[HN Gopher] Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating no...
___________________________________________________________________
Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
Author : ArtWomb
Score : 198 points
Date : 2021-01-27 13:19 UTC (2 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedirect.com)
| hn_asker wrote:
| An expert is an expert whatever their title claims.
| Tepix wrote:
| I know a game designer who does this semi-professionally. He
| really spends a long time in the alpha and beta testing phase of
| game design with lots of playtesting in different groups. He
| recently launched an amazingly fun social deduction game on
| Kickstarter called " _Feed the Kraken_ " with tons of gameplay
| elements previously unseen in social deduction games.
|
| I think that professional designers often have a hard time
| competing with the amount of time invested by these enthusiasts.
| mac01021 wrote:
| Shouldn't the fact that you're paid to do it for a living give
| you _more_ time to spend on it?
| usrusr wrote:
| A full timer needs to have sufficient throughput to pay
| bills. Someone whose bills are taken care of by a dayjob
| income can give their side project as much time as it needs.
| markkat wrote:
| If you use a product, you are aware of things that people that
| don't use it, aren't.
| loriverkutya wrote:
| If you are suggesting, that boardgame designers are not playing
| with the boardgames they designed, you are probably not
| familiar with the boardgame development process, which includes
| a shitton of playtesting to finetune the game's balance. If you
| are not suggesting this, I have no idea what you suggesting.
| contravariant wrote:
| Am I just bad at reading the graphs or is the effect size
| negligible?
| cedex12 wrote:
| > Overall, HHS teams are more likely than professional teams to
| create truly creative game designs.
|
| That's a pretty bold statement to make in the highlights in my
| opinion.
| thom wrote:
| Presumably most bad hobbyist designs don't make it to market,
| and most hobbyists develop their best idea once and that's
| that.
| kthxb wrote:
| does creative imply good, though? that's the real question
| alickz wrote:
| They do quality creative as meaning "novel and useful" in
| their abstract.
|
| Novel can be a double edged sword but useful implies good I
| believe.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Yeah, there are so many criteria on which to evaluate a board
| game-- a quick look at the board games section on Kickstarter
| reveals hundreds of games which pitch well-- gorgeous art,
| great premise, but you can tell just by looking at it that
| the gameplay fundamentals aren't there. Either the mechanics
| are boring (a reskin of classics like Parcheesi or Uno) or
| it's a jumble of stuff cribbed from other games with no
| cohesion ("look here's the deckbuilding part, and over here
| is worker placement, and look an area control mechanic on a
| modular board, yay!").
|
| And there's the whole business of how much of a luck factor
| you want, how much rubber banding there is to keep it
| competitive, how much your strategy has to adapt in response
| to what others are doing, etc etc. These are things that pro
| designers carefully iterate on in the context of hundreds of
| test plays, often with a community of other designers who are
| equipped with the necessary experience and context to think
| deeply about how a game works and will work across multiple
| playthroughs.
| m_eiman wrote:
| _" look here's the deckbuilding part, and over here is
| worker placement, and look an area control mechanic on a
| modular board, yay!"_
|
| I once listened to a podcast by some board gamers who had
| gone way too far in this direction. They'd say the name of
| a game, and describe it as e.g. "it's worker placement with
| area control", and that was the end of their description
| and analysis of the game. Seems to me they're missing a
| fair bit of nuance and more importantly, it doesn't tell me
| anything about how likely it is I'd enjoy the game. Oh
| well, to each their own. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| smogcutter wrote:
| Look up the "8 kinds of fun" if you haven't seen it
| before. It's a really compelling (I think, at least)
| framework that explains why looking at games as just
| collections of mechanics doesn't communicate whether
| you'd actually _enjoy_ them.
|
| I feel like a broken record posting something about this
| on every thread about games, but I really think it's
| worth spreading around.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I would say that the mechanics tags are more of a weak
| negative signal for me. There are lots of games that I
| don't enjoy despite them featuring mechanics that I like;
| for example, I should like Scythe based on what it is,
| but across about two dozen playthroughs I just don't--
| the pacing is wrong for me and I'm never satisfied with
| where I end up.
|
| On the other hand, there are certain mechanics that I
| either don't enjoy (dice battles) or am sick of (deck
| building) which if present makes it much less likely that
| I will enjoy the game as a whole.
| smogcutter wrote:
| Totally, I don't think any one perspective is complete &
| sufficient.
|
| What I like about the 8 kinds of fun is it pushes back
| against an approach I think you see a lot in "serious"
| board game circles of a kind of "model/view" perspective
| on games. The mechanics are the model and the only part
| worth paying serious attention to, and the
| setting/fluff/etc is the essentially interchangeable
| view. The "8 kinds" perspective is a reminder that people
| engage with games in a lot of different ways, many of
| which really live in the interaction between the model
| and view.
| theabrax wrote:
| Well, to be fair, the article doesn't say anything about
| that the chosen set of mechanics (novelty) have to
| provide fun. Actually, this seems to be the usefulness
| part of creativity, or as they describe it, how "playable
| and entertaining" "appropriate observers" perceive the
| game.
|
| As you already refer to LeBlanc's "8 kinds of fun": he
| also is one of the authors of the MDA framework - a
| framework to analyze games - which states, that the
| mechanics of a game are the only thing game designers can
| influence.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDA_framework (the article
| itself is linked in there)
|
| While the authors don't state it directly as this
| framework, they refer to the framwork as an explanation
| of why they use mechanics.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| This matches my expectation, it's just that I'd expect the
| household-invented games to be novel/creative _and bad_ on
| average.
| johannesgoslar wrote:
| You haven't been at many game designer conventions, where a
| lot of 'household-invented' games are deriatives of Risk,
| Monopoly, Chess, Game of Life and current mechanism of the
| year. They are still bad though.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| Exactly. And one that they can get away with making because
| it's not quantifiable. You can't measure creativity.
