There are some typical questions that come to mind in people who want to design games but haven't really done so yet.  One of these is "how do you actually start a game"?

I have written about how games originate, what element starts the thought process.  http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/662/idea_.php  This time I want to focus on questions you can ask yourself, lists you can make, techniques you can use, rather than on specific aspects of the game.

I am supposing that you don't want to make a game that's just like some published game.  This can be good practice, but unlikely to result in a commercially viable game.   I'd rather spend less time modifying an existing game rather than make a clone from scratch.  No, that's not commercially viable, but it's good practice. 

There are various ways to approach game design, for example as problem-solving to create something that succeeds mechanically, or secondly as a way to find interesting things for people to do (play).  The first doesn't always result in a particularly-interesting game, and playtesting can show this.  The second may have a potential to be interesting, but you may never be able to figure out how to make it happen, how to have the game provide the interesting things to do.

Some designers are very cerebral, some design from the gut, and the rest are somewhere in between.

The extreme gut method is "I've got some notions written down, can quickly make a 'kind of' prototype, let's play and make the rest of the rules as we go along" method.  This might be called the "seat of the pants" method or "winging it" method.  This reminds me of a D&D referee who prepares almost nothing before an adventure and makes it up as he goes along.  Some game designers can manage to do this occasionally and get good results, some make a hash of it.  But there usually has to be a partial game as a starting point.

What it reminds me of is a painter staring at a canvas, about to paint something, he has a vague idea of what.  I'd call it the "artist" method of creating a game, as opposed to the more "scientific" method that many use.   My guess is that people who are making commercial games rather than art games would rarely proceed this way.

The beauty of paper prototypes is that this can be done pretty quickly.  It doesn't work for video games unless you are a dynamite programmer and aiming at a quite limited game.



If you're lucky, and if you have experience, another way a game may start is that it all leaps pretty clearly into mind, and it works when played about like you thought it would.  But that still means there's a long, long process of playtesting and modification to be done.

This "leap forward" may be preceded by a long gestation period when you're trying to get your ideas to fit together, and then suddenly it all comes together.  You nibble at it like a dog chewing a bone (and sometimes dogs bury them or just forget about them for a long time).  Once again, you usually have to have something in mind to start with, so it's one step beyond "the start".


Now let's look at some things you can do to organize your thoughts, to be more "scientific" in your method, and to help you avoid making games that are purely derivative.  Recognize that it's still going to take a while. A game isn’t built in a day.

Likability of Games
Make a list of games you really like.  List the three or four outstanding reasons why you like the games, each one in turn.  Do some of the reasons occur again and again? 

Now do the same for games that you really don’t like.  This time, list three or four things you do like along with three or four that you don’t like.  Do some of these “bad” games nonetheless have some “good” characteristics?  This will often be the case; a really good game succeeds not only by having good characteristics, but by avoiding bad ones.

At some point you may want to list of three or four things you’d really like, that you want in a game you’re working on.

The Essence of games
Another approach is to write the essence of games you like.  The essence is a two or three sentence description that gets to the heart of what the game is about.  Do the same for some games you don't like.  Then try to do it for a game you want to design.  I've written about this separately: http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2011/04/essence-of-game.html

What is the player going to do?
You might find that the things you like about games are often related to what the player does.  One of the most important aspects of game design is the question, “What is the player going to do?”  Try making brief lists again of what the player(s) do in games you really like, and what they do in games you dislike.  Then make a list of what you want players to do in a game you’re working on.

What’s going to happen?
Another way to look at a game is, “what happens”?  A way to approach this in game design is to make a list of events you’d like to have occur in your game.  Some of these events may occur many times, some only once, some may not occur in every play of the game.  You can make such lists forever if you go into enough detail.  Try to end up with a list of 10 to 20 events at roughly the same level of detail (“granularity”).  (Those familiar with Systems Analysis will recognize that the Event List is an important part of analysis.)

The two methods above are both aspects of what legendary video game designer Chris Crawford says in his First Law of Software Design, “Always start by asking, ‘What are the verbs?’”

Answer a "what if" question
This seems to be the start of many science fiction stories.  Do you have, or can you think of, any "what if" questions that can be turned into games?  These are legion for alternative history ("what if Napoleon had died in one of those early battles in Italy").   And many historical games can be designed to allow exploration of alternate histories.  Or it may be as simple as "what if chess pieces had differing combat strengths". 

Reality Management for Game Designers

For a couple decades I regularly taught graduate computer management classes.  One of the most important themes of those classes was that a manager/supervisor has to recognize what reality is, not what he would like reality to be or what he thinks it ought to be.  If you don’t know what’s really going on, how can you make it work better?  Yet a great many managers lose track of reality, and the really poor ones are often in what I call “cloud-cuckoo land.”

You might feel that this shouldn’t matter to game designers but in fact it’s very important.  Game design in some sense is project management.  Your project can’t come to fruition if you don’t recognize the reality of it, the true state of your game.  The classic project management cycle is plan-execute-monitor-control-replan and continue with execution.  That’s the same thing you’re doing with the game as you create it and especially after you have a playable prototype.  In case it’s not clear, “monitor” means observe what is happening (the execution) and how that doesn’t match the plan, and “control” means act to change how things are going when they’re not going according to plan.  Of course, if you have no plan you don’t know where you’re going and so you’re most unlikely to get there.  For a tabletop game the plan isn’t so much a prescription for how things will go (because things will change), as a description of where you want to end up.  For a traditional AAA video game the plan is more prescriptive because it takes so long to get to a playable prototype.

Your principal reality check is playtesting.  That’s why it’s vitally important to pay attention to playtests and to *listen* to playtesters.  If you’re making a game with a team rather than solo (solo is common for tabletop games), you can also hope that the team will provide a reality check.  Unfortunately the team’s view of the game will be so skewed by their closeness to it that they will have lost touch with its reality to some extent.  (Clearly you can’t rely on your family and close friends as principal playtesters to keep you grounded in reality; though that depends a lot on the family!) 

In other words, insofar as the purpose of most games is to satisfy the target audience, it’s important that the playtesting is with the target audience.  Otherwise playtesting doesn’t match reality.  I’m convinced that this has been the flaw in many video games that fell on their faces, although it still more common that the games are issued before they have been sufficiently tested owing to unchangeable marketing schedules.

Remember that there are facts revealed by playtesting that the playtesters won’t tell you, won’t even notice.  I recall specifically a game that worked well and playtesters seemed to enjoy, but which had the flaw that whoever was ahead halfway through almost always won.  I had to keep track of the points and notice this before I had a chance to fix it.  With a great deal more playtesting it might have been noticed by the testers, but don’t wait for playtesters to reveal flaws you can detect yourself by monitoring a series of games.

The heart of game design is monitoring and control, not the planning.  Video game design books often give an entirely different impression because they concentrate so much on planning.  That’s because, for AAA games, so much planning must be done before the playable prototype stage is reached.  The focus on planning is in fact a defect of the software creation process, at least as it has been traditionally practiced.  Nowadays we have Agile and Scrum and other methods of speeding up the process so that a playable prototype is reached early rather than late in the production.  But it’s still the case that it takes a long time to make a playable prototype of a video game compared with the time it takes to make a tabletop prototype.  That’s why many experts recommend that people planning a video game make a paper prototype as soon as possible, if that’s practical at all.  I know of at least one video game where the entire game was “played” in a paper version before the software was created.  (Shadow Complex, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4119/making_shadow_complex_donald_.php?page=2)

The need to focus on reality is why I sometimes say that game design is about critical thinking and self-criticism.  One reason why novice game designers struggle is that they’re not accustomed to “getting down to reality”.  Young people especially have been encouraged to “follow their dreams” and “be creative”, and are told that they’re special and wonderful, consequently they can be pretty far into cloud-cuckoo land when they are evaluating a game that they have created.  Experience helps, both experience in game design and experience with a broad variety of life.  A broad and deep education helps as well.

A reason why free-to-play online games have been so successful is that the players provide a strong reality check as the game is developed.  The game is usually made available to players long before it could be called “finished”.  Then if enough players like it they are likely to tell developers what they like and what they don’t like, providing a strong reality check as long as a relatively small group’s opinion does not become dominant by virtue of being noisier.  That’s the danger of online communities.  They may have opinions that don’t jive with the majority of players, yet because they are amongst the minority who talk online about the game their opinions may be taken as representative of all the players.

Recognition of reality in the sense of what your target audience wants and needs is very important.  I recently talked in a post on my primary blog (http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/) about avoiding arithmetic in games because so many people find it frustrating.  Some respondents were dismayed that I didn’t recognize an opportunity to help improve arithmetic skills by putting them into games.  But that’s a venture into cloud-cuckoo land.  People in this century don’t want frustration in their games.  The reality of the commercial game market is "arithmetic frustrates most people".

There is a well-known book about creating usable websites called “Don’t Make Me Think" by Steve Krug.  What the author means is, don’t make people think about how to get at the information that’s on the website, because this distracts and frustrates them.  This has to be modified specifically for games.  In many games we want people to think, but we want them to think about the mechanics and dynamics of the game, and about the opposition, not about something that is ancillary to the game, that is not part of success or failure.  What’s important in a D20 tabletop RPG is whether or not you hit, not whether you can add modifiers to calculate your to-hit total.  Doing arithmetic is ancillary, though there are other games where arithmetic is central to success or failure. 

