14 ms·
Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
- cedex12 6y ago> 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 6y agoPresumably most bad hobbyist designs don't make it to market, and most hobbyists develop their best idea once and that's that.
- kthxb 6y agodoes creative imply good, though? that's the real question
- mikepurvis 6y agoYeah, 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 6y ago"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. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- smogcutter 6y agoLook 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoTotally, 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.
- alickz 6y agoThey do quality creative as meaning "novel and useful" in their abstract. Novel can be a double edged sword but useful implies good I believe.
- throwaway2245 6y agoThis matches my expectation, it's just that I'd expect the household-invented games to be novel/creative and bad on average.
- johannesgoslar 6y agoYou 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 6y agoExactly. 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
- lmm 6y agoProfessional 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 6y agoThat 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 6y agoI engaged with the paper. They didn't do a controlled test of anything. They ran some stats on BoardGameGeek.
- johannesgoslar 6y agoI 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.
- epage 6y agoIf you want a game from a designer that isn't safe, check out https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/295905/cosmic-frog https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/295905/cosmic-frog
- avereveard 6y agook, but who moved a larger volume? they have different incentives, of course that result in different optimizations.
- jonplackett 6y agoThis 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.
- Gravityloss 6y agoThat'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.
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoThere 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
- jonplackett 6y agoThe 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 6y agoWell, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
- toyg 6y agoSometimes 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 6y agoI'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 6y agoI'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.
- PeterisP 6y agoIn 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.
- mkl95 6y agoThis 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 6y agoYes. Like writing reports for a company versus personal writing. You often have to use corporate templates and follow a house writing style.
- mkl95 6y agoBethesda 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.
- polote 6y agoI 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
- fireattack 6y ago> 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.
- mkl95 6y agoI 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".
- technics256 6y agoDoes 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 6y agoSure, 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 https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/171499/cacao) - Carcassone (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/822/carcassonne https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/822/carcassonne) - Alhambra (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6249/alhambra https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6249/alhambra) - Ticket to Ride (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride) - Samurai (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3/samurai https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3/samurai)
- mtm112 6y agoBelow 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 6y agoI really enjoy Wingspan (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266192/wingspan https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266192/wingspan) It's not that hard and it's beautiful.
- InitialLastName 6y agoWingspan 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.
- Tepix 6y agoI 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.
- johannesgoslar 6y agoThe 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 6y agoThis 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.
- markkat 6y agoIf you use a product, you are aware of things that people that don't use it, aren't.
- loriverkutya 6y agoIf 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.
- Kirth 6y agoThis article sure could do with some pictures!
- js8 6y agoJust reading at the next post https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364 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.
- supersrdjan 6y agoI 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 https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/309625/forest-radgost
- ballenf 6y agoThat looks incredible and such a cool origin story about a father nurturing his son's idea into fruition.
- supersrdjan 6y agoYup. Particularly the part where the sculptor modeled one of the minis after a lego prototype constructed by the son. Prototype: https://www.radgostforest.com/images/creatures/besomarLego.jpg https://www.radgostforest.com/images/creatures/besomarLego.j... Sculpt: https://www.radgostforest.com/images/creatures/besomar3dModel.jpg https://www.radgostforest.com/images/creatures/besomar3dMode...
- fallingknife 6y ago> 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 6y agoInteresting. Please, elaborate why you think that is and how this - against the background of the paper - would bias the results.
- fallingknife 6y agoThey missed all the amateur designers whose games were not published and ranked. So only the best amateur designers made it into the sample.
- tomaszs 6y agoIt 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 6y agoGamedev 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?
- IAmAtWork 6y agoI 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
- krisgee 6y ago>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.
- slingnow 6y agoWhat 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 6y agoWell, 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.
- superMayo 6y agoThere 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 6y agoThat's because there are more hobbyists than professional designers.
- contravariant 6y agoAm I just bad at reading the graphs or is the effect size negligible?
- Hoasi 6y agoMaybe 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.
- hn_asker 6y agoAn expert is an expert whatever their title claims.
- im3w1l 6y agoOne 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.
- travisporter 6y agoWhat 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 6y agoDid 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.
- travisporter 6y agoSloppy on my part, sorry :/ but in my defense it was paywalled
- LolWolf 6y ago"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.
- irrational 6y agohttps://twitter.com/gengelstein/status/1353790088942153729 https://twitter.com/gengelstein/status/1353790088942153729
- kbird322 6y agoThere's another recent preprint out that goes into a bit more detail on the novelty concept: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02683 https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02683