|
| And I wouldn't be surprised if they're not truly viewing the
| whole indie landscape. For every truly innovative, well
| balanced game, there may be another 100 failed kickstarter
| clones of existing games, or just plain bad games
| Kirth wrote:
| This article sure could do with some pictures!
| polote wrote:
| I don't remember where I've read that but I remember seeing that
| creativity starts to decrease when you are getting paid for it.
| And it decreases even more if you are getting paid less. While
| when you are doing it for free creativity remains at the same
| level over time
| mkl95 wrote:
| I wonder what the results are when you are being paid really
| well, I suspect some people would have levels of creativity
| similar to doing it for free and others would lose all their
| motivation.
|
| There are people like John Carmack who could have retired many
| years ago, yet they are still creating stuff, and other people
| like Notch (Minecraft) lost their creativity the moment they
| got "fuck you money".
| fireattack wrote:
| > remains at the same level over time
|
| Probably true for the hobbyist, but I'd argue some
| professionals may do the activity more by orders of magnitude,
| which would affect their creativity, paid or not.
| LolWolf wrote:
| "Hobbyists beat professionals of [x] in [x]"
|
| No they don't.
|
| -----
|
| Look, I know we can go down the rabbit hole about what
| constitutes a good epistemology, how these notions are correct
| only some of the time, or how the metrics can be wrong. Here's a
| simple rule of thumb: if the result is completely
| counterintuitive in basic scenarios, then it's probably not true.
|
| Yes, yes, of course, the new response is "but wait quantum
| physics is utterly unintuitive, yet it is correct! So is
| chemistry! etc, etc" but look both you and I know that this is
| beside the point. Our simple and obvious priors are much more
| useful than we think, and they are right a lot more of the time
| than any of us want to give them credit for. Surely, there will
| be times when it's flat-out wrong, but those times are very few
| and far in between.
|
| Reading the paper, this certainly looks like the basic knee-jerk
| "No" is right by most useful metrics.
| travisporter wrote:
| What do they mean by "knowledge diversity is a double-edged sword
| that has opposing effects on [the two dimensions of team
| creativity,] novelty and usefulness"
|
| So (more) knowledge diversity = (more) novelty and (less)
| usefulness? or is it more = less and less
| theabrax wrote:
| Did you actually read the article? ^_^"
|
| Nevertheless, it's seems that the more knowledge diversity a
| team has, the MORE novelty and LESS usefulness. It's all about
| communication, sharing ideas, interpretation of knowledge
| (mental models), and self-regulation.
|
| Has to do something with the communication and sharing ideas as
| well as
| js8 wrote:
| Just reading at the next post
| https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364: "but then Kovarex was
| playing and .."
|
| I think simply if you dogfood your own creation then you care
| more about it. Unfortunately, our society is built around value
| created for someone else (selling on the free market, with
| capitalist's investment), not value created for us, for our own
| passion.
| lmm wrote:
| Professional designers can't afford failure, so they make "safe"
| designs that are likely to work. This isn't a result about
| "knowledge diversity", it's a result about incentives.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| That is a plausible hypothesis. However, without any research
| backing it up I wouldn't be so dismissive of the conclusions of
| paper that actually put in the legwork to test its own
| hypothesis, without even engaging with the content of the
| paper.
| lmm wrote:
| I engaged with the paper. They didn't do a controlled test of
| anything. They ran some stats on BoardGameGeek.
| epage wrote:
| If you want a game from a designer that isn't safe, check out
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/295905/cosmic-frog
| johannesgoslar wrote:
| I am not sure that holds up at least in the German market, most
| boardgames are what most other industries would consider
| failures with maybe 2000 copies sold and hardly breaking even
| if you would consider all the hours put in. You make some money
| with semi-hits if they are licensed in our contries as you
| basically have no further effort for income. The only big money
| pot is hitting Spiel des Jahres.
| avereveard wrote:
| ok, but who moved a larger volume? they have different
| incentives, of course that result in different optimizations.
| kbird322 wrote:
| There's another recent preprint out that goes into a bit more
| detail on the novelty concept: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02683
| irrational wrote:
| https://twitter.com/gengelstein/status/1353790088942153729
| Hoasi wrote:
| Maybe there is something like the burden of knowledge at play
| here. The more you know about design, the harder it is to design
| unpredictable games. In other words, because they know less about
| game design, hobbyists have less fear, are less judgmental, and
| can come up with more mercurial results.
| slingnow wrote:
| What is the measure of novelty? This seems like a useless thing
| to attempt to measure, and then to claim one group "beats"
| another in it.
|
| I could use an RNG to slam together a bunch of rules and I can
| pretty much guarantee novelty. There, I did it. I "beat" a
| professional designer. Is the game worth playing?
| theabrax wrote:
| Well, you could, but then you only would have generated
| something "new," probably without any sense - something
| bizarre. That's why the authors measure usefulness, too. Only
| if both - novelty and usefulness - come together, you create
| something really creative. There is a lot of research about
| this, especially in the field of psychology.
| supersrdjan wrote:
| I have a friend who will love to hear this. He is an engineer who
| spent the last six years of his spare time (together with his
| family) developing an ambitious board game[1]. It started as an
| after-school project to do with his son... then it snowballed
| into something big... as he started hiring sculptors, designers,
| illustrators... outsourced testing to board game clubs... and now
| he's about to face D-Day... A launch on Kickstarter to determine
| whether all the effort was in vain or not.