Don’t make people think about doing math unless math is central to the game.  Don't make people think about anything that isn't necessary to the game.

But it all depends on your target market.

Last year I was asked to write a blog post for Buffalo Games, a maker of family games. This was originally posted on their Facebook page.

          What’s important in board and card game design

Game design is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.  Don’t think that the idea is important.  What makes a marketable game is the execution, the creation of a complete game, not the idea.  Some ideas are better than others, true, but there are hardly any original ideas–if you’ve thought of it, probably a hundred others have as well.  Virtually no publisher pays for an idea, publishers pay for completed games (though they may then change them...).  So be prepared to work!

The second most important thing to remember about ideas is, you need to work at getting lots of them: maybe a few will work out well.

Ideas come from everywhere, from all kinds of associations: you must actively seek to get ideas, don’t wait for them to come floating by.

Lots of people have game ideas, fewer make a prototype, fewer still actually play the game.  You don’t really have a game until you have a prototype that can be played.  It needn’t be pretty, but it must be functional.  If people enjoy playing a merely functional version of the game, they’ll enjoy the pretty published version even more.  Maybe when you submit the completed game to a publisher you’ll make a pretty version.

You don’t have to have a full set of rules to start with, you just need to know how to play.  Writing nearly-perfect rules is the hardest part of designing a game.  Trying to write perfect rules when the game is new may be a waste of time, as the game IS going to change.   In the end, though, if the rules are inadequate, the game won’t be played correctly, which is usually a disaster, and you can’t leave rules writing until the very end because the rules must be tested just as the game must be tested.

“Playtesting is sovereign”.  Play your prototype, probably solo at first to work out the worst kinks, then have others play.  And play.  And play.  Virtually no game prototype is good at first.  The key to a good game is to playtest it, revise it, playtest it, revise it, playtest it, revise it, and so forth until the gameplay is polished to a gleam.  Change is the norm. 

You will probably get sick of the game before it’s “done!”  As Reiner Knizia says, it’s easy to get a game to an 80% completion state, hard to get it to 100%.   And you may think it’s “done” only to find that something MUST be changed.

Getting your game playtested is an invitation to say it sucks!   Your playtesters must be in your target audience (you ALWAYS have a target audience), and you need a lot of them.  Your family is not sufficient!  You need people who are willing to tell you the truth.

If you just want to design one game at a time, go for it.  If you want to be a game designer, you need to be designing a lot of games at the same time.

Unless you are very very lucky, you aren’t going to get rich designing games.  Do it because you love it, and perhaps you’ll make some money along the way.

Risk Legacy

Someone I was corresponding with mentioned Risk Legacy to me, and I found the rules online and read them.

The idea is that you a series of games (beginning as more or less standard Risk) are connected together, and as you play the board and other parts of the playing environment change, and rules change, from one game to the next. In the process you write on the board, destroy cards, stick stickers on the board in the cards, open sealed envelopes, write on stickers, and other things which render the game unplayable if you want to start from scratch. This is all in the name of personalization, that what the player does makes a difference to the environment in the long run.

Some people seem to think this is an innovative or cool idea. What’s cool about destroying your game? There’s nothing cool about destruction, period. Too many people look to express themselves, look for their reason (excuse) for existence, in destruction rather than in creation. Top that with what I can only describe as another of the destructive Triumphs of Capitalism, planned obsolescence: it’s not only built in obsolescence, it’s programmed destruction.

What’s innovative about rule changes? There lots of games where the rules change, though perhaps not very many where the play of one game changes rules in the next game. But so what? There are lots of games that have well tested variants and you can play the game with a variant whenever you want, hence changed rules. Here you have a more chaotic set of changes in rules. Yes, the choices you make in one game affect another. But does it really matter? And is it worth rendering the game useless?

There is no reason why this game could not have been designed so that it could be reusable. As it is you buy a game that you immediately start to destroy after you play it once. In fact there seems to be a celebration of destruction, disguised as personalization.

Moreover, it appears to be designed for a situation that will rarely occur, where you have the same 3 to 5 people playing a long series of the same game. But even if you do have that situation, at the end you need to buy another copy of the game to play again. Duh?! The cynic in me says that Hasbro may have hit on a real bonanza, a way to persuade people to buy the same game over and over if they really like it. I’d be ashamed to sell it. *Shakes head*.

Quite apart from that, do we have built-in design problems? As if leader bashing wasn’t a problem in some games, here we mark the leader off very clearly over a series of games.


Again I can only shake my head. My ego isn’t so weak that I need to personalize everything, including my games. Though I have nothing against personalization when it isn’t destructive. Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but to me this whole idea is destructively stupid as implemented.

Lew Pulsipher

Review, The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell , 2004-5 Harper-Collins.

This is the first of a series of historical novels about Anglo-Saxon England facing Viking attacks, especially the Great Army. Some of the Britannia players at WBC put me onto this, though it was sheer luck that I passed by it in the library stacks while browsing the other day.

I haven't read an historical novel in 35 years, but this one feels kind of like fantasy without the magic; in any case, you can see that my interest in the setting is greater than normal, thanks to the game Britannia.

Bernard Cornwell is a very well-known author of historical military related novels, especially the ones about Sharp that have been turned into a series of TV movies starring Sean Bean (I've never seen any). This novel is pretty intense and pretty grim at times, told very much from the first person point of view of a single person, the young heir to the earldom of Bamberg in Northumbria. A major character is King Alfred the Great, shown here as a very pious, sickly man who values learning as well as military prowess.

As many historical novelists, Cornwell appears to know his subject very well and to take as few liberties as possible. But with so few sources of information for that time this is a case where the historical novelist has a great deal of room to maneuver in.

I only had this book from the library, otherwise I'd already be reading the next. I look forward to reading more of this series, which will reach six books in October.

Book contract

As some of you know, I recently signed a contract with McFarland & Co, Publishers, for a book about learning to design (video) games. I have just finished the "next-to-final" draft, which is being commented on by some people, and will need to submit the final draft by Oct 15. With luck it will be available next year. (Keep in mind how long these things can take.)

The title I favor is "Learning Game Design", because I have not tried to be comprehensive. In fact, I've cut out almost as much as there is in the book (102,000 words at this point).

While it is about learning video game design, it also covers tabletop design to a great extent, both because they are the same in most respects, and because the best way to learn video game design is to start with the tabletop, as I explain at length in the book.

Lew

The Interface

All games have an interface, whether it’s pressing a button or moving a joystick, or manipulating cards and pieces. A poor interface can ruin a game; if you’ve played many video games you’ve surely been frustrated when the game made it hard for you to tell it what you wanted to do, a failure of the interface. We’d all like to just think what we want the game to do, and have it act accordingly, but that remains an aim for the Matrix/Star Trek holodeck future.

For a AAA game there might be a designer or two who only work on the game interface. People who are learning to design games cannot devote all their time to interface but it is still important topic.

Jakob Nielsen is the guru of usability for commercial Web sites, and has been for many, many years. (His partner is Don Norman, who wrote "The Design of Everyday Things", a classic book which I recommend you read.) Much of what Nielsen writes about making easy-to-use Web sites also applies very closely to designing good games. Every few weeks he publishes a new article. I strongly recommend that anyone who wants to be a good game designer read his material. You can begin with http://www.useit.com/alertbox/design-diversity-process.html

Nielsen identifies ten general principles--rules of thumb--for Web user interface design. I'll try to summarize these in relation to games.

"Visibility of system status". Users should be able to look at the game and know what's going on (as far as they ought to know, of course–information about the opposition may be hidden). When they do something they should be able to see the result, usually immediately.

"Match between system and the real world". The game should use words, phrases, and concepts easily understood by the user. We know that you shouldn't ask five-year-olds to do complex math or understand "big words". But every target audience has its characteristics that the game needs to accommodate. Furthermore, information should be presented in a logical order.

"User control and freedom". Give users a way to bail out when they make a mistake in using interface--not a game mistake but a game manipulation mistake. Allow undo and redo in video games.

"Consistency and standards". Follow platform conventions. People expect things to work a certain way, and if you do it another way that may interfere with their enjoyment of the game. This is one place where doing it the standard way is almost always a good thing.

"Error prevention". Design games so that users are unlikely to make mistakes. Good error messages are important but design that avoids mistakes is better.

"Recognition rather than recall". Don't make the user memorize things or keep track of things, let the game do it. Instructions should be easy to find if they're not visible.

"Flexibility and efficiency of use". Allow expert users to install shortcuts, such as remapping keys and joysticks on a controller. Don't expect the new user to use obscure commands.

"Aesthetic and minimalist design". Don't provide irrelevant information. Don't require two actions where one action will do.

"Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors". When a user does something wrong, describe exactly what the problem is and suggest a solution

"Help and documentation". The ideal game does not require the user to learn any rules, but this is rarely practical. Help and documentation (such as rules for tabletop games) should be easy to search.

See http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html.

A really big playtest failure

"Playtesting is sovereign", I like to say to students. But it has taken a long time for videogame companies to recognize this, and there're still examples of complete failures to do playtesting right even when they play test.

