Zynga and Fundamental Problems with their Social Network Games

As you probably know, Zynga's stock is priced far below its IPO cost, and many executives are leaving the company.  It's not like they're losing money, but they're losing mind-share rapidly.  Will Zynga be able to turn around this trend?

Zynga's fundamental problem may be the fundamental characteristic of the video game industry as a whole: video games are designed to be played for a while and then discarded.  You "beat the game" or you learn the story, or you get tired of "the grind", because there's an emphasis on the destination, not on the journey.

Good board and card games are played over and over again, over the course of many years.  I know people who have played my five hour board game Britannia five hundred times, and undoubtedly there are other board and card games of similar longevity.  I may have played the tabletop RPG D&D that many hours.  Video games do not match that, though MMOs can approach it.  But social network games are nothing like MMOs.

Inevitably, in a video game that more or less constantly asks you for money, that builds in frustration so that you'll spend money to stop being frustrated, the player will get tired of the game and quit playing.  And when the next game is practically just like the last (as is typical of Zynga Facebook games), the player is going to get tired of the next one that much sooner.

Yet Zynga is so big, every incentive is to avoid risk, hence the games are the same over and over again.  Because they still draw millions of players, it's just the same group over and over again.  But that group may be getting smaller.

Traditional arcade games were so hard you couldn't beat them, so many players kept going until they could no longer improve.  But this is a new century, people don't want hard games, they want entertainment and time-killing and playgrounds, so social network games are stupendously easy to play.  They are mass-market games, a completely different "kettle of fish". 

Contrast Zynga's big-company low-risk mentality with King.Com's small teams churning out games every 3 months for online trials.  Then they turn the most successful into social networking games.

The following explains the key to making really good games:
    . . . Just Cause 2 developer explains that while most developers produce downloadable content to prolong user engagement, the real trick to long-term success is to make a game that players don't want to put down in the first place.
   
    'We create a game allowing players to properly explore and have fun and not focusing so much on the actual end goal of the game,' he says. "

In other words, make a game where people enjoy the journey, not just the destination.

Comparing this year’s game conventions

This is not a “convention report,” because I don’t care about many of the events at conventions such as the Origins Awards, and I didn’t bother to attend the really big D&D Next event at GenCon, and I don’t much care about the latest new games.  I’m interested in certain aspects of things and that’s what I’m going to talk about.

Generalization about four conventions: GenCon is a story convention - not just story in games.  WBC and PrezCon are wargame cons.  Origins is a non-story, mostly non-wargame, game con.

GenCon is a convention where stories are king.  Aside from games you have many fiction writers, and costuming/anime/film, mostly in those five ancillary hotels that I never visit (I stick to the convention center).  Nichelle Nicols (Uhuru from original Star Trek) was the major (“media”) guest of honor.  Brandon Sanderson, author of the Mistborne books and also the writer who completed the Wheel of Time series, was also a guest of honor.  But even in the convention center the stories have a strong presence.  RPGs are the dominant story-in-game genre, but even in boardgames there’s an emphasis on story, *personal* story, that I don’t see at other conventions I attend.

I say *personal* story (including RPGs, boardgames, fiction, costumes, anime . . .) as opposed to national/collective story.  At GenCon panel sessions and seminars, people tend to talk and think in terms of role-playing game books rather than board or card games. The traditional boardgamers are not prominent and the companies known for wargames, such as GMT, Worthington, Compass, Avalanche, and so on, were not there.  (Some of them also weren't at Origins, but that's a cost-benefit matter given how Origins has diminished; they used to be at Origins.)  GenCon is very much a convention for Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) and Wizards of the Coast (WotC).  Those companies don't even attend the other conventions. 

In contrast Origins is about games that don’t have personal stories built in.  (Every game has a personal narrative in the sense of "what I did as I played this game".  But a personal narrative of this kind is of much more limited interest than a built-in story, which (if good) appeals to a large number of people.)  Mayfair and Rio Grande (publishers of many dusty abstract Euros) dominate Origins, especially the former.  Some of the wargame companies attend Origins.  Origins does include collectible card games and miniatures but not so much in the way of role-playing games.

WBC is about board and card games, wargames traditionally though nowadays there are many non-wargames as well.  FFG can’t even be persuaded to contribute, last I knew, let alone come as an exhibitor.  GMT is definitely there.  Not even Mayfair or Rio Grande attend, let alone FFG and WotC.  (Mayfair is at PrezCon because part of the company is located in the same city.) Then again, it’s a small convention (1500+), so it’s a small market for the bigger companies.   Same for even-smaller PrezCon.

And (personal) story makes for bigger companies in the 21st century.

When is a theme not a story?  For purposes here I'm suggesting that the theme is a setting that may have a somewhat likely direction, for example what actually happened in history.  A story in this context is an actual plot imposed upon the game by the designers, though in some games players may not be forced to follow it.

Attendance
WBC (Lancaster Pennsylvania) again posted a 2% increase in attendance. In all, nearly every state plus 17 nations sent participants in 2012.   This is roughly 1,500 unique visiors.  PrezCon (Charlottesville Virginia) is about one third the size.  Origins (Columbus Ohio) is somewhere more than 10,000 unique visitors, but not much more, and many only by the inexpensive path that lets you go through the exhibit hall and a few other places for a day.  At GenCon (Indianapolis Indiana) 300+ exhibitors displayed in the Exhibit Hall, showing more than 45 debuting games.  41,000+ unique and 134,000+ turnstile attendees took part in the Best Four Days in Gaming™.  WBC and PrezCon are much longer conventions.

Compare this with Essen Spiel in Germany where attendance is said to be near 150,000, but I have never ascertain whether that's unique visitors or turnstile, but I think it's the former.  I've never been to Essen Spiel. 

For another comparison we have the UK Game Expo which is larger than WBC but not nearly as large as Origins.  (The population of the UK is between a fourth and a fifth of the US population.)  I'd compare the Game Expo most closely to Origins, except that where Origins seemed to be diminishing, the Expo I attended in 2011 seem to be "going great guns."

I'm from southeastern North Carolina, and encountered two people from North Carolina that I know.  Yet another from my university game club, a fellow who's easy to spot because he is tall and has a deep singer's voice, was at GenCon and neither of us saw the other (and I'm even easier to spot because I'm 6'6").  In my two times at GenCon I've never gone to the subsidiary hotels where many of the more story-based activities occur.  The Indiana Convention Center is huge, and with more than 40,000+ unique attendees this year the convention is much larger than it was three years ago at 27,000+.

Miscellaneous comments
I attended lots of seminars that GenCon, and they were always interesting and useful.  They make their guests of honor work, by having them sit in on many of the seminars that are panel discussions.  In fact the one-man seminar is the exception.  In contrast there are many fewer seminars at Origins and the quality is less consistent.  The WBC and PrezCon have few seminars.  Also many of the Origins seminars are the "National war College", which are not free.  In all the other conventions they are usually free.

If you’re interested in how the game industry works, then anytime you get a chance to listen to Matt Forbeck, James Ernest, or Ken Hite, do it.

I saw Risk Legacy on the Diana Jones award nominee list.  Readers of this blog know that I really despise the disposable nature of this game, something that was not necessary to the concept of the game.  Evidently people LIKE to be abused by commercialism/planned obsolescence.

I stopped at a GenCon booth for "Gaming Paper".  These are big rolls of paper with printed squares intended to be used with role-playing games.  I asked what made this better than the fabric battle mats that you can write on with a water-soluble pen and reuse indefinitely.  I was told what makes it better is, it's disposable!  Once you've used it you're done with it.  Consequently it is much cheaper per square inch than battle mats.  At that point I said I don't hold with disposability (which is ultimately a waste of scarce resources) and walked away.  I'm old enough to remember my mother's stories from the Great Depression about taking leftover bits of soap bars and melting them together to make new soap bars – in fact we did this when I was a kid – and I despise the wastefulness of the modern world.

Thegamecrafter.com had a booth and is evidently going strong, with 400 games available and more and more options in pieces and boards (including mounted boards). 


Good story.  One person's Kickstarter project offered the opportunity (for $1,000, I think) for someone to have the author of the RPG book come to his house anywhere in the country and run a game.  Surprisingly, someone contributed the $1000.  At some point the contributor met with the author to talk about the upcoming trip, and afterward the author's daughter was excited.  Why?  She recognized that the contributor is a rock star, the drummer for "Fall Out Boy".   (If that doesn't mean anything to you, Fall Out Boy was ranked the 93rd Best Artist of the 2000–10 decade by Billboard.) They'll be playing on one of those fancy (and expensive) gaming tables that you see at Origins and GenCon, as well.


GenCon is largely a "non-electronic" convention.  I say that partly because there was no usable Wi-Fi available in the convention center as far as I could make out (though I only asked one of the volunteers about it), but mainly because it's not about video games.  Nonetheless there was a large ballroom where people could play video games for a per hour fee.  There were tournaments organized on the hour and I sat for a while watching the end of a Gears of War tournament (I don't know which version).  There were two players on a side with the sides video projected on the wall more than 10 feet wide so that people could look at one team or the other as they played.  I watched another four player team tournament where the objective in each heat was to win two out of three matches in which, when you died, you were out of the game.  I also heard a call for a Dance Dance Revolution tournament so it wasn't all shoot'em ups.  At Origins we only have the 'mech free-for-all where players actually walk into large pods and sit to play; it looked like the same gang was at GenCon.

