Transcript "What video game developers can learn from 50 years of tabletop game development." Dr.

"What video game developers
can learn from 50 years of
tabletop game development."
Dr. Lewis Pulsipher
Fayetteville Technical Community
College/Webster University
Pulsiphergames.com
8 April 2010
Note about the slides
 Slides
are provided primarily for those who
want detailed notes later, not as an
accompaniment to the talk
 Consequently, they are “rather wordy”
 Available at
http://pulsipher.net/teaching1.htm
 Or just go to pulsipher.net (not .com) and
look for teaching material
Who Am I?


Designed my own games from a very young age
Began playing commercial wargames in early
‘60s, video games with Atari 2600
 Designer of six commercially-published board
wargames (most recently, foreign language
editions of Britannia, Nov ‘08)
 Forthcoming: Law & Chaos (Mayfair), Germania,
Dragon Rage
 First to teach game design in North Carolina as
far as I know (Fall ’04)

Currently teach at Fayetteville Technical CC
Teaching/Writing
 Presently
finishing a book about how to
design games, and how to teach people to
design games
 Monthly
contributor to
Gamasutra/GameCareerGuide
 Contributor
to books: Hobby Games:100
Best, Family Games:100 Best, Tabletop
Game Design (forthcoming)



Pulsipher.net, pulsiphergames.com
http://pulsiphergamedesign.blogspot.com/
http://teachgamedesign.blogspot.com
Some of my work
Don’t discount board/card games
 It’s
a much smaller industry
 But R. Knizia (Ingenious, 200 other
games)makes over a million dollars a year
in freelance royalties
 K. Tauber (Settlers of Catan) is also a
millionaire
 (Quite apart from sales of tired old
warhorses like Monopoly)
Today
 Lessons
video game designers can learn
from tabletop (board and card) game
development in last 50 years
 So we aren’t counting Monopoly,
Scrabble, etc.—not even Risk (1959)

Just as well, these tend to be poor game
designs
 We’re
interested in lessons from
wargames and “Euro”-style boardgames
(originating in Germany)
Brief list of lessons
 Convergence
is happening with
tabletop games as well as with other
media

Multi-sided is “more fun” (has broader
appeal and potential)
Multi-sided games
 The three-player problem
 Other problems of multi-sided
Turtling
 Leader-bashing
 Sandbagging
 Kingmaking

games:
Other lessons
 Playtesting:
let the non-company,
non-fanboy testers tell you what’s
good
 Simplicity prospers
 Atmosphere" (not necessarily story or
theme) sells games in the 21st
century
 Replayability is variety, not repetition
Convergence
This is the “Games and Media” section,
convergence is a big topic
 Video and tabletop games are sometimes
treated like separate animals





Programmers tend to dominate VG companies
No programming in tabletop games
So perhaps they’ve been “neglected”
The important difference isn’t programming or
art or the computer
The crux of the difference
 Video
games are computer-centric,
tabletop games are people-centric
 Video games traditionally are for one
person, with the computer providing
challenges devised by the designers
 Tabletop games are for more than
one person, with the game system
providing ways for players to
challenge one another, as devised by
the designer
In a nutshell
 Games
are about people, not about
computers, certainly not about
programming
 Games are about interaction with people,
not about interaction with a shadow of a
person (a computer)
 Games are about problem-solving, but not
necessarily about “challenges”
 Games take place mostly in the minds of
people, not in a computer’s CPU
Games vs. puzzles
 In
tabletop terms, many traditional video
“games” are interactive puzzles, not
games
 “Solve” it and you’re done. Tabletop
games are rarely “solved”
 Puzzles tend to be solitary activities,
games tend to be social activities
 Puzzles can be good—but games are
better
“Multi-player” means “multisided”

Tabletoppers call any game with more than
*two* players “multiplayer”
 Video gamers mean “more than one player”
 In video games, a “multiplayer” game often
has just two teams, as in Team Fortress,
whereas “multi-player” to tabletoppers usually
means “more than two sides or teams”
 So I try to use the term “multi-sided”,
meaning more than two separate interests
regardless of the number of human players.
Another way to look at it
 Video
games are traditionally “p v e”
(player vs. environment)
 Tabletop games are traditionally “p v p”
(player vs. player)
 But video games tend to be avatar based
 While on the tabletop, some kinds of
games are avatar-based, some not
 When you don’t have an avatar, things are
less “personal”
The Answer
 The
Answer to the expense of providing
challenges in video games?