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/309625/forest-radgost
| ballenf wrote:
| That looks incredible and such a cool origin story about a
| father nurturing his son's idea into fruition.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > We began our data collection by identifying all board games
| developed by teams of game designers published and ranked on BGG
| between 1990 and 2018.
|
| The entire paper is based on survivorship bias.
| theabrax wrote:
| Interesting. Please, elaborate why you think that is and how
| this - against the background of the paper - would bias the
| results.
| jonplackett wrote:
| This kind of thing has been shown in all sorts of creative
| endeavour. But it ignores consistency, which is the main mark of
| professionalism.
|
| Yeah, if you disregard all rules and norms _sometimes_ you come
| up with something AMAZING that no-one following the rules could
| ever conceive of.
|
| But _most_ of the the time it 's just crap.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 90% of everything is crap. 90% of the 'consistent' games are
| also more crap.
|
| Idie developers came up win Pandemic, Dominion, Settlers of
| Catan etc. Novel game mechanics that changed the board game
| world.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Big Macs vs The Naked Chef[1] is somewhat relevant in this
| context.
|
| [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-
| na...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Thats okay though. Alexey Pajitnov's "Tetris" was all he ever
| needed to do, all the world needed.
|
| Perhaps though I don't treat games like music where I need a
| new fix constantly, am happy to find a new game I enjoy every
| year or so.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The mean quality of amateur designs is lower, but the variance
| is much, much higher.
|
| When a creative market reaches a scale where thousands or
| hundreds of thousands of amateurs can experiment with new
| designs, the number of outliers surpassing the quality of
| professional designs is significant.
|
| The challenge is finding a high-throughput way to filter those
| amateur board games. We like to think the best games will rise
| to the top, but at scale this becomes a popularity contest.
|
| Furthermore, the line between amateur and professional blurs
| quickly when the amateurs start selling their products. Once
| someone starts a Kickstarter or opens a store to sell their
| amateur board game, they are effectively professionals. They
| tend to start behaving as such.
| irrational wrote:
| > We like to think the best games will rise to the top, but
| at scale this becomes a popularity contest.
|
| There are 5,000 new board games released every year (and that
| isn't even including expansions to previously release games).
| The challenge is sifting through thousands of new games to
| pick out the wheat from the chaff. The games from popular
| designers are much more likely to be successful than from up
| and comers. I often wonder how many gems among those 5,000
| games never get noticed.
| xpe wrote:
| > Furthermore, the line between amateur and professional
| blurs quickly when the amateurs start selling their products.
| Once someone starts a Kickstarter or opens a store to sell
| their amateur board game, they are effectively professionals.
| They tend to start behaving as such.
|
| Yes, in the sense that they have to factor in "professional"
| responsibilities, such as paying attention to costs; e.g.
| production and marketing.
|
| However, I think when many people say "professional game
| designer" I think they may (rightly or wrongly) include
| "seasoned" (i.e. with a track record).
|
| Of course, both amateurs and professionals may be seasoned.
| And both may have passion and dedication to their work.
| phnofive wrote:
| I mean, this is such a generic concept - there are parallels in
| viral evolution we see in the real world.
|
| There is such strong survivorship bias in comparing the top
| slice of amateurs to all professionals, who of course have
| different goals.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Keep in mind that hobbyists sometimes spend as much, or more,
| time than professionals at a given craft.
|
| I've known people with incredible skill at specific trades, but
| they had something completely different as their day job.
| svachalek wrote:
| Good point. Einstein is probably the most famous example of
| this, doing his early work while working in a patent office.
|
| Gene Wolfe (Wikipedia: "He was often considered to be not
| only one of the greatest science fiction authors, but one of
| the best American writers regardless of genre.") is another,
| he wrote most of his famous works while working a day job as
| an engineer and editor.
| boogies wrote:
| So true. Microsoft Encarta was never going to out-compete
| Wikipedia. And Windows Shell is never going to rip out bloat
| as ruthlessly as dwm, or lay it on as thickly as Compiz, or
| be as customizable as anything other than GNOME 3+.
| tialaramex wrote:
| But I don't have to play _most_ of the games produced this way.
| So I don 't experience the crap. If you make six wildly
| different board games, five of which are utter trash, and one
| is genius, I never have to play the five trash games _at all_.
|
| This is the same in a lot of creative fields. Novels, pop
| music, video games, movies. A handful of professional reviewers
| might see dozens at a time, but I see a couple based on their
| recommendations, and maybe I like half of what I see even
| though Sturgeon's revelation is correct.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| This is the basis of so many products on kickstarter.
|
| Either that they have a good novel idea but lack the knowledge
| of the professionals to make it a polished, (and balanced in
| the case of games) product, or that they think they have a new
| idea but they don't realise it's just a bad idea that the
| industry has avoided for a reason.
|
| I don't disagree that there's been some great indie games, but
| there's been a lot of highly advertised crap too
| boogies wrote:
| > But most of the the time it's just *bleep*.1
|
| In other words, Sturgeon's revelation
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)
|
| 1(as my browser displays it bc
| https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23624-profanity-filter)
| ballenf wrote:
| Maybe amateurs can more easily escape local maximas _because_
| they don 't know the ingrained rules that lead to them.
| xpe wrote:
| Yes, perhaps.
|
| Also, perhaps expert knowledge of common tendencies can help
| to avoid local maxima.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| That's why it's so fun to go to things like band competitions.
| Everybody plays about four songs. You see so much variety
| there. I guess it doesn't suit those people who just listen to
| the radio. Same about random small cafes or bars with live
| music.
| jonplackett wrote:
| The good thing about that is you're not expecting too much -
| the secret to happiness is low expectations.
|
| But it's not a great method of doing business!
| xpe wrote:
| Well, I don't think it is "the" secret, and probably not a
| "secret" at all. (At least, I hope not.)
|
| Regarding happiness, Maslow's model [1] is well-known and
| makes sense to me. As I understand it, happiness is built
| on a foundation by satisfying: 1.
| physiological needs 2. safety needs 3.