While I'm at it I might compare hobby tabletop game conventions with videogame conferences.  The major differences are that there is little game playing at videogame conference, less than video games ard played at GenCon.  And that's because the conferences are for game creation professionals and students, not for consumers.  The tabletop game conventions include tabletop game creation professionals but most of the people are consumers, ordinary game players, and the conventions are primarily about playing games.  So at the East Coast Game Conference in Raleigh, NC, the primary activity is attending seminars or occasionally panel discussions where people talk about making video games.



Typically when I get to the door of a convention, having driven a long way (as much as 680 miles), I find myself asking "why the hell am I here, why have I bothered to spend so much time and money?"  That's easily answered at PrezCon and WBC because I know fairly well the folks who play Britannia in the tournaments, and I enjoy talking with them and watching the games.  Occasionally I persuade them to playtest a game.  But there's nothing like that at Origins or GenCon.  Fortunately I usually encounter folks who I can have long and interesting talks with, at Origins Steve Rawlings and Paul Rohrbach of Against the Odds Magazine, at GenCon Lisa Camp who is the managing editor for my publisher McFarland.  And of course it's possible to have interesting conversations with lots of people on the floor as they man their booths.  GenCon also has lots of interesting seminars and panel discussions, though there was not much for me at Origins this year.

Must-have item?  I succumbed and bought 100 plastic inch-tall skeletons in three colors.  I don't know why, other than the possibility that they might be used as pieces in a game.  I suppose it's more practical than the wooden cutlass I bought at Origins last year.  Thank heaven I don't buy games these days so at least I avoid that expense.

I have to admit, if I didn't have some design/publishing business to conduct I'd not attend as many conventions, because of the long trips and expense.  But the cons are rarely dull or tedious!

**

My book “Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" is now available from mcfarlandpub.com or Amazon.   I am @lewpuls on Twitter.  (I average much less than one post a day, almost always about games, not about other things.)  Web: http://pulsiphergames.com/

Interface (and other) game design lessons from a rental car

Recent experiences with a rental car brought home to me the importance of familiarity in the game interface.

The word “intuitive” is often used in connection with interfaces.  As far as I can make out, intuitive in this context just means “familiar”.  There are certainly some things that are more natural to people than others, or at least that can take advantage of how people behave.  For example, if you put a button at the very edge of a video game screen it’s a lot easier to point at with a mouse or similar pointing device than if the button is not at the edge. [You really should read http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html ]  But familiarity is what matters most.

I’m accustomed to driving Fords and Plymouths, but my rental was a Nissan Altima.  Moreover, it had a high-tech starting system.  Instead of a key it had a small American-football-shaped key fob that I first found inserted into a suitable port; and it had a start button.  And here is where lack of familiarity set in.  Neither the port for the fob nor the start button were in either of the two places I’ve seen ignition keyholes (either on the steering column or in the area between the two front seats).  The fob port is placed to the left of the driver and near the bottom of the dashboard, lower than the steering column.  The start button is on the dashboard to the right of and a little above the level of the steering column.

When I first tried to start the vehicle I pressed the start button after inserting the fob and nothing happened.  It turned out that I needed to have my foot on the brake to start the car.  I was accustomed to vehicles where you could not shift out of park without a foot on the brake, but not vehicles that required the brake to start.  There was an electronic note on the dashboard display that said something like press brake down, but by the time I noticed that I had already checked the quick start manual and discovered the right way to do it.  (Why the brake?  The start button also controlled auxiliary power, so something needed to differentiate Auxiliary Power from Start.)

Another interface problem was the wipers interval control.  In my vehicles there is a turnable control to set the length of the interval, with a series of lines from short to long.  But where the long line meant more wipes per minute, in the Nissan it was exactly reversed, with a long line meaning a longer interval between wipes which results in fewer wipes per minute.  This may make more sense, but was unfamiliar.

How does this relate to games, especially video games?  When the method of manipulating a game is unusual, it will get in the way, at least initially, compared with tried-and-true methods.  Interface is one of the few areas of games where innovation may be a bad idea, because the user will struggle with the unfamiliar.

Still, I’d only scratched the surface of the new car interface.  It wasn’t until I read the entire Quick Reference Manual - which I did after most of the above - that I found out the interface is “a lot more different” than I thought.  The key fob provides a radio signal.  You don’t have to insert it anywhere, you just need to have it close to the car.  While the key fob is in your pocket, you can lock or unlock all the doors from the outside by pressing a button on the door handle.  You can open the trunk by pressing a concealed button under the edge of the lid, which won’t do a thing if the key fob is not nearby.  You can start the car with the key fob in your pocket.  (Which also means, you can’t lock your “keys” in the car, because you can unlock using the handle button as long as the fob is within the car.) 

The drawback of all this is that without reading the brief manual it would have taken me some time, if ever, to learn how it all worked.  And when we translate this back to game terms, how many video gamers read even a 10 page manual for a game?  How many don’t even read the text within the game?  Even if your new video game interface is as slick as the Altima’s radio key fob, if people don’t know how it works, it won’t help them.

So what do you do?  For a video game, you make the first “level” (if it’s a game with that kind of structure) the tutorial that makes people notice the new interface methods.  For a tabletop game, someone has to read the rules, and you try to make sure that person reads about the new interface.  But we have to say, unusual and unfamiliar interface capabilities are much less likely to be in a tabletop game than in a video game.

I do wonder what happens when the batteries in the key fob run out of power . . .  There is a conventional keyhole in the door, but not an ignition keyhole.  Nor do I know whether owners, as opposed to renters, get a key.

And another thing I had to be careful of, in my motel room, was to put the key fob as far from the car as possible, out of range.  It was parked just outside the room door.  Unlikely as it may be, I didn’t want someone to walk up in the middle of the night and press the door handle button to unlock the car, as I’d left things in the trunk . . .



Another lesson.  The Nissan has a CVT (Continuously Variable Transmission) that I really liked.  It had no problem in cruise control going up or down mountains on my way to GenCon, even with a mere 4 cylinder engine.  All of my vehicles are old (1995-98), so not surprisingly I looked up the Altima online to see what people thought of it, in case I decided I might buy one.  The owner comments revealed how different opinions and likes can be about exactly the same thing, another reminder of how there is no "ideal" in games (as well as in cars), and of how much depends on what you're used to.  For example, some people felt the transmission (and the car in general) was much too loud.  To me, used to my old trucks and van, it wasn't loud at all.  But compared with an expensive luxury car, it probably was quite loud.

"Seven years and a million dollars"

Here's the kind of really sad story you can hear sometimes from novice designers.  At one of the game design/game publishing seminars at GenCon, right at the end, someone raised his hand and said he and a group of friends had been working on a game for seven years, and it was a great game, and they had spent over seven years and a million dollars developing it including paying Marvel comic artists to do the art; and how could he get to talk to Fantasy Flight Games about it?  The three panelists were taken aback – if I wrote in contemporary style I would say they were "stunned" – and said nothing for a moment.  Because there's really nothing to say.  These “designers” were in cloud-cuckoo land to spend so much time and money, and their game very likely wasn't particularly good, either.

Finally James Ernest said "when you talk to Fantasy Flight I wouldn't mention the million dollars".  (Because it would mark them as clueless noobs.)  And it turned out that much of the million dollars was a calculation of how much the developers would have paid themselves if they had paid themselves anything.  But those Marvel artists must've cost a lot of money.  Yet anyone who knows anything about the tabletop publishing business knows that the manufacturer provides the art and the designer should use clipart for the prototypes, even if it's copyrighted (fair use), rather than spend money on art.  And that virtually no game is so good as to earn a million dollars for the developers, so you shouldn't be spending a million dollars.  Yet they had done so little research that they had no idea how to approach Fantasy Flight, and while that is very far from easy to achieve, the basic steps are well-known.

The session then ended and no more was said publicly.  But this is the kind of sad story one hears occasionally from stars-in-their-eyes "game designers".  They've done little or no research, they think their game's great because it's their game (and they probably designed it for themselves, not for other people), and they evidently think there's a lot of money in tabletop game design.  One can only shake one's head.  (And yes, I realize that it's just barely possible that they do have a great game but the odds are astronomically against it.)

So at that moment I started to write down "Most important cautions for novice game designers ".  And after further thought, here they are.

You won't be very good to start with.  Practice makes perfect.  When someone begins a creative endeavor they are very rarely good at it to begin with.  Nowadays so much that's involved in so many professions is hidden away or occurs in someone's mind that young people get the notion that it's easy simply because they don't see it happening.  No, there is no Easy Button.  So be prepared to throw way or give away much of your early work.

