More columns, more stuff

I've been spending the last... egad... indeterminate period of time in finishing off another project for Paizo and working on various house projects. I'm always a little leery of announcing my upcoming freelance work because I'm not entirely sure of the propriety of cementing my involvement before the official Paizo website does.

I've also written another couple of design columns for Kobold Quarterly, which you can read here and here. I'm not at all loath to promote these when they come up, and I'm entirely willing to take suggestions for columns.

When I write or talk about games, I like to have some common foundational knowledge for the discussion. To that end, I'm partial to the definition of formal elements of games outlined in Tracy Fullerton's excellent Game Design Workshop, though I modify it slightly. Based in part on the work of Salen and Zimmerman's Rules of Play, these features include players, boundaries, rules, procedures, objectives, resources, conflict, and uncertain outcome. I'll be getting into each of these later. Why these and not a different definition? In part, because this is a quickly functional definition that allows people to understand what we mean when we talk about games, and in part because I don't think the definitions that delve into semiotics and the study of meaning provide any deeper insight.

Games are primarily functional tools, and while it's valuable to study their place as cultural artifacts, it doesn't help us to understand how to design and play them with any greater clarity. Certainly, one could study Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker as a satire of the Farmville-style "games"; in this instance, we do benefit from a more analytical approach. However, as JE Sawyer of Obsidian said in a related discussion:

When academics deal with people who are part of a creative industry, they have to understand that many of us are actively attempting to solve problems that are right in front of our face.

It's important to remember that games are more than a collection of formal elements. They also combine, and indeed require, dramatic elements to help bring these formal elements to life. It's entirely possible to make a meta-game game wherein Player seeks Resources to gain the upper hand in Conflict in order to achieve victory in Outcome, but that's hardly a compelling story. Instead, we need to put a new framework on what is essentially a formalized skeleton.

I should probably mention...

... that I also have a regular column over at Kobold Quarterly. It's called "Now, the Twist," and it's another place where I write about games and gaming, with a primary focus on tabletop gaming.

I mention this mainly because I have another column up, in which I discuss the elusive concept of "fun."

The Great Beginning

Without going into too much detail (you can see the detail at my Wikipedia page), I like games. A lot. I've been playing games most of my life, and have been designing them for tabletop and electronic media for nearly 20 years now. I've even won a couple of awards.  While it has always been fun (if you don't have fun with games, you're probably in the wrong line of work), it is not precisely easy.

Even when you know what you're doing (and frequently in game design, you're making, at best, an educated guess), you still have a significant chance of watching the whole thing blow up in your face. The more complicated and complex your game, the more likely that you'll introduce a variable that causes the whole thing to explode in an entirely unintended way. Sometimes, these consequences are beneficial and lead you into new paths of play that you never suspected but turn out to be incredibly rewarding. More often, they spell disaster. Every variable and mechanic you introduce becomes another potential problem.

This is especially true in electronic media. In tabletop games, we can always fall back on house rules or expect our players to find a way around the inconsistencies in the rules (though I should note that this is frequently a hallmark of bad design as well), but if we don't consider all the ways in which the software can break, we will see the games disappear into loopholes or, worse still, outright crashes.

It takes a talented team to produce games that hold up to multiple users playing in any number of ways... and even talented teams can fall short of their goals. Witness, for instance, any number of professional, large-studio games that fail to delight or even entertain; worse, witness those that are released well before they're done, riddled with bugs. While these games might provide quick hits for their studios' bottom lines, in the end the damage done to the studios' reputation is hardly worth the price.

From the user's end, it's easy to point out flaws in a game. From a developer's perspective, it's much, much harder.