An example from last year is Final Fantasy XIV. Final Fantasy games are normally praised but this one has been trashed by reviewers. It's score on Metacritic (an aggregator of reviews) is 49, which is really bad for a videogame. http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/final-fantasy-xiv-online/critic-reviews

Here are some excerpts:

"It may be hard to believe, and painful to accept, but the last 'official' chapter of Final Fantasy is a huge disappointment, and it not only becomes the worst chapter of the saga, but also one of the worst MMORPG we have played in a long time. It's obvious that Square-Enix is no longer what it used to be."

"Final Fantasy XIV is in no way, shape, or form ready for commercial release. We suppose there is potential down the line for the experience to improve with patches and tweaks, but that doesn't justify why the game is in such shambles at launch. "

GameSpy (gave a 40). "Extended stretches of confused incredulity, punctuated now and then by bursts of intense anger. And yeah -- I just equated FF XIV with a filthy bathroom."

PC Gamer (gave a 30). "A shallow, slow, grind-heavy MMO crippled by a horrible interface and nonsensical player limitations."

So didn't they playtest it? Yes, they did! I found evidence of an open beta: (http://www.ffxivvault.com/ffxiv-beta-information.php and http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/12/final-fantasy-xiv-beta-test-now-recruiting/). "Anyone that wishes to be among the first to play the new MMORPG, which will launch on PlayStation 3 and PC in 2010, can sign up at the official beta site. Square Enix says that no prior MMO experience is required, and players selected to be in the beta will test the Windows version of the game."

So what happened? Did they test only with fanboys and girls? Did they ignore the results? It seems unlikely that they ran out of time and put the game out before was ready, because Square Enix is one of the more respected and consistently good videogame publishers.
So what can happen to give a "false positive" from playtesting?

First, you could be playtesting with people who know the game so well that the problems just don't register. But this would be likely only if the people within the studio were the playtesters, and in this case it was an open beta.

Second, you can have open playtesting but somehow you only get fanboys and fangirls, people who will say good things about your product no matter what. The have lost their critical faculties where you are concerned. Perhaps this is what actually happened. This is why you want to try to get many playtesters who don't know your products and you aren't prone to this kind of thing.

Third, you could just ignore the results, saying "oh well we know it's good". I'm convinced that Microsoft has done this quite frequently, adding smugly "we know what's best". There can be many examples but in the video game category the most famous one is the huge controller that Microsoft included with the original Xbox. Apparently it was sized for people my height (2 meters) with correspondingly large hands. According to what I've read Microsoft continued to maintain that it was fine but finally changed to a much more normal sized controller.

Fourth, perhaps they asked the wrong questions and yet didn't pay attention to the actual play. Frequently if you ask people what they think you'll get a different story than if you simply watch them and listen to them without interfering. Jakob Nielsen, the guru of web usability, always cautions you to watch people, not asked them what they will do or what they have done, because you get better data.

How long it takes

Gamers are often surprised at how long it takes for games to be published. Mayfair recently published a game that one of the principles thought they had had for eight years. Once I decided to revise the Britannia took three years to revise it and get it published. The Dragon Rage reissue took a similar time, though much of that was because it was a startup publisher. I have a game with Mayfair now that they originally saw it PrezCon 2008, if I recall correctly.

The book publishing industry can be slow too. My contribution called "The Three Player Problem" leads off the ETC Press book Tabletop Analog Game Design. This book was released this month. Because of the way ETC Press does things, giving unformatted electronic copies of books away and selling formatted publish on-demand versions for those who want paper copies, you'd think their process would be faster than a typical publisher that needs to print several thousand copies of a book. But this book has many contributors, and most of them did not write that contribution as soon as they were asked, the way I did. So I wrote my 5,000 words and "finished" the submittal copy on 13 September 2009. This was posted on a wiki for comments. I made slight changes by March 2010. The book was published in August 2011, nearly two years after I wrote the article.

When you read Writer's Market you see that publishers often say they'll take 15 to 18 months or more to publish a book once they've received the manuscript. I suppose much of this time must be in editing, because there's no typesetting involved anymore. All I know for sure is that but publishing takes a long time just as game publishing takes a long time.

Simple Versus Complex As a Game Design Philosophy

At conventions this summer I’ve watched two multiplayer fantasy wargames with many similarities but perhaps different philosophies of design. At the UK Game Expo in Birmingham England I watched Wizards of the Coast’s new game Dungeons and Dragons Conquest of Nerath being played, and at WBC in Lancaster Pennsylvania I watched a not yet published (P500) game called War Party.

Both games can accommodate up to four players, but by dividing them into two sides, that is there were not four independent sides but two partnerships, rather like Axis and Allies when you play with four or five people. (You can play four sides, but the games aren’t designed to optimize that situation.) If you play with three then one player controls two of the four nations/kingdoms. One nation is in each of the four corners.

There seem to be two points of view about game design expressed in current games. The short expression of my view is “KISS” or “keep it simple Simon”. The longer expression of this is my favorite quote related to games, which I put at the bottom of the page for my blogs and my website: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." (Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery).

The opposite view, which seems to be more and more commonly expressed in Eurostyle games these days, is that complexity is good, pretty much for its own sake. It’s as though adding features is a good thing, even though virtually every game can be reduced to a simple essence. (See http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2011/04/essence-of-game.html). Especially in abstract games, which includes many Euro games despite the atmosphere that’s tacked on, I think simpler is better so that players can concentrate on strategy rather than on details.

These two games, essentially about the same topic and approached in the same way, can be used to represent the two different views, although Nerath isn’t as simple as it *could* be. There is much more unit differentiation in War Party than in Nerath. In the latter game the units of each nation are often functionally the same as units of other nations. There are no separate, individual heroes who are not military units like all the other units. In War Party there is more differentiation, but there are also individual heroes that can be customized in a variety of ways. A couple of the military units in Nerath are allowed to go into the dungeons and “explore” while in War Party it is presumably the individual heroes who go. There appeared to be a lot more pieces on the board in WP, as well. Both are games about war rather than about battle, that is, economy plays a big part in success or failure.

Nerath uses Event Cards. Is this a complication? Event Cards are a case of adding variety (and replayability) without adding much rules complexity, because the rules are on the cards, and only need to be considered one by one as you draw the Events.

Nerath uses a victory point method, mostly related to capturing territories, that should see the game ended in about 90-120 minutes. I watched enough games to believe that. I was told War Party was upwards of 3 hours.

There are many other differences. For example, Nerath uses very nice plastic figures, while War Party uses large cardboard counters. Nerath has set-in-stone starting positions that mix the four nations closely together, as well as a standard playing order, both simplifying the game. I can see people developing standard first turn movement deriving from the standard set up, but that doesn’t make the play complicated, it just gives players something to think about when they’re not playing the game. In War Party each nation starts at the corner the board and spends a couple turns expanding without much contact with the other nations. Nerath also includes seas and ships that are absent from War Party.

And I would expect that Nerath plays faster because you don’t have that slow period of expansion without strong competition. The war is on immediately thanks to the way the nations are mixed together and yet sometimes have one part separated from another part of the same nation.

Nerath is not nearly as simple as, say, Diplomacy or Risk, but it is much more colorful than either. “Colorful” comes from the cards, from the intertwined nations, and from the pieces. By comparison War Party looks drab, but not having watched it nearly as much as I watched Nerath, I might not have seen the “color” beneath the surface.

One reason to play this kind of fantasy game is the color. If people are primarily interested in your game because of the topic, rather than because of the gameplay, then you can get too simple. You can remove so much of the color, the flavor of the topic, that potential players are no longer interested in the game.

I’ve not played either of these games, nor have I talked with anyone who’s played a lot (that is, who wasn’t involved in the development of the game), so I can’t tell you which game plays “better”, if any. I’d prefer to play Nerath because it’s a shorter game and the concept doesn’t deserve a longer game, and because the strategy looks much more interesting (I like the mix of sea and land). But I am sure there are people who would prefer the more complex game in terms of rules and variety, even though I suspect it is less interesting in terms of strategy.

WBC, Dragon Rage, and Tabletop game design book

I was at WBC in Lancaster PA for three days recently. My Thursday night talk about game design had a pretty good attendance, perhaps slightly less than when it is on the weekend (I couldn't be there at the weekend this year).



A review of Dragon Rage appeared in a British blog:
http://rivcoach.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/review-dragon-rage-from-flatlined-games/
Also on BGG:
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/684165/boardgames-in-blighty-reviews-dragon-rage




The multi-contributor ETC Press book "Tabletop: Analog Game Design," edited by Greg Costikyan and Drew Davidson, is now available (electronic downloads free). Greg briefly describes it at:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GregCostikyan/20110808/8151/Tabletop_Analog_Game_Design.php (you can click on the title of this post for this one)

Downloads in electronic book and PDF formats at:
http://www.feedbooks.com/userbook/22317/tabletop-analog-game-design

My piece on "The Three Player Problem" is the first chapter in the book.

Ruminations About Why Empires Fall

A follow-up (that I actually started first) to Why Empires Last.

Historians have always been interested in why great nations fail and fall. The first historian, whether you regard him as Herodotus or Thucydides, was concerned with the failure of a great nation, Persia and Athens respectively. One of the most famous of all historical works is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I remember reading, 30-40 years ago, some of Arnold Toynbee’s massive work about the rise and fall of civilizations (A Study of History). Toynbee saw history as a series of challenges to individual civilizations, and meeting those challenges could make a civilization great. If the challenge was too great then the civilization’s development might be arrested. And while a failure was not inevitable--"civilizations die from suicide, not by murder"– sooner or later most civilizations fail.