You need to design and complete games.  Publishers don't want to buy ideas, they want to buy complete games.  It is extraordinarily rare for someone to have an original idea, that is, one that no one else has had.  An idea may be original to you but that doesn't mean a lot of other people have not also thought of it.  And may well have used it in a game years ago.  As a result, ideas are seen as worthless by publishers.

Don't spend much money on making a prototype.  In particular, don't pay anybody for art, don't pay a lot for high-quality printing or fancy boxes, don't pay an "agent", don't pay an "evaluator".  Many prototypes don't even have a box, they are in some kind of pouch or wallet (especially considering that it's pretty hard to reduce a large board to box size, the board is often separate).  Really slick prototypes tend to put publishers off because they're afraid the designer has put so much time into the prettiness of the prototype that they've been reluctant to change it!

With modern computer software and printers you can produce a nice-looking prototype quite cheaply.  I discuss software and other points about making prototypes in my "Game Design" book if you need more information. Ask you local library to get a copy.

The 4 P's.  When you deal with publishers be professional, polite, punctual, and persistent.  And be friendly.  But remember that publishers are busy people who have hundreds of designers wanting to show them prototypes.  If you stand out because you're a butthead you're not going to get anywhere.

Playtest, playtest, playtest.  Be sure to playtest your game with a wide variety of players.  Don't rely on your family to tell you whether it's a good game or not.

You will never be finished with a game.  You'll just reach the point of diminishing marginal returns or the time it takes to make an improvement is just not worth the value of the improvement.  Even if your game is published, there will be things you may want to do in a second edition should that ever occur.

Real designers work on many games at the same time.  But there are cases where someone designed one game that proved to be so good that they are independently wealthy (for example Blokus).  If you're working on just one game however. it probably won't be published; good luck.

Designing a game is a form of work.  My favorite game is a game of designing games, but there are still times when I really wish I could just think of the prototype I wanted and it would appear before me, or when I get tired of tweaking rules the umpteenth time.  Shoving cards in the card sleeves, painstakingly drawing boards or pieces, is rarely enjoyable but it is necessary.

It's even tougher in the video game industry because you almost never get to make the game you want to make, you have to make someone else's game or work with someone else's idea.  On the other hand there are many more people making a living as game designers in the video game industry than in the tabletop game industry.

Design a game, not a story.  Stories can be important in some kinds of games, but people play a game because of the gameplay, not because of the story.

Read.  Read articles, read blog posts, read books, about game design.  Quite apart from the many books on video game design, which admittedly often have little immediately practical advice for tabletop designers, there are books that cover tabletop game design specifically.  One objective of a book is to convey the experience of the writer to the reader so that the reader doesn't have to go through the "school of hard knocks".  And nowadays no one wants to take hard knocks.

Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish.  L. Pulsipher.
This is my book, and because my publisher sells a lot of books to libraries you may be able to persuade your local library to buy it if you don't want to buy it (and if they don't have it already).

Tabletop Analog Game Design.  This is a freely downloadable book of contributions that vary widely in their approach.

Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design.  A quite small $10 book of contributions about game design.

Contemporary Perspectives on Game Design and
Design Elements of Contemporary Strategy Games
by George Phillies and Tom Vasel. 

There are other books that specifically discuss tabletop game and toy licensing and marketing, as opposed to game design:
The Game Inventor's Guidebook: How to Invent and Sell Board Games, Card Games, Role-Playing Games, & Everything in Between! by Brian Tinsman.

Paid to Play: The Business of Game Design by Keith Meyers.


See also my "Student Illusions About Being a Game Designer"  May 7, 09  http://gamecareerguide.com/features/701/student_illusions_about_being_a_.php

Just realized I missed a big one:
Do not worry about someone “stealing” your game!  Your “great idea” likely isn’t great at all, and game designers have their own ideas.  Moreover it’s a small industry, the word gets around rapidly.  And if you don’t want to tell anyone about your great idea for fear of theft, how can anyone (especially publishers) begin to evaluate it? 

A sure sign of a clueless noob “designer” is one who has patented his game.  At $3,000-$10,000 the patent costs more than the game is likely to make if it’s published!  And patents cost much more in legal fees if you want to try to enforce one.  Copyright is as much protection as you can expect, and copyright is free and immediate, though if you want to sue someone about copyright you’ll have had to register it, which does cost money ($35?).

Review: Gratuitous Space Battles

I don’t normally review games because I don’t play published games enough to review them.  This puzzle-like video game is an exception.

You’re in charge of fleet creation for a species, fighting various scenarios with various opponents.  You can give general orders to ships or groups of ships in the actual battle, but you don’t control individual units.  It’s somewhere in the range of tower defense, or of the old video game Majesty.  You give the orders, you watch the battle.  If you win, you score honor points for the money you didn’t spend on the fleet, and those points help you buy new technology (new modules and hulls for your ship designs) and ultimately new races to use.

So your primary activity is designing ships.  There are three kinds of hulls of increasingly larger size, fighters, frigates, and cruisers.  (This confused me a little as cruisers have always been middle sized ships in water navies, but here they’re the largest ships.  I’d hae called them fighters, cruisers, and dreadnoughts.)  Each type has slots or pigeonholes for weapons modules and for other modules such as armor, engines, and crew accommodation.  There are variations in the size, module capacity, and the bonuses of each hull such as a bonus to speed or to power production.  The other modules can go into weapons slots, which seems to happen a lot, but the weapons cannot go into the “other” slots.   Weapons include various missiles, rays, and science fiction fare such as tractor rays and EMP generators (and defenses).

So you assign, by drag-and-drop, modules to go into the slots on the ship that you’re designing.  As you do so the game calculates whether you have enough crew space and enough power for the modules you have selected, and it calculates the speed of the ship which is important not only for maneuver but because faster ships are harder to hit.  Each module has a weight, a structural strength that can add to the hit points of the ship, and an energy cost.

The $20 game comes with several scenarios, and for five dollars more ordered at the same time you can get additional scenarios and species.  There is also a “campaign game” that I have not purchased. 

Each scenario specifies the opposing forces in three difficulty levels and the amount of money you can spend for ships and the number of pilots available.  The latter evidently was added because players found that they could buy vast numbers of cheap fighters and beat almost anything.  The scenario may also specify unusual circumstances such as gas clouds that slow down ships or even prevent the use of certain kinds of weapons.  There is never any terrain per se.  The opposing force may consist of imperials, rebels, or other species, each with a different style and different kinds of ships. 

Once you have designed your ships you go to a scenario and drag-and-drop a fleet onto the screen, up to the total value specified by the scenario.  You can place them on your third of the map, which is divided vertically, while the enemy is on the far third of the map.  You can see enemy ships (all hulls have distinctive silhouettes) but you never know how they are armed or protected or powered, and at the hardest difficulty level you don’t see them at all until the battle starts.  You can give general orders to your ships, such as to be cautious or to concentrate fire on damaged opponents.  You can also assign ships as escorts or assign ships to formations. 

Finally you turn it all loose and watch the battle.  I’ve seen someone compare this game to the tower defense genre because you develop and select your forces but then have no control over what they do.  That is, you cannot direct a particular unit, you can only watch them as they follow their orders (and sometimes curse them for being stupid!).  As a person who has bad wrists (repetitive motion syndrome) and bad hands (arthritis) I’m perfectly happy to play a video game that doesn’t require me to move quickly and control individual units.  But many video gamers play primarily because they want to control what’s going on, and they may not be happy with GSB.

The combat has lovely graphics and sound (even though we know there is no sound in outer space).  You see the individual missiles or rays flying across the screen in two dimensions, not three.  Ships can go “over” or “under” other ships but essentially it is a 2-D display, and movement of most ships is fairly slow. You can slow the view way down or speed up to four times normal speed, and you can zoom in so that one cruiser just about fills your screen.  (I’m playing on 1600 x 1080 with an I7 quad core machine, 9 GB of RAM, and 2 GB of RAM on a middling video card; the game has only crashed a couple of times even though I’m running a lot of other things at the same time.)  There’s a mini map in the lower left corner to help you keep track of what’s going on because you can zoom far enough out to see everything at once when there are dozens of ships blasting away.  Although the fighters are just dots at the normal resolution you can zoom in during the fight and see them shaped individually and even see the smoke trails when they’re hit.  I haven’t played enough recent video space wargames to compare this to but it certainly looks and sounds good to me and there is lots of detail in the ships, the weapons, and the damage.

You can see the individual modules in one ship - see the rays recharging, the missiles preparing the next missile, reductions in armor and shield and efforts of modules to repair those defenses.  But you can’t change anything during the battle.

Without the right orders, things won’t go your way.  For example putting fighters in formation with larger ships is a bad idea, use them to escort a large ship within a radius so that they’ll go on the attack to protect the larger ships. 

It doesn’t matter how much you win by as long as you win.  If you can see that things aren’t going to work you can stop the fight.  Occasionally the computer will stop the fight a while before the last ship of one side has been lost although you can still let it go on and watch on a more constrained basis.  Successfully beating a scenario unlocks the next scenario.

