Because I am an idiot, I had a yard sale this morning which consisted of 40 metric tonloads of children’s clothing. You may ask what this has to do with game design. The answer? Nothing.

Since i live in Savannah, this meant that I had the opportunity to roast as the rising sun baked me and two of my friends as we sat there in the front yard greeting the few people who were not smart enough to go to Tybee Island. There’s a great beach there where I am sure it’s cool.

Anyway, the whole process reminded me of one of my guilty Saturday morning pleasures - going to yard sales in search of obscure board games. My prize find to date is a sealed 25th anniversary edition of Risk which I purchased for $2 and sold on eBay for $110. My humblest moment was finding one of my games for sale for 25 cents.

i got a chance to remember something this morning: if players are consistently doing something other than what you want them to do, change your design, not the player.

While playing a game today, I consistently wanted to do something other than what the game wanted me to do. I asked a couple of other friends about their experience with the same game, and they had similar criticisms. “Yeah, I thought that was what you were supposed to do at first, too.” It was a set up, because in another part of the game, albeit with a different resource, you performed things one way. Having trained you to do that, it was non-intuitive to players to do it differently when presented with essentially the same mechanics but a different resource.

Anyway, instead of doing this, there was a good bit of example that the designer had received feedback exactly like the feedback we were providing. The rules were repeated and explained harder. The result is that a) the player feels confused at best or dumb and insulted at worst and b) probably still wants to do the intuitive thing.

I wonder how often I’ve pulled something like this in a video game… put up in-game messages to explain non-obvious functionality, made NPCs repeat stuff or give more direction because the original lead wasn’t strong enough, etc. I’ve done both of those.

The exercise with this other game was a good reminder for me that explaining it harder may work, but it never impresses, nor does it make the game better.

There’s a must read over on Christer Erikson’s blog, realtimecollisiondetection.net. Scroll down to the section where he mines the H1B Visa tables for programmer salaries. For those of you who don’t know, the H1B Visa is a requirement for foreign nationals who come to work in the US. These salaries are a part of the reporting requirement for obtaining the visas.

This is a question only a designer with too much time on her hands would ever ask unless she was also surrounded by a group of other designers. If that’s the case, we’re lucky that the conversation was this normal.

During a game of Puerto Rico I was playing today, a fellow player got a call from his son who wanted to know if he could borrow 40 gold in WoW. This got us talking about game playing and game designing parents. Another player reminded me of my tragically geeky quote, “I think it’s important to introduce kids to a hex-based system as soon as possible.” It was one of those funny moments when you realize maybe you need to take up external hobbies and be a normal mom who encourages music lessons or something else.

Anyway, this all comes full circle, and I say, “Why do you like games as much as you do?” Others had a variety of answers, and I am interested in yours.

As for me, I don’t know. No one in my family or extended family plays games or ever did, not seriously, anyway. I think only one of them actually has a console. My earliest recollection was in coding my own games on the Vic 20 and later on the Commodore 64. Eventually, I moved up to the Apple and the PC and to Pascal and Assembler, but that was as far as I went before I discovered I liked designing a lot more than coding (a decision I regret now). I should have kept both up.

In talking with my brother, though, there is perhaps a family pattern. He is a professional musician, and currently en route to a PhD in English (just because he can). I wonder if for him notes are a lot like mechanics for me, and when they all come together like they do in Puerto Rico or in a Segovia piece, it’s really pretty amazing. When you really master those individual notes/mechanics, you’re partly amazed at yourself and amazed at the piece/game for being so beautiful and so challenging at the same time. You complement the composer/designer for seeing how the notes/mechanics would all come together to create those rhythms/dynamics, and you might even say out loud, “How did someone think to design/compose this?”, just as I said that today, in fact.

I am currently working with [a publisher] to develop concepts for a series of games on [NDA] and [NDA]. During the development of these, I’ve been using a method of design that I’ve not really explored with this level of consistency before: design via fantasy. It’s literally all I’m doing.

Of course, there are a ton of different starting points for design. To name a few:

• Fantasy: Who does the player want to be?
• Action: What does the player want to do?
• Setting: Where are we?
• Narrative: What’s going on?
• Out of Thin Air: Hey, I could make a game about…

… and I am about the 1,000th designer to design this way. There’s nothing new here. What was illuminating to me, though, is the consistent difference that starting with fantasy makes, particularly over action.

