Tag Archives: tabletop

International Tabletop Day. Also headphones

Posted by under event

This Saturday (30th March) is International Tabletop Day, which proves that Americans still don’t understand how the rest of the world treats the Easter weekend, and haven’t learned the lesson of Peter Adkison’s ill-fated Gen Con UK, held over the Easter weekend in 2003.

Putting that aside, it’s a worthy idea and a great way of publicising the new generation of games and gaming to a wider audience.

I’ll be starting the day at Leisure Games in Finchley, north London, where I’ll be joined by Quintin Smith, noted games journalist and host of the Shut Up and Sit Down podcast, and my fellow Black Library author Richard Williams. After a couple of hours of that I will be hot-footing it westwards, to spend the rest of the day chez Eclectic Games in Reading, where there will be playing of games and chatting of chats. It will be good. Come up and accost me and ask me to play something or explain something—the question of 2013 appears to be why the last two books of the Marks of Chaos series never came out, if you’re looking for inspiration. I’m the tall one wearing the headphones.

Headphones! For anyone who’s been following my quest for the ideal sub-£100 headphone—which I’m pretty sure is none of you—you’ll remember the saga began when someone nicked the pair of Plantronics gamer phones from my desk at work. They weren’t great but the boom mike made them useful for Skype calls and they’d survived having my old study ceiling fall on them, so there was a certain sentimental attachment there. From there I went to a pair of Audio Technica ATH-ES55s (really lovely full sound, comfy and aesthetically pleasing, broke two pairs in eighteen months), and from there to a pair of Phillips Downtowns (amazingly comfortable, good sound but quite bass-light, only available in white, purple or brown, look like they should be really long-lasting but broke in four months), and thence to Sennheiser HD202s which should have been a triumphant homecoming because I’ve liked Sennheisers since the late 80s when I took a pair round the world but they were just… they were what I expected a pair of no-brand £25 headphones to sound like, a bit muted, a bit dull, not special at any particular frequency range and not terribly comfortable, and the heavy 2m cord they come with is simply awkward, particularly on the move. Really, when the cable wrap is larger than the music player, something is wrong with your design.

So I ended up borrowing back the Sennheiser PX100-iis that I’d passed on to my wife when I bought the Audio Technicas, and that was a little revelation. A revision of a classic design, it’s a really small, light headset that folds up nicely to fit in a pocket but delivers an awful lot of sound for that. And I thought this was probably it, and I’d stick with them, even if they didn’t do a great job of keeping my ears warm in the recent inclemency. And then someone on a mailing list mentioned Koss PortaPros.

The PortaPro has been around since the eighties, and if you had to choose one word to sum them up it would have to be ‘ugly’. Ugly, ugly, ugly, even though I’m a fan of what we shall call alternative aesthetics. Plus really, how well can a pair of £25 headphones with a design unchanged since 1984 really stand up to modern music through modern technology?

Oh my lord.

I am aware that at the moment I look like a bit-player from an early cyberpunk movie, but I don’t care. Subtle when it counts but full of big sound when it matters, it’s like these things have a mind of their own—a mind that really loves music. They have a reputation for a lot of bass but I like that, and it’s not a big flat bass either, there’s a deftness in the response here that’s simply a joy to listen to. Twenty-five quid. Extraordinary. I am a man converted.

Just had to tell someone. I trust you understand.

Anyway, Tabletop Day. If you’re going to be in London or Reading then come along; if you’re going to be somewhere else then head to your local games store, or grab a box of something and a couple of mates and head to your local coffee shop or pub. Evangelise a little, maybe meet some new people. You’ll be glad you did.

While I’m writing, how’s this blog theme working out for you? I’m in two minds about it, to be honest. Let me know.

 

Munchausen by proxy server

Posted by under game design, magnum opus press

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (the Difference Engine no.3 edition) is now available for download exclusively from e23, the digital warehouse of Steve Jackson Games. This is the revised and expanded facsimile version of the game that I’ve been blathering about for the last two years, and which is finally seeing the light of day two hundred years after its original printing was entirely destroyed before a single copy could be sold.