The way to acquire some of the many additional ship modules available is to use “honor” gained by successful battle.  Your honor acquisition is the amount of ship credits that you did not spend for your fleet.  And this can be measured at each level, normal, hard, and expert.  Once you get better ship modules you may go back with your newer designs and try some of the older scenarios to gain additional honor.

You begin as the Federation but as you play you can acquire hulls for the other factions and ultimately build fleets for the other factions, though you cannot mix factions.


The game becomes a puzzle, as you try to design more efficient ships using more advanced modules and find ways to use smaller fleets to defeat particular scenarios at particular difficulty levels.  If you’re like me you try things like having ships that are almost all offense, putting them in formations so that they’re somewhat farther away from the enemy and less likely to be shot at.  Judging from the additional constraints mentioned in some scenarios there are players who don’t even give engines to some of their ships, more or less setting up “orbital forts.“

I rarely use frigates as they seem too fragile in relation to their costs but other players may have found ways to prosper with them.

There is an online segment of the game where you can devise scenarios to challenge other players or you can play scenarios devised by other players.  I’ve gone online but I’ve not tried the challenge system.

 It’s an animated military puzzle, with the virtue that old guys with arthritic hands and repetitive motion syndrome, like me, can play it just as well as the young twitchers.  Like any puzzle this game wears out its welcome once you solve the puzzle reasonably well.

I have enough programming experience to be a little in awe of what one man, Cliff Harris, has been able to do with this game.  His latest game is Gratuitous Tank Battles, which I’ve not tried.

Interview with Cliff Harris: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-02-08-cliff-harris-and-middle-aged-game-development

Choosing a title for a game design book

My author copies of my book,  “Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish",  arrived today - it was printed a little early.    I don't know when it will reach pre-order folks.  http://bit.ly/MSRs8e.  You can click on the title of this post to go to the publisher's page for the book.

So it's a good time for the following:

As with game titles, book titles are determined by the publisher, not by the author.  All things marketing are the province of the publisher and the title is part of marketing.  So the author or designer can suggest titles but he or she does not have the final say.

Sometimes this works well.  My title for what the publisher called Britannia was "Invasions of Britain", Invasions for short.  That was perhaps a more descriptive title but does not have the "gravitas" of Britannia.  The title for Valley of the Four Winds was the title of the miniatures line that inspired the story that the game is based on.  Swords and Wizardry and Dragon Rage were my titles.  And so forth.

Some of you may regard this as an esoteric subject but others may be interested in the process, so I'm going to describe how we settled on a title for my game design book.

Many titles have been suggested for my game design book.  The first (and longer) book, which has not been published but which contributed a large amount of material to the one that has been published, was christened "Get It Done: Designing Games from Start to Finish" by the acquisitions editor at the company I originally submitted the book to.  (Their game design books were not selling well in stores, not surprising as their latest was over 1,000 pages, so the decided not to publish more books of that type.)   The title on the McFarland contract was "Designing Games from Start to Finish," but I wanted the term "Game Design" in the book title because that's how people in a library are going to search for the book, and McFarland's primary market is libraries. The title that I finally selected for the manuscript was "Learning Game Design", but there were lots of alternatives around game design and learning and how to, such as "How to Design Games".

When I received the acknowledgment of receipt of the manuscript the editor said they were looking for a more formal title, one more in keeping with their image as serious publishers.  "Introduction the Game Design" was a possibility.  It turned out that a book of that title had been published in February 2012, and when I wrote to point that out I found that the publishers had "just settled on a title we like and think will work well for your book. What do you think of 'Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish'?" 

At first I thought that was quite good, but after a couple hours I realized that "create" should be changed to "design".  The reason was that so many people confuse game production with game design, and "create" implies doing all the computer programming and art as well (that is, doing the entire production).  One of the reasons why we use tabletop games to begin teaching video game design is so that students quickly understand that computer programming is not part of game design.  Many video game schools say they teach "game design" but actually teach programming and art. I tried to find an alternative word to design but "plan" has the incorrect connotations, too, as it implies doing it all "up front", an error commonly seen in game design books.

Not surprisingly the publishers have a strong rule against using the same word twice in a title.

"Back to the drawing board." By this time I had another idea,  “Game Design: How to Devise the Essence of Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish”.  As I realized later, I was trying to find a different object for the verb in the subtitle because there was no verb other than "design" that could be used for the direct object of "game" without some confusion.  So the verb "devise" had an object of "essence."

The editors didn't feel that this was working because “how to devise the essence of” sounds like you’re thinking about it a lot but not actually doing anything about it.  And I didn't want to imply that game design was all about thinking.  It *is* critical thinking but it is also doing, the two have to go together. 

So I came up with the a more descriptive title:
"Game Design: How to Conceive and Incrementally Playtest and Modify the Mechanics and Heart of a Game until It Is Done."

I used "heart" instead of essence, to represent the non-mechanical aspects as opposed to the mechanics.   "Essence" would do about as well, I think.   "Incrementally playtest and modify" is the major part of the process.  "Until it is done" substitutes for "start to finish" or "from conception to completion".

I also had problems with "start to finish", because what I mean is that wannabe designers have to complete games, not just start them.  But it implies that the book is going to tell them "everything", and that isn't even close, the book doesn't even address marketing and licensing much, let along programming and art.  But once again, any phrase is going to be open to misinterpretation.

The next day, I realized that in trying to solve the fundamental problem of the direct object of "game" the alternative titles became much too long, and I decided to throw in the towel.  In the end there's no title that cannot be confused to mean that the designer is also doing the game production.  So the title that has been settled on is the one that they suggested,  "Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish".  If this confuses people then the book will disabuse them of their confusion that game design equals game production, and thus abusing people of incorrect notions is one of the purposes of the book.

Being a good listener

Many years ago as I was part of the questioning panel in on a job interview for a computer support position, a candidate was asked a typical question: what are the three most important characteristics for this job and how do you rate in those characteristics?  This first reply was “I’m a good listener”.

And while that’s a vital characteristic for computer support people because they need to listen to the people they’re supporting, it’s also true for video game designers.

When a video game is produced by a team rather than by an individual, virtually every member of that team wants to influence how the game works.  A great many of the people who work on video games would really like to make their own game but don’t have the opportunity, so the next best thing is to help shape the game that they’re paid to work on.

The person who most obviously must accommodate the desires of all these team members is the game designer.  They’re going to give their ideas and proposals to the designer.  And it’s the designer’s job to listen, and listen well, and when necessary explain to the team member why their idea may not be practical or simply why it won’t be tried.

Listening well is an art and a science.  Sometimes perceptions are involved, for example whenever there is “multitasking”.  My wife reads a lot these days, and frequently when I say something to her she keeps her eyes on her book or reader.  Is she really listening?  Usually she is up to a point because if I ask her to repeat what I said she can do so.  Though listening well is more than repeating the words, it’s understanding and processing them, and sometimes she doesn’t do that while she’s reading.

Yes, many of us may be able to do something on the computer and listen to someone at the same time, because according to recent research a person can multitask two things without much degradation, whereas more than two causes obvious degradation in the quality with which each task is done.  But if you’re looking at the computer screen (or at a book) and not the person you’re listening to the perception may be that you’re not listening.  The perception depends on the familiarity of the two people with one another and with how they do things.  But if you really want to appear to be a good listener you need to face the person you’re listening to and look at their face, if not directly into their eyes.  (If you’ve ever talked with someone who consistently avoids looking you in the eye then you know the doubts this can engender.)

Good listening is a skill that can be learned.  Search Amazon Books for “listening skills” and you’ll find lots of books about the art of listening.  But it’s not rocket science.  There are probably just two things - well, really three - that are required.  First you need to concentrate.   This is becoming a lost art in the 21st century but it really does make a difference.  “Multitasking” prevents you from concentrating.   Second, you need to care about what the person has to say, which generally means you need to respect them.  (If you’ve talked with people such as nurses and librarians who have to work regularly with physicians, one of their complaints is that the physicians don’t listen to them.  That’s because the physicians don’t sufficiently respect the other people.  Which usually turns out to be a mistake, of course.)  On the other hand, it’s easy to understand why a successful game designer might not listen very well to the typical fanboys or fan girls who come up and try to tell them the five things they needed to do to make their published game much better.

Yes, respect has to be earned, but when you start out on a game development team you have to assume that the other people have earned their places there.  And even if the game designer has learned that particular people have exceptionally useless ideas it is still “politic” to listen to them so that they’ll be happier and presumably do better work as a result.

The third thing is, the listener has to actually process what he’s hearing and take it into account in his behavior.  You can hear the words, and respect the speaker, and still not do anything about it.

Although tabletop game design is typically a solitary activity, in the playtesting stages the designer must listen to the playtesters.  We have all heard stories, both from games and from other endeavors such as software and hardware production, of people who didn’t listen to testers and produced what amounted to defective products.

