I just found this site and I have to say: This place is awesome.
I've been reading articles and the information and ideas shared is just fantastic! I'm looking forward to joining these discussions and learning more about mechanics and balance. And I really like the idea of the monthly design challenge. That is cool. I'm excited to try.
Up to now I've been designing games in a relative void; I have a lot of professional examples to draw from in the form of the large number of games stored in our collective closets. I actually had to tear out my living room closet and build a new one that was much bigger -- 144 cubic feet -- just to hold all our games. My nuclear and extended families play a lot, and we also spend a lot of time talking about the rules and what affect they have on the games. Engineers, chemists, process managers, mathematicians. I think you would have to use a gag and a very large stick to get them to shut up and accept rules as they are.
We started modifying and extending games years ago. I would guess that HeroQuest was the first one we extended by creating new characters and game elements. Eventually I started building games from scratch, and I'd be kidding myself if I said they were good. Parts of them, maybe. It seems to take an enormous amount of testing and fiddling and arguing to put something together that doesn't have problems. I love it.
Everything I've put together has always been for us, meant purely to be fun. Friends and family and guests come over, and we invariably play games, sometimes the ones I've designed. I love that. I watch them to see their reactions to various elements. Because so many of these people are personally important to me, I've been working to put things together that maximize their enjoyment every minute of the game. I'm sure every designer does, actually. I have a lot of things I strive for when I put together games:
* Winning should be wickedly close. People seem happiest when the point spread is very small or the chance of comeback is ever present.
* Brutal, devastating tactics are best left to games where the players all are experts, and the expectation of winning the next time around is high. Otherwise, delay is more palatable than destruction.
* Rules should be, I don't know, almost invisible somehow; Players should be absorbed in the game's theme, and rules should fit with the design and make the players nod at the seeming obviousness of them.
* We have this term in process control called poka yoke - which refers to something designed so that it can't be done wrong. Batteries on a lot of devices follow this concept -- they have grooves or tabs or an asymmetric shape that makes it impossible to put them in backwards. I want my games to be like that: Fewer rules and more "natural consequence" of the design.
These are just design concepts for my play groups; I don't know if they are successful ones writ large. I'm not sure what makes a commercially successful game, to be honest. But I sure want to learn. Anyone with any input on this or anything I've said here is more than welcome to comment. I've always been taught that if you want to learn a complex skill, start reading the magazine designed for the experts. You won't understand understand most of what you are reading -- at first. But eventually it will begin to make sense. So here I am, diving in with both feet. I will post one of my simpler, abstract strategy games in another post and hope for a lot of commentary and design ideas.
--Patrick