For those who don’t know or who haven’t been paying attention, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a role-playing game. In it you play the roles of a group of drunken eighteenth-century nobles after a very good dinner, trying to out-boast each other with stories of their astounding adventures. Steve Jackson says, “The original edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen was unique and marvellous. This new edition is even better. If you are a clever person with clever friends, you will enjoy reading and playing it. Let’s not consider the alternative.” John Kovalic calls it “utter brilliance in RPG form” and even though I failed to convince Gary Gygax that it really was an RPG and not some newfangled story-whatnot, he did say that “the premise of the Munchausen game is very clever, and the system is likewise”.

If you are not yet convinced, a PDF of the first eight pages of the game is downloadable from the Magnum Opus Press website. If you are, then the Baron Munchausen download page of e23 is here.

I am very interested to learn what you think of it.

Release the Baron!

Posted by under magnum opus press, munchausen

Update on the new edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is to be released in September:

The first thousand copies of the book will be of the deluxe-format Gentleman’s Edition (black leather-effect cover with gold embossing), suitable for reading, prominent display in your library, and hurling at inattentive pot-boys. The remainder of the print run will be of the Wives’ and Servants’ Edition, having a plain white cover with simple black lettering designed to not over-stimulate the excitable temperaments of domestics and the lower social orders.

There will also be a PDF edition, available exclusively from e23 (a division of Steve Jackson Games) from August 1st. Though ideas for the title of this edition have been plentiful, none has yet hit the mark. Suggestions are welcomed, good ones doubly so, and the best shall receive a copy of the PDF in gratitude.

My guy, Gax

Posted by under game design

Some years ago, someone—it could have been Andrew Rilstone but I’m honestly not sure—commented that he wished Gary Gygax would hurry up and die, so people would stop talking about what he was doing now (which at the time was Dangerous Journeys, a tedious rules-heavy fantasy RPG at a time when the market was making it clear it wasn’t interested in such things, and dreadful fantasy novels) and remember him for the good stuff he did.

Gary Gygax created modern gaming. You cannot move these days for games with class-and-level systems: even modern FPS games like Call Of Duty 4 are grabbing RPG elements and building them in as an integral gameplay. The class-and-level system dates explicitly to Gygax’s work, and specifically to the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

(Yes, I know Dave Arneson deserves co-credit for the creation of D&D. But Dave Arneson didn’t write Chainmail, which D&D’s rules drew on heavily, and he also didn’t die today.)

By today’s standards, after thirty-five years of refinement and polish, the original edition of D&D looks incredibly clunky. But if you look beyond its unclear rules, its incompleteness and its tendency to assume existing knowledge on the part of the reader, what’s astonishing is how much of the game is right. It wasn’t the concept of roleplay in D&D that birthed the genre, it was the way the rules encapsulated the core ideas behind it—not, to the chagrin of many of us who considered ourselves on the cutting edge, ways to encourage players to inhabit their fictional avatars more fully, but ways to keep players playing and interested in progressing in the game.

And that same energy went on to power Mines of Moria, and Ultima, and the Final Fantasy series, and countless other tabletop and CRPGs, and is making Blizzard a billion dollars a year through World of Warcraft. It taps into something very primal at the heart of the gaming impulse and wraps it in a covering that has been nicked, borrowed and retrod so many times since that it pretty much defines what we think of as ‘fantasy’ today. Not that Gygax didn’t nick most of that himself, but at least he acknowledged his sources. Pretty much everything in World of Warcraft that isn’t straight out of Warhammer is straight out of D&D.

Now, at last, we can forget all the crap he did later. Even if he only had one moment of genius, it’s such a moment of such genius that it instantly elevates him into the very highest echelons of game-design greatness. His work built not one but two industries—how quickly would computer games have moved out of the arcade without the likes of Colossal Cave?—a genre, and a language of shared experience in fantastic worlds shared by hundreds of millions of people.

And if anyone disagrees, I will fight them. Roll for initiative.

Second Life for Second Person

Posted by under game design, narrative

A couple of years back I wrote an essay on games that create a story as part of the gameplay, which was published as part of the excellent collection Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2007) which I have huckstered here before. The contents of the book are slowly migrating online (didn’t like the weather in the real world is my guess) and my piece has just gone live. You can read it here.

I’ll warn you now that much of it was written in a small hotel on Skye that turned out to be run by a man who had taught me history some twenty years earlier, sitting in the lounge after a tour of the Tallisker whisky distillery earlier in the day, in a tearing hurry to (a) meet the deadline and (b) to find somewhere with internet access that would let me plug a USB stick into their machine. It turns out the Scots aren’t big on giving foreigners access to their ports, not since they learned their lesson in 1072.

