More about Patents

Yehuda B. has tracked game patents for some years (example: http://jergames.blogspot.com/2008/10/september-board-and-card-game-patents.html). The obvious and often impossibly useless nature of these patents only reinforces the idea that the patent office is incompetent, and that patent lawyers prey on the hopes of foolish inventors every day. I think most would fail in court because they're too obvious, or because or "prior art" (the "product" already being in use for a considerable period before the patent was filed).

Yehuda is doing a great service. I've read some patents and know how confusing and obscure they can be. He often cannot figure out just what the heck the filer is talking about.

Owing to limited time I only read two blogs regularly, both by video game designers now in academia who understand the value of using non-electronic games; yet I know that Yehuda's blog is very worthy of your attention.

Patents and games

Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Non-electronic and video games are rarely patented, both because it is expensive ($3,000-$10,000) and because a patent only protects a particular expression of an idea. Ideas alone are not patentable, though a business process may be. At least, that's how it is supposed to work. Patents are supposed to protect inventors from predatory companies who steal their product (not their idea) and mass produce and undersell the originator--something that used to be quite common long ago. Patents protect a particular expression of an idea in a product. Further, you're not supposed to be able to patent the obvious, because it's obvious. But somewhere along the line the patent office in the USA lost track of what it was about, and started to let people patent ideas, sometimes obvious ones, rather than particular products. One well-known game patent is for "tapping", turning a card sideways, in Magic: the Gathering. TAPping probably shouldn't be patented, and I don't think it would stand up in court because it's so obvious; further, other CCG makers seem to get around it, probably by giving it a different name.

So the telephone patent, if it had not actually expired, could not be used to stop Skype. BUT if the patent office had acted then as now, the patent would be for any long-distance communication over a wire (even though it was already done with the telegraph, of course), and would interfere.

I read some time ago that the patent office was going to allow someone to patent a particular plotline for a story. The patent-holder was then going to require royalties (in the manner of "patent trolls") from anyone whose story vaguely resembled that plot. This would be a true disaster, as well as just plain stupid, but I've heard nothing more about it so maybe the patent office had an attack of sanity.

Here is where the bull-in-a-chinashop behavior of the patent office has interfered with games. At GenCon Mike Gray of Hasbro pointed out that the big problem with non-electronic games, especially in the mass market, is that someone has to read the rules. I myself have advocated including a DVD in the game box with a video that is, for all practical purposes, someone teaching the game owner how to play the game. Publishers (including Hasbro) don't want to go for that, because of the expense. But Mike told me that the idea of someone calling an automated phone number to be taught how to play a game had been patented! This is a patent of an idea, which should not be allowed (especially because it is obvious), not a patent of a particular product; but the result is that anyone using this method would be required to pay royalties. And game players (and designers) suffer as a result.

I have tried but failed to find this patent through Google. What I did find was pretty interesting, some game patents that I'd say are "really strange", or really obvious.

Why Design Games?

A form of this article appeared on gamecareerguide, January, 2009. You can click the post heading for the original.

Why design games?

“I’m going to make a lot of money designing games”. This is a common notion, but rarely true in practice. Even in the video game industry, few game designers “get rich”. They usually work for a game developer full time, work fairly long hours, and aren’t paid particularly well (there are exceptions), because so many people want to be game designers. In fact, on average they’re paid less than the programmers, and no more than the artists! They are not paid royalties, though they might get a bonus for a game that sells very well.

Moreover, in the video game industry, people are rarely hired off the street as game designers. Instead they must serve an apprenticeship of many years as testers or (if they’re lucky and good) as level designers, or in other non-designer positions. Is the money they might eventually make worth it?

In non-electronic games, most designers are freelancers (like novelists) and barely make a profit. A few of the most famous, such as Klaus Tauber and Reiner Kniza, can actually become millionaires as freelancers. A few work for big companies such as Hasbro (which owns Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley, Wizards of the Coast, and Avalon Hill amongst others). The typical boardgame, card game, RPG (role playing game), or CCG (collectible card game) does not bring in the revenues of video games, and royalties are low, so most freelance designers have a “day job” just as most novelists do. Amongst novelists, Glenn Cook, most well known for the “Black Company” fantasy novels, wrote while commuting to his day job at a General Motors assembly plant, a job he retired from. Alan R. Moon, a very well known boardgame designer who has won two of the very important German Game of the Year awards, has said he would have had to get a part-time job if not for his second win with Ticket to Ride.

One observer suggested you could spend the time you use to design games, and instead pick up cans and bottles for deposits and recycling fees, and make as much money.

In other words, don’t design games in order to make a lot of money, because you probably won’t. You may not make any money at all.

But please, if you're going to call yourself a "game designer", then design seriously. Don't be a dilettante, don't dabble in it rather than do it half-heartedly. Or design just for yourself, but don't call yourself a "game designer".

Game designers as a group suffer from people who call themselves game designers, but work on just one game, produce a weak (though possibly pretty) prototype, don't alpha test it, and then inflict it on volunteer playtesters who walk away with the opinion that so-called game designers are "amateurs", or that "heck, anyone could design a game that weak". If you can't play your game solo, why expect anyone else to play it? Get your game to a decently enjoyable state before you inflict it on others, or you'll give game design a bad name.

Recognize also that in the "outside world", you won't get much respect. People who don't play games, or who only play traditional games on holidays (as many older people who aren't into video games), tend to assume that game design is easy, that it's "kid's stuff" that any adult can manage to do. So why respect someone who designs games? Or worse, they may wonder why any adult would be "playing with games" instead of doing something productive with their lives! (My 80-year-old English mother-in-law cannot understand why I spend my time teaching young people how to design games--though I'm paid to do it. To her it's just not an adult occupation.)

Even if you do well, you won’t be famous (again with a few exceptions). Yes, we know who Sid Meier is, or CliffyB (but that’s because he blogs), but mostly we know designers by their works. How many know who Carmack and Romero, or Will Wright are? But mention their works (Doom and Quake, The Sims) and they're recognized. I’m lucky to have a very unusual name, but more people know me through games, especially Britannia, than through my name. A game designer may be the “least unfamous” person among his friends and acquaintances, but he’s not famous the way an athlete or actor may be famous.

So if it’s not money or fame, what is it? Why design games? There’s the thrill of making something out of nothing, as an artist does with pen and paper, a composer does with music, a painter does with canvas and brush, etc. It may not be quite like what a woman feels when she bears a child, but it can be something like it.

Perhaps you’re driven to do it, the way some people are driven to write novels even without an expectation of publication. Perhaps you enjoy being creative, and this is your chosen field. When I came back to designing boardgames as an older person, after being “away” for twenty years, it was the realization that this was the best way I had to touch a large number of lives, if only through entertainment. Or you may love the thrill of seeing your game on the shelves, or of being asked to sign a copy of your game. It can certainly be a rush.

At Origins Game Fair 2008, as I was sitting at a booth talking to a boardgame publisher, someone walked by, evidently saw my name tag, shook my hand, said something like "Britannia is an excellent game, thank you for getting it back into print", and walked off. There's no substitute for that, folks, or for hearing someone say “I love this game”, when they’re talking about one you designed, or to hear someone say they’ve played your 4-5 hour game more than five hundred times. Not many people get to experience that.

You can love game design for many reasons. For me, it is truly fascinating to play your brand new prototype for the first time, not because it will be all that much fun (at this point it probably won’t be), but fascinating to see how things work or don’t work the way you expected, to “see what happens”, to puzzle out how to improve it. It’s also fascinating to watch the first time other people play, and perhaps see how different the game works than when you played it solo. Design because you like to design games, and like the “incidents”. It’s rarely a living, but it’s cool.

Game Crafters (POD games)

Recently a POD (print on demand) game producer came online, thegamecrafter.com (you can click on the title of this post). I wondered whether they were actually legitimate, but at GenCon I found the company booth and spent some time talking with them.

