What do RPGs amount to, what are you actually designing (if you do the whole thing)?

Just trying to get this straight in my mind.  I’ve never designed an entire RPG, and probably never will, nonetheless it’s well to know exactly what’s involved.

1)  A set of mechanics to govern play of the game - the actual “game design.”

2)  A world-setting, which could be a time (era) for familiar worlds (such as, medieval Europe or ancient Rome for an earth-like world), or an entirely different world that nonetheless may resemble Earth and earthly history in some ways.  E.g. Middle-earth, Spelljammer.

Some settings don’t make much difference to the play - they’re atmospheres, not themes.  In other cases, the setting makes a big difference to how the game is constructed and how it’s played.  Consider, say, AD&D settings like Spelljammer where there are many additional spells and such, and where the play tends to be quite different from the old standard “dungeon/wilderness exploration”.

World and setting are actually two separate-but-related things.  In our world there are lots of possible settings, but lots that are not possible (those involving magic or starships, e.g.).

3) This world-setting includes a definition of the state of technology (science) and magic.  At some point technology and magic look the same (remember Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic).  But technology tends to have scientific trappings while magic is usually wrapped in mystery.   Moreover, is there lots of magic or technology in the setting, or only a little?  Are “14th level wizards” (extraordinarily powerful wizards) common, or as rare as US senators (less than 1 in 3 million people), or unknown (in Third Age Middle-earth there was only one, Sauron) or somewhere in between?   Is magic used to substitute for functions where we in the real world use technology?  Does the populace approve of magic, or fear it?  Is magic based on religion, on the elements, on “mind-power”, etc.

4) The world setting, and even the rules, have a strong bearing on the stories that are part of RPGs.  But often the published game will include only some overarching stories that are wrapped up in the particular world setting, or maybe no stories at all.

5) Adventures.  Adventures are mostly published separately, though there may be introductory adventure(s) with the published game.  Adventures have their own stories within the context of the overall world-setting.  Maybe there's also an overarching story that affects all adventures (perhaps as simple as a war between good and evil), maybe not.

6) (Moral) Tone and (player) Angle.    This “player view” is something I added late in the day as I made this list.  I refer to the overall purpose and “world-view” of the game, from the players’ point of view.  This can be drastically altered by the referee, but each game starts somewhere.  Here is where we run into such tonal questions as “how black-and-white is the moral point of view”?  Some players like an RPG with the same kinds of moral gray areas that we might encounter in everyday life, where the bad guys don’t seem much different from the good guys.  Others like much greater clarity and separation, where they can KNOW that someone is a hero, or someone is a villain.  The other part of this concerns how the player interacts with the game.  Is he an actor playing a role, or is he participating vicariously in the action, putting himself into the game?  Is the game to be treated primarily as a wargame, or as a story, or as cinema, or where in between (or something else entirely)?  Once again, a referee can always push these viewpoints, but games begin somewhere: Fate, for example, is very much a cinematic game that would be hard to play as a wargame.  Most versions of D&D are much closer to wargame than to a story or cinematic game. 

In here somewhere is also the question of how “realistic” the game is intended to be.  RPGs are inherently unrealistic, I think, but some players want a game where disbelief can be suspended but not abandoned, as in a good novel, while others want something closer to the (thoroughly unbelievable) tentpole adventure movies like recent Star Wars and Indiana Jones IV.

Other notes:
A created world setting and story are both parts of fantasy-SF novels.  Though someone writing a "Star Wars" novel takes the already-existing setting and makes a story to fit within it.

A single world setting can be applied to many different sets of game rules, in general.  If we take “Tolkien-like fantasy world with elves and dwarves” as a brief description of a setting, many games use it.  Some settings will be closely tied to technology or game mechanics, many will not.

So there are games and worlds to devise, and adventures and stories to devise.  The tone and angle will be in the game, whether the designer chooses one consciously or not. 

If we wanted to narrow this down from six to three elements, it would be mechanics, world-settings, and adventures.  Most published RPG supplements focus on one of these elements, usually adventures or world-settings, that can be applied to many sets of mechanics. 

***

My brief, free, audio-visual class Introduction to Game Design is now open at
https://www.udemy.com/brief-free-introduction-to-game-design/  The "What You'll Discover" lecture from the course is on youtube at http://youtu.be/VjU8qPU0bTE.

My book “Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" is available from mcfarlandpub.com or Amazon (paper or Kindle). (Books-a-Million has an eBook version at http://bit.ly/PQQqh3.)  It's currently discounted on Amazon to less than $26 for the paperback.

Audio-visual course Get a Job in the Video Game Industry, $15 (or use this coupon URL for 20% off): https://www.udemy.com/get-a-job-in-the-video-game-industry/?couponCode=VideoGameJobs20%25Off or use the coupon code: VideoGameJobs20%Off
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I am @lewpuls on Twitter.  (I average much less than one post a day, almost always about games, not about other topics.)  Web: http://pulsiphergames.com/

Ruminations about “Magical Numbers” in boardgame design

In the course of designing “nano-games” that have between 17 and 20 pieces for two sides and very small boards that fit on part of a postcard, I again had occasion to wonder if there is some kind of "sweet spot" or "magical number" of pieces and spaces for a boardgame (or any other kind, for that matter) where pieces occupy locations?  I’ve seen several queries from novice designers asking if there’s an ideal board size, and my immediate reaction has been “it depends”. This question could be expanded to “is there a sweet spot in the number of pieces, compared with board size, in a game that involves maneuver/placement and geospatial location.”  For games that are not about maneuver/placement and location, such as many modern boardgames and most card games, the question doesn’t apply.  For RPGs and other games where you have an avatar, a single “piece,” as in many kinds of video games, the question also doesn’t apply, although we could ask if there is some kind of sweet spot for the number of characters in an adventuring party.  But that question becomes more a matter of psychology than of game.


Let’s look first at traditional non-commercial boardgames.  Chess and checkers have 64 spaces, and (respectively) 32 (16 per side) and 24 (12 per side) pieces.  Technically the checker board is 32 spaces, since you play on only one color.   So the ratio of pieces to board is 1:2 in chess and 2:3 in checkers, and always goes down as pieces are captured.  In Tic-Tac-Toe the ratio is ultimately 1:1.  In the Roman Empire placement and maneuver game Nine Men’s Morris there are 24 intersections for the 18 pieces, a ratio of 3:4.  (Tic-Tac-Toe is actually a much reduced variation of Nine Men’s Morris; both are draws when played perfectly.)  Backgammon has 30 pieces and 24 locations, differing from these other games in allowing more than one piece per location.  In such instances it isn’t surprising that the ratio is 5:4.

Leaving the games of the West, in African Mancala, which is a boardgame even though it’s a board you can easily dig in the sand, there are many more pieces (stones) than there are board spaces.   Oware, for example, has 12 spaces and 48 pieces (seeds). There are relatively few board spaces compared with other games I’ve mentioned.  Shogi (Japanese chess) has 40 pieces and 81 squares for a ratio close to 1:2.  Xiangqi (Chinese chess) has 32 pieces on a board of 90 intersections, for a ratio close to 1:3.  In the Asian game Go, played on the intersections of a 19 x 19 board (361 spaces), we have a situation closer to Tic-Tac-Toe where you could leave all the captured pieces on the board and fill the board up.  It may be no accident that Tic-Tac-Toe and Go are placement games rather than maneuver games.  If you can’t move from one place to another then the only way to occupy a particular place is to fill it up with a piece.

Intuitively, you might expect that fewer areas means the game is simpler to deal with, though the game may still have a great deal of gameplay depth.  You might also ask how much are the limited numbers of pieces and spaces simply a reflection of manufacturing limitations in ancient and medieval times? 

Let’s look at some traditional commercial games for comparisons.  Many traditional commercial games such as Monopoly, the Game of Life, Clue, and Careers have just one piece per player, a kind of avatar.  Many of these games are not actually games of maneuver/placement and location; Monopoly has location but the players have no control over where they are so there’s no maneuver.  Careers and possibly Game of Life have diverging paths but most of the time there is no choice about where your avatar goes.

How about "classic" area-based wargames?  Risk has 42 areas.  Britannia has 37, plus 5 sea areas that can only be temporarily occupied and where combat cannot take place.   Vinci has 45 (by quick count). Diplomacy has 56 land regions and 19 sea regions (75 total) for 34 pieces.   History of the World and Axis and Allies have many more areas  (and original Nova Games’ A&A had a lot).

How about piece to area ratios?  The average for Britannia depends on the era, but is roughly 55 pieces for the 37 areas, about 3:2.   But as with several of these games, one area can hold more than one piece. The ratio in Vinci is something over one piece per area.  In Risk it's a lot higher, at times, as massive armies build up.  Diplomacy's ratio is much like that of chess, one piece for a little more than two areas (and no more than one piece per area).  Unlike chess and checkers, the ratios in Diplomacy don’t change much over time because the overall game economy is slightly positive and then stabilizes.



My motto in game design is "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) or in another form, about Japanese gardening, "Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else that you can remove."  Consequently, nowadays I look for the smallest number of pieces and smallest board that gives the experience I have in mind.

For example, I have a couple prototypes that are vaguely Stratego-like.  One dates back about 30 years, the other is quite recent but grew out of the first.  I’ll describe the latter one below, and how I discovered I might need to reduce the number of pieces.  The older one is a space battle game played on squares, and when I first designed it I stuck with something near the typical Stratego 40 pieces per side, though on a more roomy board.  But when I resurrected it several years ago, when it was played mostly by video game students, I cut the number of pieces down to 19 and eliminated some of the special pieces - they became options that we rarely used.  The ratio of pieces to board became 38:113 or about 1 to 3.  This made for a much quicker game, as little as 15 minutes, that was just about as interesting and certainly as fun to play as the big version.