This is a compelling notion, but I found as I read Toynbee that there were so many exceptions, so much that had to be explained away because it didn’t fit with his theory, that it just didn’t hang together.

I’ve not read any Oswald Spengler (Decline of the West), who viewed human history and individual nations and empires as having a natural cycle of (inevitable) rise and fall. As I’m not a determinist, I’m not in sympathy with these kinds of “it’s inevitable” theories.

What I’m going to do here is try to discern some of the reasons why great empires have declined, based on years of studying history. Insofar as one of my major interests in game design has been in “sweep of history games”, and insofar as my game Britannia founded a subcategory of sweep of history games (Britannia-like games), this subject is of particular interest to me.

China:
Let’s begin with the longest series of empires, China. China suffered from external enemies just as other empires have. But much of the history of its empires can be explained by a periodic fluctuation. Chinese history is marked by periods of fragmentation and chaos, which tended to retard population growth and frequently reduce population, followed by unification which secured peace and allowed the population to grow, until the population could no longer be supported by the agricultural techniques of the time and the administrative strength of the state. At that point desperate people turned to banditry, which ultimately led to chaos whether purely internal or in conjunction with external enemies, which led to fragmentation, large numbers of deaths as a population plummeted, and the renewal of the cycle.

Good administration combined with the natural resilience of a successful system could delay this cycle for a long time, but sooner or later failures at the top led to collapse. In China those failures involved factionalism and reluctance of elites to support the government. Typically, land became concentrated in the hands of large landowners who were or became exempt from taxes, whether because of family connection, noble birth, distance from central administration, or sheer neglect during periods of factional paralysis at the top. When succession problems arose (as they always do) the elites would not support a strong character who might withdraw some of their privileges. When this happened enough to exhaust reserves, rebellions could overcome the current dynasty. If external forces were strong, they might overcome a dynasty at the end of a cycle, perhaps also overcoming rebels (as did the Manchu).

Rome
There have been many hypotheses about why the West Roman Empire failed. Each one needs to take into account that the East Roman Empire lasted another thousand years, for much of that time as the greatest empire in the West. Here are some ideas:

• Poisoning from lead pipes. If so, wouldn’t this have affected the East as well?
• Christianity led to an attitude of acceptance and pacifism
• Failure of the Republic’s ability to rely on the citizen soldier, combined with the empire’s failure to successfully conscript the indigent population of Rome, led to economic failure and a rush away from cities to avoid crushing taxes (which were collected in cities)
• Failure to establish a consistent means of succession led to periods of fragmentation and ultimately the Empire “ran out of luck” when faced with external threats
• The existence and strength of the Empire forced the barbarians to organize together in larger and larger confederations that ultimately threatened the Western Empire, but could not pass the Bosporus to the main parts of the Eastern Empire
• Depopulation of the West by disease. The East was always more populous with many more cities. It was able to withstand the diseases. It wasn’t until well into Justinian’s reign that plague debilitated the East Roman Empire, otherwise Justinian’s schemes to reunite East and West might have succeeded.

So often as I read history, great nations/empires fall because too much wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of the few. In effect, the middle class is squeezed more or less out of existence. Usually the “few” will be great landowners, since during most of history land equals wealth. Even Sparta fell on hard times because of this (only 700 wealthy citizens able to be Spartan elite soldiers), and when king Agis IV tried to redistribute the land in 4500 equal lots the landowners executed him.

Republican Rome was doomed when the attempts of the Gracci to redistribute land failed and they were murdered. In the end, there were too few citizen soldiers supported by modest land holdings, and Rome turned to essentially mercenary armies, landless men who served a popular leader for the prospect of gaining land when they retired. Unfortunately, such men looked to their generals, not to the Senate, when deciding who should govern.

In the Empire, soldiers were well paid, and the empire became a mechanism for paying the army. For lack of an agreed succession method, rebellions and civil wars became endemic, driving up costs. Taxation to support the army became so punishing, according to one view, that peasant farmers no longer went to the cities, where taxes were collected, and large cities could no longer be supported. The peasants effectively sold themselves to large landowners in order to gain protection, both from tax collection and from barbarians and bandits.

After the succession and invasion crises of the third century, with at least 20-25 claimants to emperors in 50 years, well-trained troops were scarce. At the same time, for whatever reasons, it became very difficult to recruit Roman citizens to become professional soldiers, so Rome turned to “barbarians”, Germans and steppe-Iranians (such as Sarmatians and Alans).

As western Rome crumbled, and suffered from the usual difficulties of succession, there were no more “Roman” troops to rely on. Whether the failure of western cities derived from taxes or disease, or both, when cities fail, the money economy tends to fail.

The wealthier and more populous east was able to continue to afford citizens as troops as well as use barbarians, and in the long run with the Theme system Byzantium restored something like the Republic’s reliance on citizen soldiers who were supported by modest lands. This system worked until the Turks conquered much of Asia Minor, the recruiting ground for Roman armies. (That conquest was the result of succession disputes, not of the failure of Byzantine armies.)

In the end, when citizens are no longer willing to defend their nation, defense becomes much more expensive; if there are failures of leadership, or climate changes for the worse (Harappan civilization in India?), or widespread disease further interferes with the economy, then the nation becomes vulnerable to outside forces that, in good times, it would withstand. When things went bad in the third century, the empire was able to survive because the barbarians were not highly organized, and ultimately because of good leadership (Aurelian and Diocletian). In the fifth century the barbarians were more organized, much more familiar with Roman ways of warfare, much more able to defeat “Roman” armies that were no longer highly trained; at the same time, Roman leadership was often poor.

While it’s hard to say how much Christian pacifism or fatalism might have contributed to Rome’s fall–again, the East Romans continued despite being highly contentious sectarian Christians-- Roman stability was helped by the church organization. Even after centralized West Roman administration disappeared, the more or less centralized church administration of bishops and archbishops persisted. (One reason why the Viking Age ended was that the recently-adopted Christian church, through its organized hierarchy, helped Scandinavian kings control their subjects.)

Barbarian empires
What about the empire of the GokTurks, the Mongols, the Huns and so forth?

I’m going to consider the Mongols as a separate case from the rest. Ghenghis Khan and his successors were happy to use the techniques and skills of civilized nations whenever possible, an unusual attitude that made a huge difference. They could conquer civilized and highly populated areas and use local administration to control their conquest. They could take cities because they used siege engineers from the conquered nations. They could contemplate action in vast non-steppe areas because their subordinates had experience of conditions in such areas.



As for other barbarian empires that did not hold large civilized areas, they tended to rest on weak foundations. There was no central administration to help hold the empire together in bad times. Frequently, barbarian empires included many different races and languages, though the steppe cultures otherwise did not differ so much. If there was a succession problem, or a weak leader, the “empire” (really a confederation) could fall apart. When Attila died, his sons could not agree on succession, nor could they cope with the uprising of subject nations (Ostrogoths, Gepids), and within a few years the surviving Huns streamed back into Russia, ultimately to the upper Volga (where they were known as Bulgars).

Attila’s empire, in particular, was largely the work of one man, just as Harsha’s empire was in India, and Charlemagne’s in western Europe. (Think of Napoleon’s empire, too.) When that man left the scene, the empire crumbled. Charlemagne’s took longer because he had built on the work of his predecessors, but in the end it faded away.

The Khazars, being a more or less peaceful and settled group interested in trading rather than raiding, lasted for centuries, despite the shock of an Arab invasion, but finally succumbed to a foolish attack by Kiev followed by pressure from other steppe confederations. Though the story is confused, the Khazars may have converted to Judaism in order to remain neutral between the Muslim Arabs and the Christian Byzantines. This could be a case where religion helped sustain an empire.



Now what about the older empires of the lands east of the Mediterranean Sea?

Assyria
There were three Assyrian empires, the Old one possibly of a different race than the Middle and Neo versions.

In some ways we can see this short-lived first Assyrian empire as the work of one man. The Old empire was overthrown by Hammurabi’s Babylon, which prevailed in a competition amongst as many as eight or nine states.

The centuries-later Middle Assyrian Empire diminished at the same time that the Western empires of the Hittites and Egyptians fell apart, owing to the Near Eastern “Dark Age”. This may have been caused by external invasion of the “Sea Peoples”, by a series of earthquakes, by the action of the Habiru (displaced and disaffected citizens who turned to banditry), or by a combination of those three.

Centuries passed again before the Neo-Assyrian Empire was the greatest and most feared of the pre-Persian empires of the ancient Near East. They relied on terror, on a more or less professional army, and on strong, ruthless leaders. When the succession was disputed the Empire hit a lull, and at the last, the Medes, Scythians, and Babylonians combined to destroy the Empire utterly in obscure chaos.

Unlike China, which was protected by difficult terrain and the sea, Assyria was “right in the middle of things”. Only strong leaders and a strong military could protect it. Yet the Middle and Neo Assyrian age lasted 700 years and more, longer than most empires.