What about focus groups?  While listening is a very important skill there are times when asking people certain kinds of things is not very useful. Some disciplines use focus groups a lot, but they don’t seem to be very useful in game production.  That’s because in a focus group you’re asking people what they would do rather than observing what they actually do, and in games you can observe what people actually do by having them try the game.  Jakob Nielsen, the guru of web usability, says that people often don’t do what they say they will do, not because they’re lying but because they just don’t know themselves very well or don’t take into account all the possible reactions - it’s like asking somebody which he would save if he could save only one of his wife and his daughter, whatever he *says*, he really doesn’t know what he’d do if the situation arises.  So asking people what they would do in a focus group about games is of very limited utility no matter how well you listen. 

The other thing that’s done in a focus group is to ask people for ideas, for how things should be done, and when you do that with people unless you have very specific questions it’s very difficult for them to come up with something more than “just the same only better”.

July 2012 Miscellany

Thoughts about some game-related topics that are not long enough for separate blog posts.

**
If you're into twitter, and game design, Reiner Knizia is worth following.  https://twitter.com/ReinerKnizia.  Many of his tweets are attempts to encapsulate his experience.

**
I see that GenCon now charges a base price of $2 per event--but not for seminars

**
"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public."   Sir Winston Churchill

I quite agreed with him last October when I submitted the book.  But I agree even more after taking many, many hours to proof it and make the index.   One of the most tedious things I've ever done is manually create an index for a book.  I'll automate much of the process next time.

Due to be printed 28 July.

**
I've been reading the hoorah over Diablo III.  It can only be played via an Internet connection (to prevent cheating on virtual goods, so that Blizzard can make money through their auction house for virtual goods).  And Blizzard failed to adequately provide connections when the game was released.  So people sometimes couldn't play.

Intelligent consumers recognize the following:

1) Internet connections don't always work, so any game requiring such connection won't always work.

2) Anytime you buy a game just as it's released, the game is going to have lots of bugs, as with any other software.  You can hope there won't be big ones.  If you want to avoid bugs, wait a while before buying.

So, many people haven't encountered the problems, either because they won't buy an Internet DRM game, or because they'll wait until it's "fixed".

Simple enough.  But in the Age of Instant Gratification, "I want it now" sometimes replaces intelligence.

**
Britannia new edition is proceeding.  The FFG edition is officially out of print, though still available from many sources.

**
For Amazon's author pages, I cannot include Britannia (which is sold two ways through Amazon), even though it has an ISBN (international book number).  Only books are recognized, and only those books where you are principal author, not contributor.

**
At 8PM Thursday night at WBC - August 2 - I'll be talking about game design in Hopewell.  I did *not* choose the name for the event, by the way.

I decided too late to go to GenCon, speaking rooms were full.  As far as I can tell, I tried to get something on Sunday morning but I don't know the result.

**
Frugal Dad (http://frugaldad.com/top-board-game-sites/) lists 33 boardgame blogs, a useful list.  (They call them "top board game sites" but don't include BGG--though they include Purple Pawn which is not a blog.  *Shrug*)

**
Contrary to rumor, GenCon is not moving to a different time-frame, though sometimes mid-August as this year, sometimes early August.

**
Tim Sweeney (founder of Epic Games) on focus groups: "Well, there are really two ways to get feedback from customers. One is to ask them what they want, and you never really get a useful answer from there. They'll tell you they want the current thing they have plus some fixes to it that are fairly obvious. What is really useful is building the game you want to build and building it the way you want to build it, then sitting down a bunch of people in front of it. Then watching them play, seeing where they get stuck, what they think of it and just getting their feedback that way. Customer feedback is extraordinarily useful in fine tuning something that exists. So if you use it to that extent, it's a very healthy and important part of a development cycle.

Too many companies will go and say 'So, we're considering building a phone. What do you want in a phone?' So they are like 'Gee, I want this iPhone problem to go away.' You don't get the wide, forward looking perspective that industry visionaries like Cliff himself can come up with."


**
"Social network" games are designed to be easily playable by people who would struggle to understand and play most any hobby tabletop game (e.g. Settlers of Catan).  Monopoly and Sorry are OK, but anything more demanding, good luck.  In other words, social network games are mass market games.  Surprise.

**
The most difficult thing to test, in playtesting, is the longevity of a game, how it holds up over many, many plays.  That's because most game players aren't interested in playing the same game again and again, except perhaps over many years, or unless the game is very short.  Playtesting a game for years is often impractical.

**
Rabid video game  fans are rarely sports fans.  Two often-exclusive ways of killing time?  Though sports has a lot more persistence (then again, so do MMOs).

Jakob Nielsen  says "killing time is the killer app" for mobile.  You don't need "an experience" to kill time.  Convenience is a big part of killing time.  This is why phones will predominate and dedicated handhelds will become a much smaller market.  Those who want "an experience" will use something more capable and much larger (especially in the screen) than a handheld.

**
 I understand that Diablo III has abandoned choice-based skill trees in favor of the ability to choose any six of the skills available to you, at any time, changing as you wish.

From the competitive game aspect, this reduces the depth of the game because there are no long-term choices that matter.  It also sounds quite homogeneous, rather the opposite of the trend to customizing characters/avatars so that each one is different.   But looked at another way, it allows near-infinite customization because you can change whenever you like.

From an entertainment aspect, it lets players avoid big mistakes, and gives them an enormous field to experiment in.  Diablo is not intended to be a deep game, it seems to be more the ultimate hack and slash, so an orientation to entertainment makes sense.

"Diablo III is built for people who want to tinker rather than people who want to just cop out and decide. Tinkering can be every bit as effective a hook as deciding."  Tom Chick

Yes, it's very much trial-and-error (guess and check), which is the "new way" to do things.  But there's lots of variety in trial and error . . .

Commercially viable game designs versus personally satisfying designs

I go to a college game club during the academic year.  Recently a couple of the college students have designed their own games and brought them to playtest at the club.  One of these is the past president, now a graduate student, who’s been working on games for several years and so it wasn’t surprising.  His game that’s a combination of deck building and lots of dice rolling is quite popular.  The other is more of a surprise, a 19-year-old woman who had not seemed very serious about games, who’s full of life and enthusiasm about all kinds of things, yet who buckled down and designed games.

The first game she brought in was pretty typical of a first game when somebody is starting to design.  She had not actually played it herself before bringing it in, which is always a big mistake.  It used roll and move mechanics (yuck) and had sufficient problems that the members of the club were able to dissect it and show that it was both highly random and virtually unplayable, before anyone had actually played it for long.

She took the lesson to heart about playing solo first, and the next game she brought in worked pretty well and has now been played a lot at the club.  She’s put a lot of effort into making the cards, with lots of individual (often amusing) art.  When people are designing games for the first time the games are often derivative of others, and I don’t know whether she realizes it but her game is derivative of some of my games that I’ve brought in that are often played by the members of the club.  These games are “screwage” games using cards and occasionally other bits such as dice or character markers.  (Sometimes these are called “beer and pretzel games”.)  Her game also appeared to be of this type, using cards alone. 

In screwage games such as Bang! there is not a lot of strategy and the major activity is messing with the other players, who we hope are your friends.  They tend to be fairly short and easily played by widely varying numbers of players.  While Bang!  has player elimination my games do not.  Screwage games have themes like the Wild West, the zombie apocalypse, pirates, kung fu, ninjas, and so forth.

So a screwage game with her theme, sheep herding, is quite different.  I won’t repeat the title because it’s clever but at the same time a title that probably cannot be used for a commercial product for copyright reasons.  The one surprise about her game, to me, was that sheep dogs didn't have much to do with it!  It's especially surprising because she really likes dogs. 

While her game appeared to be a screwage game, once I played it (a great rarity, me actually playing someone else’s game), it became apparent that it’s a “take that” game rather than a screwage game.  The difference is how strongly one card can affect the game situation.  “Take that” cards change the game drastically (which, of course, makes it feel more random as well). 

While I had very little to do with it, I was proud of her for putting so much effort into her game, and occasionally I’d try to advise her about the commercial prospects of it.  I particularly tried to find ways to reduce the “take that” nature of the game.   But I realized finally that she isn’t interested in commercial publication, she just wants a game that she can play with friends, and sell to like-minded people at a category of (non-game) conventions that she attends.  (Our past president, on the other hand, is definitely interested in commercial publication, and is making the nearly 700 mile trek to GenCon this summer to learn more.)

If you just want a game that satisfies you, and that you can get people to play to your satisfaction, then you're in fine shape.  Unfortunately, a game that's personally satisfying isn't necessarily commercially viable. 

And it gets worse: a game that plays very well for its intended audience, might not be one that can easily be marketed.  Two different things.  That's why some games that are essentially abstract, nonetheless have tacked-on atmospheres, so that the atmosphere can help sell the game even though it has nothing to do with how the game is played.

Fortunately, people who want "personally satisfying" games can still produce a good physical product through POD (print on demand).  The most well-known of these that cater to individuals rather than small companies is thegamecrafter.com, who have been doing this for more than three years.  If you can produce the necessary PDFs, they can make your game available, with no costs up front to you.  Naturally it's more expensive than mass production, but it's a viable alternative.  Have a look at the Web site, where they have a calculator that shows how much it will cost to produce your game.

