game design rant
May. 26th, 2009 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerUnless you are interested in the topic
My friend Frank said, in response to some reviews of a game he wants to try out out, "I did hear that the rules were written marginally better than Barkerish DBA. Something about the Brits and their writing style."
I replied:
I know lot of Brits who have written fine rules (and books). It has nothing to do with US v. UK writing styles--it has to do with professionalism in production. UK miniatures rules writers are the last holdout of the "gifted amateur" school of thinking, where taking a serious approach to something and trying to produce a polished, quality product is looked down on as something suspicious and unnecessary because "good chaps will all be able to muddle it out together". IOW, bloody lazy buggers who can't be bothered to do proper development and editing and then expect their customers to do their work for them by pointing up all the errors and inconsistencies that will eventually be incorporated into the next edition *after* these unpaid developers and editors have paid for the product.
Look at those reviews [this and this] (and others readily available on the web that I didn't bother to include [like this]). What they all say is "we liked these rules, but we really needed someone who knew them to explain them to us". THAT is a bitter indictment of game development. The whole point of good development work is to take a design and work the rough edges off of it, fill in the details. And part of that process is making sure that you *don't* need the rules author standing at your playing table to explain everything for you; having handed over your cash for the rules, you ought not to *need* further explanations unless you get into very, very abstruse places.
The US miniatures community has been gradually dragged out of the Dark Age of this sort of tosh (by people like Scott Bowden, Frank Chadwick, Rich Hasenauer, and, much as I'm not fond of his games, Arty Conliffe). The core of the US military boardgaming community has been run by people who did gaming for a living professionally for a long time, so there's been a lot less of it there. But the British gaming community, especially miniature gaming, is still deeply mired in this very backward sort of thinking in which putting together a clean, solid product is somehow seen as "working too hard" and "being showy" which are the kill phrases of the outmoded "gifted amateur" school.
There's not a small amount of this blinkered thinking at the root of hate for companies like Games Workshop and Battlefront, BTW. "If these guys can make a successful, polished product, then people will come to expect value for money, and they won't put up with the sort of underproduced crap I market" is the thinking at work, I'm convinced.
*phew* I feel much better now. Cleansed, somehow. Thanks for listening! ;-)
My friend Frank said, in response to some reviews of a game he wants to try out out, "I did hear that the rules were written marginally better than Barkerish DBA. Something about the Brits and their writing style."
I replied:
I know lot of Brits who have written fine rules (and books). It has nothing to do with US v. UK writing styles--it has to do with professionalism in production. UK miniatures rules writers are the last holdout of the "gifted amateur" school of thinking, where taking a serious approach to something and trying to produce a polished, quality product is looked down on as something suspicious and unnecessary because "good chaps will all be able to muddle it out together". IOW, bloody lazy buggers who can't be bothered to do proper development and editing and then expect their customers to do their work for them by pointing up all the errors and inconsistencies that will eventually be incorporated into the next edition *after* these unpaid developers and editors have paid for the product.
Look at those reviews [this and this] (and others readily available on the web that I didn't bother to include [like this]). What they all say is "we liked these rules, but we really needed someone who knew them to explain them to us". THAT is a bitter indictment of game development. The whole point of good development work is to take a design and work the rough edges off of it, fill in the details. And part of that process is making sure that you *don't* need the rules author standing at your playing table to explain everything for you; having handed over your cash for the rules, you ought not to *need* further explanations unless you get into very, very abstruse places.
The US miniatures community has been gradually dragged out of the Dark Age of this sort of tosh (by people like Scott Bowden, Frank Chadwick, Rich Hasenauer, and, much as I'm not fond of his games, Arty Conliffe). The core of the US military boardgaming community has been run by people who did gaming for a living professionally for a long time, so there's been a lot less of it there. But the British gaming community, especially miniature gaming, is still deeply mired in this very backward sort of thinking in which putting together a clean, solid product is somehow seen as "working too hard" and "being showy" which are the kill phrases of the outmoded "gifted amateur" school.
There's not a small amount of this blinkered thinking at the root of hate for companies like Games Workshop and Battlefront, BTW. "If these guys can make a successful, polished product, then people will come to expect value for money, and they won't put up with the sort of underproduced crap I market" is the thinking at work, I'm convinced.
*phew* I feel much better now. Cleansed, somehow. Thanks for listening! ;-)