But this cutting back is harder to do when you're trying to model a particular historical situation such as a battle or war.  Going back to the “nano-games”, the postcard games, it’s quite difficult to provide an historical model with a very small number of pieces and very small board - you can really only focus on a few things.  One reason why the traditional games mentioned above can have small numbers of pieces in relatively small boards is that many are abstract games rather than models of any reality.  Even Diplomacy gives the appearance of World War I but virtually none of the reality.  Risk is very far from reality. In the commercial game world we really didn’t have boardgames intended to be models of reality until Avalon Hill wargames came along in the late 1950s.  (We can probably think of isolated examples before then.)  Before then, only wargames played by the military tried to reflect some reality.


What about the numbers of pieces and numbers of playing spaces in relation to human comfort and human capacities?  This brings to mind the famous journal article “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two.  It discusses the number of things a human can keep in “working memory” at one time (barring memory tricks in specific instances).  I don’t know of other research of this kind, but I’d be willing to predict that if average human capacity has changed it has gone down, rather than up, as we live in a world of more and more distractions and more and more multi-tasking leading to more and more routine mistakes and inability to focus.  Human memory capacity more generally seems to continually fall, for lack of practice if nothing else.  Where people in non-literate societies had to memorize any information they needed to retain, we went to writing things down, and now to recording them digitally.  The joke used to be that old people had a disease called “CRS” (can’t remember “stuff” - or perhaps some other “s” word), but my observations of college and high school students is that they have CRS quite badly even as they usually refuse to write things down in class.

Whatever research may show, I think it’s fair to say that 21st century game players by and large prefer fewer rather than more assets to keep track of, and less rather than more memorization.  There are lots of exceptions, of course.  Yet I’m put in mind of a very intelligent freshman game player who said she didn’t like wargames because there were too many decisions, too many things to keep track of.  For her it became too much like work, no longer entertainment, though she was very capable of doing it.  I myself quit playing chess at age 15 because it was too much like work, if you wanted to be any good.

Perhaps one reason why Diplomacy has been so popular and durable is the small number of pieces for each player.  Players start with 3 or (in one case) 4 pieces.  Even a winning player probably averages no more than 10 pieces over the course of a game (18 is a certain win).  And in the much more common draws (2-, 3-, or 4- way for a 7 player game) a player averages even less. 


When considering numbers of pieces we should also look at how many different kinds of pieces there are.  Most of these games have just one kind of piece, the army in Risk or Vinci or the piece in Nine Men's Morris.  Japanese chess has eight different types of pieces, Western chess six types.  In between we have Diplomacy with two types of pieces, armies and fleets.

I think the variety of pieces is sometimes almost as important as the number of pieces.  Clearly variety appeals to those who play Western and Eastern versions of chess.

One way to avoid the potential problems of using a variety of pieces is to avoid exceptions to the general rules.  Going back to Stratego and my prototype, both games have lots of different pieces, but Stratego is almost entirely hierarchical, so that there’s no difference between a “2" and a “7" (using the old numbers where the 1 is the strongest piece) other than its strength.  Only the engineers, scouts, bombs, spy, marshall, and flag are “unusual”, though many of them also participate in the hierarchy.   And each of them offers just a single exception to the rules.  There’s a hierarchy in my prototype as well, but submarines and aircraft make it considerably more complex, as some ships can sink the subs, subs can sink some ship types if the sub is the attacker, and the aircraft are all over the place and may combine in attack (two can move at once, remember).  In other words, there are a lot more exceptions.


I saw what we might call “resistance to too many choices” in relation to one of my playtest prototypes (World War II naval) vaguely related to Stratego.  A casual player who loves Stratego, and played well, quickly buckled when playing my prototype.  There were too many choices, too much freedom of movement.  Stratego has lots of pieces, with a piece to board space ratio of 80:92.  The number of movement choices is very much limited by the board and setup.  In my prototype, though there were fewer pieces (25 per side for a total of 50), there were many more hexagons (13 by 12 for 156, piece to board ratio 1:3); the length of the “border” between the two players was much longer (12 or 13 hexes instead of 6 squares); and all pieces had a choice of moving two in a straight line as well as one space.  (Aircraft can move in segments, and two can move in a turn, much more complex than scout movement in Stratego.)   Even the winning conditions are more complicated in my game.  In Stratego you only have to take the non-moving enemy flag.  In my game you need to get a merchant ship to the other side of the map, or wipe out all the four opposing merchant ships, which can move of course.

In both games the uncertain identity of opposing pieces helps avoid over-analysis, thus simplifying the mental task.   Seeing the casual player’s reaction was quite a lesson to me, as I had thought that fewer pieces would simplify the game and bring it closer to the mass-market.  But it became clear that I’d need to reduce the number of pieces even further, given the other parameters.  (Veteran wargamers have no problem with 25 pieces per side, since they’re only moving one or two at a time.  Imagine how tough it would be on casual players if all the pieces could move at once, as in traditional hex and counter wargames.)

I’ve described this at some length because the heart of my inquiry has become, what do we do in designing games that makes them less like the classics, or more important,  makes them less comfortable for players?  It’s not just choice, or chess would not be as popular as it is.  It’s a combination of things.



Games with no uncertainty, such as chess and checkers, promote “analysis paralysis” as a player tries to find the very best move: because there IS a very best move, which is not true of most games with uncertainty (and which is why chess and checkers are essentially puzzles, because there’s an always-correct solution).  For most purposes you wouldn’t want to design a game today that lacks uncertainty.  (Of course, in the real world uncertainty is ever-present; games without uncertainty are usually abstract, and abstract games are hard to sell.)

(And as an aside, if chess did not exist and was published today, I think it would be just another not-very-successful game, not a hit.  It promotes severe “analysis paralysis”, which is why we have chess clocks, and there’s a huge advantage to first-mover.  Moreover, it ends in a draw about a third of the time.  Plus, abstract games are hard to sell.  And it only accommodates two players (I know three and four player variants exist, but likely don’t work well by the nature of the game).  Doesn’t sound good, does it?)



With the above in mind, about a year ago I tried to figure out what an “ideal” introductory wargame would be like.  One of the pretty obvious characteristics was “10 to 15 pieces per side”.  And not moving all the pieces at once.  (In fact, I realize I arrived at close to the same solution as Shenandoah’s Battle of the Bulge iPad game, that only pieces from two or three areas could move in one turn.)   I also think the number of spaces must be limited, thus prohibiting the prospect of a board of hundreds of hexagons.  In other words, keep it to the kinds of parameters we see in most of the games mentioned above.     If the game can have both strategic and tactical elements it is a better introduction to the possibilities of typical wargames.  I’ve ended up with a (two part geomorphic) area board for strategic movement, and a hex board for battles.  There’s also an economy, which is what separates war games from battle games, though the economy does not dominate play.

Unfortunately I haven’t been real excited by playtest results, perhaps because the tactical element (which I adapted from a space wargame prototype where it is quite popular) isn’t yet perfected for land battles.  So I’ve set it aside for some months.


As I said in the title, these are ruminations, I have no hard-and-fast answers to my queries.  So rather than offer a solution, I’ll just end here.

A revolution in card printing capabilities may affect game design

In the OneBlogShelf blog Steve Wieck of DriveThruCards describes what he calls a revolution in card printing capabilities. http://oneblogshelf.blogspot.ca/2013/09/the-coming-revolution-in-card-game.html  His company is no longer tied to traditional sheet printing methods and can now print individual cards, though still using ink rather than toner for higher quality.  He suggests that this can cause a revolution and how card games are designed:

    1. Offer your deck-building or customizable card game as a collection of single card products, selling as singles at prices you determine
   
    2. Allow your fans to create their own cards and have them printed.
   
    3. Imagine a card game where no two cards ever printed for the game are the same.
   
    . . . the idea of letting a game's community take over the design of new cards will seem alien to many publishers, at least until some pioneer marches boldly out into the daylight, engages their community in a viral community design and purchase loop, and reaps the rewards of doing so.
   
There is certainly some potential here for group designed games, but as a game designer and one who has taught game design.  It reminds me of the weakness of what often amounts to random design.

First, it reminded me of a game some of my students were making.  To set up pieces at the start of the game they took the pieces in hand and dropped them on the center of the board, and took the randomly determined positions.  This is a bad idea in most cases.  You are the game designer, you're the one who should pick the optimal setups, not let it be determined randomly, unless you have decided that a random set up is a sufficient improvement in replayability to compensate for the randomness of it.  Even then you should use controlled randomness not complete randomness.  For example, if you want to randomly place villages on four quadrants of a map, make sure that about the same number are in each quadrant.  But letting players design cards is a lot closer to complete randomness than to a game designer's best judgment.

Has there been a situation where players are able to make up rules, even if they are vetted by the person in charge?  Yes, role-playing games, especially old D&D.  I recall advising referees more than 30 years ago to make players earn their advantages, not to let players manufacture them through additional rules, because the average player was going to take every advantage he or she could get, rather than consider what was good for the game.

And is there a situation where official or semi-official rules made by variety of people proliferate to the detriment of the game?  Yes Third Edition D&D, where the D20 license and Wizards' own need to produce new products resulted in vast numbers of character classes and skills and feats, and an escalation of foolishness in the rush to have every character be a "one-man army".  If a referee didn't ban all that additional material he was doomed to a weak game, a sort of escalating arms race as players tried to find the additional material that most benefited them or that most advantaged their playing style.