They are still experimenting and figuring out how to make their business work efficiently. One of their problems is in sending games to individual consumers. They have a more or less industry-standard size box (10+ by 10+ inches), but have been relying on the box as a shipping container, and UPS has been clobbering many of them. They have a small sturdy box for games that are primarily or entirely cards, but it's much too small to ship safely via UPS. They are thinking of shifting to US Postal Service for shipping to consumers, which will certainly be better for the small boxes and might work better for the large ones. (Among other things, the games can be insured and fulfillment of insurance would be someone else's problem, not Gamecrafters.)

I learned from Ben Clarke of ImagiGrafx in GenCon seminars why games have an insert (which Gamecrafter has not used): to prevent the pieces shifting around inside the box during shipping. TGC has indeed seen some problems because of shifting, and may have to use an insert, which will of course raise their prices some.

I referred them to EAI Education online for pieces in general and the lovely stackable pieces that so many players like. I also suggested they do something like what Lost Battalion does (they also use POD machines): offer to print "pieces" on stickers, and include some kind of blank piece (Lost Bn uses wooden disks) so that player can stick the stickers on the pieces. This would allow them to do games with more complex piece assortments than pawns.

They use JPG or PNG, converting them to PDF so that they can avoid problems with so many different PDF formats. This contrasts with traditional printers, who usually use PDFs.

Their card printing is in multiples of 16, so the magic 55 card rule does not apply.

And I never did ask where they're actually located . . .

WBC 2009

I was at WBC (World Boardgaming Championships) Thursday through Saturday in Lancaster, PA. It seemed to be as well attended as last year, one fewer person participating in the Britannia tournament, for example.

Some of the best Brit players tried out Barbaria (the dice version) and Frankia. These two games have elicited interest from publishers, perhaps I'll say more later.

I talked about getting into the game design business at a seminar that was surprisingly well attended, about 20 people. There were so many questions I didn't get very far into my spiel, but the slides and a recording from last year at Origins are on my Web site (pulsiphergames.com).

Don Greenwood (convention director) reports: "Attendance was up for the convention as a whole and that was reflected in tournament participation as well with 17 events drawing triple-digit participation and the average attendance for the 151 events increasing 2.3 to 49.4, buoyed by 230 players for Dominion and 220 for Ticket to Ride." That average is probably a mean, I often wonder what the median was in these kinds of stats.

In the Brit tournament, red did very well early on. Blue did poorly throughout. This is fascinating because, in playtesting before this edition was published, blue was best and red worst. And in a past year the wins were very, very even. In games with inexperienced players, red tends to do better, but there aren't many inexperienced players in the WBC Britannia tournament. There were lots of green-yellow deals that left the Welsh unscathed--a stronger opponent for red, and letting yellow charge northward to keep down the Picts. Perhaps that was part of blue's problem. OTOH I saw Mark Smith suffer in a game where all his opponents (he was Roman) refused to submit, even the Belgae! I wasn't able to stay for the final, but I ran into Jim Jordan at GenCon and he said Rick Kirchner (I hope I'm spelling that correctly) had won with green in a close three-way game. He also won his semifinal as green. Rick is a matter-of-fact fellow who doesn't try to BS anyone and just does his thing with a combination of cheerfulness and resignation (see quote below). He has no enemies. Green works well him because it is, most of the time, "on the sidelines", just trying to survive. In the semifinal, for example, Mark Smith and Nick Benedict (Nick was yellow, I cannot recall whether Mark was red or blue) wore each other out while Rick took advantage.

I finally remembered to count king survival in the four semifinal games: 3, 2, 2, and 1, out of the four candidates.

Some notes: Nick Benedict: "Use a scalpel, not a bludgeon." Rick Kirchner: "I'm fighting with butterknives!" (bad dice rolls in the semis). Scott Pfeiffer would like everybody to have boats all the time. This would make for a more interesting game thanks to increased mobility, but would not be historical at all.

Impressions of GenCon

I attended GenCon Indianapolis for the first time last week. I'll have many comments and reports over the next couple weeks, but in the meantime here are a few observations:

It's Big. The convention center is larger than the Columbus center used for Origins, and there are many events in several hotels as well. I think the event count is over 6,000, compared to 4,500 for Origins, but I suspect the events tend to be smaller at Origins.

The exhibition hall dwarfs the one used at Origins. $1,300 for a 10 by 10 foot area. There were even a couple of companies (video game related, it must be said) that had "booth babes". (I talked briefly with one, dressed to be a character from an online trading card game related to Everquest, who travels with the company all over the nation, though she actually comes from California. Big bucks involved here.) The wargame-only publishers such as Clash of Arms, Avalanche, and GMT and others did not exhibit.

Pre-register. When I arrived Thursday about 1, an enormous line of hundreds of people snaked along the sidewalk, all waiting to register. I just walked in to pick up my pre-reg, no line at all at that point. There was another long line Friday.

Seminars. GenCon puts their guests of honor to work. And the results are good panel discussions.

The proportion of male and female appears to be about the same as at Origins (a quarter female). And as at Origins, there are very few black or obviously Hispanic attendees.

A lot more costumes were in evidence than at Origins. One hotel hosted the costume events, I didn't get over there.

One exhibitor mentioned 28,000 attendees, in ads prior to the convention the aim was evidently 30,000. Origins maxed at 15,000 two years ago, and was 10,000 this year.

"Everyone plays video games"--NOT!

I occasionally read someone write that "everyone plays video games now". I suppose this is to contrast with "the old days" when video gaming was unusual, and the players felt they were somehow exceptional.

But it's the long-time video game fans writing this stuff. Even now, "everyone plays video games" is not even close to true. The Entertainment Software Association's own promotional literature says 68% of US households play video games. That leaves 32% that don't. And that's in the US, still a relatively rich nation where people can "waste" money on game consoles and PCs-for-leisure.

Not so many years ago, it made sense to say "half the people in the world have never placed a phone call". They might have talked on the phone after someone else placed the call in some village out in the sticks. I suspect phones are much more common now, but game consoles and PCs are still expensive luxury devices in much of the world.

So, while we probably can no longer say "half the people in the world have never placed a phone call", I'd guess that far more than half the people in the world rarely, if ever, play video games.

Even in the US, probably a third to a half the population rarely, if ever, play video games. The ESA quotes CBS Evening News as saying "A new study found that more than half of adults play video games, about one-fifth play daily or almost every day.”

Sorry, more than half isn't anywhere near "everyone". Get a grip on reality, get out of your insular point of view.

Going into the video game business as an independent company

I know of video game creation schools where students are told, "the game companies will just enslave you, start your own company." (This tends to happen at schools that are located far from video game companies.)

In any case, some people have an entrepreneurial frame of mind and want to start their own companies rather than work for someone else.

Also you may at some time have reason to deal with a small or startup company. At that point it's your duty to yourself to "scout" the company and find out whether they seem to understand their business, or if they're in cloud-cuckoo-land.

I have a few observations about starting a company.

First, a viable business plan is absolutely necessary. You do not want to just stumble into conducting a business the way you might stumble into playing a game. There is no "save game", no "start over"--if you fail, you're done. Many times, if you diligently research a business plan, you'll find that what you thought was reality, isn't. That may or may not change your mind about starting a company, and certainly may change how you go about it, but it's always better to have the option than to blindly go forth.

Even if circumstances change, you can adjust your plan as you go. The most important thing about planning is that it makes you think about what's supposed to happen and where you're trying to go. If you don't know where you're going, how can you ever get there? "Dumb luck" is not a business plan.

When you deal with a small or startup company, if they say something like "business plans don't matter because so many things change so quickly" or "business plans don't matter because no plan survives first contact with the enemy", RUN, don't walk, away from them. In effect, they're hoping to fight fires as they arise, rather than engage in fire prevention. They're hoping rather than planning. They're in cloud-cuckoo-land.