| belongingness & love needs (i.e. connectedness) 4.
| esteem needs 5. self-actualization
|
| Though, per Wikipedia:
|
| - "There is little scientific basis to the idea: Maslow
| himself noted this criticism."
|
| - "However, it has been pointed out that, although the
| ideas behind the hierarchy are Maslow's, the pyramid itself
| does not exist anywhere in Maslow's original work."
|
| And my views:
|
| - I question the universality of #5. There are many people
| who could, technically, accomplish 'more' that are happy
| doing 'less'. Perhaps #5 would be better explained as
| "agency" -- the ability to choose a path in life?
|
| - That said -- I agree with you -- there is something to be
| said for expecting 'less'. This idea is compatible with
| "make the most of what you have". But less relative to
| what? For example, should one expect to be safe from
| violence, at least most of the time?
|
| - The studies around "good" stress versus "bad" stress come
| into play too. This is consistent with sayings such as "the
| bad times help us appreciate the good times" and "we better
| appreciate the things we work for".
|
| - Still, I believe that people, in general, are happier and
| more developed if they are not unnecessarily constrained.
| Unpacking this idea probably would requires a discussion of
| how individuals relate to society as well as normative
| theory of justice.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
| jonplackett wrote:
| I found this to be a much better explanation and takes
| into account the weird ways some people seem to be sad
| when they should be happy vice versa.
|
| https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_surprising_scie
| nce...
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| There is the equivalent at gaming conventions. I remember at
| games expo (Birmigham UK) playing an alpha version of a game
| in the main convention bar one evening.
|
| While reminds me I really must try and put some of my ideas
| for doing a 'Allo 'Allo! / Colditz mash up
| andrewon wrote:
| Survivorship bias is also relevant -- what we can find in the
| market from hobbists got to be the good ones or happened to
| find niche markets that the professionals overlooked/passed.
| dalbasal wrote:
| A group of 20 year old musicians wrote a better song than
| professionally trained composer with 40 years of experience...
| once.
| itronitron wrote:
| or just compare "White Rabbit" to "We Built This City"
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| I don't think I even have a starting point to make that
| comparison
| [deleted]
| superMayo wrote:
| There may be a huge selection bias in their study: insiders are
| more likely to publish their game, weather they are bad or good.
| In comparison, hobbyist have to propose better games in order to
| have the chance to be visible and then published. This would bias
| the study into thinking that hobbyist are more innovative than
| professionals.
| dijereedan wrote:
| That's because there are more hobbyists than professional
| designers.
| technics256 wrote:
| Does anyone have any board games they recommend for groups of
| 3-5? Something that isn't too terrible to learn, and lasts max an
| hour?
| blindluke wrote:
| Sure, I added the following assumptions:
|
| - stuff I play myself
|
| - something I can explain to the 70yo parents in a few minutes
| before the game
|
| - easily available (either recent, or a classic)
|
| Here's five recommendations:
|
| - Cacao (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/171499/cacao)
|
| - Carcassone
| (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/822/carcassonne)
|
| - Alhambra (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6249/alhambra)
|
| - Ticket to Ride
| (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride)
|
| - Samurai (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3/samurai)
| mtm112 wrote:
| Below are some common gateway games that I've had good success
| introducing with non-gamers.
|
| Cooperative: Pandemic
|
| Language Based: Codenames, Taboo
|
| Competitive: Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Munchkin
|
| Card: Monopoly Deal, Exploding Kittens
|
| Notably absent is Catan, which has a steep gap between those
| who have played before and novices, with an especially
| punishing snowball effect.
| tuzemec wrote:
| I really enjoy Wingspan
| (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266192/wingspan)
|
| It's not that hard and it's beautiful.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Wingspan is a beautiful and fun game, but the instructions
| are incomprehensible. I don't have concrete examples, but I
| needed to read the entire book twice to have enough context
| for info at the beginning to make any sense. In a lot of
| ways, this is because of the thing that makes the game great
| (deeply interlocked systems) also makes it hard to find a
| point to insert the read pointer for the explanation.
| irrational wrote:
| Watch the How to Play video instead:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgDgcLI2B0U
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I agree, that's a much better way to learn it. I've also
| had no problem teaching people the game without the
| manual.
|
| Lastly, the "new player" card pack that comes with the
| game works well to get someone up to speed and
| competitive quickly (and is an idea other games could
| afford to learn from).
| Tepix wrote:
| Check out "Deep Sea Adventure", a cute fun japanese micro-game
| where you try to salvage stuff from the ocean floor while
| sharing the limited oxygen supply with your competitors.
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169654/deep-sea-adventur...
|
| You play three rounds, if you're fast you can even squeeze it
| into the lunch break.
|
| This game manages to be fun and also teach you a lot about
| human greed.
| prawn wrote:
| My wife bought me Trekking the National Parks recently, which
| is designed by a hobbyist. It seems very complex at first, but
| you catch on within the first round or so. You often don't know
| who's won until the points are tallied at the end, which makes
| it intriguing.
|
| Enjoy playing it against my 8yo but have also had a few nights
| playing with friends who've enjoyed it also.
