Welcome back Developers!
Widen the Aperture
This month, I want to talk about the necessity for Developers (and especially Designers) to play more games. With thousands of titles coming out every year, very, very few of them are worth your time and energy. Now, that’s not to say that only the games on BGG’s Top 100 are worthy of your Kallax Shelves or Gaming Table, but it’s a reasonable start for anyone who wants to play more games with a variety of themes and mechanics.
Themes and Mechanics
At the time I’m writing this blog entry, BGG’s list of games spans 1,166 pages (at 100 games and/or supplements, expansions, promos, etc. per page), with only 189 pages of ranked games. Tic-Tac-Toe holds the very last ranked position at 18,810. Among all of these titles there are scores of themes and mechanics. The myriad themes include Adventure, American West, Ancient, Civilization, Economic, Exploration, Fantasy (Cthulhu Mythos, Vikings, Zombies, and Pirates), Industry/Manufacturing, Medical, Medieval, Negotiation, Political, Science Fiction, Space Exploration, and Warfare, while examples of mechanics include Action Points; Action Retrieval; Area Majority/Influence; Auction/Bidding; Cooperative; Card Deck, Bag, and Pool Building; Drafting; Dice Rolling; Grid Movement; Hand Management; Network and Route Building; Set Collection; and Variable Player Powers.
The previous paragraph includes more than a dozen examples of both themes and mechanics…and that’s only for the Top 20 games on BGG! Thus, for any budding developer, it’s well worth the time to look at each title’s presentation and get under the hood of Terraforming Mars or Through the Ages and see how their engine works. Moreover, beyond the forensic analysis, you need to get these titles (or others like them) to your Gaming Table. Only when you play the game will you truly experience how a particular theme integrates well (or not-so-well) with the mechanics.
Setbacks and Successes
From my own history, I experienced a few setbacks when I first moved from a hobbyist to someone who wanted to expand his gaming horizons at the professional level. The first has to do with design and the other development. Each of them served as excellent examples for me to “widen the aperture” and play more games, which would make me a much more well-rounded gamer and moreover, someone who had experience with a much greater variety of both titles and mechanics as they were coming to market.
I re-entered the hobby in 2009, as most of you know with my deep adoration for Arkham Horror, a title epitomized by dice-rolling, random events, and most importantly output randomness. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, output randomness and its cousin input randomness play a significant role in the creation of games as nearly all of them have some element of randomness. In short, input randomness is essentially information known before the decision, such as drawing a card or rolling dice, followed by the action. In sharp contrast, output randomness occurs after the decision…the player wants to do something and then draws a card or rolls dice to determine success or failure.
When I published my first game, TAU CETI: Planetary Crisis, my shelf had a few dozen games and I had played maybe a shade over 100 games at that point. Thus, my world-view was clearly dominated by what I knew and what I liked. I enjoyed random events, along with rolling dice to determine success. I had also been playing D&D at that point for more than 35 years, a game which serves as an excellent exemplar of output randomness. While I and the several dozen playtesters enjoyed the game, much of the praise we had initially received was more due to selection bias than anything else. We were excited about and taught the game. Once it got out into the wild, the reception was far more harsh. Why? Well, the world of games had moved on from what we had created. We didn’t know it because we hadn’t played enough games or as I’m an amateur historian might say, we didn’t review the literature.
Around the same time, Compass Games had reached out to me to serve as a developer for a new designer who had created a card-driven wargame. While I had more than two decades of experience playing military wargames and had recently revised and edited work on a published wargame, the card-driven genre was new to me, and without a deep understanding of the mechanic, my assistance would prove lackluster at best. Once again, my own limitations prohibited me from offering useful data points and playtest feedback. To rectify this situation and reduce this glaring blind spot, I’ve since played several COIN games, Twilight Struggle, and the epic Here I Stand.
Now, nearly five years later, I’ve contributed to more than thirty games from across a dozen publishers and designers. It’s absolutely essential that anyone who wants to assist in the development of games and especially true for those who want to move into the design space to play many, many games; understand how they work; appreciate the marriage of theme and mechanics; and begin thinking of how to synthesize what at first glance appears peculiar. Without Dominion, we would not have CLANK! By and large, there have been very few new ideas in the game space during the past 30 years, with a few notable exceptions including deck, bag, and pool building. When they occur, however, it is up to designers and developers to use the innovative idea in new and exciting ways.
Points to Ponder
If you’re thinking about development or design work, what have you played? What have you not played…and why? Do you have “glaring blind spots” on your gaming shelves, and if so, what would incentivize you to play that new game? I can’t think of a single designer who doesn’t actually enjoy playing games…that would seem anathema to the very idea of a board game professional.
What are your thoughts? How would you recommend that other designers and developers “widen their aperture?”