Second, "passion" and "hustle" and "hard work" are not going to magically make you succeed where others have failed. Do you think other startup companies didn't have those characteristics? Especially in the game industry, doesn't everyone who starts a new game company think he's passionate and a hustler and a hard worker? Don't even the big game companies expect people to work ridiculous hours and be very passionate? ("Ridiculous" hours because it's been well known for decades that after several weeks of working, say, 60 hours a week, you'll be no more effective than you were when you worked 40 hours, despite spending more time. This is one reason why most industries have 40 hour workweeks.)

If the small or startup company you're dealing with says they succeed on "passion" or "hard work", most likely they're hoping to succeed, not planning to succeed. Somehow "a miracle will occur". And you know, occasionally it does--but mostly not. If they tell you they're going to succeed where others have not, because they're so passionate about games and they're going to hustle so much, maybe you should find someone who talks business instead of football pep-talk.

Finally, know what business you're in. If you intend to make video games, make sure you behave as though you're in the entertainment business, not the technology business or some other business. There are exceptions, but most of the time video games exist to entertain. See my earlier post "what business are you really in?"

Conventions and writing

I'll be at GenCon for the first time this year. The next two years it is at the same time as WBC, which I prefer for various reasons. And usually it is too close to the start of the college semester (I teach for a living).

I'll also be at WBC (World Boardgaming Championships). I'll be offering my talk about getting into professional game design (same as one of the two I do at Origins).

I am a contributor to Family Games: the 100 Best, which will be published later this year.

I've been asked to contribute to another anthology, a book about non-electronic game design, to be published next year by ETC Press.

My book "Get it Done: Designing Games from Start to Finish" is at 115K words. I'm trying to cut it down because the original aim was 100K.

The 400 Project

Video game developers have created a list of game design tips and maxims called the 400 Project. The original idea was to come up with 400 entries, I think, but the project apparently went dormant in March 2006 at 112. Contributors include some very well-known video game designers.

These are available at
http://www.theinspiracy.com/Current%20Rules%20Master%20List.htm (You can click on the name of this post.) There used to be a downloadable spreadsheet, but I don't see the link now.

Some of the entries are more or less repetitions of others, some are specific to video games, but this list is good food for thought, especially if you want to design standard video-games-as-interactive-puzzles.

What business are you really in?

An example I used with computer networking students about "what business you're really in" is the failure of the great railroad companies (Santa Fe, Union Pacific, NY Central, etc.). The great railroad companies dominated late 19th century business; past the middle of the 20th, most were bankrupt. This happened because they thought they were in the railroad business, when they were actually in the *transportation* business. When the transportation business changed (trucks and good roads, airplanes) and railroads became much less important, they lost out. My point to networkers is that they're in the communication business, not the networking business.

How does this apply to games? Some video game companies apparently think they're in the technology business, when they're actually in the entertainment business (even the ones making "serious" games will prosper if those games are also entertaining, as for example "America's Army"). I think this can be applied to the Sony vs. Nintendo console competition. Sony thinks technology, Nintendo thinks entertainment (also applies in handhelds, it appears). (And this should have been obvious to Sony, because the *really* good technology, PCs, doesn't make it as a major game platform compared with the whimpy consoles.) As another example, many people called "Crysis" a technology demo, but a poor game. The management of the company decried piracy for a failure to sell the game in expected numbers, but the real reason might be that it wasn't much of a game.

To move down one level of complexity, some video game companies think they're in the story-telling business, or even more specifically in the movie-making business, when they're really in the video game business. Video games are not like movies, and stories are not the most important component of most video games. (See http://www.costik.com/gamnstry.html) At one time in the video game industry, film-maker wannabes published "games" that were more cinematics and cut-scenes than games, and that turned out to be a failure.

So we see proposals to treat video games, and video game production, the same way films are treated. I think this is a mistake. Every industry finds its own way of doing things. Trying to pretend you're something else is very likely to end badly.

This is the difference between saying "we should do such-and-such because that's how the film industry does it", and "the film industry has a different way of doing such-and-such, and we can adapt it this way because it makes sense." If it makes good sense, do it. If it just happens to be how some model does it, forget it.

Comparing video game and non-electronic game conferences

Some people might be interested in the contrasts between video game conferences and non-electronic game conferences. In this case I'm drawing primarily from Origins Game Fair (Columbus, OH) and Triangle Game Conference (TGC) (Raleigh, NC).

TGC is a relatively small, new conference, somewhere over 700 attending this inaugural year, but almost all of those people are either industry professionals or students who want to be in the industry. There is virtually no game playing at the conference.

Among the 10,000-15,000 at Origins, most are consumers, gamers, although there are plenty of industry professionals. (The variance in attendance reflects the effects of the recession: 15,000 two years ago, 10,000 this year.) Playing games is a big reason for people to attend.

At Origins the focus is playing games just for the heck of it, with a few prize tournaments such as the U.S. Yu-Gi-Oh championship. At TGC the focus is giving and receiving information about video game development. This reflects the non-technological nature of non-electronic game development and publishing, and the highly technological nature of video game publishing. Non-electronic games is a much smaller industry than video games, even though we can point to one freelance designer who makes over a million dollars a year (Reiner Knizia) and one huge American company (Hasbro and its subsidiaries) along with some very large German companies. Yet one of the larger American companies, Fantasy Flight Games, has smaller annual revenues than the budget of many AAA list video games.

As a consumer-oriented affair, Origins charges just $60 for up to five days (and free to teachers), though playing in many of the games and attending the historical seminars is an additional cost per event. Game playing at Origins fall into categories, boardgames, role-playing games (including "LARP", live action role-playing), collectible card games, and miniatures games. There are also seminars at Origins, many about history, many about games. TGC was $100 per day, $25 per day to students, for a two day meeting. Origins also has a $10 ticket for people who just want to go through the vendor hall and art show.

I can't say how much deal-making might occur at a conference such as TGC, but one of the reasons for a professional designer to attend Origins is to talk with, and perhaps demo a game to, publishers. I personally don't feel a need to travel 500 miles just to play games, but evidently many people do.

Origins is also more celebrity-oriented than TGC. There are several guests of honor who conduct events during the week, and the venerable "Origins Awards" are voted on and awarded to the best games in various categories. Yet there's very little of the "rock star" or hero worship I've heard happens at GDC, but which I did not see at TGC.

There are smaller conferences comparable in size to TGC, such as the six day World Boardgaming Championships in Lancaster, PA (1,500 attendees) and four-day PrezCon in Charlottesville, VA (4-500). Families often attend these events. These affairs are even more consumer-oriented in the form of organized tournaments, with few seminars and not many vendors. The tournaments are for bragging rights only (plaques awarded for best players) rather than prize money; there are also team competitions and other competition-oriented features. An award is given to best tournament referee ("GM"). There are about 125 tournaments at WBC, in both board and card games (most of them extending over several days). These can vary from simple games like "Liar's Dice" to big 4-5 hour contests such as my game "Britannia," to epics that take 6 hours and more to play (e.g. Advanced Civilization--the boardgame that preceded the computer game). Both conventions are board and card game oriented, with virtually no RPGs or CCGs.

In the unlikely event that video game production comes to use standardized methods, perhaps the conferences will become more consumer-oriented.

Games of strategy--seeing the possibilities

Some people play games like some people "sound bathe", that is, have music playing but don't really pay attention, don't really LISTEN. They're not particularly interested in exactly what they're doing, and they're not putting much effort into it.

In many Euro-style games (and let's realize that this is such a large category that there are always many exceptions to any generalization), players WANT just a few choices, and then the play of the game revolves around which choice to make. The "best" choice depends on the situation, and the better players recognize which is the best choice in given circumstances, though generally there is no choice that will always work out best in a given situation.

In other games, including many "old" games and some of the new ones, there are many choices, and one of the skills is seeing all the possibly-good choices in a situation. Better players will not only see those additional choices, they may be skilled in influencing the course of the game so that those choices are available when they next play.