Of course we should also remember that professional designers who have the benefit of the typical separation in CCGs between the people who conceive new cards and the people who develop them and decide whether to actually use them, still publish bad cards that then need to be banned because the have unfortunate effects on the game.  Now translate that to ordinary players making up cards that they think are cool - and which are probably designed to benefit their style of play.  You are going to have lots of bad cards.  (Someone said the other day that Yu-Gi-Oh has become a very brief game because there are so many powerful (over-powerful?) cards.  If that's true, then the designers have lost control of the game, even though they're the ones issuing the new cards.)

So let's recognize the other side of this revolution: players being players, if you let players help design the game it's likely to be a worse game than it was before, unless your primary objective is mere variety.  Now it's certainly true that variety has more or less replaced gameplay depth as the desirable objective for contemporary game design, so this may work out for some people.  But to me the game designer should control what's IMpossible in a game, though this is not the extreme kind of control a novelist has because a novelist controls exactly what is possible.  The game designer sets the constraints and borders and walls, but lets players make things happen within those walls.  If players are designing the cards or the rules - and of course cards are part of the rules - then the game designer loses much of his ability to define constraints. 

But just as there are ways of interactive storytelling where the listeners also tell the story, there may be ways for games to prosper without many constraints.  Neither idea attracts me, I'm afraid.  Constraints actually encourage creativity.  I'd much rather have a professional writer convey the story to me, and I'd much rather have a professional game designer arrange the game for me.

***

My brief, free, audio-visual class Introduction to Game Design is now open at
https://www.udemy.com/brief-free-introduction-to-game-design/  The "What You'll Discover" lecture from the course is on youtube at http://youtu.be/VjU8qPU0bTE.

My book “Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" is available from mcfarlandpub.com or Amazon (paper or Kindle). (Books-a-Million has an eBook version at http://bit.ly/PQQqh3.)  It's currently discounted on Amazon to less than $26 for the paperback.

Audio-visual course Get a Job in the Video Game Industry, $15 (or use this coupon URL for 20% off): https://www.udemy.com/get-a-job-in-the-video-game-industry/?couponCode=VideoGameJobs20%25Off or use the coupon code: VideoGameJobs20%Off
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I am @lewpuls on Twitter.  (I average much less than one post a day, almost always about games, not about other topics.)  Web: http://pulsiphergames.com/

Video Wargame Conversions from the Tabletop

I've recently become quite interested in conversions between video games and tabletop games, especially wargames.  I've been recruited by a large publisher to propose a book about wargame design that will first be about video games because that's where the big market is.  On the other hand, there aren't many video games that are real wargames, at least in the definition I'm going to use, which requires games where reasoning is the primary requirement for winning the game, as opposed to the athleticism that's necessary in shooters and real-time strategy games.  In fact, the book will probably be called “Strategic Wargame Design” because I need to limit the topic, so as to cover it reasonably in not much more than 100,000 words.  Tactical games, whether video or tabletop, will be practically excluded.  E.g. miniatures will get about 500 words in the entire book.

So I was happy to find that Shenandoah Games was at WBC.  They are group of people who have been involved in tabletop games for many years who decided to form a company to make video games that are essentially conversions from tabletop games for the iPad.  Why the iPad?  First, it's a very large market.  Second, it provides a convenience of use that attracts many people and is particularly suited to the kinds of short session games that are now very common in the video game world, where you play a game for 5 minutes and then do something else and then play the game again for 5 minutes, perhaps later in the day or on an other day.  Their first product is a Battle of the Bulge game.  (World War II is as popular as all other eras and settings for wargames altogether.)

The company actually creates a paper version of a game before they program it for the iPad (and some iPhones).  Unfortunately, this means that the strengths of the computer for realistic wargames are ignored.  For example, the computer is obviously stronger for fog of war than the tabletop.  It is also stronger for command-and-control simulation than the tabletop, because the computer can keep track of details that would be onerous for tabletop players, and that ought to be hidden from the players.  But there's always a dichotomy in wargames between what's actually realistic - war is a “big mess” - and what's fun to play as a game.  Wargame players like to control what happens, they like to feel that they succeed or fail because of their own actions.  Yet in war there's an awful lot of chance, as epitomized by the poem about a nation being lost for want of a nail in a horseshoe.  So we can present the wargame player with a big mess that he tries to sort out, and that might be attractive to the improviser style of player.  But for the planner style of player (more in the chess player mode) this is absolutely horrible.  Perhaps that's one reason why I prefer strategic and grand strategic rather than tactical games (for the most part - I like old D&D), because as you go to a higher scale there's less messiness.

Perhaps I ought to explain what I mean by "messy".  In a real war, a commander barely knows what's going on within his immediate sight.  He doesn't know how well his units are going to actually act under fire, he doesn't know where most of them really are, he doesn’t know where the enemy is for the most part, he doesn’t know how well the enemy units are going to react under fire, he doesn’t know how well his commanders are going to follow orders, he doesn't know how well his commanders are going to react to changed situations when they receive orders that are an hour old or a day old, and the situation is changed from what the overall commander understood - or he never understood it to begin with owing to all these limitations. 

It's one hell of a big mess, and I haven't even thrown in supply problems and problems of cooperation with air forces and navies and large-scale units that are not under the command of the particular general.  Successful generals have to be very flexible, though paradoxically they need to plan a lot before the action. And to be successful they need "Yomi", the ability to read the minds and intentions of their opponents.  Yet this is not what the minimax player is particularly interested in, and frequently is not what the planner is interested in.

(For more about styles of play see my book, or read an online version: http://fortressat.com/blogs-by-members/3216 )


Shenandoah chose to be able to create a paper prototype that would be very closely emulated on the computer, despite the limitations this imposed on the computer's ability to reflect the reality of the big mess.  In Battle of the Bulge there is no fog of war, there is no calculation of movement of orders and successful or unsuccessful understanding of orders, of orders getting lost, orders being ignored, subordinates being insufficiently competent (or quite brilliant), and so forth that would emulate the reasons why command and control problems occur.  Instead, they try to emulate the way a commander may not be able to control everything by using “activations,” but these are activations that the player chooses rather than activations determined by pulling random chits out of cups or being dealt random cards.  So in each day of the Battle of the Bulge, the player chooses in his turn one area that has not yet been activated, then he can move all of the units in that area wherever they choose to go.  Battles caused by the movement are then resolved.  A random interval of time passes and it's the opponent's turn to choose one area and move.  No area can be selected more than once in a day. The command and control difficulties really come into it because of the passage of time after each move.  The day may end before all the player's units have been able to act. 

The game includes supply lines.  It also recognizes that the Germans literally ran out of gas and reflects that at the appropriate time, by choosing a German unit that cannot move that day, and it recognizes that the weather changed and made things very difficult for the Germans owing to Allied air superiority.


The other advantage of this limited activation design is that there is relatively little downtime between play by one player and play by the other player.  It's a back-and-forth choosing of one area at a time and moving a few division- or occasionally regiment-sized units.  This also simplifies what the computer needs to calculate, such that the developers have been able to get the Battle of the Bulge to work on iPhones down to the 3GS, with a few minor changes because the small screen.  The program also works on all iPads.   It's also possible to use the computing power in conjunction with iOS to provide a computer opponent or "AI" for those who aren't playing against another human.  The AI doesn't need to deal with much change because the opponent has only been able to activate one area since the last turn of the computer opponent. 

This also makes it easy for play through the Internet.  A player can take his turn and send it to the Apple Game Center whose use comes free with iOS, I'm told.  The turn goes to the opponent's computer where it executes on his iPad, and he can then take his own turn and send it back to the first player.

iPad/iPhone owners are willing to pay much more for apps than Android owners, with less piracy as well.  Shenandoah is able to sell their game for $10, more than typical mobile apps but much less than a typical tabletop or well-known video game.

I was able to talk at some length with Shenandoah producer Jeff Dougherty at WBC.  They come from the boardgame side and their primary market is boardgame players, although buyers tend to be somewhat younger than the wargamers we see at WBC, and they get more people from the video side than one might expect.

Jeff explained a technical reason why they don't use fog of war.  It turns out that the "model view control" method of programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller )  means that it's a lot harder to program fog of war that I thought. 

As related to wargames, in this method of programming the "model" is all the information the computer needs to be able to act, the "viewer" shows the particular player what they can see, and “control” is what the player does to manipulate the game.   To have a computer opponent you effectively must have a separate viewer for the computer opponent, because otherwise it uses the model itself, and then has access to information that a player shouldn't have.  In other words, if you use fog of war the programming becomes more complicated.



A Complete Digression:

Some readers might be interested in the following.  The first draft of this post was "written" as I was driving from WBC to my home in southern North Carolina.  I dictated it to a Sony digital voice recorder that has been recommended for use with my Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition program.  When I got home I transferred the file to my desktop, ran it through the transcription program, and then edited it and added to it as necessary.  Why would I do this?  Well, when you become a senior citizen your efficiency in simple tasks like typing begins to deteriorate.  In addition, I have arthritis in my fingers, which is a big part of the problem.  Though I used to be a demon typist, I would much rather talk to the computer, even to the proxy of the voice recorder, than type.  Voice recognition is still far from perfect, even on a quad core I7 processor with 9 gigs of RAM, but it's not too bad.  And it is ever so much more relaxing than typing.  Last of all, of course, I can't be typing while I'm driving.  But when the traffic on the Interstates is light as it was on part of the trip,  I can dictate while I drive.