And next month when the club starts to meet again we'll find out whether the sheep herding game has gone that route.

Six words about chance/randomness in games

According to tweetdeck, one of the trending:worldwide topics on twitter not so long ago was six word stories.  In the past several months I've asked people to say six words about game design, programming, wargames, stories in games, casual games, innovation (and plagiarism) in games, and zombie games.

This time the challenge is this: say six (interesting or amusing) words about chance/randomness in games.

Game Rules are a Pain in the "Watukas"

Here is an example of how a simple misunderstanding in the rules can break a game.

My 1982 game Dragon Rage was reissued at the beginning of 2011.  The process of finding a publisher, who was a new publisher, and getting the game arranged and printed took about three years.  The publisher, Eric Hanuise of Flatlined Games, felt he should rewrite the rules in a more modern style, more sequence of play than the old rules which were written in a reference style as most were in the early 1980s.

At one point he told me that the dragons seemed to be losing an awful lot of games in his playtesting with the newly written rules and asked me if I could figure it out.  So I took his preliminary art and mounted the board and pieces on foam board and painstakingly cut the pieces out.  Then I took it up to my brother's house (more than 300 miles-- but he had experience of having played the original version).  I sat in his living room with my originally submitted rules, the originally published rules, and Eric's version of the rules and tried to make comparisons.

Fortunately it didn't take long before I got an idea of what had happened.  Corresponding with Eric confirmed it.  In Dragon Rage the defenders get reinforcements by ship after the game has been going for a while and at regular intervals thereafter.  The design purpose was to force the dragons to have a go rather than hang back and fool around.  If the dragons simply charge in and blunder about, they'll likely be killed.  So the dragons have to pick and choose their times and places to act, sometimes nipping in and out, and the reinforcements help induce them to actually attack rather than fool about.  In other words, the reinforcements provide the momentum toward a conclusion, something every game must have, as what starts out with a slight advantage to the dragons gradually becomes an advantage to the defenders.

The timing is determined by turns.  And Eric had counted turns differently than we did in the old days (and, I suspect still do in wargaming).  In the old days, play by one player and then the other constituted a single turn.  Eric counted this as *two* turns.  So the reinforcements started coming after five turns rather than 10 turns, and thereafter came twice as fast (every two turns instead of four).  Keep in mind that Eric's native language is the Belgian version of French, not English, so this misunderstanding is not surprising.  But it made a huge difference in how the game played.


This illustrates why the designer ought to be involved in the production of the game.  Often, once the designer submits the game, he has virtually no input in production.



While we're on the topic of Dragon Rage, it is notable because the maps, which have a lot of detail on the two-sided mapboard, were not drawn by a professional artist.  Campaign Cartographer 3 by ProFantasy is a fantasy map-making program built on top of the FastCad computer aided design program.  It is powerful enough that Eric Hanuise of Flatlined Games was able to use it and CityDesigner3 for the maps, thus trading his time to learn the program in order to save very substantial artist fees (no licensing fee from ProFantasy required). See http://www.profantasy.com/rpgmaps/?p=571 for a brief description with the final maps.  The step-by-step process is described at http://www.profantasy.com/rpgmaps/?s=Dragon+Rage (scroll down to September 12, 2011).

"Don't Make Me Think" (about the interface)

A major objective of any game designer should be to avoid inflicting unnecessary frustration on the player(s).  In video games in particular it’s easy to find reviews that criticize the user interface for being difficult or fiddly or confusing.

Sometimes we can find good advice in disciplines that are not part of the game industry.  One of these is the Website design industry.  The World Wide Web is particularly susceptible to some of the kinds of problems that can bedevil video game interfaces.  Web users tend to spend very little time on a particular page and are unwilling to expend effort to find information or to read the information they find.  Typical advice is to write half as much as you normally would and to use bullet points rather than narrative, because that’s the way most Web users read things.

And Web users as a group tend to be technologically inept.  They are poor at searching, frequently giving up if their first search doesn’t work, and rarely going to the second page of search results. (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search-skills.html .) In one test Jakob Nielsen found that “only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn't do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.) “  (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html ).  For most anyone reading this, this would be very easy, but we’re not a group representative of Web users as a whole.

This is the caliber of people who are playing social networking games on Facebook.  Facebook is a great blessing to the video game industry because it enables technologically inept people to play video games.  Just as many people struggle to do a specific search at a specific search engine, many people struggle to do much of anything on the Web, but many have learned to use Facebook.  Apparently for many people Facebook IS the Web, as far as they’re concerned, and they rarely do anything on the Web outside of Facebook.

Nielsen is the guru of Web usability, and his Website (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/) has provided biweekly articles about usability for many years.  I think that anyone who designs video games should read many of these articles, nor will it hurt people who design tabletop games even though problems with the user interface are less common on the tabletop.

I’ve seen people who claim to know a lot about Web design praise Websites that are hard to figure out but pretty.  Pretty may be important for certain audiences, up to a point, but not for many purposes and rarely for serious purposes.  The same can be said for game interfaces. There are also lots of Web designers who don’t test their sites, and that works about as well as game designers who don’t test their games – wretchedly.  Nielsen’s objective is to serve his market of people doing business on the Web, where a site that’s difficult to use can literally cost millions of dollars of business.  His major thrust for Web usability is that you have to test your sites regularly with the intended audience while developing them, and he devotes many of his articles to discussing how he tests and also discussing his test results in terms of preferences for different age groups.  As with the games one of the most important things is to understand who your audience is.

Nielsen has written more or less scholarly books about Web usability, but I first recommend a small book by Steve Krug titled “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability”.  Of course Krug doesn’t mean no thinking at all from the user, he means don’t make people think about how they’re acquiring their information, don’t make them make decisions that could interfere with finding and consuming the information they’re looking for.  Once they find what they’re looking for, if they want to think about that, fine. (Warning: the book predates “Web 2.0", so the examples are seen as dated, by some.  But much of the point of “don’t make me think” is “don’t fool around with extraneous displays of cuteness”, a common failing of contemporary Web sites.)  I’ve not read his more recent book about testing, “Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems”.  A look at Nielsen’s own Web site, which is very utilitarian but very easy to use, is instructive in itself.  Krug’s site (http://www.sensible.com/) is not quite as utilitarian, but still simple and straightforward.  (Keep the audience in mind, in both cases.)

Let me interject here, I don’t use the word “intuitive” because it has become meaningless, a sloppy replacement for the word “easy”.  If anything is intuitive on computers it’s because people are familiar with the task from other software.  There is nothing particularly natural about how humans work with computers.  The natural way would be that we would talk to the computer as though it were a human and it would understand, but we’re not there yet.  Another natural method is that we would think at the computer and it would know what we wanted to do, and that’s even further away.

When you think about it, games should be as easy to use as the Web needs to be.  The player should not have to think about anything except the actual decisions and challenges of the game.  They shouldn’t have to think about how to make their avatar move, they shouldn’t have to think about how to shoot, they shouldn’t have to think about keeping track of information such as the turn number.  The game should make this so easy that they don’t need to think about it.

“Don’t make me think” isn’t quite the same as K.I.S.S. - “Keep It Simple, Simon” - as you can have a complex game that nevertheless doesn’t make the user think about how to manipulate it and tell it what to do (e.g. chess).  K.I.S.S is akin to my favorite maxim about game design, "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-Exupery)

Some games that require a lot of thought for success, chess-like games or “strategy games”, may require more thought in areas other than the actual gameplay because the game itself is more complex.  Yet chess itself is an example of a complex strategy game with a very simple interface.

Book proofs arrive

The proofs for my book "Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish", have arrived for me to proofread and to make an index (tedious but necessary).  It is likely, given the printing schedule, to be available at GenCon in mid-August, where McFarland exhibits.  And it now seems likely I'll attend GenCon.

http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6952-9

Dreamers

An amazing number of teenagers dream of making games for a living, if my informal surveys at local schools and colleges can be expanded to the entire generation.

There are all kinds of individual delusions (see http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2010/09/student-illusions-about-being-game.html ), but I’m talking about the big dream: “I’m going to be famous (and rich) as a video game maker.”

Perhaps the dreamers fall into two categories, those who dream without having any idea how to get there and no plan to get there, and those who dream while doing something to try to get there.  The first group is much the larger, as is likely true with any kind of dreaming.

Teachers are “stuck in the middle” when it comes to dealing with dreamers.  I’ve heard many people say “you shouldn’t destroy their dreams” while others, including me, think that people of adult age (as are college students) need to understand reality, and the ones who dream strongly and are willing to do something despite the odds still have a sufficient chance to succeed.  In other words, they won’t be put off because one teacher or even all their teachers show them that their dream will be very, very hard to attain. 

We have a K12 school system (in the USA) that has endeavored for years to avoid the negative, to pump up student self-esteem without requiring any action to earn self-respect.  People are awarded for participation, and competition is discouraged.  It is the opposite of the real world.   When students enter the real world they're shocked that they're not special, that people won't do things for them "just because" of who they are.  Part of a college teacher's job is to help students realize what the real world is like, to help students learn to take responsibility for themselves and to *earn* respect.

