May 2013 Miscellany

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

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

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

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

I will have games to playtest, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

Giving Victory Points for Fighting Battles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three hats: the three parts of creating games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

A Broader View

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

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

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

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

Not Just RPGs

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

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

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

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

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

Buyers versus players

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

2012-13 Game Designer Survey results

Game Designer Survey Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six words about the role of inspiration in game design

According to tweetdeck, one of the trending:worldwide topics on twitter last year was 6 word stories.  Since then I've asked people to say 6 words about game design, programming, wargames, stories in games, casual games, zombie games, chance/randomness in games, innovation and plagiarism in games, social networking games, game sequels, and "If I could give a present  to the game industry this Christmas".  Contributions are sometimes amusing, sometimes serious, sometimes worth remembering.

This time the challenge is this: say six words the role of inspiration in game design.

PrezCon 2013

Once again I attended PrezCon in Charlottesville Virginia near the end of February.  This was the 10th year since I started going although I haven’t attended every year.  It was the 20th year for the convention.

PrezCon is a strictly board and card game convention that works much like the World Wargaming Championships (WBC).  There are many dozens of tournaments with heats, sometimes semi finals, and finals, with plaques awarded for winner and sometimes for those who place depending on the size of the tournament.  Players pay one lump sum to be able to play as many tournaments as they can squeeze in.  If you just want to participate in open gaming the fee is a little less.

The convention takes place in the Doubletree Hotel in north Charlottesville on US29.  There’s enough choice in food that you can stay in the building for the entire convention.

As most readers know I don’t play in tournaments - for the most part I figure if I want play games I can do it at home, so I’ve never been one to play games at conventions.  When I have the opportunity I like to watch people play and sometimes talk with the players to try to help me understand the game more quickly than if I just spent the time playing one session.

It’s a very friendly convention with many people who’ve known each other for years, but make no mistake there are many expert players, and if you are a tyro in a game where skill counts for a lot then you’re not likely to win much.  There are many old-time wargames but also less serious games like Liars Dice and Werewolf.

This year seemed less crowded than normal, but according to Justin Thompson, the Man in Charge, attendance was up at over 600.  This compares with over 1500 at WBC, over 10,000 at Origins, and over 40,000 at GenCon.  The convention used more rooms than in the past which may be why it seemed less well attended.

It also seemed that there were fewer young people.  The majority of attendees are folks who played wargames since they were quite young and are now in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.  As is typical at such conventions the proportion of females is low.

The convention begins on Monday but I arrived Wednesday evening.  PrezCon has an auction and auction store on Thursday, and on first run through the auction store I planned to come back later that evening but was occupied with other things and so didn’t buy anything.

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday there are vendors selling games including some manufacturers such as Mayfair and GMT.  Z-man was not there this year (a change resulting from its sale to a French Canadian company).  Clash of Arms who are usually there were not not, but Worthington from the Norfolk Virginia area was.

When I go to a convention I always ask myself short time before I leave “why am I doing this?”  Why am I going to all the trouble of travel - I’m not a travel fan - and so forth?  But when I get there I usually really enjoy my time, and so it was at PrezCon.  At PrezCon there’s usually time to talk with people like Jim Jordan, Mark Smith, Nathan Twigg, Rick Kirchner, and many others.  (Even though I broke my rule and allowed myself to get into a discussion about religion with Mark and Rick - I told them they wouldn’t like it.)

I also met some new people such as “Jeffro,” a fan of micro games including Dragon Rage.  He said he might come to my talk that Saturday evening but in the end he was playing a  space wargame with my roommate (from Durham) and another person from Durham!  Until 5AM . . . Which probably didn’t help my roommate when he was unsuccessful in the Roborally final the next morning . . .

The biggest surprise was how well people took to my 1942-43 World War II air and naval game that is vaguely related to Stratego.  (Little-known fact: my game Swords & Wizardry, published long ago by H. P. Gibsons, is related to Stratego.)  This game is immensely more fluid and strategic than Stratego, which is a very limited (few choices) mass-market kind of game.