This dictation takes some practice, but I've used Dragon NaturallySpeaking quite a bit.  It's not like writing at a computer, however, as I don't see what I'm saying, whereas when I use Dragon Naturally Speaking at a computer it recognizes what I say and shows it on the screen almost immediately.  When I'm talking to the voice recorder I have nothing to show me what I've said in the past.  But it's still a lot better than nothing.
***
My brief, free, audio-visual class Introduction to Game Design is now open at
https://www.udemy.com/brief-free-introduction-to-game-design/

My book “Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" is available from mcfarlandpub.com or Amazon (paper or Kindle). (Books-a-Million has an eBook version at http://bit.ly/PQQqh3.)  It's currently discounted on Amazon to less than $26 for the paperback.

I am @lewpuls on Twitter.  (I average much less than one post a day, almost always about games, not about other topics.)  Web: http://pulsiphergames.com/

GenCon (and WBC) 2013

If you've never been to GenCon you might not realize the scope of the convention.  Last year there were more than 40,000 attendees and I suspect yet more this year.  The convention is spread out over the Indiana Convention Center, which is very large - immensely larger than Origins' Columbus Convention Center - and *eight* large hotels.  The convention is not just about tabletop games, but also has a little bit of video games and a lot of anime, film, cosplay, comics, fiction writing - that's a big segment - and other cultures related to the gaming culture.  For example, I videoed the costume parade for five minutes and decided that was enough, though it lasted a few more minutes, several people walking past every couple seconds. 

Some physical services this year had problems compared with last year, such as frequently empty water coolers (or no cups) and bathrooms mostly out of toilet paper by late afternoon.  There were occasional shortages of the convention schedule book as well.  All this might indicate a higher-than-anticipated attendance, and they had already anticipated a record.

WBC in Lancaster, PA, is essentially a family convention.  Don Greenwood (Mr. Avalon Hill) took it upon himself to make this convention a success after Avalon Hill was sold to Hasbro, who really didn't want the company (they wanted the game Diplomacy) and shut it down.  Don himself can occasionally be a gruff fellow, but he definitely wants the convention to be pleasant for families.  And I see many of the gamers I know bringing their sons, daughters, or wives to the convention.  The 21 year-old who nearly won the Britannia tournament this year is a son of another player.  Although the female contingent is not much seen playing wargames, which are dominated by salt-and-pepper haired old farts, they play in many of the Eurostyle and other non-wargame tournaments.  And when you see many dozens of people playing Ticket to Ride you know what's more popular with younger people than wargames.  As someone pointed out at the Avalon Hill reunion this year, board wargaming is essentially a hobby of the baby boomer generation.

GenCon, on the other hand, is a story convention, and not just stories in games, but also stories in film and comics and novels and anime.  For me it's a much more impersonal convention, but unlike WBC and PrezCon where I know the guys who play Britannia, and so have a group of gamers to talk with, at GenCon (and Origins, when I go) I do not.  There isn't an emphasis on families at GenCon, though I don't doubt that many families attend.  The impersonal feeling may also be because WBC is attended by some 1500+ people while GenCon is attended by more than 40,000 people.



I was at GenCon from about 8 AM to as late is 11:00 PM on three days, and on the morning of Sunday until 11:30. In the entire convention at any given time there might be dozens or even hundreds of people visible, but you are unlikely to see any particular person by chance.  I know of three people for my gaming group who attended; I saw two of them (a couple) on Thursday at a distance, and they came to my talk on Sunday.  I didn't see the other one at all, even though he's over 6 foot and stands out pretty well.  And of course, they might've's seen me, but didn't.  I saw Tom Vasel once and once only.  I saw Matt Forbeck only once.  Robert Mosimann of Excalibur Games was there and had a booth, but his booth was not in the list so that I didn't know he was there, and I didn't see him.  40,000 people is two big basketball stadiums or one small football stadium full of people.  I don't have much of an idea how big the exhibition hall is, but certainly big enough to hold an American football field or a soccer field.  If you walk from one end to another when the hall isn't crowded - which is to say, when it isn't open to the public - it takes several minutes.

The rooms for speakers often could hold 150 people, though there are rarely that many.  It seemed that 40 was a much more common number for an audience.  I didn't spend much time in the game playing halls, but the numbers of players are ridiculous.  As I was leaving on Sunday I saw a huge hall filled with with what must have been at least 100 large tables of role-playing gamers.  (In that environment, how they were able to hear their GMs is beyond me.)  And that was just one of several halls that were full of gamers MOST of the time.  Sunday is the day when many of the attendees have already gone home, yet that enormous room was full (D&D tournament, evidently).

This year I was one of 30 "Industry Insider Guests of Honor."  That meant I didn't have to pay for a badge, I got into the dealer room an hour early on Thursday - well, 50 minutes, after I walked to four entrances and more than a quarter mile to find an entrance where they'd let me in - and I participated in four panels.  It would have been five, but one was  suggested by a GoH who was unable to come to the con, and though I offered to do it anyway GenCon decided to cancel it.  Being GoH also meant people could look at my badge, not recognize my name, and ask me what I did to be rated GoH.  That didn't bother me much, as I hadn't recognized some of the names of the GoH when I first saw the list - the selection is very broad, and most of the people work full-time in the industry, which I have never done.

So much of the time I sat on panels, or did my four solo seminars, or listened to panels of fiction writers (many aspects of the business of game design are similar to aspects of fiction writing).  I've decided that successful adventure fiction writers, by and large, are really smart people who are good at thinking on their feet.  Or maybe that's only the ones who come to conventions.  Most notable writers: Brandon Sanderson and Mercedes Lackey.  (And her husband and fellow Media Guest of Honor, Larry Dixon, is a cover artist, did the eagles in LoTR and The Hobbit, is an editor, game designer, and writer himself, and is a bit of a jokester to boot!)

And the rest of the time I talked with publishers and gamers (and McFarland's managing edtor) in the exhibition hall and at the game designers meet and greet.

Whereas at WBC and PrezCon there are so many gray-haired folks (including me), at GenCon there are so many younger people that sometimes I felt like I came from a different era.


The only untoward incident (other than feeling my age in a variety of ways) occurred Saturday before a panel.  I came early and sat down in the middle of the dais, and another Guest of Honor turned up and asked if I was going to run things like I had (in his mind) on a previous panel.

Before the convention, I'd asked panelists via email about asking a few questions of the audience when we were setting up.  And I said I wasn't volunteering to be a moderator because I had four solo seminars to deal with. I evidently said something in the discussion that somehow rubbed this panelist the wrong way.   And he thought there was no need for a moderator.  I think that works sometimes, sometimes not, but said I wouldn't worry about it.

So when he said I'd run the earlier panel, I said something like "did I?"  Yeah, he said, and I'd talked 40 of the 60 minutes (and there was more).  (The time is something I can actually check as I recorded the session.)  I said "no way" and after that, "get out of town" with an accent from the old Joe Pesci commercial.  And he turned around and walked out of the room, and didn't come back!  Which was neither adult behavior nor proper for a panelist.

So I was the only one of four panelists when the start time rolled around, but soon after the other two came (having been at other events, with a schedule that leaves no time for travel from one event to the next), and both had a lot to say about playtesting, so I didn't have to say much.  I did disagree with them insofar as they were looking at it from the angle of recent association with big companies, whereas the audience didn't have that advantage and had to find playtesters in less satisfactory ways.  It's easier to get playtesting done when a big company says "we're going to publish this game, we need playtesters."

In about 50 minutes on Thursday morning I managed to walk through most of the exhibition hall aisles and speak briefly to a few people and listen to a talk about a four player chess game.  I asked the designer, how do you avoid turtling?  Essentially it's through a time limit and giving points for killing pieces, so that if somebody turtles they are not going to have any points.  He said in one of the early games some years ago a professional chess player played and immediately turtled, but that time they didn't have the time delay and he didn't have to worry about the points.  The other three players happily chopped each other up, but they finally realized what was going on and  proceeded to attack the professional chess player and wipe him out. 

The game is also unusual in having some spaces behind where you set up your pieces - it's a four corners arrangement - that give you access to more of the files and ranks for pieces like bishops and rooks, and also an area of four squares at the very center of the board where pawns, knights, and Kings can effectively position themselves in any of those four squares before they move, thus giving them much greater flexibility, and ability to hold the center.

[Interjection: here's a difference between an experienced and relatively inexperienced designer.  It's obvious, to me, that any chess game for more than two players is going to have turtling problems that must be solved by some rule change.  That's because it's a battle game, with no economy to speak of.  Perhaps it wasn't obvious to the designer of this game, when that professional chess player playtested the game.]

I didn't have the time or energy to wander through many of the vast halls full of gamers playing games, and I don't play games myself at conventions, figuring I can play them at home.  I can't say I saw anything in the exhibit hall that really caught my attention. 

The most notable events were arranged by James Mathe of Minion Games.  One was an evening "speed date" for game designers, where some 70 game designers brought their prototypes and 10 publishers swaps tables every 5 minutes looking at the prototypes.  I was only there for 10 minutes, but it was scheduled for four hours.  Evidently some contracts have already resulted.  I didn't think to count, but my recollection is that most of the games were cardgames, few were boardgames, and perhaps not surprisingly, given the event, most of the prototypes were much prettier than I am accustomed to.

The other was a game designer "meet and greet" in a portion of the Hyatt ballroom rented by Mathe at considerable expense.  (When I asked him why he spent four figures of dollars to do this, he didn't have a concrete answer; I suspect there's a philanthropic side behind his formidable exterior, especially given his other activities that benefit inexperienced designers in his blog and on Facebook.)  A few game manufacturers spoke briefly and then more than 100 designers raised the sound level to "it's hard to hear" level.