Nevertheless I think the piece holds up, and raises some interesting points about a neglected area of game design. I believe there’s a way to make comments on the MIT site though I couldn’t find it; have a poke around and if you can’t locate it then do come back here and we’ll chat in the comments.

La Règle du Jeu

Posted by under game design, munchausen

I finally played Puerto Rico, Andreas Seyfarth’s award-winning boardgame from 2002, over the weekend. I’ve had it sitting on my games shelf for well over a year, but for some reason I’d forgotten I’d never got around to giving it a try.

On Saturday evening I was forcibly reminded of that reason. It wasn’t the long and complex game set-up phase, but the rules or more precisely the rulebook. Puerto Rico has the worst-explained set of rules of any boardgame I’ve ever played.

For those who don’t know Puerto Rico, it is currently the top-ranked game at Boardgamegeek. To give you some idea of the competition, that’s on a list of 3804 names, and chess is #186. It’s a resource-management game of building a mercantile empire in the eponymous 16th-century city, and in terms of complexity it’s on a par with popular German boardgames like Settlers of Catan or Carcasonne.

We sat there reading the rules, four adults educated to degree level and beyond, two of us being people who design games for a living, and after half an hour none of us had even grasped the structure of the game and what you were trying to do in order to win, let alone the minutiae of each part of each turn. Every part of the rule book is bad: the structure, the language, the layout, the terminology, the component descriptions. I defy anyone to work ouit how to play the game from that set of rules as written. It can’t be done.

In despair I turned to the web. The Wikipedia entry gives a three-line summary of the game that summarises its object and structure, which was better than anything in the actual Puerto Rico rules. It also provided a link to a 150-page PowerPoint presentation that not only explained the rules in a clear and systematic way but also gave a thorough example of play that had some good jokes in it. We read through that, everything fell into place, and we played the game. And it totally rocks.

Had my broadband been down, that copy of Puerto Rico would have been on fire. Literally.

I know that it’s an old truism in the computer-game world that nobody reads the instructions. But my design background is tabletop RPGs where the rules are everything, or at least they were. First-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was 512 pages, of which 509 were nothing but rules and games stats. Those other three pages were an example of play, and I maintain that without it the majority of readers would never have understood how the game should be played. When I published Nobilis, the notoriously ‘difficult’ (read: non-combat oriented) RPG, it had a 20-page example of play that walked the reader through all the major features of the game’s rules and showed them how to structure a campaign as well. And I’m intensely proud of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (which I wrote) and De Profundis (which I published and wish I’d written), both of which are genre-bending RPGs in which the description of the rules is also the example of play.

Video games, of course, don’t have examples of play. They used to have attract modes, a pre-recorded snippet of play that gave prospective players a rough idea of what and what not to do, but these seem to be preserved for arcade games these days. Some games do have tutorial levels, and some of these are better than others. Halo‘s first level, which wasn’t just an introduction to the game but many peoples’ first use of the Xbox controller too, is still the best I’ve ever seen.

These days what games do have is downloadable demos. Whether it’s Xbox Live or Manifesto Games, or a cover-disc for the Luddites out there, those gaming Amish whose view of the world has not been allowed to progress beyond 2003, almost any game worth a damn will let you try it for size. And I have lost count of the number of games I’ve played for maybe two minutes, quit and deleted because I couldn’t work out what to do, or how to do what I wanted, or simply because the game didn’t play the way I expected it to. Foomph, gone, and with it any chance of selling me a copy.

What’s the most depressing sight in a video game demo? A diagram of the controller listing fifteen or twenty different functions that the player is supposed to remember. What’s worse than that? Only displaying the diagram for fifteen seconds. What’s worse still? No diagram at all… in which case either your game had better have the most intuitive controls in the world or a tutorial level, or you’re stuffed.

Understand this, demo-makers: my investment in your demo is nil. It has cost me nothing. I have no emotional capital riding on liking your game. I am waiting for you to impress me, or at least to not piss me off. If you can’t structure the first two minutes of your demo to give me a smooth and enjoyable introduction to your creation and how to play it, why should I assume that you can do better with the full retail product? And you will not get a second chance.

