Game Design #1: Rage, rage against the dying of the design

I don’t remember the first game I designed as a kid. Probably something in response to playing monopoly and hating losing all the time, something that I stood a chance of winning. I never enjoyed monopoly, but it was always so appealing because before the game started there was always the possibility of grinning at my opponents as they landed on my expensive hotels.

I do remember very clearly the first game that I designed with a friend. It started as a concept talked about over a few beers, a semi-cooperative space survival game, where you were fleeing the galaxy from an evil dictator or invader. The concept was decent if unoriginal, and the initial design made some degree of sense. What followed was a very, very long process of playing and redesigning, where the concept shifted just a touch each time to accommodate a changed or newly introduced mechanic.

After many iterations, our space survival game morphed into an arena dice battle game, set in space, but involving space-faring vikings with a love of ale and televised wrestling. How we ended up there evades me now.

All of this is to make a generalised point on concept, mechanics and overall design, which is in a few parts.

Part One
Fighting The Bad Fight

Some concepts are just difficult to get onto a tabletop. Not impossible, just difficult. How this difficulty is approached can lead to a fascinating game or to a jumble of struggling mechanics. I don’t think this is news to anyone. Perhaps what I want to draw attention to here is a recognition, which in my mind comes from experience mainly but can also come from exercising your conceptual brain, that pushing too hard will almost always lead to failure.

It seems to me that there exists a balance between a strong conceptual vision and the emerging game’s breathing space. I believe that first game I helped to design fell prey to exactly this, in that we wanted so desperately to make the idea work that we never gave the game enough room to grow organically and let the elements settle. Instead we pushed hard, hoping that the next thing we introduced would solve the issues in the gameplay.

I recognise this feeling now as fighting against the design. I’ve been a professional composer for many years, and even on high pressure jobs I know to allow space for the music to be itself, and have recognised for a long time this same process; that if you push too hard, the music falls flat. Why I thought this would be different for designing board games I have no idea. This also sets up the next part.

Part Two
Your Process Is Your Process

If there’s one lesson that creative pursuits have taught me, it is this. Who you are in life is who you are in everything; leaving yourself at the door is not an option.

There’s a well known saying, a paraphrasing of which is “you need to go a long way in the wrong direction, to go a short way in the right direction”. I’m sure there’s a more poetic version out there. And although this is true in many regards, it didn’t need to be true for me with design for board games, and it needn’t for you either, if you’re reading this.

I make games like only I can, other designers make games like only they can. This is the same for music, for writing, for art, for any creative outlet. That’s where the magic lies. And very helpfully, it’s also the best way of avoiding conformity and lack of originality. If you want to make games that reflect how you see the world, or a vision of some other world, then if you go about making that game in a way that doesn’t also reflect who you are, then you re always going to end up with a game that is somewhat wide of the mark.

Does that mean you’ll always create the game you set out to make? No, of course not. But I do believe it gives a much better shot at doing so. My process varies within a range, but will always begin with a lengthy conceptualising stage, utilising idea maps, interactive spreadsheets, rudimentary sketches for graphic design, followed by plenty more idea maps and options for mechanics. I have learned to cast the net very wide and wait for the game to speak for itself. Or perhaps not the game so much as my subconscious.

Part Three
Don’t Think About It

This goes hand in hand with pushing too hard. The active brain can be a great tool, but it is simply no match for the subconscious mind. The subconscious is where inspiration rises from, where unlikely ideas are thrown together and excitement gathers. The subconscious is also not accessible though intention alone. I don’t know about you, but my best ideas have consistently come either from a dream, from waking up from a dream, or from idle daydreaming.

Yes there are plenty of opportunities for the conscious mind to be the starting point of inspiration. I’m sure some of the best games out there started out as consciously directed talking and thinking. For me however there is no substitute for the subconscious. It has a major role to play in affecting the quality and originality of your work, and if you never give it the space to do its job then you’re missing out on an absolute powerhouse.

Genius lies in the quiet moments. Take a walk, go look at the trees for a while. Do the washing up, just observe the plates getting cleaner. Folk would probably call this being mindful. Whatever it is for you, try to find ways to help your active brain take the back seat, even if it’s just for five minutes every day.

Part Four
When The Game Wins

Which is to say, when you’ve tried everything and the concept you were so excited about has hit gridlock and there’s no way out. What then? Well, first of all you aren’t alone. I doubt there’s a single designer out there who hasn’t felt this at one point or another. I certainly have, and it’s always a great disappointment.