When kids are quite young then they’ll have many dreams and a teacher is probably going to encourage them to find dreams that really fit their personalities and desires.  When the student is close to graduating from high school or is in college then they need a big dose of reality so that they don’t waste years pursuing something that they may not be suited for.

A disconnection with reality seems to have become the norm amongst pre-adults.  In 2007 I had a class of high school students taking a college course in Web design.  We had a discussion about fame and about famous people, and I asked them to think of famous people from the local county.  In the end we could only come up with three football players, all of them retired by that point, and one deceased governor, out of 300,000 people.  We did a little math to show that it was quite unlikely that anyone from a group as small as the class would be famous.  Then I asked them how many of them thought they would be famous in their lives and about a quarter raised their hands.  I understand that this is not an unusual proportion for millennials (Gen Y).

This is an extreme of dreaming.  You can dream of being really good at something and enjoying it but that doesn't make you famous; these folks dream that they're going to be famous.

The tremendous lack of initiative of young people as a group (there are of course many exceptions) has really impressed (or depressed) me.  A "generation expert" speaking at a teachers’ conference described the "ambitious but aimless" tendencies of millennials (Gen Y). They have a goal, but not only don't know how to get there, they may not even be willing to pursue a path to it when the path is available. The expert's example: millennial says "I'm going to be an astronaut".  Well, that's very praiseworthy, but that requires a lot of work, you'll likely need at least a master's degree in some science-related subject, you have to take physics, math, etc. "Nope, I don't do math," says the millennial. Then how can you be an astronaut? "I'm going to be an astronaut". They don't see the connection between where they are and where they're going, but somehow it's going to happen.

Dreams are not a bad thing--as long as you DO SOMETHING about them.  Dreams should be about goals and how to attain them, not pure fantasies.  Talking about dreams isn't likely to go well, as you'll get a dose of reality from those with more experience.  Dreams on their own are empty, vacuous even.  You need to try to get results.

It’s common to hear people say “well, I could do as well if I tried that”.  But they never try it.  And while it’s usually not true in practice that they’ll do as well, sometimes it is, as with the 35-year-old Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan, Barsoom) in 1912 when he felt he could write stories as good as the ones he was reading in magazines.    The difference is, ERB went for it, he didn’t just talk about it.

Sid Meier, talking about the original Civilization game, said  "Most of the letters we'd get were almost a standard form.  They were like, 'Dear Sid.  I liked your game Civilization.  Here are the five things I would change to make it a much better game.'"  People who almost invariably had no clue about game design, but thought "I can do just as well as he did," told Sid where he went wrong. Ridiculous.  (And that’s as much the previous generation as millennials, in the early 1990s.)

Fantasist-dreamers can get to the point that they're personally offended by someone who describes a reality much different from the one the fantasist-dreamer would like to imagine.  And blames the person "delivering the reality".  For example, many people love RPGs so much and imagine what great work they can do, then meet the reality of a market that used to be very active, but collapsed several years ago leaving only a few companies able to make much profit.  Some of these folks are actually offended when someone describes how and why the market is quite small (beyond the efforts of those few big companies).

Before I taught curriculum game design, I was at a college where I mainly taught computer networking, and taught a game class on the side.  I was able to find enough students for the curriculum (for college credit) game class, even though there was no degree, but when I tried to do a continuing education (inexpensive, not-for-credit) class almost no one signed up.  A 16-year-old who did sign up said he tried to get some buddies to come as well, but they were "too busy".  I'd bet a lot of their busy-ness amounted to killing time playing video games; but if you're a person who thinks that somehow things will just work out, you're not likely to take the initiative to change the state of affairs.

Admittedly, this lack of interest in learning isn’t confined to younger people.  At my Origins seminars about game design this year I asked people how many had read a book about game design.  Very few.  Admittedly, until my book comes out, there is only one book that begins to discuss tabletop game design (though it’s free), and most of my audience were interested in the tabletop, not video games.  The audience did take the time to come listen to what I had to say.  But surely, if you’re really interested in game design, wouldn’t you read at least one of the well-known (video) game design books?

Remembering that this blog is about game design, my point is this: it won’t just come to you, you have to do it, you have to pursue it, you have to take every opportunity to learn about it (read!).  Then again, if you’re reading blogs like this, you’re already ahead of most of your contemporaries who dream of being game designers.

A Eureka Moment about Training, Education, Puzzles, and Games

I was thinking about a time when my department head came to my game design class unannounced to evaluate my teaching, and I wasn’t “lecturing” to the students.  They were working on game projects.  (This was not an introductory class.)  She seemed surprised that I wasn’t lecturing, but that may be because she typically taught introductory computer literacy style classes such as how to use Microsoft Office.  Classes that teach use of specific office software can be taught more or less by rote: if you want to make something bold you highlight it and press control-B or click the Bold button.  If you change margins you do thus and so.  And so forth.

These intro software classes don’t have to be taught entirely by rote but commonly they are, complete with what I call “monkey books”.  These books have students follow steps to accomplish something, but students tend to focus on getting through as rapidly as possible, and when they’re done they don’t know what they did and haven’t learned much.  Like the monkeys who, if they type long enough, type Shakespeare’s works . . .  You can learn from monkey books, but only if you want to learn and make the effort to learn.

Designing games is not and can never be taught by rote.  Teaching by rote is training, not education.  Education is about why you do things, why some things work and others don’t, about understanding what you’re doing.  Training is about exactly how you get a particular thing done.  I recognize that not everyone follows those definitions but I find it very useful to make this distinction, and other people with other purposes when defining education and training may make different distinctions.

Designing games is about education, not training.  Designing games is about critical thinking, and much of it is thinking, which is the antithesis of training.  You’re trained to do things automatically, without thinking.  (Reiner Knizia on twitter recently said, "To summarise my experience: Design is a way of thinking!")

Video game production at the outset can be taught by rote because people are learning how to use particular software, for example Maya or 3DS Max, or they’re learning how to program.  In the long run there is a process of education there, especially for programming, but in the short run for introductory classes a lot of it is simple straightforward “this is how you do it”.  There just isn’t much of that in game design.

But where the Eureka moment occurred was when I realized that an analogy can be made from this to games and puzzles.  A puzzle is something that has a solution, or perhaps several solutions, with the defining characteristic that once you figure it out the solution(s) always works.  So you can teach someone by rote how to beat the puzzle by teaching them the steps required.  It’s possible that those steps require certain skills such as hand-eye coordination levels that the person may not have attained, but once they attain those skill levels they can follow the solution and complete the puzzle every time, or as it is said in video games, “beat the game”.

A game does not have these kinds of solutions, and cannot be “beaten.”  To be good at the game requires something much more akin to education than training.  You have to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and when that isn’t the best thing to do, when something else is the best thing to do.  There is certainly problem-solving in games, but there aren’t solutions to the game as a whole that will always work.  Frequently this is the difference between having human opponents and having no opponent or a computer opponent, though computer opponents continue to become better over time.  Frequently this is the difference between, on th one hand, perfect information or uncertainty that can become predictable, typical in puzzles, and on the other hand uncertainty that cannot be predicted or accounted for by simple mathematical processes–the kind of uncertainty that comes from having several human opponents.

You can teach someone, by rote, how to win at Tic-Tac-Toe, or even Tetris, and you could for chess if anyone had completely solved the extremely complicated puzzle.  The checker program Chinook, as I understand it, plays by rote, playing what it knows to be the move most likely to lead to a win from whatever the current position is–no reasoning required.  You cannot teach someone how to win at Britannia or Dragon Rage, Diplomacy or even Risk, by rote, they have to understand how it all works and then think as they actually play.

Looking for a publisher for new edition of Britannia

After sales of 16,000 the FFG version of Britannia has sold out (though it's still available in some stores, FFG has no more).  I've received a notification from FFG that the contract is terminated.  So I can immediately begin looking for another publisher for a revised edition.

This will include three new versions of the game and a slightly-revised version of the current game published by FFG.  The idea is to offer games that will answer all of the major objections to the current version of Brit, and include the current version, so that the package will be suitable for a larger audience.  (The objections: too long, too scripted, too much chance; and occasionally, not sufficiently realistic in one respect or another.)

One new version is a much shorter game, played on a simpler map on the second side of the board.  There are two candidates for this version.  One of these uses battle cards instead of dice.  The other is very reduced (eight nations), and uses dice, but the method reduces the effects of chance. 

There is also a simpler and shorter version using the same map and sides (colors), so it is an alternative when there's not time to play the current version but players want something much like the original.  It also uses the less-random dice method.

The "Epic" version is more detailed and "historical" than the current version of Brit, and adds Ireland to the existing map.  The rules are not more complex, but there are more nations within the standard 16 turns, so it is a longer game.  The colors are quite different, so there is a new set of strategies to explore.

Obviously the short versions will have broader appeal than the Epic version.  But the Epic version will be "more historical" than the current version.