I admit I have been wrong before, and famously. Two notable card-games were launched at Gen Con 1993, Magic: the Gathering and Once Upon a Time, and once I grew tired of demoing the latter I went to see what the fuss about the former was. Joanne White (later editor of Scrye magazine) offered to show me how it worked. She cracked a new deck and we played a game in which, due to being dealt a truly sucky hand, I was unable to cast a single spell. I walked away thinking, “It’s a shame about Wizards of the Coast, they’ve done some nice stuff in the past but this Magic thing is going to kill them.” But that experience had everything to do with poor luck and nothing to do with the quality of the demonstrator.

Because, of course, the way that most gamers learn a new set of rules is not from reading the rulebook but from having the game explained by friends. If everyone had to learn to play Puerto Rico from its rulebook it wouldn’t be topping the charts on Boardgamesgeek right now. It was Jonny Nexus who observed that almost nobody plays Monopoly by the proper rules because almost nobody has ever bothered to read them: they just absorb them—along with interesting variants, omissions, errors and house rules—from playing the game with other people.

It’s the same with video games. Anyone can use a demo to play, but to learn to play well you’ve got to watch other players, or at least ask their advice. In the days before Gamefaqs there were tips mags, and in the days before them we used to cluster round arcade machines to witness and take notes. Video games, of course, can’t be changed by house rules but the secrets to beating them are passed on the same way. I defy anyone to work out all the secrets, tricks, hidden areas and easter eggs in any game purely on their own.

Games are social. Not necessarily in their play—though Puerto Rico is pretty dull solo—but they encourage interaction, working with others to map the territory of gamespace and dig up its secrets. Which is why the stereotype of gamers being lonely or loners is such complete tripe. A good game is a treasure hunt, and a good treasure hunt is a party.

And that’s enough about games, treasure hunts and parties for the moment, before I shoot my fat mouth off.

Footnote: my brief moment as a conduit of game wisdom, or at least my best one, concerns Area 51, the 1995 Atari arcade light-gun shooter involving zombies and aliens. 1995 was about the time that John Woo’s movies were breaking big, with Chow Yun Fat’s two-fisted pistol stylings, and Jose Garcia of Daedalus Games showed me that it was possible to emulate this in Area 51, with one person playing both Player 1 and Player 2, a pistol in each hand. Later, in a London arcade, I worked through the game this way and turned away from the machine to find—for the first time in my life—a crowd of onlookers, who all now wanted to try the same thing.

Rough Trade

Posted by under game design

You’re alone in a foreign country, on a mission of international security. Your police escort has been killed, and you’re in the middle of nowhere, armed only with a pistol and a few rounds of ammunition, most of which you’ve already had to use on malevolent locals. You’ve been captured and injected, you’re alone, no backup is coming, and the background music is really beginning to creep you out. And then, behind a building, you meet a cloaked figure.

“Got a selection of good things on sale, stranger,” he says, “heh heh heh,” and every shred of suspension of disbelief that Resident Evil 4 had built up flies up and away, disappearing like a startled crow.

There aren’t many games that handle traders and merchants well, but RE4 handles them astonishingly badly. For a start, what the hell are itinerant salespeople doing in a survival-horror game? Obviously, yes, there’s a market for high-powered weaponry in a section of Spanish countryside populated by zombies, but the risk-to-reward ratio has got to be higher than opening up a boutique by Seven Sisters tube. Plus, if you did decide to earn your living by selling weapons to passing US Secret Service agents (“enough weapons to start a small war” as the game says at one point), you would stock some ammunition as well. Mr “Heh heh heh” has apparently forgotten that. Or maybe it’s his way of making sure that you don’t buy a nice new gun and a clip of ammo, and then blow his fool head off with it and nick his stuff, T-800 style.

Of course, of course, that last point is for game balance: survival-horror is nothing without ammo shortages. But then why bother with power-up weapons at all? Make the player fight through the whole game with a small selection of guns, none appreciably better than another? I mean, if it’s good enough for the Master Chief…

But I’m digressing. The moment the merchant appears Resident Evil 4 stops being about surviving mad zombie attacks and saving the president’s magic football, and becomes about exploring the environment to find enough cash and things to sell in order to buy better kit. In other words, the presence of the merchant fundamentally changes the game. I’ll go further: it ruins the game.