Beginning last year I volunteered to give a talk about game design at PrezCon.  It’s not likely to be fertile field for such things, with so many long-time players.   If they're intending to design, they've probably started long ago, and if they don't intend, then they wouldn't try to come to the talk.  So I'd never expect a big turnout.

Last year I had nine people, but we were in a ballroom with a lot of other people and it was so loud that sometimes even I, with a loud voice, had to stop talking.  This year we were scheduled for the same room so I did almost nothing to promote the talk.  It was not highlighted in the schedule as far as I know and was just one amongst all the listings of tournaments so I wasn’t surprised end up with five this time (and one of those had not seen it in the schedule, he just happened to pass by while I was waiting for people to turn up).  Fortunately Justin had a nice room in reserve so we were able to move there from the first floor ballroom.

If I know I have a good room next year, I can make some flyers so that more people know about it, but I’d still expect a pretty small attendance.  I get 20 or so at WBC which is more than twice as large in total attendance.  I get a lot more people at Origins when I speak there but attendance at the convention is much higher, of course.  (I don’t expect to go to Origins this year, by the way.) 

Generalizations about conventions: GenCon is a story convention - not just story in games such as RPGs and story oriented boardgames, but stories of all kinds such as film, animate, and science fiction/fantasy. WBC/PrezCon are competitive game cons.  Origins is a non-story mostly noncompetitive game con including boardgames, RPGs, miniatures, and CCGs.

If you’re a competitive player of board/card games, and can go to only one convention, it would probably be this one or WBC.  If you’re in the business, or if you’re a story-gamer, GenCon is clearly the number one convention.  There may be competition conventions like PrezCon and WBC in the western part of the country, or perhaps far the Northeast, but I don’t know of any.

March - well, a little early - 2013 Miscellany

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

You know how to do something because you've done it, or because you've read about/seen how to do it, which is much more "iffy".  There is too much of the latter and not enough of the former in modern education, too much talking about how to do something and not enough doing it.

Tutorials, in video games, are examples of having players "do it" rather than read about it.
**

People play games for many reasons. I play either (in cooperative games such as D&D) to "succeed in the mission" and keep everyone on my side "whole", or (in competitive games) to win the game. I like to know the rules of a game thoroughly; I much prefer to read a set of rules rather than have someone teach me, probably because I want to thoroughly know what’s going on. I recognize that the rules-reading preference, in particular, is a minority view! Nonetheless, I tend to design games that I like to play.
**

Some people like to have music playing in the background all the time, though they aren't very particular about which music (liking many genres).  I call most of these people "sound bathers".  Gamers are often "game bathers," not caring greatly about which game they're playing as long as they play a game.
**
One "genius" of tabletop RPGs: there's intelligent opposition, but the referee doesn't "lose", and players don't so much "win" as survive.

2nd "genius" of tabletop RPGs: a good referee can react intelligently and creatively to what the players want to try, a computer cannot.

A 3rd "genius" of tabletop RPGs: it's in-person social (met my wife thru D&D) in a way computer RPGs/MMOs cannot be.
**

Allan B. Calhamer, designer (I'm tempted to say, inventor) of the game Diplomacy, passed away recently.  He published the original 500 copy run of Diplomacy in 1959 (also the year of the American edition of Risk, and of Tactics II, unless I misrecall the dates).  I met him a few times at a Diplomacy convention.  An unusual man.
**

The Power of Branding at Wal-mart: board games Angry Birds, Lego Harry Potter (Lego seems to be very strong), Star Wars R2D2 in Trouble.
**

I know "wargamers" who think you must have hexes and cardboard counters with numbers on them. But more fundamentally, I think many "wargamers" are people who don't like games that can involve negotiations, that is, games where talking with other players  can give you an advantage (or disadvantage); or perhaps more specifically, they don't like games where you're clearly at a disadvantage if you don't talk to other players.  Many wargamers are accustomed to playing solo, and I think some (who have probably gone into computer wargames) really don't want to deal with other people.  Fair enough, but that doesn't mean all wargames must be this way.

