Rug-Sweeping and the Party Game Problem
Thanks again to Bartoneus for filling in for me last week. (Guess this means I need to make a comic for a Random Encounter- there’s a scary thought.) As a short rebuttal to the question he posed, I generally don’t talk about fun specifically because it’s hard to design to be fun, and it’s a very subjective measure. We have someone in our design group whose job it is to make sure that a game is fun enough to proceed in designing after it passes the simple/elegant/not-broken tests. However, there is the other factor of whether a game is compelling or not, which is like fun but different. That elaboration will have to be a column by itself.
Now that I’ve swept the fun issue under the rug, it’s time to talk about another issue: rug-sweeping. This is a brand new game design term that we coined this past weekend at the retreat. This refers to a designer specifically ignoring an issue with a game and hoping that the players will not exploit this issue. This tends to happen most in party games. Why is that? Read on…
Why Do We Play Games Anyway?
Dave’s out of town this week, doing whatever it is that those “gamey” types of people do, and so I’m posting a (late) Critical Threat to keep the trend. Every week he discusses a new idea or concept that comes up to him about game design, playing board games, and living in the world of trying to be a professional in an overlooked field. He’s discussed things ranging from elegance in overall design to how theme interacts with a game’s mechanics, and one of the things I’ve noticed is that theme comes up in pretty much every one of these posts. He’s even discussed how theme effects which games we decide to play. There is one word that I have rarely if at all seen in his posts, that word is FUN.
Why do we even play these cursed things?! I discussed what seems like a hell of a long time ago (1.5 years) that having friends who are game designers somehow ruins many of your naive experiences with playing games. The first thing you have to understand is that these people are not human, they are game designers. They’re the exceptions to the following rule: We play games to have fun. I say “we”, but that excludes them, only satan really knows why they do it, possibly the only explanation is to hone their dark arts.
I view this exemption of the word ‘fun’ from his articles as a dangerous oversight, and I am challenging him to define what it is that makes some games fun and some games the opposite – not fun. As we were talking earlier this week, Candyland is not really much of a game because there are only two decisions involved in playing it. It’s so far from a game that I didn’t even italicize its name, that’s how serious it is. Now we come to a definitive problem area though, as it is quite clear many people can have loads of fun whilst playing the game Candyland. Surely not everything that is fun is therefore a game, but does everything that is a game also not need to be fun? [Read the rest of this article]
Balticon Panel Recap / Crappy First Prototypes
First, thanks to everyone who came out and attended the panel I was on at Balticon. The guys with me on the panel are geniuses who I always like comparing ideas too, and I’m glad we had a good discussion with an audience that seemed genuinely interested.
Some random points that I remember from the panel:
- Playtesters are very important. Get people who can be brutal.
Conventions are important. Not only do you have access to a wider variety of playtesters who can give you new feedback, it also allows you to network with game publishers.- Focus on what makes a game fun, and make sure that people are doing that as much as possible.
- The one piece of advice 100% shared by all the panel members is that simplicity should be your main goal.
- Kingmaker is bad.
- One audience member described his hatred of what he termed “reverse kingmaker” (but not how I’d characterize it) where one player is essentially playing the game for another person. This can be because the rules are too complex or the decisions are too opaque, and so one person has to rely upon another who gets it more.
- Short games can also fix that problem, in addition to solving the problem of someone losing for long periods of time. It can also minimize kingmaker. [Read the rest of this article]
Handslap!
In our group, if you make a rules mistake and inadvertently try to cheat, Jake will say “Give me your hand.” He becomes quite insistent until you present your hand, at which point, he will slap it on the backside like a nun’s yardstick. This is his way of enforcing the rules, and I believe, trying to give a negative stimulus to enforce a rule in people’s minds.
This may be way we have the term “handslap issue.” A handslap issue, in our game design parlance, when a rule is accidentally broken by a player, often repeatedly. Sometimes handslap issues arise from unclear rules explanation, or by not paying enough attention to the board.
However, if a rule has a consistent handslap issue with everyone, then it becomes a game design problem. Clearly, something in the players’ heads is telling them that an action SHOULD be legal. Should you just beat them silly until they get the rule? Maybe, but more likely, you should address the issue.