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/255708/trekking-national...
| matthiaswh wrote:
| I would recommend going to Board Game Arena and finding a few
| games that seem interesting to you, then give them a try.
| Here's a filter roughly matching your criteria:
|
| https://boardgamearena.com/gamelist?section=all&playernumber...
|
| From the top options presented I can recommend
|
| Kingdom Builder - incredibly easy to learn strategy game with
| just enough depth to keep it interesting over multiple plays
|
| Love Letter - one of ourmyregular games to kick off a game
| night. Quick to pick up, quick to play, and fun.
|
| Coup - similar in many ways to Love Letter, but with bluffing,
| which makes it much more cut throat, but it plays quickly
| enough that no one gets angry, they just get back at you the
| next game.
|
| Colt Express - exciting game with a unique "programming" like
| mechanic that's very simple to pickup, and allows for some
| playfully grievous player interactions.
|
| Gaia - underrated game that shares a lot of mechanics with the
| more popular Carcassone. Very strategic, and the advanced
| version amps up the competitiveness.
|
| Carcassone - one of the most popular games around. Can also
| recommend Hunters & Gatherers.
|
| Stone Age & Puerto Rico - great entry level worker placement
| games.
|
| Granted, it doesn't have every game imaginable (Catan,
| Munchkin, Risk) but its selection is large enough to find good
| games for just about any group.
|
| If you want something more advanced, this doesn't exactly fit
| your criteria, but I highly recommend Terra Mystica. One of my
| favorite games of all time.
| tialaramex wrote:
| We've been playing a fair amount of Kingdom Builder (whereas
| normally we'd play longer games of Terra Mystica or Through
| The Ages that would definitely not quality for this "under an
| hour" constraint)
|
| I think with five players an hour is pushing it for Kingdom
| Builder, but of course this will vary if you've got players
| who are just generally faster at playing board games.
|
| Note that the boxed Kingdom Builder game is actually _four_
| player, BGA is providing a five player expansion (because it
| 's a web site, so the extra little wooden pieces don't cost
| anything) but if you are in the real world that's an issue
| for five.
|
| I feel like Stone Age is a better introduction to worker
| placement than Puerto Rico but I wonder how often you'd
| really get a five player game in an hour. We generally take
| 90+ minutes for four players.
| irrational wrote:
| You'll probably get better responses by asking your question
| here:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/l7kypq/daily_di...
|
| However, some of my recommendations include Parks, Wingspan,
| Splendor, Azul, Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Potion Explosion,
| Kingdomino, Lanterns, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic: Iberia,
| Carcassonne, Concordia or Concordia Venus, Quacks of
| Quedlinburg, Treasure Island, etc. There are literally
| thousands of games that could meet the criteria of 3-5, simple
| rule set, 60 minute play time, and fun game play.
|
| See also this ranked list of family board games:
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/familygames/browse/boardgame?sort=...
|
| Pretty much every game on the first page of that list would
| meet your criteria.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Love Letter and its variants (I like the Batman one myself).
|
| You can explain it to a person who's two-three beers in and
| they'll get the rules well enough to start playing. Rounds last
| 5-10 minutes depending on how much people start analyzing the
| cards on the board. You can play as many rounds as you want.
| Tepix wrote:
| Love Letter is great, i like the variant "Lovecraft letter"
| even more!
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/198740/lovecraft-letter
|
| I've got to try the Batman variant!
| tomaszs wrote:
| It is an interesting research. I can not imagine how hard it is
| to design multiple board games, so that every one is fresh and
| new.
|
| With Summon The JSON it was easy for me, because it is a well
| known card game format but combined with programming learning
| gamification and set in fantasy world, a genre that i always
| loved. All of these things were known to me and was passionate
| about.
|
| That was the main part of the success. But there is really a
| limited number of things a person can be passionate about at a
| given period of time.
|
| Maybe that is why hobbyists seem to be sometimes good at
| designing board games.
| 60654 wrote:
| Gamedev here. Sigh.
|
| One, the measurement of novelty is bad: it's basically the
| measure of whether the game exhibits a novel mashup of mechanics
| according to the BoardGameGeek ontology of mechanics.
|
| This is a _terrible_ definition of novelty, as it ignores all of
| the other aspects of game design, both in gameplay (interesting
| systems, challenges, loops) and non-game play (fiction, setting,
| presentation, etc). Who measures novelty as "mashup of
| mechanics"?
|
| Two, the measure of knowledge diversity is based on BGG reports
| of how many genres the designers have worked in. This is, again,
| not only questionable, but also leads to weird effects: imagine
| knocking Salman Rushdie, JRR Tolkien, or Umberto Eco for having
| low knowledge diversity because Amazon says they write books in
| only one or two genres!
|
| But fine, even assuming that, the actual effects are not strong.
| Looking at the figures, the scatter plots are all over the place,
| and the trend lines fit poorly.
|
| And finally, the main problem is: sure, if you compare hobbyists
| (who make what they want for fun) with professionals (who are
| making a product that needs to sell more than a small handful of
| copies), of course you're going to find that hobbyists are more
| free to experiment with wild permutations of mechanics. But in
| doing so, they conflate personal ability with situational
| constraints. What about professional designers if they were able
| to work without commercial constraints, like hobbyists?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| There's also a part of me that wonders if novelty is overrated.
| I'm less familiar with the history of board games, but, at
| least in video games, my impression is that many really clever
| ideas never really go anywhere, and, of the ones that do, the
| first game to incorporate a mechanic rarely ends up also being
| one of the ones that put it to the best use.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| When a game does put a novel mechanic to best use ... was the
| novelty overrated? Or the game that first introduced it
| (poorly) overrated?
|
| Regardless, I think we both agree we want novel games. No one
| still wants to be playing Senet. ;-)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet
| whatshisface wrote:
| Your argument sounds something like, "Mining is overrated,
| the true source of our materials is smelting."
