Video Game Design vs Board Game Design

I am somewhat in the thoughts of video game design lately. I have re-opened the Wizardry Legacy project, and with the comming of tablet PC and the new OUYA console, I am thinking more and more to either make strategy games I could not make as Board games, or port my board games as video games. I am still thinking if it could be done in a reasonable amount of time. Probably I will try to port my Fallen Kingdom board games as a video game first.

Even if does not see so, normally they make paper prototype for video games too. I have tons of pictures in my book. I have even see a first person shooter paper prototype, so yes it's possible. Still, video games tend to be what I call "loose design". If the is a bad number in a certain area, it won't break the game. It will make the game easier or harder, but that's it. But in board games, the design is so tight that a simple error can break the game. Strategy video game are much more fragile to design errors, but most of the time, you can get around it. For example, in ogre battle 64, the new feature called legion were actually uneffective. So people still managed to finish the game without using them.

In video games, I would say that much less playtesting is done because a lot of time is placed on production rather than game design. Once you go in a direction, it's hard to move back without serious cost increase. This is why you can end up with video games that has flaws, especially for strategy games. Like I Once said, board game design is 80% design and 20% production, while video games is 20% design and 80% production.

Video games has the advatage to hold much more information and automate calculations. This has the effect of saving processing time. Consider that a player can handle a certain amount of information and process. Video games simply compress that information into something smaller allowing the player to be able to handle more. But too much could lead to other problem.

Pacific storm had that problem when you managed large fleet in the pacific and you could also know the morale condition of individual pilots on your squadron. Too much information.

I don't have time to answer the last question. Maybe later.

I'm happy to disagree with the above statement almost fully. While there certainly are harder budget and schedule considerations in most video game projects than board game projects, it doesn't automatically translate to a lack of design or playtests. Look at Firehose Games out of Boston for an excellent example of a studio that pretty much scrapped their design 8-9 times through playtesting to come up with a direction and gameplay vastly different from their starting point. Furthermore, a well designed framework allows fast iteration and every game company I've worked at has the ability to iterate on many mechanics. (Firehose is 1 example in a long list that I could give, but is probably the best example of a design/playtest driven studio I know of. Heck, even Zynga is playtest focused, as every decision they make is a response to player feedback of their games)

I would argue the management of vision on video game projects has been the main culprit of "oh crap" moments that I've had over the years working on video games. Coordinating 50+ or 100+ people towards a single goal is an incredibly complicated problem. Just because you have a great design doesn't mean you can implement that vision and share it with a large team. When you are doing a boardgame, you have the luxury of being the designer, producer, programmer, and often times concept artist all in one go. This gives you incredible control over the vision and direction of your project.

Also, fundamentally, playtests do not make your game better. They provide you information, and you can use that information in many different ways. Depending on who is processing it, how it's collected, and what is done with it will dramatically change the usefulness of that feedback. Zynga, as a playtest obsessed company, is interested in making money, not fun, and their games reflect that fact.

I guess at the end of the day I'm saying that good companies/people who make good games. You just need a lot more of those people in 1 place to make it happen for a video game versus a board game. I've played plenty of really awful boardgame prototypes as well as released products, video games just get more press because a lot more time, effort, and money was wasted getting to that point.

I've been a video game developer for 20 years, and have never seen a paper prototype. Some designers do it, but it's the exception rather than the rule.

There are two reasons for this (maybe more). First, most video games involve a real-time dexterity component. No amount of paper prototyping can simulate the behavior of camera and controls in the final product, but that "feel" component is integral to the success of the product. Second, for games that could be prototyped on paper, the interaction of components and rules are usually more complex in the video game version (for better or worse).

This isn't to say one shouldn't prototype videogames. On the contrary, it's hugely important to prototype early and often. Generally, though, one prototypes in the engine one intends to use. Alternatively, one might do early prototypes in a different engine, but either way, it's more common to prototype in the medium one intends to use.

