6 ms·

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 th

• IAmAtWork 6y ago
  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
  • 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.
  • andredz 6y ago
    Is this the vault you are referring to: https://www.gdcvault.com/ https://www.gdcvault.com/ ?
  • JKCalhoun 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      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.
      • sdenton4 6y ago
        Nah, Catan is an EXCELLENT game, especially in the context of what was available when it was created in the 90's. I don't play it anymore because I've played enough for three lifetimes, as of ten years ago. But it's good enough that I have played it that much! Ticket to Ride is entirely forgettable, though... It feels like Candyland, but without the meta-commentary on the illusion of free will.
        • JKCalhoun 6y ago
          You say that like Candyland is a bad game. ;-)
        • tubularhells 6y ago
          Catan breaks when I have all the wood and you need wood to win but I refuse to trade with anyone. It's a very aged and crummy design. Many people just don't know better.
          • sdenton4 6y ago
            That's hilarious. The Root discussion forums are an endless mess of issues like this, for which the answer is uniformly 'pay attention to the other players and don't let that happen!' (With the added problem of being Root, so that knowing what other players are up to takes about two dozen games if experience.) And yet root is still a pretty high rated game...
• mumblemumble 6y ago
  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.
  • whatshisface 6y ago
    Your argument sounds something like, "Mining is overrated, the true source of our materials is smelting."
    • mumblemumble 6y ago
      It's more meant to be an, "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything," kind of sentiment.
      • tines 6y ago
        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.
        • TeaDrunk 6y ago
          > 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.)
          • tialaramex 6y ago
            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.
• grawprog 6y ago
  >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 6y ago
    I think you both are hitting on that thin slice; the Venn diagram of strong design, managerial pressure, and resources.
  • meheleventyone 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
• burmer 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
  "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".
• 99_00 6y ago
  >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
• Groxx 6y ago
  Yeah, even a glance at the graphs is enough to raise significant doubts. This has the smell of p-hacking to claim/find a correlation where there is none.
• theabrax 6y ago
  IMHO it is not as flawed as the way you present it. >>> 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"? Using the mashup of mechanics to measure novelty seems logical for two reasons. First, in creativity research, it is quite common to measure novelty as uniqueness or as distinctiveness regarding already existing "solutions." One way to do so is using the combinations of the base elements of the creative output. There is also similar research doing the same with patents. Second, the authors refer to the MDA framework in their method section as an explanation of why they use mechanics. Following this framework, mechanics are not only the core elements of a game but also the only thing a game designer is able to influence - not the dynamics (i.e., run-time behavior, which seems to be "gameplay" in your wording) nor aesthetics (i.e., emotional responses of the player, which seems to be "non-game play" in your wording). >>> 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! Why do you think using genres to measure knowledge diversity is questionable? What is your concern about doing so? Please elaborate if you seem to have such a strong opinion on that. Again, there is quite some research (esp. in creative industries) about how working in specific genres might influence how you think/understand things, i.e., how you come up with solutions, what solutions you come up with, how you talk about them, and so on. Regarding the proposed weird effect: you (illogically) compare a single author's knowledge diversity with a team's diversity. However, the authors do not compare a fantasy author against a fantasy/horror author, but how a team with low diversity (3 Tolkiens) would compete against a more diverse team (Rushdie, Tolkien, and Eco - for the sake of the example). >>> 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? Although the last question might be interesting to answer, what you describe before is the direct effect of being a hobbyist, resp. professional on creativity. However, being a hobbyist, resp. professional is the moderation effect, hence the paper looks at "how the effect of diversity on creativity changes because being a hobbyist or professional." All this, however, is described or at least referred to in the paper.
• jdkee 6y ago
  Honest questions: Wouldn't BGG ratings be a good proxy for measuring novelty? Apart from the fact that the rating system can be gamed, it does appear to have validity from the community's perspective.