From a game design point of view, my biggest takeaway was that we in tabletop gaming have reached a point similar to what has happened in video gaming, where "discoverability" is the number one problem in game design.  If someone doesn't know your game dexists, he can't buy it or play it.  Especially in the mobile game sector in video games, there are so many new games every week that without a lot of luck no particular game can be in the awareness of very large numbers of gamers.  I was told they were 800 new tabletop games at Essen last year and I suppose that number will be closer to 1000 this year.  As a result, just as in the video game world, the marketing possibilities of a game become much more important than whether it's a good game to play.  In the video game world few games are played very long before someone moves on to the next game, and I see this phenomenon becoming common in the tabletop world where a game is only played one or two or three times before players move on to something else.  The games don't have to be good games in the old sense of games that you are happy to play over and over and over again, rather they have to be games that have a marketing hook and that look good and sound good when described (the latter especially for Kickstarter).  And not surprisingly, the typical published game is pretty weak, especially those coming out of Kickstarter.  This is a great contrast with the past when, if you designed a game that was really good to play you had a reasonable chance of getting it published.  Now whether the game is really good to play is pretty unimportant.

New games also are leaning much more to the abstract, usually with an "atmosphere" or "canvas" tacked on after the fact (something that does not affect the play or design of the game) to help sell.  (A striking example is a Kickstarter for the Viking game hnefetafl that has been overlayed with Cthulu vs. Vikings . . . http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1569862606/cthulhu-vs-the-vikings-the-game-and-the-comic?ref=live .)  New games that are models of some reality (including fictional realities), typical of wargames, just aren't seen much in non-wargames, and then the models are frequently tenuous.  These are trends, of course, not absolutes - you can find lots of counterexamples.

I'll have more to say about trends in games in a separate post.

The Movement Toward Simpler Game Devices

I recently read a blog post that asserted that the idea behind "the PC is dying" isn't that it will go away but that people are content with much simpler devices that do what they need to do and don't require the complexity of a PC.  Those much simpler devices are tablets and smartphones.

This matches my view of the early history of video gaming, after the big crash in the early 80s.  At that point the Commodore 64 and Atari 800 computers played fine games, and I thought there would never be another console like the Atari 2600.  Of course I was wrong; I had completely underestimated human fear of the keyboard.  People bought their children Nintendos rather than Commodores and Ataris because there was no keyboard, because the device was easy use, because it was sufficient for their needs.  Their children might've wanted a computer, but the parents didn't want to put up with that (and didn't want to have to help the child figure out the computer); and the computers were little more expensive.

Of course we still have desktop computers and play games on them and high-end PCs are much more powerful than the consoles, just as was true after the 80s crash.  The PS4 and Xbox One, like the PS3 and Xbox 360, are computer wannabes that will be less powerful than some computers the day they are first sold, and will be less powerful than a great many gamer computers within a year or two.  Yet they are simpler devices, and a lot of people prefer the simpler device.  But now the consoles have competition from other devices that can achieve the same simplification and avoidance of a keyboard that thrust the Nintendo forward - tablets and smartphones.  It seems to me likely that because of competition from tablets and smartphones the new consoles will not sell nearly as well as the ones we're using now.

It is the Age of Convenience (which includes battery-powered mobility), far more than in the early 1980s, and the Age of Instant Gratification, and the Age of the "Easy Button" (as popularized by Staples).  Already, the Nintendo handheld 3DS outsells other "consoles" despite a slow start.  The impetus toward use of devices that are just sufficient to the purpose, that avoid unnecessary complication, and that provide the convenience of mobility, is even stronger now than it was 30 years ago, so I expect the popularity of tablets and smartphones to have quite a strong effect on sale of new consoles.  It's partly a matter of price and of what else people want to do on the tablets and smartphones that is not game playing.  The latest iPad is expensive, but tablets like the iPad Mini and the Google Nexus 7 cost less than the new consoles.

Sony has appealed strongly to core gamers to try to counteract the move to smaller, simpler devices.  Microsoft has tried to position their new console as the central device for the household (or at least, the living room), associating it with TV and other traditionally living-room activities even as people are less and less likely to watch TV in the living room, often watching on computers instead.  Neither approach appears likely to counteract the trend to simpler devices, I think.  Time will tell.

How not to start a print game magazine

Of course, given the trends in publishing it would be very wise not to start a print magazine.  Game Developer Magazine, a venerable print magazine for videogame professionals published by the same company that owns the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and Gamasutra.com, recently closed down.  It was always profitable but not sufficiently so to keep it alive in the current climate.  The World Wide Web is effectively a competitor with magazines, and I’ve seen in the video game fan magazines how competition from websites has changed the nature of Gameinformer and PC Gamer.  The reviews always appear much later than the reviews on the web, so both magazines now devote a large fraction of their now-thin printed form to extensive previews of unpublished games.  Print magazines are not sufficiently immediate for the Age of Instant Gratification.


But if you’re going to start one, and you want the largest possible pool of contributors, then your writers’ guidelines should not omit some of the things I’ve just seen omitted from a recently started print game magazine’s guidelines.

First, you need to say what rights are involved.  Dragon Magazine for example, about 30 years ago decided to start buying all rights to any article, and that’s when I stopped writing for Dragon because I won’t sell all rights to anything.  (I typically sell first world serial rights.)  That policy continued when the magazine was farmed out to Piezo Publishing, required by Wizards of the Coast.  But electronic rights are also important.  Not so many years ago the New York Times had a dispute with authors when it began to post electronic versions of print stories online, and ultimately lost any right to do so if I recall correctly.  So if the magazine publishes an article in its print version does it also have rights to publish it online if it so chooses?

Secondly, it would be a good idea to say whether you’re actually going to pay the contributor, or even give them a free issue.  In these writers’ guidelines there’s not a word about any of that.

Third, if you want to cultivate a group of contributors then this policy is a really bad idea: “If we decide to use your article you will hear from us within three months. If we have not responded within three months then we will not be using your article at this time."  Sending a "rejection slip" by email make us a few seconds but doesn't cost a dime.  And if the editors don't like what you've contributed, but tell you why, you might be able to revise it to their satisfaction and it would help you with any further contributions.  Furthermore, email communication can be haphazard - try writing to any tabletop game publisher. 

Of course, many magazines require a letter of inquiry first; this one just says send the article.  To me that shows little respect for the entire process.

***
I've not had much chance to write blog posts this summer.  I have been heavily occupied creating a Udemy.com game design course, among other things.

Convention seminars: 
I'll be doing my usual talk at WBC ("Lew Pulsipher's Annual Game Design 'Seminar'").   As much as I can say (and hear) about game design in the time people want to listen (two hours plus, usually).  Since my book that's strictly about game design has been published, I'll focus more this year on the business of game licensing and marketing, including protection of intellectual property.  And a bit about self-publishing.   Thursday, 1600 (4 PM), Hopewell.

At GenCon:  all in ICC 242, scheduled for 1 hour (though I'll stay longer if the room is available)
Game Design Business: Getting the Attention of Publishers 8/15/2013 7:00:00 PM
Game Design Business: Protecting your Intellectual Property 8/16/2013 3:00:00 PM
Game Design Business: Publishing (and Funding) 8/17/2013 1:00:00 PM
Of Course You Can Design a Game, But Can You Design a Good One? 8/18/2013 10:00:00 AM

I'll also be on five panels as an "Industry Insider Guest of Honor":
SEM1350865 Designing Analog Games with Digital Futures Thursday 11:00 AM 1 hr $0
SEM1350876 Intelligent Design: Evolution of Rules Thursday 1:00 PM 1 hr $0
SEM1350891 Putting More History in Your Story Thursday 4:00 PM 1 hr $0
SEM1351061 How We Began Saturday 2:00 PM 1 hr $0
SEM1350872 How to Maximize Effective Playtesting Saturday 4:00 PM 1 hr $0

***
My book “Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish" is available from mcfarlandpub.com or Amazon (paper or Kindle). (Books-a-Million has an eBook version at http://bit.ly/PQQqh3.)
I am @lewpuls on Twitter.  (I average much less than one post a day, almost always about games, not about other topics.)  Web: http://pulsiphergames.com/

Is a 15 minute game too short?

I was sufficiently stimulated by seeing this question on boardgame designers’ forum (BGDF) to write the following.

First, game length must be commensurate with what your target market gets out of playing the game.  A five hour game is okay if your target market is willing to play five hour games and finds sufficient interest in yours.  A 15 minute game is okay if your target market likes that and gets sufficient enjoyment out of the game.

Second, in a century of many distractions and opportunities for leisure time, and a sharp decrease in attention spans, games are rapidly getting shorter.  When people play games they are more likely to do other things (especially messing with their phones) than in the past, so they are less likely to notice or remember what’s going on, and a long game simply exacerbates those problems.

Also, people value variety more than depth nowadays (related to the “cult of the new”).  I recall years ago at a game designers’ meeting one person saying he wanted to play games all day but none that took more than an hour - perhaps now a common attitude.  If your game is short but has lots of variety so that a person can play it more times and experience more variety in a given length of time, you can satisfy this attitude.

So for marketing purposes a shorter game is more practical than a longer game.