And here is a another difference: the Assyrians virtually disappeared in all respects, political and cultural, while half the Roman empire survived, and bits of the rest persisted for many years. Rome was first sacked in 410, and again in 455, but the empire was not officially laid to rest until 476 or later, and Roman traditions persisted much longer. Chinese empires disappeared, but new ones arose, sooner or later, to take their place; and the culture always survived. The Assyrians disappeared so throughly that they were largely forgotten. We only know the Assyrians well now because excavated hardened clay tablets reveal so much about the times.

Egypt
Egypt has a history of Empire, protected by very difficult border access. Unlike most empires, it’s internal problems had to fragment the empire without much influence of internal threats; though there were partial or full foreign conquests in later times, from the Hyksos, and from the Libyans and Nubians/Kush. Those internal problems often involved the priesthood in opposition to the Pharaoh. Gradually the priests came to control much of the land, through centuries of gifts. The priesthood could be richer, and consequently more powerful, than the pharaoh.

Egypt, too, may have been vulnerable to the cycle of population growth and resulting chaos that we see in China. Even more than the Chinese, the Egyptians did not want to leave Egypt (this involved religious reasons, more or less). And like the Chinese, the Egyptians were not seafarers. There was no practical outlet for excess population, nowhere for the discontented to go.

Persia
Persia (Iran) and Mesopotamia saw several empires in ancient times. At first these were confined to Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, but beginning with the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great and its threat to Greece, then the Greek Seleucids, later the Parthians succeeded by the Sassanids, and then the Arabs, these empires covered much of the Near and Middle East. The Achaemenid empire was the largest ever to exist, in terms of the percentage of world population that lived within it.

Although some argue that the Achaemenid empire fell to the Greeks because of internal problems, it’s more likely that this was a case of pure foreign conquest, which is rare in the history of the fall of empires. The Persian leader was not a great man, though not clearly incompetent, either. He and his empire had no answer for the Greek phalanx, along with a little Greek good luck (Alexander the Great survived despite being in the thick of battles). Alexander and the Greek way of warfare proved to be too strong for the Persians.

While we might think that language differences would tend to shorten the lives of empires, both the Persian and Assyrian managed just fine. (It must be said the written language tended to be the same throughout the Near East, in Assyrian times.) Rome spread its language throughout the west, though in the east it was only a language of administration, finally abandoned in favor of Greek once west Rome was only a memory.

There is a language division between north and south China, Mandarin and Cantonese, and there have been times when the two areas were separate empires, for example the Jin and Sung before the Mongols attacked.

Indonesia has seen a succession of empires, but always of a maritime nature, much like the short-lived Athenian empire. While the sea normally serves as a barrier, it provided much better communication, in southeast Asia, than was available by land in the jungles and difficult terrain of the Indonesian islands. The sea worked similarly for Athens. But such empires are always terribly vulnerable to naval reverses. The Indian Cholas fatally weakened Srivijaya, and the Spartans weakened Athens. (Not long after the end of the Peloponessian War, Athens was independent once again; but it could never again quite dominate the way it had as the champion of the war against Persia.)

Similarly, the first British Empire fell in part because their sea dominance was successfully contested (e.g. the French kept the British fleet from rescuing Cornwallis in 1780-1). But they retained their stake in what became the crown jewel of the second empire, India, even as they lost the United States.

So, military reverses can lead to loss of empire, but it's much more common for a sea-based empire.


Summary of possibilities:
• Succession problems/poor leadership
• Disease leading to depopulation and economic failure
• Language differences
• Cultural differences
• Lack of a tradition of empire
• Weak administration
• Climate changes
• Military reverses

Math in games--bad idea

At one of my game design talks at Origins I said that designers should avoid requiring players to do math, because so many younger people are very poor at doing math in their heads. One member of the audience let out odd shrieks of laughter: he just couldn't believe me.

Yet as I have played "D&D Encounters" the past six months, I've seen more and more examples, right down to an (adult-aged) kid counting on fingers to add 17 plus 7, and people often getting wrong answers when doing simple math like this. The older players have no problem, the younger ones often do. Whether this is a consequence of the availability of calculators to the very young, or the way they're taught math, or something else, I don't know, I just know the reality.

(As a comparison: when I was a freshman in college, we had a 8" by 8" by 2" electronic calculator in the physics department. A $3 calculator today can probably do the same thing, though it's not as easy to read. But in 1969 this one cost $1,500. We had to do math in our heads.)

WBC attendance

I'll be at the World Boardgaming Championships next week from Wednesday about noon through Friday (wedding to attend at the weekend). Looking especially for people to play Assyria and perhaps Eurasia. (Not Brit-like but Sweep of History for sure.) I'm giving a talk about game design Thursday night at 8.

Ruminations about why empires last

Sweep of history games, such as Britannia and its spinoffs, History of the World, and others (Eurasia and Rise and Fall of Assyria are two of my prototypes), are never far from my mind. I have two all-of-Europe games as well, and have dabbled with several all-of-China games. (China's current boundaries, and Europe, are close to the same size.)

A problem in an all-of-Europe sweep of history game is keeping the small nations extant. Historically, small nations tend to hang around in Europe, complete with separate languages and sometimes separate cultures. The problem in a Chinese sweep of history game is that the dynasties dominated (at times), so getting rid of the chafe is necessary. The small nations can't be allowed to stick around TOO long.

And you could ask, why did China tend to be a universal state, while Europe did not? There are several reasons, such as the internal terrain, the external terrain and organized outside threats, culture, and language.

Mountain ranges and dense forest divided Europe into distinct geographical areas (the forest is gone now, but even in 10th-11th century Germany it was a barrier). The Baltic Sea and English Channel especially contributed to this division; we can also see the Mediterranean Sea as a separator with what might otherwise more sensibly be European North Africa than African North Africa. Then again, the Mediterranean can also act as a connector because it's a serene sea, easily sailed upon, compared with the northern seas. Further, owing to terrain and climate agricultural methods that worked in the lands bordering the Mediterranean did not work in northern Europe and vice versa.

The terrain within China is much less divisive than the terrain within Europe. The North China Agricultural Plain was the heart of early Chinese empires, with the addition later of the Yangtze agricultural plains. There is not quite anything like either of these areas in Europe, they are more reminiscent of Mesopotamia and the Egyptian Nile, where "universal empire" was common. These areas of China provided the basis for empire. Szechuan, which is separated from the rest of China by mountainous terrain, was sometimes a separate entity, and Tibet even more so, only recently incorporated into China. The southern half of China is more difficult terrain than the North, and was not incorporated into China until Roman times.

China is surrounded by difficult/unproductive terrain (steppes are agriculturally unproductive), even the sea is difficult because there's "nothing out there" (other than Japan, an unattractive volcanic stone backwater). Further, there is really no basis for large states in the areas adjacent to China. Japan is much too small, India is very strongly separated from China by the Himalayas, Southeast Asia is a jungle that supported only small empires, Tibet and the desert to the North could not support large numbers. The only real threat came from steppe barbarians to the north of China. And any time China was in good shape internally it was able to fight off barbarian threats, thanks to great superiority in numbers. China tended to self-destruct through overpopulation, but that’s a topic for another time: why empires fall.

Europe is surrounded by terrain that is sometimes easy to traverse. The near East provided a fertile ground for empires that could oppose a European empire, for example the Persians/Sassanids. There was still the pressure of steppe barbarians, and history shows them moving to the west more than they moved to the east. (Whether that was because there was less organized resistance to the west than to the east is open the question.) Perhaps it was harder to hold a "universal state" together in Europe against these outside pressures.

If North America had been occupied by Eurasian-like ancient-medieval cultures, it probably would not have been a single empire. The Great Plains, and then the Rocky Mountains, divide it strongly; the Appalachians would also have provided a strong barrier. On the other hand, there might have been no outside threat for a continent-occupying empire.

Here we might interject that pre-modern empires suffered from poor communications. If your emperor is 3,000 miles away, you're probably going to ignore him. One reason for the success of the Persian empire was efforts to establish good long-distance communication. Rome relied heavily on seaborne communication--it was essentially a Mediterranean empire. In other words, there were practical limitations to how large an empire could be, that were rarely overcome.


Psychological factors?
What about the mind? There is a tradition in China of the universal state, starting with the Shang and Zhou; even those "empires" were probably not empires in the sense we usually think, but Chinese thought of them as empires. There was only one "universal empire" in Europe, and it didn't occupy all of Europe, it was really a Mediterranean empire.

In China there is a language division between north and south, Mandarin and Cantonese, and there have been times when the two areas were separate empires, for example the Jin and Sung before the Mongols attacked.

But compared with Europe, this language divide is nothing. One can suppose that common language is one of the main ingredients that holds an empire together. Latin became the common language in the western Roman empire, though Greek predominated in the east; and in the end the West fell, while the east stood for another thousand years. On the other hand the Persian Empire was quite polyglot. Even when China was conquered by outsiders, they soon adopted Chinese language (and culture).

There was a tradition of empire in Europe after the fall of Rome, with Charlemagne crowned Emperor in 800 AD, and much later a "Holy Roman Empire" was established. But language differences, failures of technology, and the terrain generally mitigated against re-establishment of the Roman empire. On the other hand, the Byzantine Empire persisted for centuries, though at a much-reduced scope after 1071.