A sure way to spot this point of view is the gamer who plays a game once, then criticizes it for poor play balance or too few choices. While the game may indeed have those characteristics, it can also be the case that the player has assumed he's recognized all the choices, and all the balance possibilities, the first time he played.

I recall a young player at the WBC Britannia tournament (his first Brit game) who, when he finished, said he couldn't see how he could have done anything differently (no, he wasn't near winning). It was only after some expert players talked with him a while that he realized there were large choices he hadn't seen, and also, that even small choices made a difference in the long term. Perhaps he wasn't accustomed to games that did not reveal the choices immediately.

We have an essential difference:
"It's important but I haven't figured it out yet."
or
"I haven't even realized it's important."

So the expectation in those Euros that are essentially "family games on steroids" is that the first is the typical situation after one play, yet in many strategy games there will be a strong element of the second after one play.

Perhaps this is a reason (not a sufficient reason or necessary reason) why there is the emphasis on multiple ways to win in Euro games: so that the players will easily see at least one way to win at first playing.

I'll take an example from my own experience. Here's a comment I ran across about Britannia. "Innovative, but only interesting once. After that, it's just rolling dice for 6 long hours, very boring. Green is horrible. Purple is a one shot wonder also." Here's a person who thinks he can see all possible strategies the first time he plays a game. Is that because he plays simple (shallow?) games? This player clearly didn't have a clue about many of the strategies in the game. I'm curious if he wondered what the people who've played 500 times were doing? I suppose he didn't know how intensely the game is played, how (as Tom Vasel says in his review, it "may satisfy the itch in players looking for a deeper encounter, an epic game that is all about the experience."). Rather than consider the possibility that he'd missed something, the commenter dismissed the game. (Btw, there are lots of perfectly reasonable reasons why some people do not like Britannia, e.g. the length, the dice rolling, the "scripting", the need to plan well ahead. Poor play balance is not one of them, clearly.) This is the kind of comment I'd expect from a "shallow" player, perhaps someone who plays shallow games, though maybe just someone who doesn't easily see strategic possibilities in this kind of game.

I'm afraid there are a great many players of this kind nowadays, which may be one reason so many games are only played a few times: either they are shallow, so there isn't much there, or the "shallow" player isn't going to play any game many times because either he gets it easily and exhausts the possibilities, or he doesn't get it at all.

Is this "bad?" I suppose that's a matter of opinion. Designers need to recognize it, in any case.

Miscellaneous info and observations

Another of my articles (not directly relevant to game design) on GameCareerGuide (you can click the title of this post):

"Industry Hopefuls: Prepare Intelligently" 7 July 09 http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/757/industry_hopefuls_prepare_.php

==

When it comes down to it, should a designer in playtest stages do what he wants with the rules of play, or what the playtesters recommend? Or what works out for the players in play, which may be a little different than the recommendations he gets?

I believe I'm very receptive to what players suggest (or what I see that they would prefer, as they play). If people take the time to play my game, I ought to be receptive, else why bother? I think playtesters may be more likely to offer suggestions if they know the designer is receptive to them.

I'll contrast this with, say, Microsoft's attitude that they really do know what's best for people, even when people say otherwise. I'm sure they often ignore the computer equivalent of playtesting input. The original huge controller for the XBox is a famous case. So is that Paperclip help in Microsoft Office that drove so many computer users right up the wall--they finally stopped making it the default.

I'll say this: if you're not willing to change your non-electronic game, you're more likely to end up with a "developer" who will change it as he likes regardless of your preferences.

==

Video game designers tend to say "I know what people will like". Non-electronic game designers tend to say "maybe people will like this, let's see." A harsh person might say that this the difference between the person who thinks he knows and the one who recognizes that wisdom comes from knowing what you do not know. More likely, though, it's a matter of necessity, the video game designer must plan all the details of the game before there's a game to play; the non-electronic game designer can make a playable prototype while still hazy about many of the details.

Origins follow-up

Origins follow-up

Origins says over ten thousand gaming enthusiasts enjoyed the 2009 show, down 18% from 2008. 2008 was itself a down year owing to very high gas prices; the previous year the count was around 15,000. (This is unique attendees, if someone is there five days he counts as one attendee.) Day-pass tickets (instituted in 2008) were up 16%; the total includes those folks. So in contrast, 2007, which did not have the inexpensive day pass, approaches double the attendance of 2009!

They also say "more vendors"; whether that is in comparison only to 2008 I don't know. But I am sure that the square footage is way down from 2006-2007.

Trying to balance the colors in Brit-like games

I recently played the Diceless Barbaria prototype solo, as well as several scenarios of Frankia (also diceless).

I used to try to play early prototypes as though each nation was independent. I wanted to see what were the most natural moves for each, and try to arrange the game so that the most natural moves matched what they did historically. But I found that this didn't work out when the influence of colors was introduced. So now I always keep in mind the colors I've selected.

I still want the most natural play to be the one made historically, but I have to be aware of how an unnatural play by one nation may help another so much that the game will be skewed.

I'm not really worrying about how strong the nations were historically, I'm worrying about how strong (or weak) they need to be to make their most natural moves match history.

I know that in any game, unless I put a real straitjacket around the player, as in many of the SPI games from back when, the game is rarely going to follow history. What I want is one where I can say, after a player has moved, "yes, that's just what they did historically". I am striving for effect, largely, relying on cause only in the very largest sense--because designing games for cause is a chimera (barring, perhaps, highly-detailed tactical games where you use made-up scenarios rather than known historical battles).

In Frankia, which is a fairly small game (around 30 pieces on the board at any time), I have taken to counting pieces of each color, and areas occupied, after each turn. I'm trying to be aware of what it would be like to play a color: are there times when a color has few pieces and little to do? Sometimes there's nothing I can do about that (as when yellow in Britannia have only the Scots and R-Bs), but I can try to avoid it as I try different nation combinations.

Origins Game Fair 09

I was at my sixth consecutive Origins Game Fair last week, and I have to say that it has "diminished". Where it really hit was in the lack of exhibitors and apparent lack of attendees. The auction appeared to be in a smaller area with fewer items and fewer bidders, but that's hard to judge. Smaller booths for companies, or no booths at all for hobby game mainstays (Days of Wonder, GMT), were the order of the day. I was told GAMA raised the booth prices, but other folks didn't seem to think that was a sufficient explanation. Matrix Games, the makers of electronic wargames, were not there. Those "Really Big Show" booths that used to dominate the floor from WotC, WizKids, AEG, and so on were all gone. The aisles were all wide, the area at the end of the hall where the larping practice took place was even larger than in past years. We still had the slightly pathetic little booths of self-publishers who have one or two games and were trying to drum up interest. They usually find it isn't worth the cost, and aren't back the next year, replaced with another set. I admire their moxie, but maybe not their business sense.

FantasyFlightGames was there but no Britannia copies were in sight (they could have sold out, they had two days before I got there).

The economy is clearly part of the effect. Avalanche had a booth but sent only one person instead of three. The attendance seemed to be down, and certainly judging from attendance at seminars, there were fewer people at Origins this year. (Official attendance may look better because this is the second year for the $10 ticket that is only for the exhibits and such.) I talked with someone who'd just been to an engineers conference where attendance was 40-60%, and he said others there had told a similar story about other conferences. Who knows what it will be like next year? I expect the recovery from this debt-based recession to be very slow and limited, as we're not willing to stop going further into debt as a country.

The usual Chinese companies trying to drum up business manufacturing game parts seemed to be missing. Someone told me that the minimum order from China had risen from $5,000 to 10,000 PIECES of an item. Though I talked with someone else who had found a Chinese producer of nice plastic parts willing to make just 2,000 of each.

Some companies are doing well. Decision Games is growing in their magazine production. "Strategy & Tactics" has a 15-20K circulation altogether, more without the game. They emphasize analytical articles and maps maps maps. But their "Fire & Movement" magazine was not mentioned in the Decision Games update, so it may be that magazines about games rather than about history aren't doing well.