These wargamers tend to play battle games, games without production economies, whereas the wargames for more than two players not only feature talking, but frequently have production economies.  (Axis & Allies is one of the exceptions, a two player wargame with production economies.)  The object in a battle game is usually to destroy (though not necessarily kill) the enemy force; the object in a war game (notice the space between war and game) is to take economic capability from the enemy and improve your own, because the best economy will usually win in the end.  Which is quite often true in Britannia, for example, and always true in computer Civilization, Diplomacy, and Risk (except for the kludge of the cards).   It is *not* true in History of the World, which despite the title is a battle game, not a war game, with a variable order of battle and no production economy.
**

Many schools (secondary and college) think they're in the business of disseminating certain information and confirming that the individual has imbibed that information.  They don't think they're in the business of preparing people for life and work.  Which is one reason why so many high schoolers are so clueless when they get to college.  And a reason why so many college graduates are so clueless about career jobs.
**

"My thing is that most scripts aren't bad scripts, they're just not finished yet."   Michael Arndt (scriptwriter for Star Wars VII, Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story III, etc.)

This applies to games as well, including many that are published.
**

"You wouldn't expect to be able to run a marathon without training. Why do new devs think they can make the ultimate game without experience?"   werezompire (twitter)
**

 I recall 40 years ago hearing the idea that K12 education was designed to get people used to the idea of sitting quietly and doing something they didn't want to do for long periods of time, because that's what their adult work would be like.  But now it doesn't even do that.
**

I don't like the idea of Steam, because if owner-company Valve goes belly up, or just decides to discontinue Steam, then I've lost every game I've bought there.  Unfortunately, many PC games are only available through Steam.  That's because the publishers get something like 70% of the revenue, far higher than for other distribution methods, and because it pretty much prevents piracy, which is rampant in PC games.

Fortunately for players, games are often cheaper on Steam, and discounted heavily during sales.  I just bought Fallen Enchantress, for example, at 66% off (and the list is $40, not $60).

Dragon Rage "Designer Diary"

(Eric Hanuise and I have tried since September to get this published amongst the Boardgamegeek designer diaries, with Eric even posting it in a BGG publishing queue in correct format, without success.  We are both puzzled about why we've been completely ignored.  We've finally decided to post it elsewhere.  LEP)

Dragon Rage Designer Diary

Lewis Pulsipher

While Dragon Rage was originally published in 1982, it was reissued in a much higher-quality format with an additional map and many additional scenarios in Belgium in 2011.  The game was very expensive to obtain from the US, as I’ll explain below, so I haven’t written this until the advent of good distribution in the USA through GameSalute.

This will be a quite different designer diary because it has been over 30 years since the original design.  Perhaps it will be instructive to game designers more for the publishing history of the game than for the development history.

Dragon Rage has had a pretty checkered history.  It was published in 1982 and sold very well I was told, but I was never paid for it.  The publisher went bankrupt for reasons having nothing to do with its boardgames, and their games went into a kind of limbo.  At the same time I took what amounted to a hiatus of 20 years from the game industry, and when I “came back” it took me many years to find a new publisher for the game.  Here’s the story.

The original publication

Dragon Rage was originally published in 1982.  I had already had some games published – Swords and Wizardry by H P Gibsons, the Diplomacy Games and Variants booklet, and Valley of the Four Winds (Games Workshop’s first game) – by the time I offered Dragon Rage to the Dwarfstar Games subsidiary of Heritage Models (Duke Siefried’s company).  Old-timers may recall that those publications were all in Britain, perhaps not surprising because I was living in London from 1976 to 1979 to research my doctoral dissertation on the Royal Navy.  By 1982 Britannia was also substantially complete and had been offered to Avalon Hill, who said games of that era don’t sell.  In 1984 I offered Britannia to Gibsons, and it was published in 1986, but by that time I was on hiatus and didn’t even see a published version of Britannia played until 2004.

I don’t recall what caused me to start working on DR.  I’d say the theme is quite obvious.  On the other hand Steve Jackson’s Ogre, which is closer to Dragon Rage in theme than any game I know of, was published in 1977, and though I never played it I was aware of it.  Much of the playtesting would have been done at the Drago game club at Duke University while I was finishing my Ph.D.  Further changes were made by Arnold Hendrick, Howard Barasch, and the developers at Dwarfstar, in cooperation with myself.  I’m including an image of the board as I submitted it, and those familiar with the game will notice that a second gate on the west side of the city was added during development.  The only other thing I recall - actually my brother recalls – is that the dragons might have one too few hits per wing, in our opinion.  But if you want a game to be more challenging for one side than the other, it’s probably best that the attackers have the challenge because attacking tends to be more fun than defending.

