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.)