Idea ownership issues

That's an excellent question.

It's funny and it seems unlikely until you'd been designing for a while, but it's true, ideas are incredibly cheap. I could quite literally sit down with a pen and paper and come up with 10 solid game concepts, with themes and basic mechanics, in one hour. These would be games that have probably never been done before. In fact, here's a fun site to sharpen your design skills: Game Design Challenge.

Of some value are Incredibly Original Ideas. These are much less common, though are still awfully cheap.

The only thing of actual potential value are fully fleshed-out games, games that have been designed and then developed and then playtested and then redeveloped (and if necessary redesigned) and then replaytested and then... you get the idea.

And even those aren't worth all that much, unfortunately.

Knowing that ideas are cheap, then, means that we can freely share ideas with each other. Maybe we don't share our Incredibly Original Ideas all that often, and rarely share fully fleshed-out games, but ideas are there for sharing.

The Game Design Workshop is, I think, particularly interesting in this regard. There we are presenting semi-fleshed-out ideas and are discussing them with each other in depth. These are much closer to real games of potential value, but even there the real value is in making the game work and finishing it (and playtesting it and re-finishing it and...). In the GDW everyone is helping you along that path. Could someone "steal" the idea and present the game to a publisher? Sure, but games are put into the workshop because they're not ready for prime time.

And if you see a fully fleshed-out and fully tested game here, that still doesn't mean that the designer is interested in trying to have it published. From my experience in several careers it's very common to do all kinds of "early" work that, while not bad, certainly isn't something you'd want to try to put forth professionally. It's like that first "complex" woodworking project you do: while it's neat and all, that recipe card box isn't really worth anything, and as the creator you can see all of the flaws and the many ways it could be so much better. Your next one will be better if you work at it, and the one after that will be even better, until one day you reach a point where you actually have something valuable. That you probably don't want to post publicly. :)

I also tend to agree with the discussion that's been going on here. Ideas are cheap. Implementing those ideas are truly expensive, at a minimum several thousand dollars.

I don't know if the lot of you are like me, but I seem to get a new idea for a game every month or two -- much faster than I have the money to publish or others really have a chance to publish. I'm sure, not every idea I have is worth publishing, nor do I do have a rich wife like James Ernest that I can afford to publish every idea I get. :wink: I do have a very understanding wife who let me publish one on a trial basis to see how it goes. :)

If someone steals an idea of mine, I would be out a few weeks of work at most. If someone steals a full-fledged ready-for-presses prototype, then I would be a little more upset, but I would tend to keep that a little closer to home. So, as a general rule, I only show what I wouldn't mind losing.

Well, everyone else is chiming in here, why not me as well?

My personal feeling is that the transparency you see here is a reflection of the community mindset that we all have. I for one don't really think about the "silent majority" of people who are viewing my posts, but think more about this being the place where I come to talk to Matthew, Seth, David, Rene, etc.

That said, I think how much or how little you disclose is completely up to you, and should be in proportion to how comfortable you feel with the audience. The reality is that to make your game a success, you're going to need to tell someone at some point. But, that need not be a community of people you've only just met.

So, in that sense, I agree and disagree with Seth. Sure, I will need to share my ideas before getting them "out there", but it need not be with this group. Perhaps my own playtesting group can be the "sounding board" instead. And I think the quality of the games that are discussed here proves pretty compellingly that this isn't a "what not to do" board.

Yet, at the same time, we are, in some sense, in competition with each other -- we're competing for a limited market, we're competing for accolades in the Hippodice contest, etc. It would be naive to deny that we're in competition with each other at some level. That doesn't mean we don't want each other to do well, so much as that a little secrecy need not be construed as anything more than trying to maintain what little bit of an edge we may have discovered (a clever mechanic, for instance).

At the same time, I view this more as a scientist than as a business. I think that these games exist so that people can have fun, and sharing the ideas is an important ingredient in people being able to enjoy them. However, I don't want to share anything before it's ready to be shared -- why let someone else take an idea that I had and run with it before I've gotten it to the point that I want to get it to? But, when it's ready, I'm happy to let others know about it, and if they use it, cool. As evidence of this, consider that many people have posted the rules to their games that they've entered into contests, yet they did this AFTER they entered.

That said, what I also like about this community is that we are good enough at coming up with ideas or mechanics that when someone says "hey, I need a mechanic to do X", it's no big deal for us to come up with "throwaway" mechanics for that goal. A good example is the recent "term paper" discussion. I'm sure that those who contributed wouldn't feel that their great ideas had been "stolen" if Matt chooses to appropriate some of them for his game. But if he said "hey, I'm going to take the best bits of Everest, 8/7c, and WarZone and make a game out of that", I think some of us would be more annoyed by that.

So, to my mind, yes, you're going to need to talk to people to make your game great, but when you do that and whom you choose to do that with has to be based on who you trust. For the most part, I think there is enough mutual trust here that you'll see a lot of transparency about game design. But I don't want or expect other members to tell me every detail of every one of their games. I appreciate it when they're willing to share anything with me/the rest of the group, because that suggests that I/we have earned their trust. If people want to hold things back, how could I fault them for that?

-Jeff