Third, it’s a lot easier to get sufficient playtesting for a short game than for a long one.  First, you can play it more times in a given length of time.  Second, a short game inevitably has less to it than a long game so there is less interaction of its parts and less to fix.  In this respect it’s like symmetric versus asymmetric games, there’s less to fix in symmetric games when you’re playtesting.  Third, you can find more potential playtesters for a short game than for a long one, perhaps fitting in between longer games at a playtest session.

Fourth, if your objective is to provide some kind of depth - variety is not depth - then a short game is more difficult to design than a long one.  And that’s true regardless of the kind of depth you want to provide, whether gameplay depth, story/narrative depth, puzzle depth, or model/simulation depth.  Depth of any kind involves players making significant decisions, and players make fewer such decisions in short games, other things being equal.  Any of those kinds of depth are going to be harder to provide as the game is shorter.

When I began to offer the third edition(s) of Britannia to publishers, one of them immediately said it would have to be cut down drastically from the FFG version, much too long.  Indeed, I have two standalone shorter versions of the game, and the introductory version of the Epic version will be 2-3 hours, not 4-5.  I expect the new 90 minute version will garner much more interest than the 4-5 hour version, from the marketplace, even though the long version has a long and successful history.


Most likely, inexperienced designers will err on the side of putting too much into a game and of making it too long.   I prefer to simplify as much as the objectives of the game will allow:  "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.  Another form, about Japanese gardening actually, is "Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else that you can remove."

But video game designers and some board and card game designers, being accustomed by and large to making interactive puzzles with correct solutions, where greater complexity makes the puzzle harder, have every incentive to make a game more complex, which usually means longer. 


When a game involves different stages or phases, where the immediate objectives of the players change, then it can be longer without becoming predictable or tedious.  See http://gamasutra.com/blogs/LewisPulsipher/20120624/172937/Phases_in_Games.php .


Consider also that the same game can be a 20 minute game for casual players, and a much longer game for serious players.  On BGDF one person called draughts (checkers) and Blokus 20 minute games, but when played by experts checkers is much longer, and Blokus is probably longer when played "seriously".

Some games get longer when played by experts - that's why we have chess clocks - while other games get shorter.  E.g. Britannia is 7 or so hours when played by novices, 4-5 hours (and sometimes less) when played by experts.  What makes the difference?  Part of it is familiarity with the rules and the strategies.  Perhaps another difference is the type of game.  If the game is puzzle-like - chess and checkers can be solved, there is always a best move - then with experts the game takes longer, while if it is a game that cannot be solved, with experts it takes less time to play.  Some puzzle-games are so easily solved - Tic-tac-toe is the obvious example - that they aren’t long games, but as the puzzles become more complex, playing time among “experts” is likely to rise drastically as they look for the single best move. 


Designers looking for commercial publication also need to consider the cost of the game compared with the length.  Expensive, very short, games may feel sufficiently valuable to customers.  Certainly, there are games that last "forever" ("monster" wargames) that people are willing to pay over $100 for, but you'd be hard-put to find a short game that people would pay as much for (usually it would be a deluxe edition, such as the $380 Settlers version - not that Settlers is a very short game).


From the players’ point of view, the question is always, is the enjoyment the game provides worth the amount of time expended?  And the best guide for that is playtesting the game with lots of different people from your target market.  If the players say the game ended abruptly, perhaps it needs to be longer.  If players in the target market start to lose interest then it's too long.  If the player who is ahead after half the game virtually always wins, then the game should be about half as long. 



So we can never say in general that a 15 minute game or even a five-minute game is “too short”, but it can be too short for certain kinds of game players and certain kinds of design objectives.

May 2013 Miscellany

Thoughts about some game-related topics that are not long enough for separate blog posts.
**
As I read the rules for the 2013 Game Chef contest, the "self-plagiarism" component of this one struck me as bizarre:
"Rule on Previous Work
You may draw on concepts you have thought about or worked on before the contest, but everything you submit must be new work, not existing material. Plagiarism or self-plagiarism will get your game disqualified."

It reminded me of the education community, where "self-plagiarism" is regarded as wrong, and many teachers will flunk a student for doing it.
If you've done the work, why shouldn't you use it?  Both in a class, and in a game design contest.

Game Chef is a sort of "Game Jam" for tabletop games, conducted over nine days, and judged by the participants.  The games tend to be RPGs.
This year's contest starts 17 May.  http://gamechef.wordpress.com/

**
This year I was at PrezCon, will be at WBC, will be at GenCon as an "Industry Insider Guest of Honor", will not be at Origins.  I didn't attend ECGC this year.

I will have games to playtest, of course.

I'm interested in talking with people about the nature of game design.  (Which can be really interesting, believe me.)  You don't need to be an expert, you don't even need to be a game designer, because the players are more important than the designers . . .

Convention seminars:
I'll be doing my usual talk at WBC ("Lew Pulsipher's Annual Game Design "Seminar").   As much as I can say (and hear) about game design in the time people want to listen (two hours plus, usually).  Since my book that's strictly about game design has been published, I'll focus more this year on the business of game licensing and marketing, including protection of intellectual property.  And a bit about self-publishing.   Thursday, 4PM.

At GenCon:  all in ICC 242
Game Design Business: Getting the Attention of Publishers 8/15/2013 7:00:00 PM
Game Design Business: Protecting your Intellectual Property 8/16/2013 3:00:00 PM
Game Design Business: Publishing (and Funding) 8/17/2013 1:00:00 PM
Of Course You Can Design a Game, But Can You Design a Good One? 8/18/2013 10:00:00 AM

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I've been reading the list of over 8,000 events for GenCon 2013.  GenCon is a story convention at least as much as a game convention, and it may be instructive that it's much larger than other hobby game conventions in the USA.  Stories are good for marketing, always epitomized by my experience looking through game libraries at conventions.  Most of the games in game libraries are Euro-ish games.  Many of them are essentially abstract games with atmospheres tacked on.  But when you look at the game box, it's all about the atmosphere, you rarely learn much about the actual gameplay.  Because stories sell games, though gameplay makes people play games repeatedly.

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Some college/university classes, like some games, are intended to be models of reality.  But as with games, the classes are often so far removed from reality, they can no longer pretend to be models.  They are abstract or purely theoretical.  In the best classes that are aimed at real-world jobs (not all are) you do things that represent what you'd do in the real world.

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A brief review of my game design book is in ARBA vol 44 p. 16: (final sentence) "Although a single book cannot substitute for education in game creation or practice, this book provides useful tips and resources for game designers and those interested in entering the field."  This is another professional, subscription only, journal so I cannot provide a URL (I got a non-convertible PDF from my publisher).

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 I've always thought it might be frustrating to be a Hollywood screenwriter, because the directors get so much more credit than the writers.  Yet even the best directors aren't going to make a good movie with a poor script.

I suspect the better directors are also better at recognizing good scripts and bad ones.  Are the "auteurs" in video games better at recognizing exceptionally good game ideas from lesser ones?

And this all seems to be muddied by the advent of "creative directors" in video game production.  The game designers appear to be shoved down to the status of mechanics adjusting bits of the game.

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Giving Victory Points for Fighting Battles

Occasionally I hear about a game that gives victory points (VP) for fighting a battle (not even just for winning, just for fighting).

Why would you do that?  From a modeling point of view, what’s the virtue of fighting a battle, especially one that you do not win?  In the real world, fighting a battle is one of the dumbest things you can do.  Or as Sir Winston Churchill said, "Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter."  And the best general is one who wins a war without casualties.

One reason to reward fighting that is common in video games, where the computer can easily track it, is that units gain experience, and ultimately gain new capabilities, through fighting.  Of course, you’ve got to survive to prosper.  And in tabletop games there is too much record-keeping involved in experience for individual units to make it practical. Still, that’s not victory points, it’s increased unit capability.

There are excuses for VP points for losing battles: it represents glory, causing fear in others, learning lessons that can be applied later; but then these should only apply to winners.  While we can argue that those who lose a battle learn more than the winners do, and this is often the case for a war as a whole, it is much less clear for individual battles.   You can’t learn anything useful if you’re dead or captured.

No, in virtually every case, I think, this kind of rule is added to encourage fighting where otherwise it may not be worthwhile.  That is, the gain in VP is worth the losses (physical and positional) when you lose a battle.

So why would a designer do it?  Awarding VP for fighting strongly implies that the game otherwise encourages “turtling,” that is, hiding out, staying out of battles, sitting on the sidelines, letting the other players beat each other up.  In other words, giving VP for fighting and not winning a battle is a kludge designed to save an otherwise flawed design.  (“Kludge” originally meant “a software or hardware configuration that, while inelegant, inefficient, clumsy, or patched together, succeeds in solving a specific problem or performing a particular task.”  But this term can be applied to game design just as well, just substitute "game design configuration" for "software hardware configuration".)

The most well-known game design kludge I can think of is in Risk, also to discourage turtling.  It’s the turn-in of territory cards for lots of armies.  Players must successfully attack at least one area to get a territory card, thus forcing turtles to do SOMEthing, to take at least one territory.  And no player can afford to stay out of the “card derby” because it yields (under American rules, at least) so many armies in the long run when you turn in sets of cards. 

Risk is hardly a model of the real world, but the card-play, in particular, has absolutely no correspondence to anything that happens in reality, it is analogous to nothing.  It is there only as a structural kludge.

The cards are also a kludge to bring the game to an end in a reasonable amount of time.  Without them, given the structure of the game, many games would last many, many hours.  With them, players can be wiped outn by the enormous influx of armies when someone turns in a set of cards, and the enormous reward for wiping out another player is that you gain his cards, which can lead to another turn-in for even more armies.


