calling games played over social networks such as Facebook "social games"?  They are solitary rather than social, and you don't play with friends, you use them distantly to get ahead.  (You "use" them, you don't play with or against them.)  These games are the opposite of "social".  They should be called "social network games".

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I reported (http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2011/07/origins-2011.html ) how Origins drastically changed my schedule of talks this year.  I found the missing correspondence I mentioned (it was in an email address I don't use much), and by that time I'd learned from John Ward, Executive Director of GAMA, that the person who was the likely culprit no longer works for GAMA (though I don't know why).

I've also learned in the interim that Origins attendance was 6,545 full passes and 4957 day passes, for a total of 11,502 people, a 7.8% increase over 2010.

In case you missed it, Origins has moved to the end of May, from the end of June.
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Video games for some people are "graphics bathing" or "twitch bathing" in the same way that some people (especially those with iPods full of 10,000 songs) are "sound bathing".

Some video gamers like "the new" (the cult of the new) because they like the interactive story, and once they know the story, it's on to the next game.

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 I don't at all appreciate the "gamer lifestyle", which so often amounts to "let's fritter our life away trying to be a bad-ass gamer even though that means nothing in the real world".  OK for kids, not for responsible (we hope) adults.

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Euro gamer types say they want new mechanisms, then buy rethemed games that are hardly changed at all.

I think they want different puzzles (combinations of mechanisms), not different stories.

Wargamers don't mind similar mechanisms as long as the game is a sufficient model of reality.  It's a different mindset.  Most wargames are models of some part of warfare.  Most Euro games are abstract, not models of anything despite the atmosphere that has been tacked on to help sell the game.

Of an interesting Euro game we might say "clever".  Of an interesting wargame we might say "good model".

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In the end Britannia is a strategic game, and if you can come up a simpler standalone strategic game of that era, why not?

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Anyone know of studies identifying the "profile" of people who spend $$$$ playing free-to-play games?  Why do they do it?

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If you ask people why they like to play a particular game, they often respond "because it's fun".  But that doesn't tell me anything, so the real question is, what makes it fun or why is it fun.  And then they struggle, because they haven't tried to analyze it or even think about it.  As a game designer I'm cursed: I can't play or watch a game without thinking about how it does what it does.  (I understand novelists have the same curse, they can't read a novel without thinking about how the author succeeds (or fails) at what he's trying to do.)

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Are game designers (or publishers?) following the general trend that it's better to not do anything wrong, than to do a lot of things right and one wrong?  The result tends to be bland games, "pablum".

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The story may be a reason or even *the* reason why people start to play a game, but it's gameplay that keeps them playing a game to the end.  For tabletop games, it's the gameplay that keeps people playing again and again.  For video games, the story comes to the fore again as a reason to keep playing after the game is "completed".

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 Like most other people, programmers (even programmers who work on games) think that designing games is just a matter of getting a few neat ideas.