Culture (and language)
Culture, too, helps make empires homogeneous so that they can hold together. Chinese culture always predominates within China, especially in the minds of the Chinese, who think of the rest of the world as barbarians. There is not (and never has been) a single cultural tradition in Europe as strong as Chinese culture, though we owe a lot to the ancient Greeks. Perhaps if the Greeks had lived on a very large agricultural plain, their culture would have come to dominate a large area of Europe. As it was, divided up by the terrain of Greece, Greek culture was borrowed by others rather than dominating others. Hellenism was supreme in the Near East for quite a while, but even there it never filtered down to everyday folk.

Egypt and Mesopotamia benefited from common culture, as well.

Of course, the existence of an empire can spread what becomes a common culture and language, as happened with Rome.


Other empires
How about locations other than Europe and China? The Indian subcontinent, less than half the size of Europe or China but still half the size of the contiguous United States, has spawned many empires. But these empires ordinarily control the agricultural, lowland northern Ganges plain (much like the North China Plain), not the rougher, plateaued south or the mountainous west (Pakistan). India is more like China than Europe insofar as external threats, mostly former barbarians, came from only one direction, over the northwest mountains from Central Asia. Historically the Indians were controlled by foreigners more than the Chinese were, especially by Muslims such as the Mogul Empire. An Indian culture and language remained sufficiently diverse that it was not able to assimilate foreigners as rapidly as the more uniform Chinese culture.

If we look at the earlier and smaller empires of the Near East we see that they formed in areas with no terrain barriers, but were subject to barbarian incursions from many directions. The Hittites may be suggested as a terrain exception, but they had an awfully small empire. Though they once sacked Babylon the strain caused their empire to collapse. And unlike the larger and more stable empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Hittite Empire was overwhelmed by barbarians in the near Eastern "Dark Age". The normal state of affairs in Mesopotamia was a universal empire, and the same can be said for Egypt. They were rarely both part of the same Empire because of the barriers of the Sinai and Arabian deserts.

The Mongols and Gokturks (Blue or Celestial Turks), among others, maintained generations-long empires in the steppes. Again, there were no internal terrain barriers to speak of, and little likelihood of incursions from outside. But failures of leadership usually led to disintegration of steppe empires. Agricultural empires can better cope with poor leadership.

What makes a game “Epic”?

(This originally appeared in "Against the Odds" Magazine.)

While I don't believe a game designer can deliberately set out to design a "great" game, I DO believe a designer can set out to create an “epic” game, though this effort is just as subject to failure as any other game design.

I'm interested here in game designs that most players would call "epic", not in an individual play of a game that might be regarded as epic. I've played and refereed epic adventures of First Edition AD&D, but I wouldn't call D&D an epic game.

"Define:epic" at Google gives this first definition: "very imposing or impressive; surpassing the ordinary (especially in size or scale); 'an epic voyage'; 'of heroic proportions'; 'heroic sculpture.'"

Another dictionary meaning: "heroic; majestic; impressively great".

In common among these definitions is feeling, rather than logic. Games "feel" epic--they emotionally involve the player. But once again, D&D emotionally involves the player yet is not an epic game, though there can be epic adventures. There's more than just emotional involvement.

Any and all definitions of anything, of any length, can be picked apart. As I am interested in characteristics that define an “epic game”, my list must be fairly detailed, hence open to even more nit-picking. Nonetheless, I’m going to take a stab at it. In the course of the discussion we’ll see some of the things designers can try to do to create an epic game.

I've settled on a number of characteristics that can be divided into three categories: 1) scope, 2) player commitment, 3) tension and memorability. I'll briefly describe the characteristics, then talk about them in more detail with some examples. Epic games won’t necessarily have every characteristic. That’s the flaw of any detailed definition.

1) Scope
• Geographically and chronologically broad setting without feeling abstract
• Represents a titanic struggle important to very large numbers of people and many generations
• Non-mundane theme
• Story "arc" reflecting great changes

2) Player commitment
• Depth of gameplay including high replayability
• Sheer length or complexity (or both)

3) Tension and memorability
• The gameplay reflects major changes over time, end-of-game gameplay feels very different from the beginning
• Uncertainty about who's winning
• Asymmetry
• The game engenders "gaming stories" that you remember fondly and retell with pleasure (or chagrin!)

Discussion:
1) Scope

Geographically and chronologically broad setting without feeling abstract
"Sweep of history" games that involve many centuries and countries or the world, such as Britannia, Italia, History of the World, and 7 Ages, are generally regarded as epic. So, too, is Civilization, both the original boardgame that preceded the computer games and the computer games. Yet other games with big scopes are not epic, for example Vinci and Risk, I think because they feel so abstract that the “real world” no longer feels present. A short game with the same subject might not feel epic: for example, I’ve designed a 90 minute version of Britannia (admittedly leaving out the Roman conquest) that is unlikely to feel epic to most players.

Represents a titanic struggle important to very large numbers of people and many generations
Some Napoleonic games might qualify here, perhaps even some American Civil War games. War of the Ring and Twilight Imperium qualify, even though the struggle is not “real”;
it can be fictional, as long as players suspend their disbelief and adopt the fiction. In all cases these are great “slugfests”.

Non-mundane theme
You’re not likely to regard a game about selling real estate as epic (Monopoly!). Nor a game about building a house. Nor a game about eating fish. Many people expect “epic story elements” from an epic game, such as becoming king or saving the world.

Story "arc" reflecting great changes
I don’t think a great story is necessary to an epic game, and certainly many games with great stories are not epic. Yet in some epic games, the game "story", what it represents, reflects major changes over time, a saga with beginning, middle, and end, so that the situation at the end of the game is very different from the beginning, almost like it's a different world. To use Britannia as an example, early in the game most players vainly try to fight off, or accommodate, the Roman conquest. Late in the game players are fighting to determine who will be king of England, a very different story.

2) Player commitment

Depth of gameplay including high replayability
This is clearly open to differing opinions about depth of gameplay. This is another case where Vinci and Risk fail my definition, as there is little depth to their gameplay. But you could argue the same thing about History of the World.

Sheer length or complexity (or both)
Civilization is one of the most widely acknowledged epic games. Can you have a two hour Civ game and not lose the epic feel? Many would say "no". Can you drastically simplify what the players do without losing the epic feel? Hard to say. It seems that length, rather than complexity, is part of the mystique of the game.

An epic game need not be both very long and very complex. I’d cite Britannia-like games here, as Britannia is lengthy but not complex. Italia is considerably more complex, though derived from Britannia.

But an epic game will very likely be at least one or the other, very long or very complex.

Oddly enough, often this means no role assumption is involved!
In role-assumption games, you can conceive yourself as taking on the specific role of an individual person. For example, you might be a squad leader, or a castle builder. It’s too much like something you might do in the real world. Yet in many epic games you cannot name a specific individual that you play, at best you might take on the roles of a series of individuals (kings, presidents, generals). Perhaps a game (as opposed to a D&D adventure) feels more epic for the very reason that you cannot identify with one (mortal) person.

In many epic games you don’t even play just one nation, but several. You have an “omnipresent” (though not omnipotent or omniscient) point of view.

3) Tension and memorability

In the following list of characteristics related to tension and memorability, we might keep in mind a trait of many popular video games, “immersiveness”. Yet a game can be immersive without being epic... Immersion: “state of being deeply engaged or involved; absorption.”

The gameplay reflects major changes over time, end of game gameplay feels very different from the beginning.
Another way to put this, is by the time you get to the end of the game, it seems very different from the game you were playing in the beginning. “Sweep” games tend to feel this way. In Britannia, for example, in the beginning most players are trying to survive the Roman conquest with a healthy nation, yet give the Roman some trouble. At the end, all are concentrating on who will be king of England, and often trying to kill opposing candidates. These require quite different kinds of strategies. In History of the World, players begin in a relatively small area, but by the end are acting all over the world.

Further, what was an important and useful move early in the game might be a weak, poor move by the end. That is, there may be an increase in “power” and scope of the things the player can do.

Uncertainty about who's winning
If you certainly know who's winning at a particular time, a multiplayer game becomes subject to all kinds of defects such as kingmaking and sandbagging. This tends to annoy players and reduce tension, and may be another downfall of Risk and Vinci.

If it’s a two-player game and one player is obviously winning, the other will probably resign/surrender–end of game, no epic provided. A long, drawn-out struggle in chess might be called “epic”, but the game itself is not.

Point games can be a problem. The plastic Hasbro version of History of the World added secret scoring bonuses in an attempt to obscure who is in the lead. In Britannia the nations and colors score at different rates, at different times, so it’s never quite clear even to experts who is in the lead, by how much, until the game ends.

Asymmetry
In asymmetric games, each player has a different starting position/situation. The opposite is symmetric, a common characteristic of “Euro” style games, where each player starts with an identical position. Abstract games tend to be symmetric, and tend not to feel epic. Is chess an epic game? I don’t think so.

Most epic games are historical or pseudo-historical, and history is rarely symmetric. So we may only be seeing a symptom, not a cause, in this characteristic.

The game engenders "gaming stories" that you remember fondly and retell with pleasure (or chagrin!)
Some games result in memorable sessions, some do not. They are more than games, they are “experiences”. This goes back to the idea of “immersion”, of buying into the game. It leaves out most “Euro” games, which tend to be somehow inconsequential–games, not experiences.

This is certainly a characteristic of “great” games, and is sometimes a characteristic of “epic” games.


