Leacock on Pandemic and game design

Continuing my current trend of studying game design more than actually doing it (bad Rob!), after someone shared a link in a thread on BoardGameGeek, I have just watched a nice Google tech talk by Matt Leacock. This was recorded in 2008, when his game Pandemic was still new and hadn't become the phenomenon it grew into, so it is interesting seeing how some of his comments (and questions from the audience) have been reflected in developments since then.  For instance, there was talk of an abandoned line of development where one player controls the diseases, something which basically became part of an expansion a year or so later.

Image grabbed from YouTube.

The title of the talk was "Cooperation and Engagement: What can board games teach us?" and there were some very interesting points about engagement (reduce friction and embody the players are key), but an overall theme of the talk seemed to me to be the value of iteration, with a lot of testing and observing how the game gets played.  He had a nice anecdote about a playtest group where a playtester called him out for intervening and correcting players when they got the rules wrong, telling him to shut up, sit in the corner and watch.  This resulted in realising some major flaws in the game as it was currently set up and a big step towards getting Pandemic into its final, published form.

There is a lot for me to think about in this talk, but I think one of the most powerful messages came from a short set of bullet points he showed fairly early on:

• Find a spark.
• Keep it simple.
• Keep it raw.
• Find the core game.

Prototyping, printing and playing

I just wanted to dump a link here to a nice article on League of Gamemakers, basically gathering together a few videos made by James Ernest (of Cheapass Games) showing some of his methods for making game components for prototypes or print & play. All good stuff. Though now I have major envy for James' guillotine, which looks awesome.

Game patents

One of those questions that comes up all the time on game design forums is about how to protect intellectual property and prevent someone stealing your idea.  The often dry, but always interesting Lewis Pulsipher has just released one of his talks about game design, this time on the subject of patents for games.  He points out the cost of acquiring a patent, the additional cost of maintaining and defending it, as long as the likelihood of a court ruling it invalid, and the average amount of money earned from a game (his figures are from video games, but appear to be broadly applicable to board games too), and concludes that patents are for suckers.

I think his closing comment sums things up very nicely: "If you have spent money to get a patent, I am sorry, you have screwed up."

Making games funny

So I read an interesting blog post on Funny Games by Grant Rodiek.  While a lot of writers out there have been talking about depth, luck, accessibility, and so on in game design, I like that someone has been thinking about games that make people laugh.

And we're not really talking about games that have comedy elements in them -- they often wear thin quite quickly -- rather about comparatively serious games that just hit you with something where the only response is to laugh.

A lot of the time, the laughter comes from player interaction, but Grant suggests some other elements that could lead to real laughs.  Now I am thinking about this I'm remembering assorted incidents.  Like the time when we were playing Coup and everyone decided that I was an untrustworthy cur who must be bluffing, but every time I was called on it, I was able to innocently reveal the correct card.  Or the many times we played Robo Rally and had a robot's program taking it inexorably to its doom thanks usually to a small nudge from another player.  Or getting stuck at the top of the mountain in K2 thanks to the swine camped below me as a storm rolled in.  All good stuff.

I think the games I have designed in the past do not really lend themselves to being funny, but I would like them to, so many thanks to Grant for getting me thinking along these lines.

On failure

Well, it looks like I'll be failing to meet my objective of at least two posts each month, but I guess I'll just have to make up for it later.

Image from StockMonkeys.com via Flickr

Coincidentally, I have been catching up on the latest series of Tabletop Deathmatch (well worth checking out) and heard a really interesting point from one of the judges, Luke Crane:

"Failure has to be the most interesting part of your game.  Failure has to be the thing that compels you to continue playing in games like this.  It spurs you on, it makes you want to play even more.  If failure demoralizes you and doesn't make you want to play any more, then your game is broken."

I guess this isn't really rocket science, but I feel I need to make sure I remember it.  The context for this was a game where there were situations like, for example, a player's entire turn was rolling a die to see if they passed a challenge, getting a bad roll, and that was it, they had to wait for their next turn to try again.  And this happened at least twice in a row.  This does not make for riveting gameplay.

It is also worth noting that another judge was commenting about the same game that being successful wasn't very exciting either.  I haven't got to the end of the series yet, but I'm guessing that this probably wasn't  the winning game.

This got me thinking that a good policy would probably be that in most cases where there is uncertainly of success or failure, either outcome should just open up a new opportunity to develop the game's narrative.  Or at least, if you fail, you gain something that may help you mitigate against bad luck later.

Actually, that is sounding quite fun, having a game where failure early on could give you real advantages later.  I'm sure that's something to work with.

The poor man's 3D printer

Making games involves building prototypes, and so far I have made do by using blank cards (or printing them out), scavenging components from other games, or pulling stuff from my growing collection of game bits.  Matt Leacock, the designer of loads of great games, including Pandemic and Roll Through the Ages, as well as the currently-on-Kickstarter Thunderbirds board game, has written an inspiring blog post about using craft foam.

Stolen from Matt's blog: a fine example of sculpting craft foam into Thunderbird tokens.

He waxes lyrical in his post about the advantages of using this not-too-expensive material.  Aside from the sculpting potential (see the picture for neat Thunderbirds prototype components), I'm rather sold on the idea of using this stuff for making up tiles: print out what you want on regular paper, back with self-adhesive craft foam, then cut up with a sharp knife.  I'm definitely going to be trying this trick out...

Daviau Dishes Decent Design Dirt

I figure something I can do with this blog is to make notes of useful or interesting advice I see around the place, so here's something...

I've just been watching Shut Up & Sit Down's Gen Con special, which includes a very interesting (hung over) interview with Rob Daviau, creator of Risk Legacy, amongst a decent list of other games.  One of the things Rob was talking about was really interesting.  It was basically a technique he uses to develop a theme for a game.

I'm sure the coffee is helping.

So the trick is to come up with a basic idea, his throw-away example was pig farming.  He then writes down a list of assumptions about that idea, including really fundamental and trivial things (spotting these, I would say, would be the real skill to practice), so in his pig farming example, this could include things like the farmers are trying to fatten up the pigs, the pigs are stupid, and that the farmers know that they are farmers.

What you can then do is tweak one of those assumptions, so perhaps it turns out that the pigs are actually intelligent, and then you can explore that idea and see where it takes you.

I am sure this is something that they would teach on day 1 of a creative writing class and that just about everyone in the world out there but me knew this already.  Actually, after hearing someone say this and writing it down for myself, the whole thing seems pretty obvious in retrospect, but I'm a bear of little brain and have difficulty thinking of this sort of stuff for myself.  So, something learnt today, which makes it a good day, I reckon.