DR was designed as a hex and counter wargame, which was the typical hobby game of the time.  The game has the virtue as compared with many other hex and counter wargames that there are no stacks of pieces, only one unit per hex with very few exceptions.  The combat table is also a differential table so it’s not necessary to calculate odds by division, just to subtract.

The game was published along with seven others, six of them developed internally by Dwarfstar, in a Microgame format.  The boxes were 7.5" by 4.25", the 14" by 12" board was printed on thick cardboard rather than mounted, the half-inch pieces were also printed on cardboard though die cut.  On the other hand it cost only $10 (which amounts to about $30 in today’s money, but seemed quite cheap compared to game prices in 1982).

I was told that 10,000 copies were printed and that Dragon Rage was the best selling of the eight games.  I think I received maybe three copies of Dragon Rage and one or two copies each of the other seven games.  And as it turned out that’s all I ever received for designing the game.

The business failure

Now what I report I cannot swear to, I only know what I was told by the guys who developed the game, and I’m relying on memory about 30 years old. 

Dwarfstar was a subsidiary of Heritage Models.  Heritage was one of the big miniatures producers of the time, and even today Duke Seifried is very well-known in the miniatures community.  Like many small companies Heritage depended on a bank line of credit (loan), and according to my informants Duke and his bank manager got into a “spitting contest” (not literally of course - but I remember that phrase from 30 years ago) and the bank called in his loan.  That was it. Although Dwarfstar was doing well it went down with Heritage. 

There were reports in 1984 that the line would be revived, but I heard nothing about it directly, and nothing happened.  I suspect the unavailability of the printing plates was a deciding factor. The plates that were used to print the games were kept by the printer because he had not been paid.  This made it sufficiently expensive for someone else to pick up the games that they languished, and as far as I know the other seven languish to this day although you can find electronic copies of all seven at Joe Scoleri’s Dwarfstar games site at http://dwarfstar.brainiac.com/. 

(The importance of printing plates at that time:  Remember Avalon Hill saying games of Britannia’s era don’t sell?  When Gibsons showed that it did sell, and Gibsons had the printing plates already done, which is a considerable part of the expense of publishing, Avalon Hill decided to publish Britannia in the USA.  This is why there’s so much physical resemblance between the Gibsons and Avalon Hill versions, evidently they used the same printing plates.  And of course it turned out that games of that era could sell.  But maybe they hadn’t up to that time.)

Most likely the failure to be paid anything for this game was one of the things that convinced me that hobby boardgames were going to, if not disappear, diminish greatly.  I saw RPGs on one side – D&D was for 20+ years my favorite game – and computer games on the other side, squeezing boardgames in the middle.  And I was right about wargames, they now have an immensely smaller market than in the early 80s.  So I decided to ignore the game hobby and get a real job, and for the next 20 years taught myself computer programming, became a teacher of computer literacy and programming, worked as chief of networking in an Army Medical Center, and then went back to being a college teacher of computer networking and later of video game design.  One of my last actions in the hobby was to submit Britannia to Gibsons and two years later they published it, but when the copies arrived I looked at it and then set it aside because that was no longer where my mind was.

The Theme

As you may know, many times a publisher will choose a different name than the author’s for a game.  I think Dragon Rage is one of the best titles any game could ever have, and  I don’t think there was ever a possibility of changing from the title I’d selected.  As an example of a change, my name for what became Britannia was “Invasions of Britain,” or “Invasions” for short.   I discovered a few years ago that there’s a PlayStation 2 game by 3DO named Dragon Rage that has nothing to do with this boardgame.  Good title, eh?  I used it first.  But if you look up Dragon Rage on Wikipedia, that’s the game you’ll get.