Off the top of my head, I can think of three better ways to handle the character’s progression up the equipment tree:

  • Solve puzzles. Work out how to open a locked gun cabinet, for example. There are plenty of puzzly puzzles in RE4. It would make a lot more sense to have them protecting something of immediate game-value like a weapon, instead of a gem that needs to be fitted to another item and then sold to the merchant to buy that weapon.
  • Equipment drops. The character is in radio contact with base. They are in a position to send reinforcements and air-drop stuff. Instead they mostly supply obvious answers to your character’s asinine questions, and occasionally email you files telling you how to kick things.
  • Give it to enemies. Put a sniper at the top of the church tower. The player could dodge the sniper-fire and avoid the encounter, but if they choose they can climb the tower and kill the undead sod. If they do, they get its rifle.

(This last one gets more on my nerves every time it crops up. If I kill an enemy that’s been attacking me with item A, I want to be able to pick up item A and use it. I do not want it to disappear, or to lie on the ground but not let me grab it, or be mysteriously replaced by another item, usually a health potion that the enemy could have used to stay alive but didn’t. Please. How hard is this, really?)

Games in general have never handled the matter of traders convincingly. Many adventures for tabletop D&D featured poor farming communities in the deepest countryside that somehow supported not only a large tavern but also at least one shop filled with weapons, armour and adventuring supplies. Games like Moria and Angband continued that tradition (Angband starts in a town of eight buildings: three magic shops, two adventurer supply shops, a weaponsmith, an armourer, and your house). Now the twin principles that (a) there must be traders and (b) what they sell must be geared exclusively to the character’s needs (and (c) that they must also be willing to buy any old tat you want to sell them) are so thoroughly set into most games that experienced gamers don’t think twice about it and new players wander around thinking how completely unlike a real, believable town this is.

The Final Fantasy series is a good example of what I call the three-shop town rule (weaponsmith; armourer; magic and provisions), and usually there’s an inn as well for the supply of rumours and bedspace. Final Fantasy has never been about realism—the word ‘fantasy’ in the title is a bit of a give-away—but realism and believability are two different things. And if you don’t believe in a game-world on some level then basically you’re just twiddling your fingers.

I’m not saying, obviously, that every community in every game needs a corner shop, general hardware store, laundrette and Chinese take-away. On the other hand, shops in games shouldn’t just be places to buy and sell goods. Build them into the back story. Build their owners into the story. Ask yourself why they’re there in the first place. Some games do already. Other games just include traders because other games of the same genre include traders. The designers of the latter games need punching.

I will say, as kind of a footnote, that Fable gets it sort-of right. Although most of its towns do only have adventurer-centric shops they also have a feel of bustle and community, you can buy and sell trivialities. But you can also encounter merchants on the road and (this is cunning, so pay attention) they’re almost inevitably either selling hairstyles or tattoos. So if you kill them or if they die while in your company, you shouldn’t be disappointed when their wares aren’t scattered on the ground. That, I thought, showed intelligence and a degree of wit.

Though, on the other hand, an early mission in Fable involves escorting two merchants to Darkwood Camp. Darkwood is full of bandits and werewolves, not a regular trade route in a world that has teleport-gates, and yet when you finally reach it Darkwood Camp turns out to be a three-shop trading village… dependent for its market, one expects, on adventurers lured there by merchants hiring them as escorts. That was the moment I realised that Fable wasn’t a fable, it wasn’t even a good story, it was the usual fantasy hotch-potch nonsense written by someone who Hadn’t Thought It Through, and my heart sank another little bit. Not as far as it sank at the words “Got a selection of good things on sale, stranger”, though. Because there is only one instance where it’s permissible to mix shopping and zombie-horror, and that’s Dawn of the Dead.

I may at some point write up my theory that Fable is Moria with nicer graphics, and Fable 2—in which, as previously noted, you have a dog—will therefore be Nethack with nicer graphics. The theory is mostly balls but it generally gets a laugh and starts a decent pub-debate, and therefore serves its purpose.

Cahiers du Cutscene?

Posted by under game design, narrative

Wired has suddenly got a bee under its bonnet about the idea that video games need a critical vocabulary before they can begin to be any good, or at least taken seriously. Annalee Newitz argues that film didn’t flower till the 1940s and it was the publication of French film-crit magazine Cahiers du Cinema in 1951 that allowed audiences to truly understand and discuss how films work.

