My Responses to questions related to a book about the game Risk

 In December 2012, Dave Shapiro contacted me to contribute to a book about Risk he was co-authoring.This took the form of answers to a series of questions. The book appeared recently, sans this material. This is part 5 of 5.

You hold a Doctorate in Military History and have taught a course in game design for several years. The following questions are design related in general (not specifically Risk related). The questions are intended to encompass board, card and video games.

There have been thousands of games released over the years. Today, more games are released in a single year than ever before. What percentage of these would you consider to have some core design flaws?

Design flaws, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.  For example I think the leader-bashing in Vinci (and Smallworld) is a huge flaw but a lot of people evidently don’t think so.  

I will say that I think people are much less critical of game designs and much more critical of the physical aspects of a tabletop game or of the graphics and sound of a video game than in the past.  Often they don’t play the game enough times to reveal the design flaws.  The original Ticket to Ride had a distinct design flaw from a competitive point of view but most people never figured that out.  Or didn’t really care.

And the expectations have changed.  People play a video game once or a few times and they’re done.  That’s leaked over into tabletop games.  Like many video games, many tabletop games now have a solution, and once you have that solution you can implement it each time and so you tend to stop playing that game and move on to something else.  Also we’re in an age of the “cult of the new”, so people tend to play game a few times and then move on to the next new game - there are so many distractions including more games.  It’s now much easier for people to self published games and so we have vastly more games published in a year than was true in the 60s or 70s.

There’s more a “consumption” point of view about games.  So many people are interested much more in the destination, not the journey, in “beating the (video) game”, in bragging about how quickly they beat the game.  People are more interested in saying how many different games they played, than in how much they did (or didn’t) enjoy while playing.  This is an incentive to play lots of games shallowly than to play fewer games deeply.

Because of this perhaps, gamers are generally less skilled at playing games than they used to be.  They rely on intuition more than logic, they don’t study the game, they just “don’t bother”.  “On to the next game!”

Back in the day people would get a new game, read the rules, study the rules, study the game, and then play with someone else.  Now people try to learn the game while reading the rules for the first time, which gives me the heebie-jeebies.  They play once or twice or three times and then they’re on to the next game.  Back in the day the emphasis was on depth in games and now it’s on variety.

As I say, games are often consumed rather than enjoyed.  

So I’d say most published games have serious design flaws.  But it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

I’d also say that as time passes, more and more poor games are published, especially with the common notion that games are made to be played just one to three times. I try to design games that can be enjoyably played 25 or even a 100 times, and I know people who have played Britannia (a 4-5 hour game) more than 500 times. (I haven’t!)

What is the most common mistake novice designers make?

I’ve written about this at length in my first book and on my blogs.  There are a whole lot of big mistakes.  Perhaps the most common one is that novices think that all they need is a good (great) idea and they can get rich.  Ideas are worthless, they’re “a dime a dozen,” and it’s extremely likely that any idea you get is an idea at least 100 other people have got.  “There is nothing new under the sun.”  The idea is only the beginning.  

One of the common complaints about video games is that they lack 'meat'; that the games are graphically superior but significantly lacking in 'game play'. In the past decade, similar complaints have risen concerning board games; that in an attempt to shorten playing time, the game play has been reduced. As an experienced observer, instructor and designer, would you agree with the criticism?

See answer to above question about design flaws.  It’s really worse than that, as I’ll be discussing in a book I’m writing.  Games have changed fundamentally, especially video games, from consequence-based to reward-based.  You can’t lose a video game.  You can’t fail in a video game, unless you are just insufficiently persistent or insufficiently dexterous in those “games” that are really sports rather than games.  Games used to be about earning something, now they’re about being given something.  Free to play video games continue to push us in this direction, where “engagement”, which used to mean “intellectual interest,” has been replaced in meaning with “activity and reward” that does not need to be earned.

Another topic that regularly surfaces in game groups is a discussion on randomness. Some consider a game without any random factors to be a puzzle, not a game. The other extreme is that any randomness eliminates the ability to plan properly. How much randomness is acceptable in a game?