All of these versions exist and have been played by people other than myself, but are not sufficiently playtested.

Any suggestions as to publisher are welcome.

Origins 2012–-“Diminished”

This is not a “convention report” per se, as I had no interest in the banquets and awards, nor in the special guests, nor (with few exceptions) in new games and announcements about games.  The featured guests were media people--film and TV--rather than game people, though Wil Wheaton does a boardgame videocast (which I have not seen).  The others were Felicia Day and Adrienne Wilkinson. There were only two game design guests of honor (Rob Schwalb and Jeff Tidball), quite a departure from days past, one artist (Sandra L. Garrity), and one author guest (Aaron Allston, formerly a D&D writer).  SF author Timothy Zahn was scheduled to be around as well.  In years past Reiner Knizia, Richard Garfield, and Jim Dunnigan have been guests of honor, but if people of such stature in game design were present I did not see or hear of them.

The convention has moved from late June-early July to early June.  I heard this was to avoid a clash with GenCon, when they move to earlier in the summer.  But the result, so close to the end of the K12 school year, was that a lot of people evidently could not make it.  Next year Origins will be on 12-16 June.

I was surprised at how few people I saw in the game-playing rooms.  Further, there was a time when most tabletop game manufacturers came to Origins, but not now.  Wizards, Fantasy Flight, GMT, Columbia, and smaller outfits like Avalanche weren’t around.  There’s a lot more room in the exhibit hall than I remember from, say 2005.  I think the entire convention this year would fit into the exhibit hall used at GenCon.

I like the system used at WBC and PrezCon, where you pay your entry fee (about the same as Origins) and you can play any game or attend any event.  But those are boardgame conventions.  At GenCon, as I vaguely recall from my one visit, the seminars were free to attendees, but some tournaments and RPG events may have cost additional fees.  At Origins there are many more additional fees, and they get extreme with a fee for the wargame room, a fee for the boardgame room (though there is also open gaming), fees for so many seminars even though there’s plenty of room for listeners, and so on.  The exhibition hall and art show are free, fortunately, and that helps bring in the people paying the one-day $10 fee.  (The line for the one-day pass was very long on Saturday morning.)

I don’t go to conventions to play games, that’s something I can do much nearer home.  I like to attend relevant seminars and panel discussions, but this year there were fewer than usual (and half a dozen of those were cancelled because of a family emergency for the speaker).  For the past seven years at Origins (excluding 2009, when I didn’t attend) I’ve given free seminars about game design for beginners.  This comes partly from my inclination to teach, and partly (more recently) from a desire to publicize my game design book that’s due to be published late this summer.

There was also a scheduling problem as many seminars that were supposed to be free were listed in the program at $2, and others were listed at $2 more than intended. Only my Friday seminar had the $2 price, and some others that were repeated on the weekend were free then, but $2 on the weekdays.  It was as though someone had done a global addition of $2 to seminars up through 9AM Saturday.  In past years the master event list was sent to people who had submitted events, but this year it was not.  By the time I thought to check, I was able to find it online and then have the error removed, and this was reflected in the computer so that people who registered for the Friday talk were not charged, but at that point the schedule book probably had gone to the printers and could not be corrected.

When a person or group offers to do a seminar (or any other event such as a tournament or RPG session) they choose their time and day without knowing what else might be scheduled.  Scheduling is very important for the seminars, with late Saturday morning evidently being the best time, and Sunday morning the least.  There are also many more people at the con on the weekend than on weekdays.  This year I was able to schedule two hour blocks to allow for lots of questions and discussion, in previous years I’ve usually been restricted to one hour blocks.  (This may also reflect the small number of seminars altogether, there were more time slots available.) 

I was up in the seminar area a lot, and monitored attendance as I did so, to help me figure out the best times for the future.  Most seminars had about a dozen or fewer listeners.  The most-attended seminar I saw was mine at 11AM Saturday about “Starting a Game Design,” with 28 people.  I was surprised at this because by chance, at the same time, a game designers panel discussion was scheduled in the very next room, including some well-known designers who make a living in game design.   The count there was 23.  You might hope that Origins would catch such scheduling conflicts and give one or the other the chance to move to a non-conflicting time, but not this year.

Later Saturday afternoon I attended talks by James Ernest (formerly of CheapAss games) and Kenneth Hite (RPGs), both excellent speakers, but with only a dozen listeners. 

Ernest talked about themes in games.  He much prefers games with themes, disliking those with “themes” added on after design.  As I put it to him in a comment he agreed with, I prefer that a play I make in a game has a clear analog with reality, rather than simply being a move in a game–unless the game is out-and-out abstract.

Though there is no theme in Dominion, Ernest still enjoys playing the game.  I’m more extreme.  When it first came out I watched a game and saw that there was virtually no interaction amongst the players, a puzzle-contest.  People have told me that with certain cards there’s a lot more interaction, but it is still mostly about people individually solving the puzzle of the game, and I don’t care for that at all.  As for the lack of a real theme, Earnest says the theme was added after the game was finished, and in the end they took the medieval clipart they’d been using just to use something, and created the theme from it (which is what I would call an atmosphere, because it has no effect on gameplay or game design).

Hite talked about getting the heart of a genre right in an RPG.  It’s the story the genre tells that’s important, he says.  For example, at the heart of Noir is Sam Spade being beaten up or otherwise thwarted (as in, the police try to stop his investigation), yet from this he learns more information that ultimately lets him solve the mystery. 

I asked if Hite was familiar enough with Steampunk to say what the story is in that (to me) obscure genre.  He pointed out that it’s now more an aesthetic than a genre, the goggles and leather and glass and so forth (and corsets for women?).  Yet he then made an erudite comparison, saying that just as fairy stories helped Victorians reconcile with what was a pretty ugly past (and where the real fairy stories were “don’t go out on the moor at night or they’ll eat you), steampunk helps people reconcile with technology.  Modern technology is a “black box” to most people, but most people can understand that hot steam expands and can move things, and feel comfortable with the steam engines and “clockwork” of Steampunk.  Steampunk helps people come to terms with technology.  A remarkable answer.

I don’t look for new games at conventions, so I can’t say anything about such with a couple exceptions.  I did see two games that caught my eye, published by Catalyst Labs, who are known for miniatures, not boardgames.  Hibernia, played on a map of Ireland although it could be played as well on any map with the addition of a color scheme, is a bloodless wargame.  Using a color scheme on the map, plus the roll of a color die, four or fewer players expand throughout Ireland.   The designer explained it, and my comment was “clever”.  It felt like a traditional Eurogame, if only because it is a clever game and is not a model of any reality.  I first noticed it because I have a prototype “Hibernia” game, about actual Irish history (such as we know) in the Dark Ages; I’ll have to add a subtitle to it. 

Another Catalyst game is Balance of Power.  Though ostensibly about the Napoleonic world, it is even more abstract than Diplomacy, with a traditionally Euroish feel to it.  There is no uncertainty other than the intentions of other players.  With turn-based play, the other source of uncertainty in Diplomacy, from simultaneous movement, does not exist.   Nor is there the significant tactical aspect to it that counterbalances the strategic in Diplomacy.  “. . . Players carefully create and move Kings, Generals and Bankers as they capture territories and expand their empires.”  Bankers?  In Napoleonic Europe?  At first glance it appears that Prussia and Austria are “stuck in the middle” between England, France, Russia, and Turkey.  It may be clever--because of the apparent strategic imbalance I reserve comment--but it is not a model of any reality.   The game does allow secret negotiation, making it more like Diplomacy than games that only allow over-the-table negotiation.   And I’m told it’s a much shorter game than Diplomacy.

In both of these games, maneuver is very limited, and there are not many choices at a given time, as befits traditionally Euroish games.   Boardgames tend to be games of maneuver, but do not need to be. 


To go back to the convention as a whole, one publisher, who sells via Internet and conventions only with few exceptions, remarked that the retail game distribution system is broken.  He pointed out that even at the convention many people now scan the codes on games with their smartphones, then look for cheaper prices online, before deciding to buy.  Game shops are struggling or non-existent, suffering from competition with Internet sellers who sometimes go to extremes (as one US-based seller who offers Dragon Rage for $59, much less than the 50 euro list price dewspite the cost of shipping games from Europe to the USA).  Someone told me about an area of 600,000 people, part of a larger city, with not a single game shop.  I live near a sprawling 230th largest metropolitan area in the US, 300,000+ people with a high proportion of young people, where there are just two tabletop game shops, only one of which offers many boardgames.

When I walk into the Columbus Convention Center for Origins I always think initially, “why have I bothered to come here?” (it’s a thousand mile trip).  I actually skipped 2009.  Yet as in the past, I found some interesting people to talk with, though I missed one I wanted to meet.  People seem to like my talks, and this year on the spur of the moment I even recruited some to playtest a couple of my games.  I don’t know whether I’ll be back next year, it depends on how things go in the publishing world and on circumstances in general.  For most gamers, I have to suggest that GenCon is a much more interesting convention.  If it were an equal distance from where I live, I’d go to GenCon every year and frequently skip Origins.