Attendance at Monte Cook's seminars--admittedly, they weren't in the convention book, but were listed on easels in main thoroughfares--was quite low, considering how well-known he is in RPGdom (wrote the 3rd Edition Dungeonmasters Guide, among many others). Attendance at my seminars was way down from the past two years.

I have always disliked the money aspects of Orgins: you pay extra to play games, even open gaming! You pay extra for a lot of the seminars ("Origins War College"). Mine are free, btw. WBC is a MUCH, MUCH more friendly environment for game playing, but as it's limited to boardgames (which are a stepchild at Origins, I think), the minis guys and CCGs types and RPGers aren't at WBC and probably wouldn't be welcomed in large numbers.

There wasn't much opportunity for business from my point of view, and I'm not sure I'll attend next year.

I did my usual survey, counting people walking past a particular main thoroughfare. The result (out of 200, counted in two separate sets of 100) was 45 women out of 200, and only three black people (all males). This fits with previous years, relatively many women, very few blacks. I saw no one who appeared to be Hispanic, but I think that's too hard to notice in any case. There is definitely a cultural difference when it comes to attending non-electronic game conventions. (I'll have to count at the next video game convention I attend, but I think the proportion of blacks is higher.)

Ways to reflect the "fog of war"

This originally appeared a couple years ago in "Against the Odds" magazine.


Ways to reflect the "fog of war"--
designing in uncertainty in conflict boardgames

Lewis Pulsipher

(All game titles in the following are trademarks of their respective designers or publishers.)

I want to discuss how uncertainty can be introduced into wargames, uncertainty about an opponent's location, his strength, or his goals, uncertainty about timing and the actions of non-player forces, and uncertainty about the outcome of combat. This uncertainty is often called the "fog of war", and is one of the major influences on warfare, and sometimes in classic games. (In card games such as Bridge and Poker, for example, you don't know the opposition's strength--though you learn their strength when you win the bidding round in Bridge.)

The original Avalon Hill commercial wargames such as Tactics II, Afrika Corps, and Stalingrad provided complete information about the opponent's strength, goals, and location--the major uncertainty arose from combat. Risk and Diplomacy, dating from the same period, similarly provide complete information, except that in Diplomacy the movement is simultaneous, introducing a considerable element of uncertainty.

Nowadays in most video games we have a variety of "fog of war" levels, as in general the nature of a computer game makes uncertainty the norm. Even if the manual tells you how combat is conducted, it may not be entirely clear what makes for success and failure. You rarely see the opponent's moves, unless the units are near your own. And you may not even know what the opponent's objective is. Unfortunately, this level of uncertainty is not easy to reproduce in boardgames, and some would argue that it isn't necessarily desirable.

The major source of uncertainty in ANY multi-player game, of course, is the intentions of the players themselves. What I'm discussing here is uncertainty that's built into the game by the designer.

Uncertainty about strength (and location)
"Block games", in which a player can see the strengths of his units on the back sides of the small blocks, but an opponent can only see the blank side indicating that a unit is present, but cannot know the type or strength of the unit until a battle occurs, are very popular in the hobby nowadays. They are, practically speaking, a development of Stratego (my original Stratego set actually used wooden blocks). While in this country we knew only Stratego until recently, in Britain there were several games using this principle. These games are quite old in origin, before World War One for the first (I strongly suspect this is the game from which Stratego is derived). The titles included L'Attaque, Dover Patrol, and Tri-tactics, and the publisher was H. P. Gibsons, as I recall. My own game Swords & Wizardry, also published by Gibsons, used the same method, but was more complex than Stratego and introduced a die roll into combat to increase uncertainty.

R. Knizia, the famous "Euro" game designer, produced a Lord of the Rings game that resembles Stratego in some respects. The German title is "Der Herr
der Ringe - Die Entscheidung" (Lord of the Rings--the Confrontation, I think).

In block games we usually have uncertain strength, but not uncertain location. However, it is always possible to have a piece represent no units at all, should the designer prefer it. You can be faced with a long line of pieces, not knowing which might represent powerful forces, while others are decoys representing nothing.

Unfortunately, the nature of any block game is that you can have only two opposing sides. It's very difficult to employ three sets of blocks such that the backsides of two sets are hidden from each opponent, and the problem is progressively worse when there are more players.

About 40 years ago I owned a naval game, ordered through a comic book, from Helen of Toy Company that featured hidden strength in modified form. The hundred or so plastic ships had different forms, so that you could tell a cruiser from a destroyer from a submarine from a cargo ship; a cruiser could always defeat a destroyer, a battleship would always defeat a cruiser, and so on, but a strength number on the bottom of the ship determined which destroyer was strongest within the destroyers group and which cruiser was strongest amongst the cruisers. We could do the same in a Stratego-like block game if the blocks indicated which type of unit they represented.

I designed a multi-player space wargame many years ago that used upside down pieces to conceal strength (and sometimes existence) of units from the other players. Block games use the four sides of the block (other than the front and back) to enable an individual unit to have varying strength. This is not possible in games that use upside down units; on the other hand, a piece in an upside down game can represent no force at all, or can represent a VERY powerful force. It is particularly good for representing ships (naval or space). While an individual ship is either at full strength or destroyed, a group can vary in strength, from one "scout" to four (or more) "dreadnoughts" in one piece.

A drawback of upside down units is that the owning player cannot easily see what he's got. Some players strongly dislike the need to manipulate a pile of pieces to see what's there. Another drawback is the cost of coloring the backside of each piece.

Hidden units, of course, had been used in other wargames long before I tried it. Sometimes it is implemented simply as "you can't look inside a stack of opposing pieces", sometimes as actually placing the pieces upside down. Another method is to use numbered counters or distinct figures, by some means hiding the units represented by each counter. Nowadays, you may have pieces that represent the location of units, and those units are represented by cards laid out in some manner. You don't actually have military unit pieces, just the cards themselves. And if those cards can represent several units, different types of units, or no units at all, you have a strong "fog of war" element.

The hidden strength aspect can be taken further. Nathan Kilgore pointed me toward his game Iron Tide: Panzers in the Ardennes. It "has a built in semi-fog of war system using random chits for the combat strength. The fog of war aspect is strengthened by the inability of your opponent to inspect stacks and the hidden chits. Also, because of the complete random chits, the owning players don't even know the exact strengths of their own units until the first time they engage in combat."

Entirely hidden location dates back to Kriegspiel chess (neither players sees the other player's pieces, referee required) and traditional Battleship (originally a graph-paper and pencil game, no referee required because there is no movement). Many computer conflict games (most real-time-strategy games, for example) use hidden location of all but nearby opponents.

Uncertainty about capability
What can the enemy do? In some games this involves more than just unit locations and strengths. I suspect one of the attractions of the "card-driven" wargames is uncertainty about the opponent's capabilities, because you don't know what cards he has drawn. Hammer of the Scots, a popular block game, uses cards as well as blocks. Many of the "card-driven" games provide much of their detail and "chrome" (historical feel) via the various cards and what they allow the player to do, and what the player cannot do without the appropriate card.

Jonathan Hager says "In Memoir '44, each player has a set of cards. Each player may even have a different number of cards indicating how prepared the forces were when engaged. During play, there is some uncertainty to where the player will attack next. A player must have the correct card in order to move units in a given area."

The recently-published War of the Ring game uses special dice instead of cards to generate uncertainty about capability. Each dice face enables a different action by a player; players can see the dice rolls of the opponent, then play their actions one by one, but before the dice roll they cannot be sure what their opponent will be able to do, let alone when.

Event cards are a popular way to represent uncertainty of capability. Does my opponent have a card that will increase his movement rate? Can he cause a plague in my homeland? Will he be able to counter my Famine card with his Good Weather card? Can he force a dynastic marriage alliance on me at an awkward juncture? And so on.