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It's more meant to be an, "Ideas are cheap, execution is
| everything," kind of sentiment.
| tines wrote:
| Strong disagree. Good ideas are rare, and nobody knows
| how to come up with them reliably. (For example, in the
| world of cinema, see how the writers of the subsequent
| Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and the people around
| them, had no idea what made the first one good.)
|
| An idea without execution is still valuable, but
| execution without an idea is worthless.
| irrational wrote:
| > the people around them, had no idea what made the first
| one good
|
| That's easy - Johnny Depp in black eyeliner.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > > Ideas are cheap, execution is everything
|
| > Good ideas are rare, and nobody knows how to come up
| with them reliably.
|
| The operative word there is " _good_ ideas are rare ".
| The claim is that you don't know whether a idea is good
| until it's been executed on (which seems plausible, and
| at any rate you haven't contradicted that), and that good
| ideas are rare, so most ideas are crap (which you
| yourself just asserted). Thus, the expected value of a
| given idea (absent execution) is very low, aka cheap.
| tines wrote:
| I mean, I think it's obvious that the OP meant "good
| ideas" when he said "ideas are cheap." His entire point
| was "novelty" and "many really clever ideas" are not
| worth anything without the execution to go along with
| them.
|
| > The claim is that you don't know whether a idea is good
| until it's been executed on
|
| I don't think his claim was just epistemological the way
| you're interpreting it, and if it was, then I will
| withdraw since it's not the idea I meant to engage with.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > I mean, I think it's obvious that the OP meant "good
| ideas"
|
| Eh, I consider "Ideas that are _known for a fact_ to be
| good (ie useful) are useful (ie valuable, provided they
| aren 't already devalued by ubiquity[0])." to be
| sufficiently tautological that I would not expect someone
| (intellegent and good-faith enough to be worth engaging
| with) to be arguing against it. Although note the
| distinction between merely good ideas, versus ideas that
| you actually _know_ are good, since the work of turning
| the former into the latter was what I assumed they were
| attributing to execution.
|
| > I don't think his claim was just epistemological the
| way you're interpreting it, and if it was, then I will
| withdraw since it's not the idea I meant to engage with.
|
| Fair enough; I'm not sure we even have a disagreement
| over facts so much as over how we're categorizing things
| and the terminology therefor.
|
| 0: Eg, "writing" or "general-purpose computers" are
| almost _incalculably_ valuable ideas, but they 're not
| worth anything in a supply-and-demand sense because
| everyone in the world already knows about them.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree, life and the internet have taught me that "nothing
| new under the sun" is true.
|
| Novelty and ideas are golden. There would be no good
| execution of said idea if the idea wasn't put first first
| (of course).
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| > An idea without execution is still valuable, but
| execution without an idea is worthless.
|
| FIFA?
|
| (Not trying to be snarky, but genuinely motioning to
| something I believe to be execution without novel ideas.)
| tines wrote:
| I know what you mean. But I don't think that disproves my
| point, it just shows that people like garbage.
|
| And that's ok. I love garbage sometimes, there is
| absolutely zero harm in garbage. But that doesn't make it
| anything other than garbage. The harm comes when you
| think the garbage is gold.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The international association football/ soccer governing
| body? Or the video game series?
|
| FIFA the organisation was much more corrupt than you'd
| expect, and so I suppose to the extent this organisation
| was novel (there are a _lot_ of international sports
| bodies) the novelty was apparently undesirable.
|
| But I think the FIFA video game may have been the first
| to introduce several awful ideas, which were nevertheless
| novel. Blind buy "lootboxes" were introduced to the FIFA
| games fairly early because fans were familiar with the
| idea of buying a pack of "trading cards" in the real
| world which are also blind buy.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| It sounds more like, "Mining is overrated, 90% of the work
| in getting useful materials is smelting.", actually.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Novelty is overrated due to a selection bias - it implicitly
| tends to mean "novel and at least good for a change of pace".
|
| Adding in a feature that say previous winners become the new
| boss and losers get a bonus inheritance from their prior run
| could be hailed as novel and doing good things for pace.
|
| Having to randomly roll 10 dice x 365.25x days x 18 years for
| events to create your starting character would be very novel.
| Especially if it is a commom occurance that all four players
| to die before turn zero due to childhood disasters resulting
| in the winner being the one who lived the longest at eight
| years old before dying of cancer would be terrible to
| actually play.
| irrational wrote:
| > the first game to incorporate a mechanic rarely ends up
| also being one of the ones that put it to the best use
|
| This definitely applies to board games. Dominion was the
| first deck-builder board game and is still fairly popular,
| but it has been superseded by many other superior deck
| builders that came out afterwards.
| bobbyi_settv wrote:
| Definitely disagree. There are other successful games that
| use deckbuilding as an element of a larger game (in the
| vein of Clank or Quest for El Dorado), but no pure
| deckbuilding game has come close to overtaking Dominion as
| top dog.
|
| If we use logged plays for the past month on BGG as one
| datapoint, Dominion has more than than Aeon's End,
| Ascension and Marvel Legendary combined.
|
| Sure, there is a specific population of people who log
| their plays and it differs from the gameplaying public as a
| whole, but if anything it veers more towards "cult of the
| new" and away from people who still play an older game
| because it's what they have.
|
| EDIT: It looks like Star Realms has almost as many logged
| plays this month as Dominion, but I would still maintain
| that Dominion is in no way "superseded" even if it is no
| longer the only relevant game in its genre.
| Marazan wrote:
| I have yet to come across a better deck builder than
| Dominion.
|
| It is so pure and focused that it is absolutely the best
| deck builder there is IMO.
|
| So many other deck builders either completely mess up the
| extremely careful calibration of chance that exists in a
| deck builder or the 'other' game that is tacked on to the
| deck building engine interacts badly or in very swingy
| ways.
| grawprog wrote:
| >And finally, the main problem is: sure, if you compare
| hobbyists (who make what they want for fun) with professionals
| (who are making a product that needs to sell more than a small
| handful of copies), of course you're going to find that
| hobbyists are more free to experiment with wild permutations of
| mechanics. But in doing so, they conflate personal ability with
| situational constraints. What about professional designers if
| they were able to work without commercial constraints, like
| hobbyists?
|
| This last paragraph reminds me of the video game world and
| common arguments on indie games vs AAA/big studio games.