A few scenarios occur.

The mechanics don’t serve the game’s best interests. You didn’t spend enough time in the concept stage, didn’t spend enough time feeling out how things would interact. And when it came to the table, the approach to fix mechanics that didn’t interact well was to put a plaster over it, which will almost inevitably require another plaster, and another plaster. Mechanics upon mechanics is not inherently a bad design choice, but it should be a starting choice, not a fix. This probably means shelving the concept for a while, or if your resolve is strong enough to go back to the drawing board and imagine a new set of mechanics.

The mechanics were great on paper, but on the tabletop they don’t work as you imagined. I don’t think you could find a designer who hasn’t experienced this. Most games have some degree of iterative play, by which I mean sequences of play that result in a unique outcome. Not all outcomes can be predicted, and sometimes not even the most common outcomes can be either. This is happily the easiest scenario to fix, as you just got the game to the table. Now is the chance to redesign the game at its core level, before putting plasters on it in the hope that it all works out.

The mechanics no longer gel with the theme, and now I need a new mechanic to tie it back together, but that will break the game. Yeah, been there. I would argue in this case that the theme wasn’t strong enough to start with, though obviously there are quite a lot of variables as to why you might find yourself in this situation. From my experience, it is a case of that old adage about woods and trees. Too much focus on an individual part of the game at the expense of the whole can skew the game to what you think is the most exciting mechanic rather than what creates the overall most exciting game. This may mean stripping the game back a bit and perhaps re-theming, or perhaps it means returning to an earlier iteration of the design before you felt it had this issue, and choosing a different branch for the design to grow along.

The game keeps changing, and you can’t settle on a theme. Been here too, especially so with that first example I gave. I think unfortunately unless by some miracle you land on a theme that happens to fit well, you’re barking up an abstract points tree. You may well have some mechanics that interact really well with each other, which is obviously really cool and should be held onto or at least remembered. But people will not play a game unless the theme has some value, some meaning and affect on the game. There are of course different extents to the accuracy of that statement, but dry themes are on the whole just more boring. If you want to hold onto these mechanics, this probably means spending a good long time thinking up themes that get you excited, until one of them clicks. Then the most important part - stick with that damn theme!

The game has some awesome moments, but the experience as a whole just isn’t fun. This is probably the most disappointing situation to find yourself in. Designers want their games to be fun; if they aren’t then what and who are they for? I would suggest that this may not be as hard to fix as you might imagine, and plays into the tie off for this blog entry. Strip the game back. Identify what makes the game fun, and what makes it seem laborious. Minimise or straight up remove or replace the laborious parts, even if you absolutely adore them. You can always use them again in another game. Foreground the fun parts, find ways to increase their frequency. Think more about what you can give your players rather than how you can hinder them.

The game is interesting but is too easy. Hard doesn’t mean fun, but easy doesn’t necessarily mean fun either. I’ve recently been working on a game which was mechanically sound but lacked depth. The solution in the end for it was to remove certain elements from the game, rather than to introduce complexity. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a broad direction of solution to this situation. I like to remind myself that good games give the illusion of doing more than turning over the top card of a deck and slamming our hands down when the same number comes up twice in a row, without necessarily doing more than that. It may well be that your game needs more complexity, but before committing to that path, maybe try simplifying first.

To Finish

There’s a saying, popular in writing circles, that I’m very fond of: “Kill your darlings”. It’s a great phrase, and it has a great ring to it. For novel writing, it advises that your favourite moments or characters in your story may not actually be very helpful to the bigger picture. It’s very easy to get attached to things because we like them, rather than because they serve the greater whole.

Undoubtedly this is exactly the same for board game designers. Perhaps the whole of this blog entry could be distilled down to this phrase. Or perhaps I wanted to make the point that giving space to your game (your subconscious) gives time for all of those wonderful processes to take place, without you having to even think about them. Reflection, evaluation, re-conception… These are all processes that are aided by giving space, not by pounding your head against your computer screen.

So I leave you with some questions.

• What was your first game you designed and took all the way through to its end point? How do you feel about the process of having made that game now?

• How does your individual voice influence your design process, and has this been the case since day one?

• Do you recognise any of the ‘when the game wins’ scenarios, and how did you find a way through?

As always, thanks for reading.

Benjie x