The only game I can remember designing where I tried to conform to a particular story was Valley of the Four Winds.  I don’t do “simulations” but I do like a non-abstract game to be a model of something, and the model here is an attack on a fantasy city by various monsters.  As one recent reviewer said, everything in the game serves to illuminate and reinforce the theme.  DR has a ready-made “story”, not a story imposed on the game, but a story growing out of a situation. 

I like to set up a situation and let the players determine what happens.  If it’s an historical game then I recognize that what did happen in history is only one of many possibilities, and probably not the most likely one, which leaves a lot of room for different occurrences.  So in Dragon Rage I didn’t try to impose a story, I just set up a situation where the bad guys – a couple dragons, or possibly a bunch of evil humanoids and giants – are attacking a human city.

While I’m no longer much interested in tactical games (other than Dungeons & Dragons), and now prefer games with more than two players, more than 30 years ago I designed several two player games including many tactical games.  The tactical games are certainly a stronger way to present a personal story, that is, something that you can identify with directly.  In Dragon Rage you can identify with a dragon or a giant, or you can identify with a hero or a wizard.  In sweep of history games like Britannia there’s really no one to identify with; although there are leaders, even the longest lived leader is only there for a small part of a thousand years of history.

I’ve always thought of boardgames as competitions where people are trying to figure out the best move, but there is no absolutely clear best move because of all the uncertainties of warfare and reality.  (Chess and checkers have certainty, there is a best move even though no human is good enough to always know the best move.  In a sense they are puzzles.  I don’t like puzzles.)  So you have to do some thinking to succeed at Dragon Rage.  Some players might say “oh I’m a dragon, I’m going to just kick butt and blow those humans away.”  You can try to do that, and for a while it will work, but if it were that easy then who would ever want to play the human defenders?  You can charge right in but this will probably lose the game.  You have to be smart; you have to, in sports terms, take what the defense gives you, nip in and out rather than simply charge in and start smashing.  There’s lots of smashing to be done but if you let yourself get into a slogging melee early on, you’re going to die.  Yet the city defenders receive reinforcements periodically so you can’t “take your sweet time” to avoid all risks.

I think this fits the theme better than sheer mayhem, although it may not encourage the kind of power trips that are common in video games where you don’t have an actual opponent.  Dragon Rage could certainly be adapted as a video game, either for the defenders to defend against computer attackers or as a two player networked game.

The game is colorful and provides a great stimulus to the imagination without actually having a specific story attached.

Jump ahead to 2004

In the early 80s I was teaching myself computer programming and networking and playing D&D as I had since 1975.  Between 1984 in 2004 I had nothing to do with hobby gaming other than to play Dungeons & Dragons and some video games.  When I gradually “came back” to the hobby my first concern was getting Britannia back into print, but another task was to find someone to reprint Dragon Rage.  Microgames per se had pretty much disappeared, replaced by collectible card games and casual video games.  And Dragon Rage is, despite its simplicity, fundamentally a hex and counter wargame, which is a category that diminished immensely during my 20 years away.  In any case I wanted Dragon Rage to be published in a much nicer, larger format than a microgame.

Many readers have probably heard about the confusion about rights of the game Merchant of Venus that is now being published by Fantasy Flight Games with additions by Stronghold Games.  I had encountered problems with Britannia, in fact my first reintroduction to the game hobby was hearing that MultiMan publishing thought that they had the rights to reprint Britannia, as assigned by Hasbro after the end of Avalon Hill.  The rights had been licensed to Avalon Hill by Gibsons, not from me directly, and my contract with Gibsons specified that the game rights reverted to me once it went out of print, so I was quite sure that neither Hasbro nor MultiMan had any rights at all.   (Notice also that the Avalon Hill Britannia was copyrighted in my name, not by Avalon Hill.) Fortunately MultiMan wasn’t really interested in publishing Britannia, otherwise there would have been “a mess”.

In the process of looking for a Dragon Rage publisher I heard that Reaper Miniatures thought they had the rights to the Dwarfstar games.  I had no trouble tracking down the main man at Reaper and being sure that there was no confusion about rights.  Then I could try to find a new publisher.