Let’s say the fantasy is Rock Star. Obviously, we’d got GH or Rock Band, but we could have a lot more too. Rock Stars do all kinds of things, particularly stars back in the old days of Hendrix, Joplin and the Doors. There are so many different sides we could explore there. From an inspiration point of view, starting with the fantasy sends your head down a dozen or more different paths, each of which could potentially be a game. GH and Rock Star are two of those possible paths.

Fantasy as a term is misleading, though. It implies something wild or high and mighty. It doesn’t have to, though. How many times have you been at work wishing you were sitting home doing nothing? How many times have you thought that doing someone else’s job would be amazing? Is that person a king or a rock star or an actress or a soldier in a war? There are all kinds of fantasies that we could make into games. Answer this question genuinely, and you will have one: What do you wish you could do right now that would actually be within your power to do within the next few hours? There’s a game there (even if your answer was sleep, there’s a game in that… several).

I received this press release today:

Tucson, AZ: Running With Scissors (RWS) has announced Randy Jones of the original ’70’s musical group sensation The Village People as the first in a series of celebrities who will be appearing in the third major installment of its long-running POSTAL series, POSTAL III.

American Music Award winner and multi-platinum recording artist Randy Jones has been a pop cultural icon since the 70s, when his band The Village People racked up such musical mega-hits as “Macho Man”, “YMCA” and “In the Navy”. Randy is currently celebrating his 30th year in show business with a new CD and international concert tour “TICKET TO THE WORLD”….

This is like the game version of the Surreal Life.

Without commentary, here you go:

Create a “Race to the End” Game.

Step 1

Understand the pattern. We have all played race to the end games. Think Candy Land or The Game of Life. Basically, you start at point A and get to point B. That is all you need to know. Draw a straight line on a long sheet of paper. You are now over 1/4 of the way finished. You can make the line squiggly if you want, but it probably won’t affect gameplay.

Step 2

Find a narrative. What are you racing toward or what are you racing from? You can go as simple as Candy Land and say, “We’re racing to get to the end first” or something a bit thicker like:

Step 3

How do you race? What’s the game mechanic that allows you to move forward? You could use an element of chance (dice, random draw or whatever) or you can use an element of strategy (though this takes it out of the easiest design exercise ever) or skill (i.e. one point per foot a person can jump… though that would just be weird). Keep it easy and go with dice.

Step 4

Add conflict. The easy as toast version of “adding conflict” is as follows. As a designer, you need to figure out a way to make the race interesting:

• Speed people up
• Slow people down
• Make people change places
• Make people lose a turn
• Give people an extra turn

Once you figure out how you will do this, let players do this to each other. So, I get to make you miss your turn. I get to change spots with you, etc. Add a few players so they have to decide who to affect or who to reward. The simplest way to do this is to put spaces on the board that force these actions. A modified version of this uses spaces where a player gets to draw a card. They may use the card on themselves or on another when they choose. So, I draw a “Skip a turn” card, and I play it on you or someone else whenever I want to.

Step 5

You’re done. Will it win awards? Never, but you will have actually created a game, and the process will be satisfying enough that you just might want to make something else a bit more complex.

Commentary

There was some talk over the last couple of days on my Fear of the Game post. This exercise is designed to get people who have never designed a game, but who want to design a game no valid reason not to do so.

Every single week, I am currently putting people through a design bootcamp of sorts. I declare on Monday, “By Wednesday, you will have a playable game,” and no one believes me, but by Wednesday, there they are playing and fixing and playing and fixing. All this is happening in a summer design workshop for rising high school juniors and seniors that I am presently teaching. It’s one of the most fun gigs that I get to do, because I truly see people get passionate about game design for the first time in their whole lives. I don’t know what they come in expecting (It’s called “Game Design Basics”), but I push each and every one of them from standing still with a bag of 100 wood tiles to a complete non-digital prototype in the space of a week. Granted, the prototypes are of varying quality and conviction, but each and every one of them is a real game that someone made. I hear “I love game design” daily, and for a geek like me, that’s poetry.

I remember the first time that I actually made a non-digital prototype in front of my students and then let them play it. For some reason, it was a bit of a nerve-wracking experience for me. By nature, I’m what could be described as a closed designer. I tend to talk with one or two people during the process of the design, and I’ll playtest with those people until the game is ready for prime time (any by that, I mean functional and playable but not at all done).

In this case, though, I designed it right there on the spot and put it into playtest. I don’t know what they were expecting, and I don’t think they did either. It was a pretty solid turn-based strategy game with some whacked points as can be expected with any first prototype. The design was to prove a point: that you can make a game about anything. I polished it up and dumped it shortly after class because I have other more interesting stuff that I’m working on.