She’s wrong, for three reasons. First of all an artform that had produced Greed, M, Sunrise, Gone with the Wind, The 39 Steps, Duck Soup, The Wizard of Oz and Snow White is an artform that had clearly already flowered, and certainly didn’t need another ten years and a bunch of French critics to tell it how to do things right. Secondly Cahiers du Cinema has never had any real influence on mainstream American cinema because mainstream American directors have never paid it any attention—not because it’s French but because it’s in French, something that most American film directors believe is a type of mustard or a way of kissing.

And thirdly, narrative games already have a perfectly serviceable critical vocabulary, if they choose to use it. It’s been developed over the last fifteen years or so and is used to describe and discuss those other narrative games, the tabletop roleplay types, notably at places like The Forge. It evolved naturally, is quite developed and I rather like it.

You want Cahiers du Cutscene, go ahead, publish it. Don’t expect to make any money, don’t expect anyone to be grateful, and don’t be surprised when people tell you half the work’s been done before.

Things to do in game design #1: cheat

Posted by under game design, street games

(This post is a follow-up to “Things not to do in game design #2: cheat“)

Because it’s not about fairness or balance or level playing fields. It’s about the user experience.

Let me tell you about a game you’ve never played. It’s called StarPower.

StarPower was created in 1969 by R. Garry Shirts and published by Simulation Training Systems as an educational game for use in schools, colleges and training situations. It’s a face-to-face turn-based game for 18-35 people that models a simple market-based society. Players draw random counters from a bag and must trade them in order to make combinations that score points. High-scoring players get Square badges, mid-scorers get Circles, low-scorers get Triangles, And from the third turn onwards the Squares can change the rules, altering how the game functions and what players can and can’t do.

What happens, of course, is that the three groups stratify and insularise quickly and the Squares make rules that keep them in the lead and force the other players to continue to lose. The Circles work to consolidate their position in the middle and appease the Squares, and the Triangles begin to feel oppressed, apathetic—or angry.

StarPower is often used to teach historical and sociological principles like class stratification, the abuse of power, and the roots of popular revolutions.

Here’s the big secret-that’s-not-a-secret-at-all: the game is fixed. The draw of the counters is not random. Once the Squares have started to win they will continue to win. Once you’re a Triangle it’s almost impossible to move up a group. StarPower is, by all conventional standards of game design, broken.

In educational-game circles StarPower is a legend.

No matter how liberal the players, the Squares always take advantage of their position, and when the Triangles gets angry, often they get really angry. Though I’ve been unable to confirm it, a senior member of ISAGA once told me about a game of StarPower in an American university where a member of the faculty who’d become a Triangle became so overwrought about the state of play and the abuse of power he was witnessing that he walked up to a member of the Squares and stabbed him.

He didn’t attack the people running the game. He didn’t walk out. He became so involved in the experience that he actually stabbed another player.

How’s that for an emotional response to a game?

I admit that frustration, hatred and homicidal rage are not necessarily the emotions that we as games designers want to create in our players. But still, the designer of StarPower created a game that cheats and managed to focus the players’ resulting feelings not at the game but at the other players. I know I said that two paragraphs up. I’ll keep saying it until the implications sink in1.

Of course games cheat. Computer games have cheated since the original single-player Pong. Of course it’s possible for the computer to play a perfect game of Pong, implacably batting the pill back at you until you falter and miss. But nobody would have played it if it did. So it cheated and missed a few shots on purpose, and voila there’s the games industry.

Because it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you experience the game. Good experience means repeated plays, more quarters in the slot, whatever. I mean, if I only bought boardgames that I can win I’d have a much smaller collection than I do.

The most obvious contemporary example of cheating is rubber-banding in racing games: letting the AI opponents exceed their supposed top speed and performance so they can catch up with the player. Because racing on your own around a track isn’t nearly as enjoyable, particularly if your vehicle has forward-mounted weapons. Rubber-banding is occasionally frustrating but crucially the player doesn’t feel that the game is cheating. You may suspect it is, or treat the reappearance of an opponent with momentary disbelief, but did the game cheat or did you over-brake on that last corner?