So as I attended game conventions I looked for possible publishers.  After Fantasy Flight Games published Britannia they had DR for a couple years before passing on it.  In any case it is not an FFG-style game if you look at their product line.  Neither is Britannia but in that case the owner liked the game, and the owner of a game publisher has some latitude in what he does!   GMT games looked at Dragon Rage and said they thought they could sell it for something like $45 but they couldn’t produce it to sell at that price.

I have no recollection of how I first came into contact with Eric Hanuise, who to this day I have never spoken with either by phone or in person (I can say the same about the owner of FFG).  Eric says he heard about DR through Joe Scoleri’s site and wrote to me out of the blue.  But over the course of three years we got to the point that his new company, Flatlined Games, published Dragon Rage as their first game.   (I’ll interject here that I tried to convince Eric to pick a different name for his company since “flatlined” means dead, but it’s some kind of inside joke.)

My original idea for reissuing Dragon Rage was to retain exactly the wording of the rules, because I know all the problems that can occur whenever you change rules, and I had seen that manifest in the reissue of Britannia (2006).  The only thing I wanted to do was add rules for the Princess, who was mentioned in an original scenario but without any rules for how to deal with her.  Eric felt he should rewrite the rules in a more modern style, more “sequence of play” than the old rules which were written in a reference style as most were in the early 1980s.

Believing in reusability, I’m going to quote from my book Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish"

In older games, rules were written to be read thoroughly before play.  They were organized to be easily referenced when a player forgot a detail.  Now most rules are written in "Sequence of Play" style, on the assumption that the players will try to play the game while reading the rules for the first time.  If that’s true, then the rules must follow the order in which the players will try to do something in the game.  This makes for a poor reference, unfortunately.  But the fact is, most tabletop game players want to be taught how to play rather than read the rules, and if no one can teach them, they often try to learn the game as they play.

I still prefer the reference style because I’m convinced that anybody who tries to play a game at the same time that they’re reading the rules is inevitably going to screw it up.   In Eurostyle games that doesn’t always matter, but it tends to be more important in wargames.  Yet sequence of play is how it’s done nowadays.  And I don’t think I tried to talk Eric out of it.  In the end we have both kinds of rules included in the game, a sequence of play set and a reference rulebook.

Eric devised the map for Nurkott and added the scenarios for it.  He made the maps with Profantasy Campaign Cartographer.   See http://www.profantasy.com/rpgmaps/?p=571 for a brief description with the final maps.  The step-by-step process is described at http://www.profantasy.com/rpgmaps/?s=Dragon+Rage (scroll down to September 12, 2011).

At one point Eric sent me a rough cut of cover art which unfortunately looked to me like a Neogi from Spelljammer, not a dragon.  Fortunately the cover art that was used in the end, by Miguel Coimbre, is outstanding and nothing like that first cut.

So my function was more as a proofreader than anything else as the project took shape.  We did run into one problem that’s very instructive, an example of how a simple misunderstanding in the rules can break a game.

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

Fortunately it didn't take long before I got an idea of what had happened.  Corresponding with Eric confirmed it.  In Dragon Rage the defenders get reinforcements by ship after the game has been going for a while and at regular intervals thereafter.  The design purpose was to force the dragons to have a serious go rather than hang back and ticky-tack the defenders to death.  The dragons have to pick and choose their time and place to act but the reinforcements help induce them to actually attack rather than fool about.

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

The rules had to be translated into Spanish and German, Eric having taken care of the French, and that actually may have delayed the entire project a while.

You may know that the number of copies printed of the game makes a huge difference to the cost per copy.  The setup cost is a fixed cost divided across the number of copies printed.  So Eric had to choose the largest print run that he thought he could afford to pay for, could sell, and could store somewhere, in order to have the best price for the product - 1,500.  The MSRP (which is several times the printing cost, of course - see http://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/13334/observations-about-changes-in-game-distribution-a) came out to €50 or approaching $75 each.  This sounds like a heck of a lot compared to the price of the original game, but keep in mind the equivalent in today’s dollars, $30 rather than $10.  The new version has a much larger, mounted board with maps on both sides, and much larger pieces beautifully printed by LudoFact in Germany.  It is several times as good in physical quality as the original.