Whatever’s acceptable to the target audience.  I’m not a typical game player so I’m not generally a member of a target audience, I’m not the person to ask.  But the question of “acceptable” is meaningless because it depends entirely on the preferences of the target audience of the game.  An entirely random game like Candyland or Chutes and Ladders is acceptable to a four year old.  But not to the same person when he or she grows older.  (On the other hand, “Left Right Center” is entirely random, yet I see adults from my own extended family play it.)

Insofar as playing games now relies much more on intuition than on logic, randomness is more acceptable.  On the other hand, games tend not to have solutions when a lot of randomness is involved, and more people like puzzles than games.  A great many Eurostyle “games” are much more puzzle than game, where several people compete to solve the puzzle before anyone else does, or to have the most efficient solution when the game is arbitrarily ended, but they rarely affect one another during the game.  

Randomness is a big topic.  The draft section of my Nature of Game Design book about randomness, chaos, and uncertainty is 8,000 words.  The section comparing and defining games and puzzles is almost as large.  Greg Costikyan has written an entire book about it.

The game industry is now larger than the film industry. What do you see as the future of gaming? [Remember, ths is 2012]

Contemporary video games are more like cinema than like traditional games.  In fact I advocate the inclusion of an autopilot mode in video games - it’s something that’s occasionally been done in the past decade but is quite rare - so that a player can let the video game play through the difficult parts while the player watches, and a player can play whatever parts he or she likes.  Yet those players who still like challenges can be challenged by the game.  As it stands now video games continue to become less and less challenging in order to attract a larger market.  Autopilot would let us get around that although we partly do so with different difficulty levels.

Even though video games involve a lot of activity, in a sense they are becoming more passive because you’re always going to succeed, so in a way your activity is meaningless.

Brands are becoming increasingly important, which is why almost all the expensive video games are sequels rather than “new IP”.  I mentioned what Hasbro is doing with brands in a previous part.  Settlers of Catan, now just Catan, is a brand.  D&D is a brand.  Angry Birds is a huge brand, when you see Angry Birds stuffed toys in Walmart, Angry Birds movies, and “Angry Birds Star Wars”.

Tabletop games face a new challenge in free-to-play video games.  When video games were $50-$60 a pop for a game that quickly wore out its welcome, tabletop games were a much, much better entertainment value.  Now tabletop games can be compared to playing free-to-play video games, and tabletop games do not appear to be as good a value.  Tabletop games have core aspects, such as the social aspect, that video games generally don’t have. On the other hand video game players are becoming much more group oriented than they used to be, but the tradition and stereotype is still the solitary video game player.

Moreover, we’ve taken competition out of the schools in the USA, and rampant egalitarianism is blanketing the country.  And that means we want everyone to be the same and not let anyone stand out.  So competition has been taken out of many tabletop games and this will continue to be a trend.  Single player video games were never competitions, really, because you didn’t have an opponent and couldn’t lose.

The future of games may be less and less competition and more and more simple participation.  Moreover, cooperative games are “trending upward”, more than competitive games.  I’m happy with the trend to cooperative games personally, as I more or less quit playing games competitively when I was 25.  But a game, for me, requires intelligent opposition, which a cooperative card or board game like Pandemic cannot provide. Though I have recently figured out ways to achieve this in a co-op board game. The ideal game for this future is a role-playing game because the players can cooperate with one another and win or lose collectively yet they have intelligent opposition from the referee/GM that doesn’t exist in puzzles and doesn’t exist in video games because the computer is not nearly as smart as a human.  As time passes, computers will provide an opponent that is more and more like a human.  We’re not near there yet.

That is the end of the entire set.

Recent videos on my free "Game Design" channel on YouTube:

Confusions: "Old School" and "New School", not just RPGs  https://youtu.be/-kmczk4mjBs

How often is there a three-way battle? https://youtu.be/cynF8VWAXQE 

"Monster" Tabletop Games https://youtu.be/4Eqsa2nXVYw

Musical analogy for understanding fundamental game types https://youtu.be/uaVgQOgLgw4