Now if you see a game design as just a collection of mechanics devised to allow certain things to occur, you might see awarding VPs for fighting as just one more mechanic.  If a game is abstract, this point of view is easier for me to understand.  But a non-abstract game is modeling some reality in some sense, and that's when this VP-for-fighting mechanic becomes an obvious kludge. 


So why the kludge to encourage attacking?  I think it’s because the rest of the game design is flawed.  What can a designer do to discourage turtling?

I discussed the turtling problem at length in the first chapter of the book Tabletop: Analog Game Design (chapter title, "The Three Player Problem") which is a free download at http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/content/tabletop-analog-game-design
  (the book consists of contributions from a couple dozen writers).

Briefly, you redesign that game so that it makes sense to fight despite losses that may occur.  Make what you gain from the battle more valuable, in the long run, than what you lose.  One way to do this is a zero-sum game, that is, you can only gain something if someone else loses it.  A turtle stays static while successful attackers get stronger.  Consequently, turtling doesn't lead to success. 

But even in a non-zero-sum game, if your gain is worth the losses - in the long run - then fighting makes sense.  This usually involves an economic game, often with a maintenance limit, that is, your economy must support existing assets before you get more, so the only way to increase your overall assets is to improve your economy.  If you can improve your economy peacefully, or improve it as much peacefully as you can belligerently, then you can turtle.  If improving your economy requires territorial expansion, you've got to attack, not turtle.  See my discussion of "The economic production cycle in games" at http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-economic-production-cycle-in-games.html .

Extreme uncertainty about who is ahead in the game also discourages turtling.  Turtling only makes sense when the turtle can see that he benefits by hanging back.

In games that are primarily tactical rather than economic, but for more than two players, the tendency is for everyone to turtle.  Consider three or four player chess.  Unless the rewards for attacking are very great, the only smart strategy is to sit back and let the others kill off one another - because there's virtually no economy to allow creation of new units (promoting a pawn is the exception). 

Fortunately, most tactical games, and most games depicting a set-piece battle, are for two players (or two sides, which amounts to the same thing).  Turtling is rarely a problem in a two (or one) player game.

Design your game so that you don't have to use VP to encourage fighting.

Three hats: the three parts of creating games

(While I begin by talking about RPGs, I am later going to generalize to all kinds of tabletop and video games - “sit-down games”.)

When I used to write lots of articles about RPGs for White Dwarf, Dragon, and other magazines three decades ago, I mostly wrote two kinds of things: game rules, and advice about how to play and especially how to referee Dungeons & Dragons successfully.  I rarely wrote settings; and only occasionally in the magazines did I write adventures, which are a combination of rules and setting/story.

When I thought about this further I realized that this can be generalized to any role-playing game: the person who creates the game is taking on three writing/designing tasks to a greater or lesser extent, the rules for the game, advice about how to play the game, and the setting (which includes at least the story that comes from hiSTORY) for the game.  Supplements to the game are almost always about setting/story, often with additional rules.  World-settings often include advice about how to use the setting, about how to successfully incorporate it into a campaign or base a campaign on it. 

TSR published several settings for AD&D such as Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Arabian Nights, and Forgotten Realms, after the original Greyhawk setting.  Some of Greyhawk was included with the AD&D rules, because it was Gary Gygax’s original campaign, but for the most part the original rules assumed a more or less Tolkien-like fantasy setting without being specific.

A world-setting supplement may be almost entirely about the “world,” about things like the geography of the world, how magic works in the world, who or what rules the world, and the history of the world.  If it’s the more narrow sense of setting, as in the context for a particular adventure, along with a story (more or less), then much of the “setting” is descriptions of locations and NPCs.  In adventures there are also rules in the sense of how the various obstacles to success work, as in “if the character walks across the pit trap there is a four in six chance it will activate and he will fall in”.  There may be additional monsters, magic items, and other explicit rules for play.

The world-setting is like the background of a novel, or a sort of bible, with the story being the history of the world.  The adventure setting is much more like a short story or (sometimes) novella.

Of course, some “world-settings” aren’t for an entire world, but may be for a single city and its environs (as in the Freeport series) or for a particular country or region (Arabian Nights).  They’re usually large enough to provide the basis for an entire campaign, and that’s why they’re usually called “world-settings”, for the player characters they are the entire world.

Video game RPGs, being based in software, usually tie world-setting and rules together inseparably.  If there’s a new world-setting, it’s usually an entirely new game to buy.

Some TSR tabletop world-settings for first and second edition AD&D were later adapted, if only in a magazine (e.g. Spelljammer in Dungeon Magazine), for the Third Edition rules.  Settings generally can be adapted to more than one ruleset.  Tolkien’s Middle-earth has been adapted several times, and many other settings that originate in movies or novels are then adapted to several rule sets over the years (e.g. Star Wars).

 

So you can write an RPG supplement that is almost entirely a description of a new world setting that can be adapted to many different games, such as the Freeport series and a great many other “D20" works.  Or you can write one that is specifically adapted to a particular game by including many rules for that game, for example the original Spelljammer setting for AD&D.  Or you can write an RPG supplement that has a specific setting and lots of rules for that setting, for example a dungeon adventure.

The more rules you include the more there’s a need for playtesting, though I’m pretty sure that rules included with world-settings often get little or no playtesting.  Someone who writes rules and doesn’t include advice such as examples of how to play is probably not doing an optimal job.

A Broader View

You can write a set of RPG rules that has virtually no setting attached, for example the free-to-download Fate rules.  But that set of rules is probably going to include some advice about how to use it successfully.  Think about it, any example of how to play, unless it’s very specifically about a particular rules, is a form of advice.

And of course you can write a supplement that is almost entirely advice about how to play RPGs successfully, either a specific RPG or RPGs in general such as Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering.

Adventures can be largely about rules or largely about story.  In the early days the adventures tended to be about rules, partly because they were written by people who were longtime wargamers.  More recently, published adventures are much more often strongly story-based, partly because many of the writers are frustrated (or even successful) novelists rather than wargamers.  Also there are so many adventures available that many people who buy adventures aren’t likely to actually run the game, but like to read them - and naturally it’s the story that attracts them more than the rules.

The easy-to-remember form of all this is that the person writing RPG material can be a game designer, a teacher, and a storyteller/historian, with the latter divided into “short stories” (the adventures) and long stories (the world settings).

Not Just RPGs

Once I arrived at this conclusion I realized that any tabletop or video game is a combination of these three things.  There are always rules or we wouldn’t have a game.  (Though some improvisational RPGs are pretty light on rules, these days.)  There is often advice about how to play the game in the form of examples of play if nothing else, but also strategy hints.  Completely abstract games have no setting or story, and there are many abstract tabletop games that are given a setting or story that actually has nothing to do with the game (this has been common in Eurogames).  But thematic games generally include a (his)story and setting, and many of the AAA video games are very thematic.

Puzzles also can have these three elements, but frequently have only one.  Most puzzles include little or no advice about how to “play” the puzzle. Tabletop puzzles rarely include a setting/story, whereas many video game puzzles, such as “adventure games,” are heavily connected to a story.  But all puzzles have to include an objective, which is a form of “game rule.”

Some toys have these three elements but typically a toy has neither rules nor goals, and many toys have no story - the “player” makes up the story.  So I can make paper boats - there are rules about how to make paper boats, but not what to do with them - and no particular story to follow: I make up my own.  So if I decide to put the paper boats in a tub of water, set them afire with burning paper airplanes, and sing “Stars & Stripes Forever” as they sink, that’s not something that was inherently part of the toy.  (My fifth grade teacher actually did this when she was a kid in days before TV - she was cool.)  Or if I have a set of race cars there’s an obvious implication that they’re going to be in a race but I have to decide everything else.  The striking thing about many modern commercial toys is that they almost always include a setting and often a story, so that the kids don’t have to figure out the main parts of usage themselves (with consequent deleterious effects on the development of imagination).

In video games of course much of what we’re talking about is incorporated into the software and not something that someone reads.  The rules are enforced by the software so that the player must play according to the rules (barring glitches in the programming of course!).  The advice comes in the form of the tutorials, and sometimes in all of the hints/quests/other pointers that advise the player what to do.  But video games tend to be light on advice about how to play because the software forces the player to follow the rules. 

The settings in a video game, whether short-term or long-term, are less often explicitly described than in published paper role-playing games.  This is partly because a video game offers other ways to describe and especially show the setting, and also because video gamers generally don’t read about the setting even when their character finds a virtual “book” or scroll that describes some of the setting - they just don’t bother.

Buyers versus players

It’s going to take a while to get to the point of buyers versus players: please bear with me.

In earlier posts I’ve wondered what the effect of free to play (F2P) video games would have on tabletop gaming.  We already know that it’s a disruptive force in video gaming.  F2P games have helped put pressure on AAA console games and have helped ruin the market for mid-level console games.  They also put video game developers in a dilemma, because F2P requires the game to hold back some of the things that make it enjoyable in order to persuade the players to spend real money. It creates a divide between the players who don’t spend money, and consequently must spend time to equal the advantages of those who spend money, or who simply cannot attain the same advantages.  This is why some people call free to play “free to die”, “free to lose”, or “pay to win”. 

As for the effect on tabletop games, on the one hand we could hope that if players are buying fewer video games they’ll have more money to buy tabletop games.  On the other hand, the perception that games are free might make people less likely to spend $40 or $60 and more on a tabletop game.

We certainly see that the market for individual tabletop games is decreasing rapidly, although it may be that the total number of tabletop games sold is steady or even increasing.