But the initial problem that raised the cost so much for buyers in the United States was that Flatlined Games is in Belgium, and the Belgian Post Office had a monopoly on shipping until quite recently.  As a result, shipping to most other countries cost €30, approaching $40!  So this made the game cost over $100 in the United States.

More than six months after publication, through contacts at Essen Spiel, the big game convention in Germany, Eric managed to sell some copies to online retailers in the US, but he wanted a more satisfactory situation.  The reasons are complicated, but at one point he was shipping games to Germany from which they were shipped to the US and Australia, because that was more practical than shipping them directly from Belgium!  In the end he has shipped his remaining English-language copies to GameSalute for distribution in the United States, and I saw GameSalute selling the game at GenCon for $75.  You can also get it at http://shop.gamesalute.com/products/dragon-rage.  That availability was the impetus for me to write this piece.

Future additions

Practically speaking, Dragon Rage provides a game system that can be used for many fantasy warfare situations involving fantasy creatures and battle magic.  And right now it seems to be one of the few, if not the only, fantasy hex-and-counter game in print and still supported by publisher and designer.

At some point Eric expressed a desire for ways to play the game with more than two players.  I devised a version, based on the idea that there is a competition to rule Nurkott, that works well but you need to have extra control markers to indicate who controls which pieces because there’s only two sets of pieces, the human pieces and the monster pieces.

Many boardgames have expansions these days but expansions have always struck me as very much limiting your market: if the expansion is an add-on to the original game only people with the original game have any interest in buying the expansion.  So we’ve settled on a standalone “expansion”, something that is a game in itself but can be combined with Dragon Rage for more scenarios and for play by more than two players.  But it will be a long time before that becomes available.

Dragon Rage is a niche game, not one that appeals to a broad market.  I think fans of the dry-as-dust, essentially abstract Eurostyle have started to want to play games where the theme really means something, where it makes a difference to how the game is designed and how it is played, and Dragon Rage is such a game.  It was designed as a game that can be played over and over again, not as a game that will be played a few times before people move on to something else.  Nor is it puzzle-like, there is no single solution as there are in many of today's “games.”  That's a large part of why it succeeded in the early 80s, and is succeeding today.

***

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

February 2013 Miscellany

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

**

I expect to be at PrezCon in Charlottesville, VA on the last weekend of Feburary, and at WBC in Lancaster PA.  Remains to be seen whether I'll be at Origins or GenCon.

I'll have various versions of Britannia (one less than two hours long) to try out, as well as a pirates game that needs to be tested by the more hard-core kinds of players we get at PrezCon.

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

**

Alan Paull, English game designer and publisher, has started a blog that I'm sure will be good reading.  I've known him since 1977, and enjoyed many of his insights even as I sometimes disagree with him.  http://www.boardgamegeek.com/blog/2165
**

What is typically called "gamification" is usually "scorification".  Scoring mechanisms are adapted to some work that is goal-oriented.  That, plus the idea that you're "playing" rather than working, can help make work less onerous.  But it isn't turning work into games.  Not good games, anyway.
**

Even the higher class game magazines can get stupid, as when they're disappointed that Sony's presentation at E3 was not "stunning".  Getting punched in the face is stunning if you're not expecting it; finding out you have cancer is stunning, whether you expect it or not.  Being "stunned" by what someone says or shows in a presentation at E3 is NOT stunning, that's a sign of a weak mind.
**

My book "Game Design" etc. is now available in a Kindle edition for $14.74! http://amzn.to/Wq3Vmx.
A "Nook Book" (ebook) edition from Barnes & Noble is $13.74.  The "Nook book" version may only be readable on Barnes & Noble ereaders!   http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/game-design-lewis-pulsipher/1110783952 .

