Victory Conditions

How do I see myself succeeding at this game design game? I'd like to create something playable; something fun. I see three main ways this might be achieved, three kinds of games, or more accurately three kinds of game designs, that might forge that path.

1. The real game. The traditional-sized, fairly complex game that doesn't reinvent the hobby, but that I just happen to make better than average through some effective designing. This is the hardest to accomplish, the hardest to prototype, and the most daunting to playtest.
My Examples: Pirate coop, nearly every early game I designed
Real-World Successes: Puerto Rico, Arkham Horror, most games.

2. The simple game. Sure its not the best game you ever played, but its an illustration of a clever mechanic or interaction, and it was obviously designed as a "small" game. Pet games might use cheap components, or existing components like traditional dice or cards, piecepacks, or minimal custom decks. Can seem unexciting, but are far more feasible to prototype and play.
My Examples: Several designs, tellingly though, few that get talked about here.
Real-World Successes: Many public domain games, many cheapass games, card games such as 6-nimmt and rage, For Sale, many smaller Knizia games.

3. The innovative game. Take a simple idea and make it fly, providing something really new, without necessarily recombining things that you'd seen in the past. This best explained through:
Real World Successes: Apples to Apples was able to go with nothing but a decko f words and like 3 rules to create gameplay. Tales of the Arabian Nights brought the book of tales concept to its full height (and most of the rules they added afterwards really weren't necessary). Finstere Flure built a simple set of rules around the idea of an autonomous monster, Roborally added some (too many, perhaps) rules around the basic notion of prealigning moves with a card each. Magic obviously blew things up with its collectible notion (though the game itself is one of the most complex around if you really get down into it).

The real game is the hardest to create, the hardest to work with, but its easy to slip into. I often start with something simple or innovative, and I really like it. But it doesn't quite work, and I can't quite get it to come together, but I liked the original idea enough that I can't really let go of it. Soon I've painted myself into a corner, and don't know it, or cling onto the idea anyway. Making a real game work requires, as I've described recently, resources and/or bravery that I currently don't have, and rather than fight it, I'd like to satisfy myself with smaller designs for a while. So, how to proceed.

1) Accept the growth and go ahead and try to make the "real" designs that start to emerge work.
2) Show more discipline in keeping ideas simple. Easier said than done, but something I'm working on.
3) Generate more simple ideas, creating a large number of them, and not getting too attached to any one.

This last one is where I'm going with all this. It seems a little unintuitive, essentially a strategy of quitting. To explain: I think its far, far too easy in design in general, and game design in particular, to get hung up on a given idea, work out some additional rules/constraints/decisions to make it work, get locked into those ideas, and find yourself in a failing state in the space of possible designs, without the will/wisdom/wherewithall to know how to salvage what was working. In fact, in the midst of working on a given idea, I'd say its nearly impossible to even throw away everything other than the core idea and try a different direction on it, let alone retreat to a more complete, later, partially successful state.

But that idea was good - what's needed is a way to keep it, but to get a clean conceptual start on it. I wonder if rather than hashing out a single idea, it would be wiser to create a large number of ideas, take a stab at working out each, but then log them, move on, and use the time working on newer ideas as a palette cleansing period to take on those that have fallen by the side.

Perhaps I'm not succeeding in explaining the motivations behind this process, let alone the process itself. But I want to find a way to:
1) ride that enthusiasm of an idea, which is fun
2) explore it a bit
3) but not keep pounding on it until its broken
4) find away to return to it later

In short, going a bit more breadth first with my design process for a bit - increasing my chances of keeping the core good ideas straight and sticking to those simple and innovative games without letting the need to make them work distort them. This might involve a more rigorous approach to my sketchbooks and filing, or might emply this blog somehow. We'll see.

gosh but designing games is hard

I worked for a while on the pirate coop game, and the asymetrical monster city game - and I think both have potential. Lately I've hatched an idea for a strange drafting / sports game that seems to have learned the lessons of previous similar designs. But its proving tough to get past a certain point with these designs.

I think part of the problem is, there is only so much you can do without a playtest group. Furthermore, I think you need hours and hours of playtesting at various levels to make any progress. And while I might have had the possibility of such a group years ago, I didn't take advantage of it, and now the possibility has largely evaporated.

What is the solution? I'm not sure, I suppose I could look for / recruit for a group locally, on craigslist of whatever. Its a bit of an intimidating prospect, but I think a groups of this kind are the only hope for moving beyond the sketches and doodles phase.

But then, is that a goal? The sketches and doodles phase is fun, and maybe that's just where I'll stay. Its a bit useless, but no bigger a waste of time than, say playing video games. And I do feel like I'm honing my sense of what will work and what won't, catching duds earlier in the process, steering designs away from pitfalls I'm learning about.

The latest draft-ball-game is a good example of this - maybe something I'll write up later.

The Strategizing

I think the clues were all there. This will maybe be no big epiphany to most of my readers, who mostly know me well. But the full realization came as something of a surprise to me: I like talking about games more than I like playing them. In fact, I think one of the main reasons I even bother playing games is so that I can talk about them afterwards, or even during.

Whatever it might be, the design of the game itself, the way the game played out, or the strategies that one might employ. The latter of these was what really got my attention yesterday. I was playing a bit of this flash game proximity, and was mulling over the strategies one might use. The game was fun, but it was mostly a testing session to puzzle over what the overall strategies might be. And when I came to interesting tradeoffs, about defensive moves vs offensive ones, for example, I wanted to chat over them. If I'd been playing with a person, I would have found that much more interesting than continuing to play the game in isolation of one another.

What does that mean? Some offshoots:
1) It help explains some of my issues with being chatty during games.
2) This explains why I like games like Magic, where discussing new cards, decks, strategies, formats, are totally part of the game. Similarly, I like that Apples to Apples is mostly about discussing the choices (at least for me), and can see how I might come to like an open-ended game like Race for the Galaxy once I could talk competently about the cards.
3) Maybe this means I'm cut out to design games, in that I like thinking about games and externalizing said thoughts. But maybe it means I'm a lousy choice - I mean, if I don't even like playing games, just theorizing about them, does that disqualify me from doing it right?
4) Is there a way to leverage this appeal into a game? Cooperative games are a start, where you discuss strategies. Nomics are a start, but sort of too fiddly. I guess the problem is that it can't be competitive, at least not openly. Maybe what I want isn't a game at all, but a conversation. Is there a way to structure an activity that would scratch this itch? Now I'm just getting out there. Maybe there is room for something like this in a Social Game (a topic I've not really touched upon yet properly here, but likely will some day).

Games are more interesting than they are fun, for me, these days. A troubling realization, perhaps.