|
| Indie games with their hit or miss experimentation, AAA games
| with their formulaic selling strategy.
|
| But in the video game world there have been professionals who
| have stepped back into the indie world to make something lower
| budget and more experimental. Those end up being about as hit
| or miss as the 'actual', for lack of a better word, indie
| games.
|
| So I guess my point is, I think the constraints themselves do
| play a part in hobbyist type games and a professional under the
| same constraints is likely to produce the same kind of thing.
|
| Something experimental that may be awesomely fun or it could be
| kinda lame.
| scollet wrote:
| I think you both are hitting on that thin slice; the Venn
| diagram of strong design, managerial pressure, and resources.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| A big part of the actual success of a game is the aesthetics
| and the marketing. How good the actual game is doesn't
| necessarily correlate.
|
| Indie games these days are as conservative as regular
| studios. Loads of a proliferation of the last big thing etc.
| The real standout indie genre is porn games and even those
| stick to a generally similar design.
|
| The problem for developers from larger studios is that the
| bizdev side of things is largely kept apart from them. So
| they might make something within a niche that's great but is
| never going to find an audience.
|
| Which is a long winded way of saying no one bar hobbyists or
| people taking an extreme roll of the dice are operating
| without commercial constraints.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Genuinely curious about porn games. They all seems to be
| either a show of pretty models with somewhat controllable
| animation or a "nothing special" game with explicit scenes
| thrown in for your enjoyment.
|
| Some of these games can be excellent, I am thinking about
| some Japanese visual novels here, but they all seem to be
| rather formulaic.
|
| Maybe I am missing something big here. I am not too much
| into porn games, and you are unlikely to stumble upon them
| unless you are actively looking for it.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Honestly I defer most of those questions to someone that
| understands the landscape better. It was an underserved
| market though and lots of people enjoy unrealistic
| depictions of sex so combining that with games is hardly
| rocket science.
|
| The bit I find interesting is despite the porn industry
| in the west being big on tech like streaming and VR it's
| not really there on games. Too much reliance on real
| people or something?
|
| More generally I think it's super interesting how
| puritanical the games market is in comparison with books
| or movies. Even within serious games.
| 99_00 wrote:
| >And finally, the main problem is: sure, if you compare
| hobbyists (who make what they want for fun) with professionals
| (who are making a product that needs to sell more than a small
| handful of copies), of course you're going to find that
| hobbyists are more free to experiment with wild permutations of
| mechanics. But in doing so, they conflate personal ability with
| situational constraints.
|
| Is that the main problem with the article, or is it the main
| point of the article.
|
| >voluntary teams of users...are driven by different incentives
| and motivations
| burmer wrote:
| > What about professional designers if they were able to work
| without commercial constraints, like hobbyists? Exactly, they
| should look at indy developers like Nate Hayden, Hollandspiele
| and others who make niche games, but professionally.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "A camel is a horse designed by a committee." (Although I heard
| it as 'A donkey is a horse....'.)
|
| I don't question the professional designer's skill sets: just
| that they have a committee that has to vet the idea/game. And
| that's where things could sour.
|
| As I have heard professional artists (writers, film-makers,
| musicians, journalists) describe it, the professional begins to
| self-censor: not even pursuing ideas they perceive will likely
| fail to pass muster with the "committee".
| IAmAtWork wrote:
| I know what you mean. I have same issue with card games now and
| rts craze before. It is insanely hard to properly balance a
| game and when I see people going crazy over one man made card
| game I already know what reviews will be. This is not to diss
| any indie developers. I am one of them. But can we actually
| talk about game design theory and how games are designed. Can
| journalist check Gamasutra nad gdc vault before writing blog
| post on genre
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > But can we actually talk about game design theory and how
| games are designed.
|
| That is antithetical to how I view art.
|
| Let the people playing the games sort the wheat from the
| chaff. There's a reason why "Settlers of Catan" and "Ticket
| to Ride" are on big box store shelves now.
| tubularhells wrote:
| It's because they aim at normies, not boardgamers (normies
| are the risk/monopoly crowd). Also they were on the market
| 'first' with a mass appeal. They are, however, not good
| games.
|
| A million flies eating shit doesn't make shit good.
| krisgee wrote:
| >Can journalist check Gamasutra nad gdc vault before writing
| blog post on genre
|
| No because if they take time to do research they'll miss the
| views they could have gotten if they just slam out a piece
| and (basically) nobody is going to pay extra for a journalist
| who's also an expert on board game design.
|
| It's the biggest problem with journalism today.
| andredz wrote:
| Is this the vault you are referring to:
| https://www.gdcvault.com/ ?
| im3w1l wrote:
| One leg up hobbyists can have on professionals is hyper-local
| audience targetting.
|
| At my alma mater there is a tradition of putting on shows. They
| are a mixture of situational comedy, singing, and basically
| anything entertaining you can do on a scene. Crucially, they are
| _by the university_ , _for the university_ , and _about the
| university_. They are some of the funniest things I 've ever
| seen. And they achieve this by having an incredible amount of
| injokes and references, that just wouldn't work for a general
| audience.
|
| So this would be my message to hobbyist board game makers: Make
| one aboout your university, company, town, or maybe about your
| other hobby. Tell your own story. Reference people and events
| that will be familiar.
| toyg wrote:
| Sometimes I think researchers do not understand second-order
| effects of their pet theories.
|
| The societal/market result of stuff like this will inevitably be
| something like "Let's crowdsource more of these creative
| activities, so we can drive down the already rock-bottom
| compensation rates of the few jobs that cannot be automated -
| this research says we're not going to lose anything on the
| quality side anyway". In the (laudable) quest to make amateurs
| respectable, they might well end up stripping even professionals
| of what little respectability they had accrued.