In some sense simultaneous movement can be seen as representing uncertainty about enemy capability. Unfortunately, simultaneous movement either requires computer assistance, or a small number of pieces (as in Diplomacy, where a player starts with three or four pieces and wins at around eighteen). In a game I'm playtesting now I use a mechanically more practical approach to this. Each player has a standard set of Action Cards representing various sets of activities. He places five of the cards face down on a layout; then each player in turn plays the first card, and acts accordingly, until all #1 cards are played, then the second card is played, and so on. Each card offers the player a restricted set of choices--for example, you can't move fleets or armies when you play the "Trade" card. Brian Leet calls this "committed intent", and says Wallenstein and Roborally use similar methods. I have not played these games, but understand that choosing the cards in Roborally is a little like procedural computer programming.

A problem with the block game Pacific Victory is that too much uncertainty is introduced, as all units look the same whether land, sea, or air. It's pretty unlikely in the real world that these unit types could be confused.

Uncertainty in combat
Dice are the traditional method of introducing uncertainty into combat. Avalon Hill used the old D6 combat table. Other games such as Risk, Axis & Allies, and Britannia use a dice roll for some or all units involved in combat.

In some games the cards govern what a player can do, but in others they affect combat. Germania uses "Battle Cards" instead of dice to introduce uncertainty in combat. Players have more control over what card they play than they would over dice rolls, sometimes knowing that a particular attack would be unwise because their hand of cards is poor, or knowing that they can try an even-strength attack because their cards are so good.

Some games such as Stratego or Diplomacy have no overt chance mechanism in combat, but guessing still comes into play at times owing to hidden strengths or simultaneous movement.

Combat methods involving no uncertainty at all are common. Vinci and History of the World use them, for example. It is also possible to devise a "combat table" that extracts losses exactly in proportion to forces (so, for example, in a 2-1 fight, the smaller side always loses twice as much as the stronger side).

Simpler and more "classical" games often completely avoid uncertainty in combat. Chess, checkers, Go, all do this (and in fact avoid all elements of uncertainty other than intentions of the opponent). This absolute certainty in combat is not usually what historical gamers are looking for, though it is popular in Euro-style games. In fact, you could make a case that one impetus toward Euro-style games has been dislike of dice-rolling in conflicts.

Uncertainty of Timing
One of the biggest problems of historical wargames is that most players know when some major event occurred that made a big difference in the outcome of a battle or campaign. For example, when playing a game about the ancient Near East, you know when the Hittites or Persians appeared. In Britannia, everyone knows that, in Turn 6, the Saxons are going to swarm into Britain in a major invasion; and players prepare for it.

This is a tough nut to crack, and forces a designer away from simulation toward representation if he wants to reintroduce uncertainty. For example, in a Near Eastern game I'm working on players roll a die to determine whether an historical group appears or not. In the turn before it actually appeared in history, a roll of a 1 or a 2 causes the group to appear early. In the turn of actual appearance, a 1 through 4 will do it (if it didn't appear in the previous turn). In the turn after historical appearance, the group will certainly show up. Then we have something that can make for a better game, but is less true to the details of history (though arguably it is truer to the spirit of history . . .).

Event cards can introduce uncertainty of timing. Cards may require certain conditions to be met before they're played, but until someone plays the card, the "Big Event" does not occur. In War of the Ring, it's likely that some events of great advantage to one side or the other will occur during the game, but not until the appropriate card is played.

Brian Leet points out that "in many war games there are tracks that represent certain inevitabilities that are impacted by the player's actions. Elements such as discontent, moral or political will all may have a certain outcome, but uncertain timing (or be potentially avoidable altogether with careful play, perhaps allowing the Roman Consulship to survive is
a good historical possibility)."

In some "sweep of history" games uncertainty can be introduced at the end of the game without detriment to historical fact. Multiplayer games that don't include uncertainty about the timing of the end of the game can suffer from "ganging up on the leader" and bizarre moves, simply because players know the game is about to end (History of the World and Vinci can have this problem). I counter this by introducing a chance element (die roll) in the game ending. The roll needed varies with other conditions in the game, but in any case players can never be sure the game will end in a particular turn, and the roll comes after the turn is over. This tends to eliminate the end-of-game shenanigans that are often so unlike historical reality.

Uncertainty about Non-player Forces
Often in wargames, if there are any forces not directly controlled by players ("neutrals"), they are usually completely passive. In other words, players face no uncertainty about the actions of neutrals. In Germania, some invasions come at set junctures, while others occur when appropriate Event cards are played. Players temporarily control the invaders, who are anything but passive; in some games there may be more invaders on the board than player pieces.

Frequently there's a political dimension to non-player forces. Will they join the war or will they stay out? Often there are ways to introduce uncertainty to these questions. A draw from a deck of cards can be used to "control" non-players (this can even be seen as a form of programming), and if nothing else, a dice table can remove any certainty about what the non-player forces will do.

Uncertainty of Objective
Finally we come to uncertainty of objective. In war, you generally know the overall objective of your enemies, so the uncertainty is in how they're going to achieve it. But at times, especially in tactical as opposed to strategic situations, you may not even be sure of the objective.

I don't recall seeing uncertainty of objective much in wargames. The obvious method to produce it is an "objective card" selected by each player (perhaps at random) at the start of the game. Another method is to offer several ways to win. Players can disguise which method they're actually pursuing, possibly introducing an element of surprise into the game.

I once wrote a D&Dish tavern scenario in which each character, played by a player, chose a random objective. This was published in White Dwarf over 25 years ago and folks at conventions are still playing it, evidently enjoying the additional uncertainty. I suspect uncertainly of objective appears more often in Euro-style games than in wargames, frequently reflected through several ways to win the game. Opponents know what those ways are, but cannot know which way an individual player may be pursuing.

Peter Riedlberger points out that versions of standard Risk for the past 20-some years have included "order" (objective) cards, something I've not seen as my Risk-playing days go back to the late 60s. These cards are included in the latest American edition. Unfortunately, he says, the objectives are not equally difficult to achieve. Torben Mogensen says that this imbalance relates to the number of players, as some objectives may be easier or harder to achieve depending on the number of participants Too bad the developers didn't have multiple objectives on the cards, one for each possible number of players, so that they could be properly balanced.

Torben also points out that the family game Careers let players secretly choose to allocate his goals amongst three objectives (fame, happiness, and riches). I had forgotten all about this game (which originally appeared in the 1950s), one of the better family games I can recall, perhaps in part because of the hidden objectives. I am experimenting with a variation of this in Seas of Gold, in which players secretly allocate victory point weights to each of three objectives (territory, culture, and gold), or in which each player draws a card that secretly allocates weights for him.

There certainly have been wargames that used uncertainty of objective. Peter Coles says this "was used brilliantly by WRG in a 1970s Naval wargame called 'Sea Strike'. Each side drew an envelope containing a card detailing force size (in points) and objective." I'm sure there are others.

I'm told that GMT's Ardennes '44 has four different ways for the German player to win, all in effect. The German player practically can attempt only one, and must try to mislead the Allied player about which he is pursuing.

Jonathan Hager says that in Memoir '44, "the overall objective is clear - obtain X medals. But how those medals are obtained could be by killing units, exiting the board (for some scenarios) or taking a critical location."

Brian Leet suggests that Illuminati should be in the list, with one participant having a secret objective. And "'Shooting the Moon' in hearts is a classic example from traditional card play."

Who is Uncertain?
It's worth pointing out that in most of the cases I've described, only the opponent is uncertain about something. But in a few cases (as in Iron Tide: Panzers in the Ardennes), neither player is certain.

Is Uncertainty Good?
Is uncertainty a good thing? "Classical" game players prefer as little uncertainty as possible in their games (chess is an example), while "Romantic" players like a considerable level of uncertainty as it helps them pursue the "Great Play". Peter Riedlberger comments that "you can have an undesirably dense 'fog', to keep the metaphor. All Stratego-likes I know are mostly about bluffing. This can be fun, but is quite different to other, more tactical games." I wonder how much of good generalship in the real world is about bluffing; look what the Allies did in 1944, convincing the German high command that the Atlantic invasion would be at a location other than Normandy, even after the landings began . . .