You may know that you can get a free PC program  that lets you read (and buy) Kindle books.  Something of the same kind is available to read "Nook Books" on iPhones, but I don't know about other platforms.
**

My wife tells me about a friend whose 3 year old is spending money playing a "free to play" smartphone game.  Peter Molyneuax (Fable, etc.) thinks many "whales" (big spenders on F2P gmaes) are kids.  What happens when people, and smartphone controls, stop a lot of this?  Hard on F2P games?
**

A big topic in the video game industry is whether consoles will continue to be viable in the future.  Some had predicted we wouldn't see new ones from Sony and Microsoft, but it looks like there will be.  I've always thought of consoles as 1) ways to stay away from a scary keyboard (long ago when people were much more apprehensive about computers) and 2) wannabe computers that quickly become outdated.  Yet they have persisted because they provide completely standard platforms for games (which PCs do not), because they're designed to be played on a big TV (which PCs are not), and because the manufacturers could make lots of money by controlling the games that could be played, and by thwarting piracy (especially in the cartridge era).

So given the directions of PC gaming and mobile gaming, why do people even want consoles, even if they're ultimately moneymakers for the manufacturers?  I don't know.
**

Many video game makers have the saying "fail fast" (or "fail quickly").  That is, if something isn't working in a game, get it out of there, don't stick with it when you know, in your heart, that it isn't good enough.  Good advice for tabletop designers, too.

The only caution is that some people become so used to losing (failing) that they don't care any more.  Which is probably worse than the people who win all the time (assuming they win because they're good).

I understand that some first and second grade classes in some places are no longer given grades, so that we don't differentiate those who do better (for a variety of reasons) from those who do worse . . .  Hereabouts, the kindergarten teachers aren't allowed to give gold stars for exceptional work any more, for fear it might make the  kids who don't do anything exceptional feel bad . . .
**

 In computer games, you can have complex rules that go on behind the scenes, if the players don't have to see what's going on.  You cannot do that in tabletop because people have to understand what's going on.  But if people have to see it, they need to understand why it is the way it is whether it's tabletop or video game.
**

Here's an unusual website: http://www.virtualworldlaw.com/.  You can read about such things as a lawsuit over the ownership of twitter followers.
**

Accumulation of victory points:

The older method tended to be, see who had the most points at the end of the game, don't accumulate points during the game.  The focus was on the long term, not the short term.

In this century, short-term thinking is commonplace, and players evidently feel a need to be rewarded as they play - winning at the end is not sufficient reward (and of course, in multi-player games, most people don't win any particular game).  Hence the tendency is to have a player score frequently, using the accumulated scores from the many scoring opportunities to decide who wins at the end.

**

Every game has a narrative - a player's account of what happened to him and to others. Few have a story with plot, characterization, etc.
**

All these egotistical dudes who think that the way they like games to work is the ONLY way, or is the way everyone likes them to work. . . I've been called an egotistical dude too, but I recognize that there are many, many ways to enjoy games, and my way is not even close to the majority nowadays.

**

Tracking how "the word" gets around the Internet.  This is a piece at the site of the (German) Game Designer Association, SAZ, pointing to an about.com piece that in turn points to Joe Huber's review of my book "Game Design" etc.  http://www.spieleautorenzunft.de/newsreader-reports/items/tog-book-review-game-design-how-to-create-video-and-tabletop-games-start-to-finish.html

**
Perhaps tabletop game designers focus more on "the journey" and less on "the destination" than video game designers, who tend to design for one player.  You can't lose a video game.  But most of the players in a multiplayer (more than two) tabletop game lose the game.  So the designer needs to make the journey enjoyable, rather than the destination of "winning", in order to accommodate most of the players.

**
I have often speculated about how well chess or Go might sell if they had not existed heretofore and were issued as games today.  I think, not well at all.  Quite apart from both being very "difficult" to play well, chess would be heavily criticized for being so unbalanced in favor of white, and having so many draws.

I don't see their long history and intertwining with culture as a substitute for story or theme, as some have suggested.  It's simply the good luck of circumstances.  Monopoly, a poor design at best, enjoys the same advantage.  If it didn't exist and was issued today it would be a tremendous flop.

**
Comic books might be the midpoint between RPGs that resemble novels and those that resemble tentpole (fantasy) adventure movies like Indiana Jones.  Not that most comics make any attempt to be believable.

And I have to say that most video games that attempt to be photo-realistic, are actually more like comics in play because of the many accepted conventions in such games: unlimited respawning, unlimited ammo sometimes, unbelievably accurate shooting, etc.