My thanks to commenters about the meaning of “epic game” on Boardgamegeek, Board Game Designers Forum, and various Britannia forums, especially Richard Young.

A couple explicated maxims of game design

Here are a couple of maxims/truths about game design.

“Don’t Panic”. When you’re playtesting a game, don’t let an odd result in one game bother you too much. If it looks likely to happen again and again, once people know about whatever happened, then you need to fix it. But “whatever happened” may be just an outlier, something very unlikely to happen.

On the other hand, you need to see what you can do to avoid destructive outliers. Mike Gray of Hasbro told a story about a game he was introducing to Hasbro’s design group as a candidate for publication. The main part of the game didn’t get going until a 50/50 event was positive. When he showed the game, it took something like 13 times for that event to be positive. By that time the game was ruined, and had no chance with the design group. The designer had failed to anticipate the admittedly unlikely possibility, much to his detriment. He needed some kind of trigger that would have got the game going, perhaps an increasing probability, or simply a “trigger is positive on fourth try”.

In Law & Chaos, playtesting went very well, but in the very long run experienced players learned to anticipate many possibilities and the length of the game could go far above the typical 15 minutes to one hour (to two and a half hours). I introduced a trigger that changed the parameters slightly (increasing the number of ways a player could win) so that games wouldn’t run very long.


“A game is always a compromise”. This especially applies to “realistic” video games; tabletop game designers usually recognize that given the tools available they can only compromise on “realism”. You can never achieve as much as your wilder imagination hopes for. So look at the good you’ve done, don’t look at what you failed to do. Games are models of reality, and reality is too complicated to comprehend in a game (though the Star Trek “holodeck” will come close, should we ever get there). Game design requires idealism, the ability to pick out what’s important and depict that, rather than try to depict all of a situation.

Tabletop military simulations sometimes founder on designer attempts to “depict all of it”. The game then becomes so complex, or so long, that it isn’t enjoyable to play even for much of its intended audience.

The first time you design/make a game that you realistically want to commercially publish

A while ago I wrote some tips for those making a game for the very first time. (http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2011/05/so-youre-going-to-make-game-for-very.html and elsewhere.) I assumed that you were not, at that point, making a game with realistic expectation of commercial publication-because it’s most unlikely that the first game you ever make will be published.

Now I want to discuss what you might do when you design a game with reasonable intention that it be commercially published. While my personal experience of commercial publication is related only to tabletop games, and I write this for tabletop designers first, I’ll cover video games as well. There’s a lot more to consider now, so this will be much longer than the first piece.

What Kind of Game?
I’m assuming you’re doing this on a freelance basis. If you’re working for a company, you’re probably going to make the game that the company wants to make, not the game that you want to make. If you’re working for a startup, perhaps only a student group, then you have more flexibility. In every case one of the first things you may decide is whether you’re going to design a game that you think is particularly marketable, or design a game that you think will be particularly good. They often are two different things.

While what makes a game good changes over time, though the rate of change is much slower than the changes in what makes a game marketable. Marketability depends on what else is in the market and the current trends. One of the biggest mistakes designers make is to try to cherry pick all of the popular characteristics of games of the moment and design a game with all of those features. They usually end up with a soulless, herky-jerky amalgam of “stuff”. In other words, a failure.

Nonetheless, we do see lots of clones and near clones of highly successful games. When shooters moved into the modern era so successfully we saw a lot of modern era shooters follow. When the tabletop game Dominion started the deck building phase amongst Euro gamers we saw lots of deck building games follow.

I hope that by the time you embark on a game with serious intent to publish in mind you will already have a large store of ideas and concepts to choose from. While you’re learning how to design you will most likely have been writing down all of your ideas and expanding them when it seems worthwhile. Many experienced commercial designers have dozens of fleshed out concepts to refer to, though this is not likely to be true for you when you’re starting on the commercial road.

My recommendation is to design good games first and worry about marketability second. Both terms (good, marketable) are so amorphous and mean such different things to different people that you don’t need to get hung up about either. The simplest thing is probably to design a game of a type you like and make sure that your target audience likes it as well.

Recognize also that whatever you decide to do, the likelihood is that the game will never be published. One of the most successful tabletop game designers (Alan R. Moon) estimated that 60% of his games would never see the light of day. Conventional wisdom in the video game industry is that 9 out of 10 games that are initially funded are never published. And where does that leave the ones that are not even funded? Given the changes in ease of production and distribution in the games industry, those percentages may change; but the reality is still that a great many of the games (not simply ideas or concepts) that you come up with will not be thought good enough for commercial publication.

If you’re fortunate enough to become a designer at one of the most successful companies such as Blizzard or Epic then you’ll expect almost all of your games to succeed. But by then you will already have done a lot of games.

Licensing or self-publishing?
Tabletop designers have a possibility that they can find an established company to publish their game. Video game designers either must already be working for such a company, or they must find a way to publish their game themselves. It is almost impossible to find a publisher to fund development of a video game when the developers do not already have a record of successful game production. While tabletop designers can concentrate on the design, video game designers will have to spend most of their time getting the game software written and produced.

At some point you’ll have to decide how you want the finished video game to be distributed. Are you going to try to sell it to an established commercial publisher? While this is possible, with alternative means of distribution now available you’re more likely to publish a completed game yourself. In the tabletop industry it is possible for the designer no one has ever heard of to sell a game to an established publisher. It’s more common, however, that a new designer self publishes his or her tabletop game, and it’s becoming common in the video game industry that new designers self publish via the Internet.

Internet publication can be in some form of downloads, and will often be through an aggregator such as the web sites that host flash games. Console-based distribution (XboxLive etc.), Steam and other major digital distribution, iPhone and Android distribution, all may be possible.

So for tabletop you can design and test, then find an established publisher. For video, if you design and test without a publisher you’ll probably self-publish digitally.

Focus on what’s practical
Once again I’ll say, as I said last time, “reign in your ambition”. You are not going to make a AAA video game, your buddies and you are not going to make a AAA video game, your start up company and you are not going to make a AAA video game. The costs are just too high, the hundreds of man-years are far more than a small company can provide. Fortunately, with the popularity of XBox Live and its competitors, of the cell phone, the iPhone and iPad, and of other means of digital distribution of inexpensive games, it’s possible to make a commercial game with a small group of people. You have to recognize what you and your group can accomplish; if you aim at something more than you can practically do you will end up with nothing. Part of being successful in business is recognizing what is practical today and what is not; you can intend to aim for the skies in the long run but you have to learn to drive the car before you fly the plane.

In the tabletop industry it’s not unusual for someone to self-publish a game in expectation of selling thousands of copies, only (and usually inevitably) to end up with a vast quantity of unsold goods and a big debt. This again is a problem of too much ambition.

I’m not saying that bad luck can’t be involved, I’m not saying that good luck can’t be involved, I’m saying try to be realistic and you’re less likely to fall flat on your face. What matters is the long haul not the short haul. If you fail the first time or the first 10 times, if you’ve reined in your ambition you can still have the drive to try again. If you have effectively wasted a great deal of time and money because of over ambition then you’re less likely to try again.

Playtesting is what really matters
Some designers are so committed to their game, so convinced that it’s “the greatest thing ever” that they don’t listen to the playtesters. Yet even if game experts believe that your game is excellent when they play it, what really counts is what ordinary game players in your target market think. Even successful commercial studios/publishers sometimes make the mistake of ignoring playtester reaction, or of not even collecting feedback from ordinary players. The result was often a game that the developers liked but not many other people do. Remember that playtesting is your road to finding ways to improve the game, but it also helps you know whether the game is good enough to meet your requirements. When you go commercial, you’re not designing a game for yourself, you’re designing it for other people.

While it’s important to be committed to what you’re doing, your “passion” makes no difference to a publisher, and usually makes no difference to a consumer. Passion is self-centered; commercial publication is about groups and their preferences and buying habits. Playing the game is about the game, not about the designer(s)/creator(s).

Fifth Annual UK Game Expo

In early June I was a "featured guest" at the largest tabletop game convention in Britain, the UK Game Expo, in Birmingham England (second largest city in the UK).

The Game Expo is modeled after the big game convention in Essen, Germany in October: the objective is to give ordinary gamers the chance to play games and buy games they enjoy. So while there were lots of exhibitors, much of the space was taken up by tables where people could try out games.

The convention took place in the Clarendon Suites, but it turned out that the Clarendon Suites is a Masonic Temple being rented out for conventions! I think of the Masons as something of the 19th century, but I discovered that they are still going strong, with at least one of their chapters having been founded in the year 2000. The building was very interesting, a three story brick structure with no windows except near the entrance, and lots of half levels and stairs and small rooms, rather labyrinthine: a good place to set a D&D adventure. There were some large halls as well, and these were filled with exhibitors and gamers, among them 150 people playing War Machine. Almost all of the play was boardgames and miniatures, not CCGs or RPGs, though there were RPG publishers among the exhibitors. The seminars/panel discussions took place in the lodge rooms, quite reminiscent of small churches with wooden pews and fonts, and banners along the wall representing the Masonic chapters. There were also lots of display cases full of medals and other Masonic gewgaws. On the walls were the obligatory old-fashioned portrait paintings of their past leaders.