|
| It's likely that democratization of creativity is a fundamentally
| unstoppable force in itself (like we've seen in photography,
| music, video etc); there is no need to hasten its rise though.
| scotth wrote:
| I'm curious about what you see as the end state.
|
| What does this possible outcome mean for the people who are
| making games now?
|
| What does it mean for the entrants?
|
| Both short term and long term. How do you see this going?
| faceplanted wrote:
| I'm not him, but looking at the other markets this
| "democratisation of creativity" has happened in, it seems
| like we're going to get more of the patronage model where the
| professionals and better hobbyists can individually put their
| work up for subscribers with some free content as
| advertising.
|
| I don't know how this will work with board games which have
| physical products that need creating and sending. It might be
| the right place for distributed "print shops" with card
| printers, 3D printers, and laser cutters to provide the
| actual game pieces.
| krok wrote:
| If person A wants to get paid to do something and person B
| wants to do the same thing to a similar quality for free as a
| leisure activity, isn't it sort of expected that it will become
| hard for person A to make a living? Doesn't it make sense that
| to make a living they will have to either produce something far
| better than the amateur, or do the parts that amateurs don't
| want to do, or differentiate themselves in some other way?
|
| It seems to me that it would be an odd society which didn't
| even allow people to _ask questions_ about the relative merits
| of person A and person B 's work, in case they found out
| something which would be disruptive to person A's business
| model.
| ballenf wrote:
| Predicting second- and subsequent order effects accurately is
| basically impossible for any non-trivial issue.
|
| Here I'd argue that the effect may instead be that
| professionals are able to figure out what the amateurs are
| doing differently and incorporate it into their discipline.
|
| If you hold up the research trying to figure out which second-
| order effect is more likely, you'll never get any research done
| on anything of substance. (You see, the second order effect of
| your suggestion is an overall suppression of research. Damn,
| arguing from second-order effects sure is tempting!)
| toyg wrote:
| Suppression, no; but choosing priorities carries an element
| of ethical responsibility. You can choose to dedicate your
| time towards improving chemical weapons or towards improving
| harvest yields. Better chemical weapons will likely come
| about anyway, but why hasten their arrival?
| ballenf wrote:
| Isn't that a first order effect though?
|
| A second order effect would be researching a life-saving
| drug for a lifestyle condition. You research means people
| have less incentive to live healthily and end up dying even
| sooner from some other diet-related disease. The disease
| you cured would have scared them "straight" diet-wise.
| PeterisP wrote:
| In general, researchers don't try to understand second-order
| effects of their pet theories, because the consequences of the
| theories are not relevant to the theories being true or false -
| it's an "is-vs-ought" distinction.
|
| This is an article that observes and describes aspects of how X
| influences Y. The question whether Y and its implications are
| good or bad is orthogonal to that; any discussion about whether
| Y should be hastened or slowed down would be simply offtopic.
| Discussion about which _other_ factors would hasten or slow
| down this effect would be relevant though.
|
| I'd go even beyond and argue that researchers should explicitly
| and intentionally _avoid_ considering such "second-order
| effects". Let's assume that this research is true (perhaps it's
| not, I have no strong opinion on that) and, as you state,
| acknowledging that "this research says we're not going to lose
| anything on the quality side anyway" will cause some unwelcome
| consequences. In that case, what should we do about it? Should
| we avoid saying the truth because we don't like it? Should we
| _lie_ and say "oh, we _are_ going to lose on the quality side
| " because we don't like the second-order social effects of
| acknowledging the truth? I'd argue that allowing the social
| consequences (how things _ought_ to be) to affect your view of
| reality (how tings _are_ ) is anathema to the concept of
| science, we should instead strive for objectivity even if (and
| especially if) we don't like what the looking glass is showing
| us.
| toyg wrote:
| See my other answer to the sibling comment.
| johannesgoslar wrote:
| The article seems to not talk about the difference between game
| designers and game developers which seem quite relevant in this
| context. It is even explictly naming "developers" in companies
| but using it wrong in context, it isn't a game developer's job to
| come up with a novel idea, that would be the company game
| designer. (Though people might fill both roles). To most people
| the amount of changes a a publishing company makes will be quite
| surprising, it will change a lot to everything about a game if it
| arrives by an author's submission and is gonna hit the market.
| The author might have submitted a novel idea and interesting
| core, but the raw games are often bad in pacing, balance,
| scoring, emotional engagement and the most people would just
| dismiss them. Good developers will be able to turn the
| interesting bit into a good game and dismiss the rest.
| SeanBoocock wrote:
| This is a good point and probably lost on people who aren't
| board game enthusiasts. In video games a "game developer" is a
| broad characterization that could apply to anyone on the
| development team. "Game designer" is a specific role on that
| team.
|
| In board games developer and designer are distinct roles. If
| you have a familiarity with modern, you may know the names of
| the designers of certain games, but the developers of those
| games are essential for turning the raw specification of the
| game into the box of tokens and cards you buy at Target. A lot
| of hobbyist games don't get that development work and while
| they might have unique ideas, they are essentially prototype.
| mkl95 wrote:
| This is not exclusive to board game design. When I work on a
| personal project, I can be really creative and produce some good
| looking applications. However, as a professional developer
| working for someone else, I have to follow some guidelines that
| can result in boring, generic-looking stuff. This boring,
| generic-looking stuff allows me to consistently make a decent
| living, though.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Yes. Like writing reports for a company versus personal
| writing. You often have to use corporate templates and follow a
| house writing style.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Bethesda is a great example of this. Up until Fallout 4 or
| so, the company kept producing games with similar versions of
| Creation Engine.
|
| Despite many fans hating the buggy engine Bethesda was using,
| and the fact their new games were basically spinoffs of their
| previous work, some of them are among the best-selling games
| of all time.
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