The Metaphor
I’m not talking about the kind you find in a short story- no, this is the metaphor in games.
Almost every game has a metaphor of some sort, except the super driest theme-less games. Chess, for example, has a pretty good metaphor, as does Go. However, something like Blokus, with its abstract play and strange pieces, probably lacks a metaphor.
The metaphor in games is related to theme. Theme is what we’re told the game is about (and a strong theme will come through in its gameplay as well.) Color is all the trappings that go into telling you the theme, like piece shapes, card art, titles, etc. The metaphor is the underlying thematic idea of the game that shows you what the game is supposed to convey.
Game Design, the Slacker Way
First, I want to recommend some other game design blog reading that is not my own: The Importance of Being Elegant takes a good shot at attempting to define elegance in board games and providing means by which we can evaluate a game for elegance. Good stuff that I need to dive into further.
Sometimes, I refer to game designers as “professional slackers.” This is in jest of course… good game design is actually pretty difficult, and it’s hard to make money at it. If you’re like most designers, you’re freelance, which means that the pay is inconsistent. So it’s really not a good job for slackers after all. To the would-be professional slackers, I recommend marrying rich or filing frivolous lawsuits.
But there is a slacker impulse that translates well to game design:
If it’s too much work, it’s probably not worth it.
Boardgames That Grab
Continuing in my series of articles comparing game design to other forms of creative expression…. (don’t worry, the semester is almost over.)
There’s a current trend in writing that I call “grabbiness.” That’s the ability of a piece to grab you right from the beginning: to suck you in and make you want to read more.
This concept exists in other forms too. There’s a reason they put artwork on the cover of a book or the box of a game. They want you to see the image and be intrigued so you open up the book or box. Not only that, it tries to evoke emotion in the viewer. It might bring to mind an epic battle, a child-like scene, or a struggle against a waterfall.
This concept can be applied to game design as well. A good game is going to answer the question right from the beginning: “why should I play this?”
Win, Lose, or Drawn & Quartered
You’d think after attending a 10 day long convention about boardgaming I’d have lots to talk about, wouldn’t you?
Well, the truth is, I spent a lot of time talking about game design, and terminology, and related issues while there quite a lot. While I have yet to become sick of talking about games and game design, I’m having trouble focusing on a specific topic so as to enlighten you this week. (I also have a couple designs buzzing in my head that I’m more eager to work on than write this column!)
I didn’t want to leave you high and dry this week without my font of game design knowledge, so I thought I’d briefly touch on a point that was raised in the comments of a post while I was gone: about winning and losing.
A Game of Pure Skill
I was at a party this past weekend that could at times have been described as “raucous.” Of course, I don’t go for this whole “unstructured social interaction” thing, so I was jonesing for gaming, coming off from a back to back win in drinking team foosball.
Fortunately, I carry a game around with me that I bring along specifically for these situations. One of the hosts of the party suggested that I bring along some of the prototypes that I was working on along, and that’d we try them. Or maybe that we’d get a big Werewolf game together.
Well, after two kegs emptied and several bowls of vodka punch chugged, I made the decision that this wasn’t the proper environment for a playtest, and getting together 9 players for Werewolf would have proven more obnoxious than it’s worth. Plus, many players can’t handle being drunk while playing werewolf and make a lot of mistake. (I, on the other hand, am a very dangerous drunken Werewolf player.)
I turned to Bartoneus and said, “It’s Loopin’ Louie Time.”
PowSpiel of Friends West
Last week, in my attempt to explain why games were art, I had to come up with a definition that I liked for art.
Apparently nobody else liked it.
However, I stick by it, but your mileage may vary. The only common ground josh0rfz and I could find about our definition of art involved guide’s sausages and pirates. I’m afraid that we’ll all just have to settle for “there still is no good definition of art.”
I may be missing my next two Friday columns (and some other columns in between.) Why’s that you may wonder? I’ll be in sunny Columbus Ohio attending the Gathering of Friends game convention. What’s that you may wonder? Well, stop wondering about everything, and I’ll explain a bit…