"Video game" isn't a genre, it's a medium. One can produce chess as a board game or as a video game, but it's the same game. So it's unusual to ask a question like, "...can this be applied to video games?" The rules of chess are the rules of chess, regardless of the medium in which it's expressed.

It's true that computers can crunch numbers faster and more accurately than people, which means the "video game" medium can render high-fidelity simulations more quickly, but that doesn't mean board games can't be huge simulations with many components (Advanced Squad Leader, anyone?).

This gets back to the advantages of the medium, and a little bit of history.

Many of the earliest computer games were multiplayer: Space War and Pong, for example. They were multiplayer for exactly the same reason board games are primarily multiplayer: human opponents supply better AI, more cheaply, than one can generate from an algorithm.

As computers became more powerful and more people owned them -- but few people knew how to network them -- single player games rose in popularity. Sure, it was *possible* that friends could share a keyboard, but a single player experience was guaranteed to work, even if you had no available friends. Algorithms became sophisticated enough that single player games could challenge and engage the audience. This development hasn't happened on a large scale within the medium of board games because it's too time-consuming to manage the algorithms that make deep single-player experiences possible. At least for *most* games.

Here again, though, the distinction between "video" and "board" games isn't real. Games are games, and one could theoretically make the same game in either medium. Some people have already started to mix genres by supplying tablet and phone apps to crunch the numbers for complex tabletop games. Another classic example is "robot chess," where a single human plays on a "real" board with "real" pieces against a computer that moves the pieces via a robot arm.

Is that a "board" game or a "video" game?

I usually playtest video games I design much more than I playtest board games. A board game almost always works, and if it doesn't work, I can spot the problem as soon as I find out that there is a problem because discovering a problem happens by running into it. However, there will always be typos and temporary brain freezes while programming, so even though the mechanic works, the code necessarily doesn't. Fixing things like this is easy when the previous version worked and I have added only 20 new lines of code, but it's much more difficult to spot the problem after 200 new lines of code.

For this reason, I might re-write 60% of the rules for a board game before playtesting it again, but I will always run a video game after every little change I make to the code.

It's probably different for professionals though. I'm only a hobbyist at both video game and board game design (and not very good at programming, but usually good enough to do what I want after some test runs).

Like I said, I have pictures of paper prototype of a FPS in one of my books (best dexterity/realtime game you could have). I could make scans of the book pages to show these prototypes.[/quote]

Yes, people *do* make paper prototypes of video games. My point is that you can't capture the dexterity component in those prototypes, so they, alone, are not sufficient to judge whether the game will be any fun. Some elements like level layout and the inventory system can be mapped out in this way, but it won't matter a whit if your camera and controls render the game unplayable.

In the end, prototyping an FPS -- or other action game -- on paper is like judging a musical performance by looking at the score. You can get some information out of it, but most of what makes a performance "good" or "bad" is not represented in the data.

I think you're right about some designs being tighter, but I disagree that this is because a game is implemented on a computer.

There are "big" games and there are "small" games. Big games -- like Advanced Squad Leader ("board game") and World of Warcraft ("video game") have many systems and usually resist small changes. Small games -- like Tetris ("video game") and Settlers of Catan ("board game") -- have fewer rules, and are proportionally more sensitive to change.

To say that "regular video games" are bigger begs the question, "what is a regular video game?" In terms of strict play time, it's not safe to assume that big budget console games (i.e., "regular" video games) garner the most play time. In fact, casual games' popularity has skyrocketed, and mobile phones have reinforced this trend. If anything, "regular" video games have gotten smaller, on average, over that past 5 years (disclaimer: I'm basing this on trends I've seen in the industry, but haven't looked up hard numbers).

Which gets back to computers being a medium, not a genre. "Settlers" is "Settlers," whether it's rendered in cardboard and wood or bits and bytes.