That initial fear I had - about designing in front of someone else - is not uncommon. Being a game designer or an artist in any medium means exposing yourself to the world and letting them give you their feedback, the good, the bad, the ugly.

I’ve recently received a couple emails from people who want to design more than anything, but have this invisible wall between them and their first game. For some, it’s a question of where to start (design a basic race-to-the-end game; it’s the easiest). Others start game after game and never finish. I wonder if some are afraid to design a full game for fear that it will not be good and the results of their greatest passion will unmask them as something less than they hope to be. I don’t mean this in any negative way, either. These people may be seriously good designers. However, by not actually completing something, they avoid critique.

Critique is fun, particularly when your game isn’t released internationally. I’ve made some amusingly bad games and bad design decisions that I can still laugh about years later (mind you, they were fixed before they shipped, so it’s easier to laugh than cry). Game design is sometime the art of being the least wrong, the least imperfect. Even Miyamoto, Meier and Wright get valid critiques. It is these things that we totally screw up that make us better designers, that allow us to learn and that let us welcome the iterative process.

Here’s a topic you don’t see covered often: Crunch Weight Gain. Here’s how it works.

You got in at 9am, and you’re planning to work until 9 or 10 tonight. The food is ordered by the company, but it’s not from Bob’s Organic Salad Co. It’s from a Chinese place that has amazing General Tso’s chicken, and you’re going to have that along with the steaming pile of rice. It’s been a long week, and you deserve it, right? Tomorrow night, there will be more of the same from a different place (pizza, anyone?), and if the crunch if a good long one, you can expect donuts or bagels in the morning. You’re too tired to go work out, so you skip it. After the crunch is over, you reason, you’ll get right back into it.

Then it happens - 10, 25, 30 or 40 pounds later, you’re not quite the man or woman you were when crunch started. I have seen ripped guys become pudgables (I just made that word up, and I like it) within the space of a single game. You feel it on your face. Your jeans get tight. Next thing you know, you’re at an office party, and the pictures people take horrify you. WTFat?

The shack machines at the office are stacked with chips and candy and pork rinds. Some enterprising person orders pizza at midnight, and offers you some.

It’s not much better when you’re alone working on a job, because you still can’t leave and you can order anything you want. For some reason, when that’s the case, it’s 10-to-1 odds that whatever you order is going toward the heavyweight end.

So, damn it, when the work is done and the game or whatever else had you in crunch is through, you have to lose the weight. That’s where I find myself now. In my fantasy world, there would be fat farm for game designers where they locked you up for 3 months with a ton of games, and fed you 3 squares a day. Exercise machines would be available, but each day, a different designer would get an opportunity to devise a game for their use, and we’d all have to agree to a meta-game to keep track of the overall score. At the end of the day, we’d be able to collect our prize, a gold coin that we could turn in for some sugar-free, fat-free ice cream flavored air the next day. After the end of our confinement, we’d be released thin and healthy with our play piles played and all our books read.

I’ve been trying not to use the word “gamer” in my writing lately. As a result of this, I’ve been a little hyper-conscious of how others refer to the people competing in a game. It’s interesting that we would never think to call Olympians “gamers”. We would call them “competitors” or “athletes”, but not “gamers”. I’ve been using “participants” and “game players” to get around it.

Why all the fuss? There’s something about the term “gamer” that I don’t like and that doesn’t fit me well. It strikes many others my age (29 for the 11th time) and gender the same way, too. In mentioning this to Ian, he said, “I guess the term has a critical mass of baggage.” And it does. Oddly enough, it’s not the game-y aspects of it either. After all:

• I play games every day. A lot.
• I read about games for fun.
• I write about games for fun (and money).
• I make games for fun (and more money).
• But I would make them anyway.

So what’s the problem with gamer? I guess it has somehow also picked up another demographic - everything bad about teenage boys. Mind you, they’re not actually the average gamer anymore. She is in her mid-thirties and is playing a whole lot of casual games. If we look on the console, he’s also in his mid-thirties, and probably showers.

Gamer feels like a dismissal of a serious pursuit, and our culture puts no weight on the necessity of human play. That omission, that lack of positive spin, bothers me, too.

In my effort to stop using the word, I’ve looked at other media to see what their consumers are called:

• Participants
• Viewers
• Audiences
• Movie Goers
• Readers

Game participants sounds too research oriented. Viewers and Audience are not participatory. The last two don’t apply at all.

I have yet to arrive at any kind of solution, but I do know that even if I did, it would be for me alone. I don’t expect the word to go away anytime soon.