At the NC State Tabletop Game Club only one of the people who likes to play my strategic games actually buys tabletop games.  But that can also be said for the people who like to play some of the other tabletop games that are common at the club.  Most of the board and card games played at the club are either brought by a few individuals or are owned by the club.  This is good for getting playtesters because I’m one of the individuals who brings games, it’s just that I bring prototypes rather than published games.  There’s another gent who brings prototypes and usually finds players, though his games are very different from the ones I’ve been bringing this year.  In fact we have only two persons who buy commercial games out of about 20 regular board and card game players.

In effect, the gaming club or informal group offers much of the convenience of free to play games without the accompanying annoyances.  I cannot remember how often, 30+ years ago, more than one member of a game club owned the same game.  I suspect it was much more common, as there were far fewer games to choose from.

In another contrast, the majority of the club members (we average 35 a meeting) are actually Magic players.  And Magic players clearly have to spend a lot of money on their hobby as CCGs and TCGs are engines to persuade people to part with their money to buy the cards, complete with a new set of cards each year.  (Full disclosure: I do not like these card games because they are fundamentally as unfair as free to play games; though I’m aware that there are competition methods that avoid the problem that the person with more money to spend can make a better deck, other things being equal.)

What strikes me today, however, is that in the tabletop market we’re dealing with two groups of people, one a subset of the other.  The larger group is players of tabletop games.  The much smaller group is buyers of tabletop games.  For commercial success your game has to appeal to the buyers as well as to the gamers.  For success in having lots of people play your game you don’t need to appeal to the buyers strongly but if people don’t buy your game then you’re going to have to give it away.  And that’s not very practical because “giving away” usually means “print and play”/desktop publishing, and that kind of game lacks the visual and especially tactile appeal of a published boardgame or card game.

So, for example, wargaming persists partly because many of the wargame players are also buyers.  (Part of this may be that wargames are often purchased to be played solitaire.)  Wargames are too complicated for many gamers and too “violent” for many others to play, yet there’s still a small core of several thousand people who are willing to buy wargames.

But the wargames must feel and smell like wargames.  GMT, who mainly publish wargames, can sell games that aren’t wargamy, but sometimes they cannot get them past their P500 system.  They want 500 people to pre-order a game before they’ll risk publication, and because of an unfortunate experience the last time they broke that rule, they aren’t going to deviate again.  So a game that’s “semi-historical” - a model rather than an abstract game but one that doesn’t appear to be a “simulation” - might not be viable for their method.  In other words, the players (and buyers) may be out there, but GMT’s initial buyers - and what GMT thinks they can persuade them to buy - determine what is and is not published.

What Kickstarter and other crowd-funding sites provide is a connection to buyers, not so much to players.  KS supporters put their money where their mouth is, so to speak.

In the long run certain types of commercial tabletop gaming may not survive because even though there are many people willing to play there are not many willing to buy.

This is all exacerbated by the very large number of tabletop games that are published, which tends to make it hard for any individual game to sell really well.  In game clubs I think what happens is that a “hot” game is bought by the club, or by the most active individual buyer, and then other games the club members are interested in are bought by other members who may buy only one or two games a year.

Keep in mind the 21st century Internet zeitgeist that “everything is free,” combine that with free to play video games, and you’re likely to find fewer and fewer people willing to buy tabletop games.

It would be interesting to conduct a survey to try to pin down some of the attitudes of people.  The problem is that people often don’t do what they say they do, especially if they’re predicting future behavior, and a bigger problem is that many of the people who are just players cannot be reached by survey or are unlikely to reply even if they know the survey exists.  I doubt that more than one or two of the NC State members looks at Boardgamegeek more than a few times a year, and none of us (including me) is a regular denizen.


I haven’t considered game collectors who may occasionally be buyers but not players.  I figure most of the people who collect games also play games.  But I’m reminded of when my brother collected vast quantities of comic books and hardcover compilations of comic books.  I suspect he did not read anywhere near all of them.

2012-13 Game Designer Survey results

Game Designer Survey Results

In the last half of December through the first part of February I distributed a survey for game designers on the Internet: "This is a short (10 questions, five minutes or less) survey for people who call themselves game designers, video or tabletop (which is as good a way to define who game designers are as any other)." In the end, 142 respondents have had a game published commercially, along with 46 self-publishers, more than half of the 346 respondents. Here are the results.

Because this was conducted through the free surveymonkey service, I'm unable to provide much in the way of analysis of the results. It was a proof-of-concept survey, and curiosity survey, rather than one with a specific aim. So I can be accused of violating my own survey rule, "only ask a question that can change your [the survey-taker's] behavior".

With nearly 350 responses, I think the proof-of-concept part has worked. Ultimately I intend to use information from surveys, as well as interview questions, in support of a book about being a game designer, how to become one, how to behave in order to be taken seriously by publishers, how to market games, how to license games, intellectual property protection, etc. In other words, all the parts of a game designers life that I did not address in my "Game Design" book for lack of space, and because I wanted to focus on the actual process of design in that first book.

Some observations:
While nearly a third of respondents are under 30 years old, the 30-49 group constituted more than 60%.

Respondents play even more video games than tabletop, though how much that is skewed by the many free-to-play and short experience video games we cannot say.

Nearly 50% have been to game meetings of a thousand people or more.

More than 13% have a game related degree or are working toward one.

A veteran game designer commenting on the survey told me that video game designers rarely read books, though they might look at one to help them solve a specific problem. I asked about game design books (#6) because my experience as a teacher is that people are much less likely now, than decades ago, to read a non-fiction book. Some students now don’t even get a copy of the textbook for a class. Part of that fault may be that most game design books are enormous, offputting tomes, many of them quite expensive.

As many have said, you’re not really a game designer until someone other than you has played your prototype. About 85% of respondents have reached that stage in their work. I also asked how many designs respondents are working on (#9), because to my mind veteran designers work on several (if not many) at once. More than 55% of respondents are working on at least three games.

Not surprisingly, I left out some choices in the question about sources of information about games and game design (#8). I didn't even list blogs, though I've written a game design blog since 2004. Duh.

Many people did not answer question 10, perhaps I should have added an answer “I don’t know what this is.” Still, the number who have supported crowd-funding (171, about half of respondents) is impressive.

Many respondents offered comments. I have read them all, though I won't include many here.

An Excel spreadsheet of the results is at http://pulsiphergames.com/Surveys/GameDesignerSurvey2012-13R... .

I am happy to hear suggestions for questions in any further surveys. You can get in touch with me through my blogs or website ( http://pulsiphergames.com).

1. How old are you?
Up to 15
0.29% 1
16-18
0.87% 3
19-22
6.65% 23
23-29
23.41% 81
30-49
61.56% 213
50-65
6.65% 23
66 or older
0.58% 2
346

2. How many different video games did you play in the past year?
0
6.38% 22
1-5
24.35% 84
6-10
24.06% 83
11-25
22.03% 76
26 or more
23.19% 80
Comments 52
345

3. How many different tabletop games did you play in the past year?
0
5.80% 20
1-5
22.90% 79
6-10
18.26% 63
11-25
20.58% 71
26 or more
32.46% 112
Comments 32
345

4. What size (in attendance) game conventions or conferences have you attended (ever, not just this year)?
None
21.22% 73
less than 200
16.28% 56
200 to a thousand
13.08% 45
More than a thousand but less than ten thousand
19.48% 67
More than ten thousand
29.94% 103
Comments 63
344

5. Have you ever before taken a class about game design (not programming, art, sound, or other game production topics that are not game design) - multiple answers possible?
No
67.25% 232
Yes, in person
17.39% 60
Yes, online
9.86% 34
Yes, and I'm working toward a game-related degree
5.22% 18
Yes, and I have a game-related degree
8.12% 28
I have taught such classes in person
8.12% 28
I have taught such classes online
1.45% 5
Comments 27
405

6. About how many books specifically about game design have you read?
0
22.54% 78
1-3
39.02% 135
4-9
23.99% 83
10 or more
14.45% 50
346

7. The furthest you've gone in DESIGNING a game (video or tabletop) is (choose the first one in the list that applies):
Had game published commercially (other than self-published)
41.64% 142
Self-published a game (or tried to raise funds via crowd-funding e.g. Kickstarter)
13.49% 46
Prototype submitted to publisher/game company/funding company
8.80% 30
Others played my working prototype
22.58% 77
Made working prototype
4.69% 16
Started to make prototype
4.99% 17
Wrote down a lengthy description (such as a game design document)
2.64% 9
Wrote down ideas about one
1.17% 4
Talking with others about one
0.00% 0
Other (please specify) 31
341

8. Which of the following sources of information about games and game design do you read regularly (you decide what "regularly" means)?
BoardgameGeek Web site 214
Any console-specific game magazine 8
Board Game Designers Forum Web site 77
Fortress:AT Web site 15
Gamasutra Web site 156
GameCareerGuide Web site 24
Gameinformer magazine 23
GameInformer Web site 18
GameSpot Web site 26
IGDA Newsletter/Web site 37
Kotaku Web site 67
PC Gamer magazine 8
PC Gamer Web site 15
RolePlayGameGeek Web site 29
The Escapist online magazine 59
VideoGameGeek Web site 18
Other (please specify) 84
878

9. How many games are you currently designing (have done something with them in 2012)?
0
4.05% 14
1-2
40.75% 141
3-5
40.75% 141
More than 5
14.45% 50
Comments 14
346

10. How many game projects have you SUPPORTED (not run) on Kickstarter or other crowdfunding locations?
0
40.21% 115
1-3
27.27% 78
4-6
12.94% 37
7 or more
19.58% 56
Comments 88
286