Students of history know that real warfare can be a very uncertain activity. Amongst wargames, uncertainty is seen more in "simulations", less in "representations", and yet less in "semblance/theme" wargames. Looked at from another point of view, if you want a good game, the level of uncertainty must be kept in check, or in the end you have nothing more than a game of chance (as in traditional Battleship).

Characteristics of successful designers

This is another article that appeared on GameCareerGuide some months ago.

Characteristics of successful designers

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Mark Twain

"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." Calvin Coolidge

Game designers must have a productive orientation in life. Game design is not something you turn on and turn off daily, it’s something that must be with you all the time, that you must make an effort to pursue. Persistence is more important than "creativity".

Many novelists write all their adult lives, even from childhood; most game designers design games from an early age, most artists draw from an early age. But some come to it late and are still good at it. Most of the people who write novels or design published board and card games have full time jobs. For example, once-profilic SF/F novelist Glen Cook never gave up his General Motors assembly line job, writing during his commute.

Freelancing is much less common in the video game industry, which is where most full-time designers work for a particular game development studio.

Many people involved in publishing non-electronic games work part-time, relying on a “day job” for their living. Most game publishers, even in video games, originated as self-publishers, distributing the "dream game" of the people who founded the company.

If you read good advice about breaking into the game industry, that advice will include "read as much as you can" and "educate yourself as much as possible", even as the advisors suggest that a bachelor's degree is a good idea. For example, everyone interested in "breaking in" should read the wealth of advice on Tom Sloper's Web site (sloperama.com) and his monthly IGDA column. I’ve used a book by Ernest Adams, Break into the Game Industry (http://ernestadams.com/), now a bit long in the tooth (2002) but still available. His advice is well worth reading (especially about getting a job and how to keep a job), and amounts to the same as Tom's.

“An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.” Anatole France

In general, game designers must have an “educated” attitude, even if they have no more formal education than a high school diploma. Let me hasten to say that "educated" refers to an attitude, not to earned degrees. Fortunately for us, the game industry does not yet have the "degree-itis" that is invading all walks of American life, as though the only way you can learn something is to get a degree in it. The industry is a "meritocracy", where you are valued and hired for what you can do and what you can create. "Educated people" doesn't necessarily imply academic degrees, it implies a certain attitude toward life. It's that attitude that the game companies want and need to succeed. So I am not talking about the classic idea of the "well-educated" person, which relates to particular things like knowledge of the Classics.

No, an "educated person" is a person with a certain attitude toward life, not necessarily one who has a degree. There are people with legitimate Ph.D.s who could be called uneducated (though this is unlikely). There are certainly many people with bachelors degrees who are essentially uneducated. And there are 17 and 18 and 19 year-olds who clearly are educated people, though they haven't had the time to accumulate a wealth of experience and knowledge that is associated with being educated.

So what makes someone "educated"? An educated person wants to KNOW, and will make an effort to find out things. An uneducated person will tend not to bother. Here's a simple example. An educated person, confronted with a word he doesn't know, is likely to look it up. He wants to improve his understanding (of language, of the world). An uneducated person isn't going to bother.

Further, an educated person teaches himself or herself when necessary, from books or otherwise, rather than wait for a class. The uneducated ones will frequently whine "I haven't been to training for that". Not surprisingly, educated people tend to read a lot, and uneducated ones don't.

In my classes I assign students the "task" of maintaining a notebook or other "data store" in which they record game-related ideas as they get them. It's a habit they should get into on their own, and I try to teach attitudes more than "facts". The "uneducated" attitude surfaces soon: "how much do I have to include in this?" The student wants to know the minimum, rather than take the educated attitude that this is something he should do anyway, that is worth doing, and he should put some time into it.

Educated people like to use their brains in top gear; uneducated people prefer to run in "idle" or first gear. The old-fashioned "thirst for knowledge" is what I'm talking about. This is part of a productive orientation.

What's important is what you know and what you can do, not what classes you took or what degrees you have. Good classes help you learn much quicker, as you take advantage of the experience of teachers and authors, but good classes are not always available.

Characterize what a game designer does in one word

There are lots of choices. I’ll describe each, starting with the most important first:

· Think

· Communicate

· Innovate

· Control

Think

The game designer needs to have his brain in gear all the time. When playing games, he should be thinking about what works, what doesn’t, and why. He must keep his mind open to ideas at all times. He must think about how to improve his game even when (if) he enjoys playing it. The game can always be improved, we just come to a time when the improvement we can get isn’t worth the time it will take (the law of diminishing returns).

Most important, the designer must think critically. “Fanboys” (or girls) will never make good game designers, as they typically praise a game or genre uncritically. Self-criticism is especially important. If you can’t recognize that your favorite mechanic just doesn’t fit, or just isn’t needed, then you won’t design good games. Self-indulgence is “verboten”.

Communicate

This is much more important for video game designers than for non-electronic game designers. Most video games require a team to produce. The game designer must communicate in writing and orally everything about his game in a manner that enables the artists and programmers to reproduce it. This is really hard to do!

Non-electronic game designers can make the prototypes and write the rules themselves, but still must communicate well with playtesters to improve the game. Moreover, since the rules are not enforced by computer, it’s especially important to write rules that are clear, concise, understandable.

Finally: if you haven't written it down, "it doesn't count."

Innovate

While game design is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration”, that 10% is important. It’s not hard to “design” the next shooter clone. Finding that spark to make it more than a clone, more than just a shooter, separates the most successful designers from the rest. Too many designers design the game they want to play, which is almost exactly like some existing game that they love to play. “Think outside the box” applies here.

Control

Game designers do not need to be "control freaks", but they need to carefully control everything in the design of the game. People who buy games want the designer to make every effort to produce an enjoyable game. They don't want to depend on random this or that unless the designer has decided that randomness will create the best game experience.

Example: students making a form of "capture multiple flags" boardgame dropped the flag markers on the board to create a random distribution. My jaw dropped.

If you're the professional designer, you should work out a set of excellent and interesting positions for the flags, rather than depend on chance placement. Why trust enjoyment of your game to unnecessary chance? Yes, it's more work for the designer, making up and recording the patterns of placement, playtesting each one multiple times. But the result will be a fairer and better game.

Do I have to be an outstanding player?

Being a “dynamite” game player, whether it’s in Halo 3 or Mario or Command & Conquer or Axis & Allies, does not translate to being a good game designer. The skills and points of view are very different.

On the other hand, if you have played Tic-Tac-Toe (Noughts and Crosses) some, and have not realized that it is always a draw when played optimally, you have a mountain to overcome, because you’ll likely not see the optimal strategies in more complex games.

In other words, you’ll help yourself a lot if you’re a good enough game player to quickly see the best strategies and tactics in a game. You can avoid dominant strategies and other pitfalls that otherwise your playtesters will have to reveal, at a cost of time and frustration.

You needn’t be an outstanding player, but it helps to be a good player.

Game Origins

This originally appeared on GameCareerGuide, 9 Dec 08. For the diagram refer to the original (click on the title of this post).

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. —C. S. Lewis

Game-related ideas come from many sources and can be in many shapes and forms. At some point, ideas coalesce into something that can become a game. Usually there is some immediate stimulus, some spark, involved.

I want to discuss the kinds of sparks that are common to new games, that is, where and how do games originate?

Ideas for new games usually come from one or a combination of several aspects of games. These are:

• theme (story, title, image)

• mechanics

• a particular game, a game system, or a genre

• components (mostly, non-electronic games)

• constraints.

The occult-looking lines in the diagram are meant to indicate that a game may have more than one kind of origin.

Let’s describe each in turn. In most cases, only the designer will know the origin of a game, so our examples will be limited.