On Friday I played Journey to the End of Night, an urban chase-game that’s essentially British Bulldogs with checkpoints. Players had to race across London via six checkpoints. If they were caught by a Chaser, they became a Chaser. I was a Chaser. Here’s the thing: we started chasing from the get-go, but we deliberately didn’t catch any players till checkpoint 3. Two reasons: too many chasers early on unbalances the game; and secondly it’s not as fun for the players to be caught. Of course, the players didn’t know they were initially safe: they still ran like rabbits (or in one case froze like rabbits) as we swept down on them, yelling. We were—or rather the game was—cheating, but it was a better game for it.

Back in the day when tabletop RPGs were still fresh one of the first big debates to rage was whether rules should emphasise realism or playability. The argument wasn’t just simplicity vs complexity, though that’s often the way it worked out: the perception was that the more complex the game, the closer to verisimilitude it was. There was even one game, The World of Synnibarr, that was so keen on fairness and transparency it insisted that after a scenario was over the GM should give the players his notes, and if they found any discrepancy between the game as written and the game as played they could claim extra experience points for each deviation.

Twenty years on and the argument’s dead, as is the realistic end of the market and thankfully The World of Synnibarr too. Nobody wants realism or player/GM balance in an RPG any more. They want something that models its genre in an interesting and amusing way, and that’s fun whether to play or to GM.

I’m not going to pretend that the roots of all good game design lie in tabletop RPGs—

Bwah hah hah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

oh, I’m sorry…

hah ha ha ha ha ha

heh.

—but every genre of games has lessons to teach and lessons to learn from every other genre. And tabletop RPGs, at least some of them, are very good at using rules to model their genre. So if you’re designing a racing game, what the player wants is racing, and racing needs opponents. If the game has to bend the rules to get them to catch up with you, the good outweighs the bad. Same reason that the player always starts at the back of the grid: it makes for a better game. Not necessarily a more realistic or believable one, but more fun in the long run.

…course, if you’re taking a long run then there’s no need for rubber-banding. Slowcoach.

1 Boardgames, or some of them, draw players in and elicit emotional responses possibly better than any other type of game. Kids kick boards over. I’ve seen a friendship end over a game of Junta. Cat’s parents, diplomats on a foreign posting, once played Diplomacy with the Russian ambassador and his wife: a furious row broke out between the two and they got divorced shortly afterwards. I suspect that the bloom was already off the rose there and the stresses of the game just exacerbated an already damaged relationship, but for the sake of the anecdote I’ll pretend it was down to the ever-tricky problem of controlling the Mediterranean.

 

Original Sin

Posted by under Uncategorized

The Origins Awards nominees were announced today. Needless to say there’s nothing about it on the Origins Awards website—the Origins convention is affiliated with GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association, whose website was at one time encouraging people to register for the Origins show that had taken place eighteen months earlier. As it is, the website for the academy that deals with the Origins Awards is still advertising that the “33rd Annual Awards Submissions are right around the corner! Sumbit (sic) your games now through the online form!” The deadline for submissions was 31st January.

(It’s not that GAMA’s eye is not on the ball. It’s that despite the efforts over many years of many people I respect, some still with the organisation and some not, GAMA still doesn’t realise there is a ball. Unjust? Perhaps. But when the homepage of your trade body has less Google-fu than the Wikipedia entry for Vasco da Gama, the message is loud and clear.)

I’m not going to go into the troubles or otherwise with the Origins Awards because I administer a different award in the same field, and I am not the kind of guy who bashes the competition gratuitously. (I will say, however, that part of the reason for setting up the DJA was frustration with the Origins Awards.)

But anyway, the nominations are up! Fifty-one nominees in ten categories, covering board games, card games, miniature games and RPGs (the OAs are and always have been relentlessly product-based). And not one single name of a designer anywhere on the press release. No designers, writers, artists, or other actual creatives acknowledged. Which is, frankly, disgraceful.

GAMA is admittedly an organisation for manufacturers and says so in its name. But the OAs are administered by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design, supposedly independent of GAMA though its Chair is appointed directly by GAMA’s president. It has one purpose: “the Academy’s principal mission is the administration the Origins Awards (sic)“—that’s from its homepage. And who are these faceless academicians? They “are published game designers, writers, artists, and other game creators.”

Well, it’s good to see them supporting their home team.