As for trade being harder to represent in a video game, I doubt this is true. I believe your specific example of trades in Settlers Online being clunky compared to the tabletop version, but suspect this has to do with the specific implementation, rather than a limitation of the medium. I know I could create a version of Settlers on the ipad that simply simulated the pieces and die rolls and let the players manipulate them any way they like. This would just be a computer-simulated representation of the board game, and would support trade to the same degree the board game does.

Makes me wonder why the screwed it up when changing to the video medium. :(

A couple quick clarifications, then I will post no more on this as we have hijacked this thread for long enough.

Advanced Squad Leader (not "just" Squad Leader), when you include its expansions, is enormous. Check out http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/243/advanced-squad-leader, find the "Expansions" section, and hit "show more." I stopped counting at 100 expansions, and that was about 1/2 way down the list. I think that's more content and rules than any Age of Empires or Starcraft game.

Saying board games are "more structured" doesn't communicate much. What do you mean by "more structured"?
Along those same lines, can you answer these questions:

If Chess is implemented on a computer, does that make it a computer game?
Is Tetris "less structured" than a game like Age of Renaissance?
What makes a "board game" a board game -- having a board (either digital or cardboard), or having a constrained ruleset (in which case, being on a computer has nothing to do with it), or something else?

What I'm driving at here is the use of the word "video game." For some, it seems to imply a very specific genre of game, like RPG or FPS, but these are genres which comprise only a tiny portion of all "video games."

Which brings us all the way back to the OPs questions. It's misleading to ask about prototyping "video games" as opposed to "board games" because you can implement board games in both chipboard and digital form. It's *not* odd to ask about prototyping FPS games as opposed to board games because these are devilishly hard to prototype outside of the computer medium. But -- and this is the point -- FPS is a *genre*, not a medium, and computers are a medium, not a genre.

Once one makes this distinction, most of the OPs questions answer themselves.

I have explored lately the idea to make a framework to make board games as video games, and one idea that came to my mind, is that it could be possible to implement the video game, before the board game design is finished in order to ease the playtesting.

The idea would be to implement a board games as a video game when it is running but requires a lot of testing. At this phase, you generally need to do a lot of test but make only little modifications to the game design. In this case, if the game is implemented as a video game, you could playtest your game much fasters since there will be no need to change the prototype, build the board, move pieces, make calculations, etc.

So a video game prototype could help in the end of a board game development to run many playtests fast.

I actually prototyped board games on a computer (both in VASSAL and once even programming the complete game with a basic AI and rules to be able to fine-tune some parameters much faster than playtesting the game repeatedly with my paper prototype). Also prototyped computer games using cardboard counters.

But saying that the two forms are only different media only go so far. I think there are many things that make a good computer game design that do not work well in a board game and vice versa.

I found the Computer Gaming World archive a few days ago and one of the old scanned articles from the early 80's was by Chris Crawford discussing computer game design. He had many good things to say about how much more ought to be possible on computers beyond straight ports of board games, and it is amazing how it seemed the article would apply equally well not 30 years later by replacing "home computer" with "tablet". It's the same move to a new platform, and the same problem of designers not yet having figured out how to make best use of the new platform (how could they?), instead relying on designs taken from old platforms. I'm sure we will see much more interesting "board games" on tablets 5 or 10 years from now, and have a good laugh at games simulating hands of cards or 3D dice rolling across the screen (although as a novelty I understand such things can help sell games in the near future to some catrgories of gamers).

Was happy to read above in this thread about making a card game that represented cards in different ways in different views. Far too many games just show cards as cards, focusing more on simulating a card game than on being a good game. This is particularly true about VASSAL modules that use scans of original cardboard markers instead of using better ways of representing information on a computer screen. It is bad enough to have to move cardboard status markers aside to examine a stack of counters in a real boardgames, much worse to have to drag simulated markers around a screen when the status information from the marker could instead have been rendered in more useful ways.

For some reason I find it much easier to come up with ideas and mechanics that I think work for board games, and when it comes to software I end up focusing way too much on programming and not having enough good ideas what the game should be like. Maybe I need to do more cardboard prototyping to figure out how I want a game to work before I start coding.