Design games that use human opponents to
provide variety and challenge
Design so that the game provides challenge
through the other players
This is not linear “story-telling”, but lets the
players write their own story through the
game
Where “fun” comes from
 “Fun”
comes from the interactions of the
people involved, not from the game
 Interest, enjoyment, fascination can come
from the game—rarely “fun”
 It’s more fun when you play with (and
often against) others—and that usually
makes the game more enjoyable
 Wii games, MMOs, Left4Dead
People rather than computers as
the primary component of games

People can provide more creativity and variety
than programmed computers can provide
(though someday that may change)
 “Memorability” is much enhanced when there
are other players to remember with
 People provide much more replayability
 This is the antidote to the repetitive wasteland of
typical Facebook games—human
opposition/participation
Questions/Comments
at this point?
Lesson: the “three-player
problem”

Three sided conflict games either:



1) No time limit, two gang up on the one who’s
ahead, game never ends
2) Time limit, “petty diplomacy problem” where
one who thinks he’s losing can decide who wins
Solutions:

A race or “multi-sided solitaire”; players cannot do
enough to hinder/harm another to make a
significant difference in the end portion of the
game
Three player solutions
 Solutions:




Sudden victory that can frequently be
forecasted and prevented, with changing
victory conditions
“Equilibrium”, no side can drastically alter the
situation in a single turn
A game that is almost entirely positional
Extreme uncertainty about who is winning and
losing
 See
forthcoming article in “Tabletop Game
Design” book (ETC Press)
Multi-sided conflict games:
Turtling
 Sitting
away from the action in order to let
others wear themselves down/out fighting
one another
 Akin to “camping”, but the camper is trying
to kill people; the turtle just wants to avoid
getting involved at all
 Even a poor game like Risk has
mechanisms to discourage turtling; but
they aren’t GOOD mechanisms
Turtling

Solutions:




Positive rather than negative economy (more gain
than loss as the game goes on)
Zero-sum game (one player’s gain is another
player’s loss)
Extreme uncertainty about the situation: the turtle
then cannot know when it’s time to “come out of
his shell” and win
Points that are scored continuously: even if
others “wear themselves out,” they can score
enough to win by the game end limit
Multi-sided conflict games:
Leader-bashing
 When
it is too easy to attack (hinder)
whoever is ahead without harming yourself
 So, most everyone attacks the leader (why
not?)
 Hence no one wants to be ahead even as
the game draws near an end
Leader-bashing
 Solutions:



Make it harder to hinder other players (a map
game can often do this, because of location)
Make it uncertain who is ahead (Britannia
example)
Make it harder to attack the leader without
harming yourself (Britannia again)
Multi-sided conflict games:
Sandbagging
 This
is the reverse side of leader-bashing
 Everyone wants to be behind rather than
ahead, so they won’t get bashed
 Also a strategy used by “turtles”—avoid
looking “dangerous”
 Solutions:

Tend to be the same as for leader-bashing
Multi-sided conflict games:
Kingmaking
 This
is the general case of the “petty
diplomacy problem”
 A player who thinks he will lose can
determine who wins (or at least, who
doesn’t win)
 Negotiation: “if you attack me I’ll throw my
forces at you and another person will win”
Kingmaking
 Solutions:



As with leader-bashing, reduce the capability
of players to attack every other player
Uncertainty about who is losing/winning
The more sides/players in the game, the less
one (losing) side can determine the outcome
Lesson: Let playtesters decide
what’s “good”
 Most
VG creators now understand that
playtesting is sovereign
 But often playtest only in-house
 Bring in non-company “improvement
testers” and listen to them
 This is essentially the advantage enjoyed
by Facebook and other “social networking”
games—initial users are the non-company
playtesters
Lesson: Simplicity Prospers
 Tabletop
games are more easily focused
on the essence of the game
 You cannot “hide behind the computer”

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection
not when there is nothing left to add, but when
there is nothing left to take away." Antoine de
Saint-Exup'ery
Simplicity…
 If

something doesn’t work, “lose it”
Admittedly, it’s much easier to alter a tabletop
than video game, especially for beginners
 Prototypes
don't have to be pretty
 Paper prototyping saves time and money

Xbox Live Shadow Complex (3D side-scroller
with exploration) prototyped all levels on
paper
Lesson: “atmosphere” sells
games in the 21st century
 “Atmosphere”
(sometimes called a “skin”
or incorrectly lumped in with “theme”) is
the supposed setting/purpose

But often has nothing to do with gameplay
 Theme
must influence how the game is
played, atmosphere does not
 Abstract games are hard to market
 Video game example: Puzzle Pirates?
“Atmosphere”
 Euro-style
boardgames are often abstract,
with an atmosphere tacked on; but the box
back describes the atmosphere, and that
(along with the art) strongly influences who
buys the game
 Shooters are usually about shooting and
blowing up stuff, but the atmosphere can
be quite different (and occasionally
becomes a theme when it affects
gameplay)
Lesson: Replayability is Variety,
not Repetition
 Traditional
video games, as interactive
puzzles, can be solved, and then there’s
no further reason to play
 Good games involving other people
usually have no “solution”. Variety, mixed
with different players, can provide nearinfinite replayability
 Britannia as an example—people play 4-5
hour game 500 times and more
Replayability
 At
the other end of the spectrum, so many
video games (especially on Facebook, and
MMOs) thrive on “grinding”, on repetition,
effectively training people (Skinner style)
to do the same thing over and over again
 “Achievements” are busy-work, not good
gameplay
 This is mind-numbing if not actually evil;
replayability implies stimulation, repetition
is the opposite.
Summation
 Video
games are “converging” with
tabletop games
 For the past several years, video games
have been moving more toward “multisided” play.
 Games are about people, not computers.
The computer is only an assistant.
 Resources: boardgamegeek.com
 Boardgame designers forum: bgdf.com
Questions?
Comments?
Copyright 2010 Lewis Pulsipher