The convention began on Thursday with gaming in the hotel adjacent to the convention building. I arrived on Friday morning and was given a tour of the main building as the exhibitors were setting up. This building was actually open to the public on Saturday and Sunday only.

Organizer Richard Denning (a physician and a novelist as well as a convention organizer) believes they had 2,500 unique individuals and about 4,000 attendances/impressions, up about 10% or so up from last year. With about 60 million people in the UK, this compares favorably with a convention like Origins, which had fewer than 10,700 people last year. Amongst tabletop game conventions only GenCon (27,000) and perhaps the relatively new convention in Chicago, along with Essen itself, appear to have more attendees. Of course, it’s much easier for large numbers of people to get to Birmingham than to Columbus or Indianapolis.

The guys from the UK Gaming Media Network (http://boardgamegeek.com/guild/935) had organized the panels and talks, and I talked with them for quite a while, especially Mark Rivera and Michael Fox. They are a group of people bloggers and podcasters who are promoting tabletop games in the UK.

I was surprised at how much people recognized me by name. I lived in England 1976-79 while researching my doctoral dissertation, and played a considerable part in the growth of games in Britain. I wrote for the two well-known British game magazines (White Dwarf is still published) and designed Games Workshop's first published game, Valley of the Four Winds, as well as Britannia which was first published in the UK some years later. The founders of Games Workshop (which is a very large company now), Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, are now two of the big names in video gaming in Britain, having sold Games Workshop and invested the money in video game companies. Steve co-founded Lionhead Studios with Peter Molyneux, Ian is Life President of Eidos. They were going to be featured guests at the Expo but had to go to E3 instead.

I discovered that for many of these people I’m evidently part of their childhood. There was a kind of deference that I rarely see in the US. I was introduced to one gent who said "I met you when I was 10 or 12 years old", which was 30+ years ago. He remembered?! I don't get many experiences like that.

I sat on a panel of role-playing game designers, which was a bit amusing because I’ve never actually designed a standalone role-playing game. But while I lived in Britain I wrote a lot of role-playing game articles, and continued doing that in America for several years until the magazine decided they wanted all rights instead of first world serial rights. I won’t sell all rights.

I watched another panel with tabletop game designers, but it’s just as well I was not on the panel as there were eight people, which makes for an awkward situation in a one-hour time slot. In any case Martin Wallace was one of the panelists and he had lots of interesting things to say. Martin is famous for saying you can’t make a living designing games, which is why he runs a game publishing company. Though I suspect he’s doing quite well now because he is one of those designers who is asked to design games by a variety of institutions. He has been able to quit his job as a teacher and is contemplating migrating to Australia. One of his most telling comments: he’s glad he started decades ago, nowadays it’s particularly hard to get published by an existing publisher.

The publishers and designers in the UK are very much oriented toward Essen and Eurostyle games. The small publishers seem to have better prospects than the small publishers in USA. Whereas at Origins there are always some forlorn-looking booths of people trying to sell one or two games (and getting lost amongst the giants), that forlorn feeling is missing at the game Expo. My hypothesis is that because there are no large publishers in the UK, and the products of the large American publishers cost a lot more because of import fees and shipping costs, the little publishers have found a niche that isn’t really available in North America. The little guys who come to the game Expo can come year after year, as opposed to many of the little guys at Origins who can only come one year.

I met lots of interesting people, for example Chris Bayliss who was running the equivalent of an auction store (I cannot recall the British name for it, unfortunately) with a significant part of the proceeds going to charity. Chris has been a game designer and told me about his worst experience, the game Assassin published late in Avalon Hill's life. Avalon Hill messed it up very badly (it has a 3.8 [sic] rating on Boardgame Geek). He says when people get his original rules it turns out to be not a bad game despite the many physical changes (a board was added, for example).

I had been asked to give an interview to a podcast, and managed to get that in Sunday morning with Paul McClean. As I have already said in the previous post, you can listen to this Yog-Sothoth (Yog Radio) podcast at
http://www.yog-sothoth.com/content/1028-Yog-Radio-48-The-Lawnmower-Man .
I was in my best form, I have to say, so I think it's worth listening to. My bit is from about :55 minutes to 1:16 (yes, it's a big podcast).

Finally I gave a talk about game design. It was scheduled for 1 PM Sunday, and I told the organizers that at 1 PM Sunday at an American convention most of the people have already left. But this convention was different, and I spoke to a packed room (60-70 people). I've not seen a game design talk better attended even in the USA. Although it was about tabletop design, I got questions about video game design as well, as the majority of tabletop game players are also video game players, and I always refer to both video and tabletop games in my talks. Audio (and slides) of the talk, “Of course you can design a game, but can you design a good one?” are at http://pulsiphergames.com/teaching1.htm

Birmingham is a long way from North Carolina, though not so far from my relatives in Cheltenham. Who knows if I'll ever be able to attend this convention again, assuming it stays in Birmingham: it appears to be outgrowing the current building.

July Miscellany

My monthly (sometimes) compilation of brief comments on games.

It's fairly easy to make a game that people will play once or twice, it's harder to make one they'll play five times, and it's really hard to make one they'll play a hundred times. In a sense, video game design is "easier" than tabletop design because the expectation is that people will play only once or twice. The drawback is that people will often play a video game a few minutes, or a couple hours, and then quit.

**
I was thinking again of simplifying games (see http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/2011/06/simpifying-game.html). There seems to be a category of Euro style game nowadays that amounts to throwing a lot of mechanisms and bits together in an essentially abstract game, to provide what I call "mental gymnastics".

Traditional games are "clean." There are relatively few kinds of simple components. This is as opposed to so many contemporary Euros with their player sheets and lots of different kinds of pieces and cards.

Is it part of the nature of the triumph of capitalism that people are suspicious of something that's simple? In effect, game designers are sometimes substituting complexity for substance.

I think that if your game is abstract, it should be simple, to let players concentrate on the essence, not on a bunch of not-so-essential details. Checkers, chess, go, all succeed because they are essentially simple to learn and to play, but hard to play very well.

**
RPG designers are often frustrated novelists. They are more or less the opposite of Euro game designers. RPGers value story, Euro-ers frequently slap an atmosphere (often called theme) onto an abstract game.

**
In the July 2011 PC Gamer magazine, of the "top 13 most anticipated games" by readers, #s 1-11 were sequels, #12 (TERA) I do not know, and #13 was Batman: Arkum Asylum, which may or may not be considered a sequel.

This is another mark of the power of branding. People will buy what they've heard of rather than something unknown.

**
"Lying Fallow"
I find it useful and instructive to occasionally allow game designs I am working on to "lie fallow", like a farmer's field used to be allowed to sit unused as a way to rejuvenate it. (Now we use fertilizer, but there's no easy equivalent in game design.) I don't do anything with the game for several months or even longer, then dig it out to playtest further. Even for games that seem to be "done" this can reveal things that need to be "fixed" or changed, particularly in the way the rules are written, but also in the play itself.

When I don't remember how to play (and I try NOT to remember, having so many games in some stage of development), then I can see the game (and the rules) with "new" eyes. I distinctly recall thinking, in some cases "What the heck was I thinking of!?" (It's important to write down what you're thinking of, as you develop a game, so that you can find out why you were thinking as you were, when this happens.) It's also instructive when I try to find things in the rules, which may not be organized as well as I thought they were. (If I still had the rules fresh in mind I might not try to find anything in the written rules.)

**
Some people suggest that the reason we like games is because we learn something while playing. Decades ago games were a learning experience both before and during play. Now, with people not reading the rules, not trying to figure anything out beforehand, and sometimes trying to learn as they actually play, games are only a learning experience during play.

One reason why lately I've designed many games that primarily use cards is that this makes it easier for players to learn as they play. And to me it's not bad to have a lot of different kinds of cards, as players learn (through the cards) as they play.

(On the other hand, some say that people, in general, don't want to bother to learn anything new. That's why "traditional" games are so popular, everybody thinks they already know how to play.

**
Are "achievements" in video games so popular because the games themselves are really a bit dull and repetitive, and we need some incentive to keep playing other than enjoyment of playing the game?

Or are they something to "keep us in the flow" by making things more difficult after we've finished the basic game?

Or are they ways to make the "puzzle" more difficult after we've completed it once? Insofar as single-player video games are often interactive puzzles, this may be the answer.

In any case, I say "achievements, my foot". Because most of it isn't worth bothering with. Or to put another way, you're achieving nothing worth achieving.

**
The biggest difference between tabletop and video game design: in the larger video games, and to some extent in the smaller, it's "design by committee." Not only are there multiple designers ("five combat designers" alone), most of the other production staff want to contribute ideas, and will be unhappy if you don't treat them seriously, whether you use their ideas or not.

**
D&D adventures as Pro Wrestling
I haven't read many lately, but in the past the published D&D adventures were written assuming something like Pro Wrestling (WWE, TNA) in the way characters behaved. So many assume the players will stand around listening to long discourses when, in fact, true survival types would be acing immediately to do away with the bad guys or get out of the area. The writers assume the players will bumble around in a group rather than use scouts or detection devices: kind of like wrestlers not noticing or looking for the obvious stuff that the audience sees (and sometimes tries to warn them about).

I suppose in that respect they're like a lot of movies, too. The standards of what makes sense have changed (degraded). Modern cinema has taken over RPGs.