Theme: Story, Title, Image

The theme is some set of circumstances, usually a story, that can affect the game’s mechanics, appearance, and gameplay. It may be as simple as a title or an image, in the imagination or in a tangible form, of some event or activity.

Most Star Wars games have a theme deriving from the original Star Wars films (1977-1983), Civilization has a theme of the rise and development of civilization. Age of Empires is a more consistently military approach to the same idea. Britannia is a board game where the theme is a thousand years of British history (after all, “story” is integral to “history”).

In general, any history, real or imagined, as the Star Wars history is imagined, is a theme. There are many board games based on (that is, borrowing the theme of) video games, and vice versa. For example, Civilization the computer game, though not directly derived from Civilization the board game, is certainly related to it, while Starcraft: the Boardgame is clearly derived from the computer game.

Sometimes the story is very simple, as in the board game Dragon Rage: attacks by monsters, sometimes dragons, on a city. The title alone helps characterize the game. At least one game’s theme comes from a story that was written to support a set of commercial miniature figures (Valley of the Four Winds).

Many European-style board games have tacked-on themes that don’t affect gameplay or mechanics at all, though they affect the appearance of the game. Despite the name, the gameplay in the board game Ming Dynasty has exactly nothing to do with China, though the artwork is vaguely Chinese. Some stories are merely excuses to blow things up, as in many shooters. In these cases the game probably originated somewhere other than through the theme.

Many AAA video games aim at “dream-fulfillment”, a subcategory of theme/story that some might list as a separate kind of origin. What kind of hero, or “star”, or expert, or even god, do you want the player to “become” through your game?

Mechanics

The non-electronic version of Dungeons and Dragons can be seen as a game originating in mechanics. There were many fantasy games, but the role-playing mechanic, which more or less began the role-playing game genre, is the defining characteristic of the game.

Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero can be thought of as games that likely originated in mechanics. In a postmortem of the latter game published in Game Developer magazine (February 2006), two of the developers from Harmonix, Greg LoPiccolo and Daniel Sussman, said Guitar Hero was really designed around letting the player feel like a rock star, rather than a game designed around a new controller. The peripheral device came about as a result of giving this rock star feel to the player.

In both Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution, we have an unusual mechanic, the flow of directions that the players follow to make certain physical moves.

A Particular Game, a Game System, or Genre

A “system” is a case where a set of mechanics has become so well-known that games are made using most or all of the set. Many historical board games begin with a system, such as “block games” (Hammer of the Scots), “card-driven games” (We the People), Risk-like games (Risk Godstorm), Britannia-like games (Italia, China: The Middle Kingdom), and “committed intent” games. Video games, apart from obvious sequels, very often adapt a system, and video game genres themselves tend to involve challenges to players that are common to most games of the genre.

Many video games originate with a genre. “We want to make a real-time strategy game,” or “let’s make a shooter.” There are genres in non-electronic gaming, but they tend to be broader (RPGs, collectible card games, war games). The genres in video games are quite specific, tending sometimes to straightjacket the designers’ efforts.

Often the genre goes hand-in-hand with a theme or system. Battle for Middle Earth is a Lord of the Rings themed RTS. LOTR Trilogy Risk is a “Lord of the Rings” themed Risk-like game.

In the end, many games derive directly from specific other games. In the video game world, the “safe” way to go is to design a game that is much like an existing successful game, but just enough different to be unique and to be perceived as an improvement. While derivation from another game is probably the most common method of origin, it is also probably the least successful, because too many resulting games suffer badly from being “too derivative.”

Components (primarily non-electronic games)

On the non-electronic side, components can be at the origin of a game. In my own experience, Law & Chaos originated because I wanted to make a game using the “jewel-like” glass beads that have become popular for plant displays, and another game originated in a desire to use stackable plastic pieces from an educational supply house.

A component could be a special controller, such as one allowing the video game player to “drive a car” in a natural way. It’s possible that Dance Dance Revolution was derived from components. I don’t know whether the mechanic or the component came first -- or maybe they came together.

Constraints

I’m going to discuss constraints at some length, as this is where the greatest variety and the greatest limitations can come from.

Are you a person who works better when faced with a deadline? I believe that many people do better work when faced with constraints, whether deadlines or something else. This is particularly true in art, but likely true in most walks of life.

In effect, everything a designer does is considered working within constraints. The answer to the question “Who is the audience” provides constraints. If your audience is preschool children, you can’t design a game that requires a lot of math (or reading). If you know your game will be a first-person shooter, your design choices have been heavily circumscribed.

When you playtest your game, the constraints are more specific. “Is this enjoyable” for my target audience? Is that too complex, or too simple? Does this element contribute to gameplay, or shall we “lose it?” Instead of that, what I’m talking about in this “origin” are additional constraints on the kind of game you want to make, imposed as part of the process of conception. I think that a good choice of constraints -- choosing more limited goals than “let’s make a shooter” -- will lead to a better game.

Let me generalize. In many fields of art, periods of fairly clear “rules” for how to create art (for example, the sonata form in music or the three-movement form of a concerto) are followed by periods when there are no rules, until new rules are established. The greatest art comes from the periods when there are established rules. My example is primarily from music.

In the Rococo period following the Baroque, Johann Sebastian Bach’s sons and others made good music, but not the great music we saw before and in the succeeding Classical era as defined by Hayden and Mozart. In the current era of “modern art” (painting) there are no rules. Not everyone thinks modern art is rubbish, but I think it won’t get much respect in the future.

Yes, great artists often break some of the rules -- Beethoven comes to mind -- yet even they follow most of the “rules.” When all the rules are swept aside, people grasp for new sets of rules (Schoenberg’s 12-tone music?), but for a time the chaos results in little that is later recognized as great art.

Consequently, a designer usually benefits from additional limitations, whether imposed by a publisher or studio (“no foul language”), or by himself (“I want a one-hour trading game”). Even though a self-imposed limitation may ultimately be abandoned in the interests of making the game better, initially it focuses the designer’s efforts and is likely to provide better results. There are always self-imposed limits, because you have your own preferences. And if you work for a game studio or publisher, you might find that you have to jettison some preferences: If they say “make such-and-such a game,” you’ll do it or you’ll be out of a job.

In other words, self-imposed constraints are “rules” you use to try to help yourself create a better result, just as the “rules” for the various arts tend to yield better results.

In any case, be sure your idea origin isn’t simply based on the game being “just like I’d like to play.” You are not the audience. You are very unusual or you wouldn’t be designing games. And the game you’d like to play has likely already been designed. My favorite game for 20 years was Dungeons & Dragons, but I have never tried to design a role-playing game. I like D&D -- why would I want to design something just like it?

It’s too much time and effort to design a game just so you can play it. Game designers should design games that other people will enjoy playing. Most of the time, you’ll like to play them, too.

Let me quote Sid Meier (Civilization, Pirates) from Gameinformer 182, June 2008:

“[T]here's a danger with some of the newer designers, a tendency to design the game you like to play. That game has already been designed -- we need new games. There's a loss of a little bit of that ‘sky's the limit, anything's possible’ approach we had in the early days. We have these genres -- we have first-person shooters, we have real-time strategy. If you've played games all your life you've gotten these certain styles really beaten into you. To get people to think out of the box is a little harder these days.”

On the other hand, do not design a game you dislike to play yourself, at least not until you are very experienced. If you dislike it, why would you expect anyone else to like it? As you get more experience and understand players better, you may be able to design a game that appeals to a certain segment, even though it doesn’t appeal to you. At some point this may be worth doing, to get you “out of a rut,” to “think outside the box,” but it’s not something to be done lightly.

In any case, write down whatever you come up with. This is not naturally what younger people do, but you’ll forget many details if you don’t. The famous writer and director Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove, 2001, Eyes Wide Shut) is said to have distrusted anyone who didn't write things down. Where games are concerned, I feel the same way.