Tag Archives: tabletop

Every Game Is Beautiful, and Nobody is Playing

Posted on by dconstructions
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There was an old joke in the 1980s when the conversation turned to overpopulation. It went “everyone thinks there’s too many people, but nobody wants to leave.” In a similar way there are too many tabletop games but nobody wants to stop designing.

This week the great Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower became another critical voice adding to this call and he hit the same notes most of us have: the problem is not really how many games there are but that there’s too much consumption and conspicuous consumption. As I said a few months back, we can start by buying less and playing more. We can use libraries and build groups; focus on experiences not things. But I don’t think we should end the discussion there – especially when companies and publication and marketing aren’t part of that solution.

Also, let’s be clear: this is a problem for everyone: for companies, for designers, for players. The average time a player gets to play a board game is plummeting. It was under two four years ago and for some hobby gamers its probably going to go below one. People are buying far far more than they can ever play. Then they go to gaming groups where, in my experience, they form a queue, waiting for the rotation when they will be chosen to get one of their games on the table, one time. Then the fancy car has to go back in the garage, hardly driven, onto a shelf of shame that tells the world they have failed. To paraphrase RS Benedict: every game is beautiful, and nobody is playing.

But nobody wants to stop. So I have a different question: if this is the new normal, how do we make it work?

Let’s set up some background and talk for a moment about Robert Cialdini’s six pillars of persuasion. Like a lot of pop psych books of the 70s I’m sure much could be done to debunk Cialdinis work but the CIA found it useful enough so let’s assume for now it’s got some usefulness. Cialdini basically identified six reasons why people will agree with or be persuaded of something, besides just the quality of the thing itself. Here they are:

  • Reciprocation. If someone does something for us we are likely to do want to do something nice for them in return.
  • Liking. Do people that I like like this thing? Is it a thing that is like other things I like?
  • Authority. Has some authority decided this thing is worthy or high quality?
  • Scarcity. Is this a thing that I might miss out on? Or am I vulnerable to some effect of not having it?
  • Commitment. Is this a thing I am already into? Is it my brand or identity?
  • Consensus. Is everyone else doing the thing?

I am of the opinion that there is nothing inherently wrong with making people aware of your product. In fact, I think it can be a thing of great moral good! But that said, marketing has always been driven by anxiety. As Don Draper says, you create an itch in your market and then offer the product as the balm. The itch tends to come in three flavours: it solves a problem you have, you’re vulnerable to something without it, or all the cools kids are doing it. Cialdinis list are the most common ways the itch can be created. An authority will tell you that it’s cool, or good, or dangerous to be without. They will associate the product with values and ideas and celebrities you already like, so the message is intensified. They’ll create limited time offers and price “drops” to create scarcity and false reciprocity. And once you’re on board they’ll give you reasons to buy in with commitment and you’ll organically bring in your friends.

And all of that is a monstrous evil that makes me sick to my stomach but but but the six pillars remain in play even if we get rid of marketing. We do and should look to authorities, our friends, standards, comparisons and repeatability as metrics for if we should investigate and hence own/do a thing. That makes sense! And as soon as there are more things than we have time to evaluate we turn to the voices of the reviewer and the critic (which aren’t the same thing). Even, indeed, to the influencer. These things are necessary and important elements of pretty much any aspect of art and culture. So is consensus and liking too. Sorry, mum and dad, but if all my friends jumped off a bridge I might suspect they had a good reason to do so. My friends are wicked smart and have good taste.

My point is these are systems we tend to use no matter what. They have been inflamed by marketing, and they may just be habit, but they make sense. So what happens when those things break down? The truth is a lot of this is happening everywhere – more and more people want to buy experiences, not things because the entire western world is in a grip of stuff-malaise. We all have too much stuff, and we even need to pay people like Marie Kondo to get rid of it for us. So we can look around us and see how other entertainment forms are dealing with this. And the truth is they too are struggling.

The dangers are clear from that. In the 1950s and 60s rock music got big but it also had a lot of churn. Individual artists could become big but often it was the producers who made the real money, switching from hot new client to hot new client. Ultimately though, they depended on huge tentpole stars like Elvis and The Beatles to make reliable money. When those vanished and the industry diversified in the 70s, nobody knew what to do. When the Bee Gees were the last big stars left, they were played so much on radio that this triggered the DISCO SUCKS movement. But the radio was running on the old rules: play what was visibly popular. Music was fragmenting into scenes that were invisible to a larger audience and difficult to turn a profit from. The industry eventually found the solution by making themselves into a kind of automated factory – companies like Stock, Aitken and Waterman made themselves in a factory. They found young artists, wrote them their songs, gave them their look and then moved onto the next artist when the fad was over. Only a precious few like Kylie Minogue or Madonna managed to gain some kind of self-mastery over this process, by doing it to themselves. Now, of course, Taylor Swift made sure she did it herself from the beginning; her success is as much because of her sheer business acumen as her song writing and voice. She is Vertical Integration made flesh.

Stock, Aitken and Waterman in their heyday. What a bunch of douchebags.

Of course, music scenes retaliated to this through punk, garage, grunge and indie movements, trying to recreate authenticity. Over time, though, the goal of the indie was to become mainstream. And that model now is also gone. The indie has grown tinier and tinier until it is a cottage industry, and the giants have become gargantuan. Spotify, the factory at the top makes billions; indie artists that might have cut an album in the 1980s and made a few grand can now reach the entire planet to make a few cents. The same thing is currently happening to movies. Martin Scorsese has talked about how movies now are made for 5 million or 500 million, and nothing in between. Anthony Mackie has explained how there are no movie stars any more, only franchises and characters; and the only movies that can be made are for “16 year olds or China”. Again, the indies are shrinking and the giants are behemoths, and the giants are machines. (Here’s a link to A.O. Scott talking about the same thing in the NYT but it’s paywalled.)

Will this happen to board games? In a small way, these trends are there, with big companies like Awaken Realms running two gigantic kickstarters a year and smaller games now struggling to be seen on crowdfunding. Likewise brands and franchises are way more important than ever. But it’s not quite the same just yet, because board games have less money behind them and are less transferrable. A better comparison is to television, perhaps: not only do both of them go directly into our lounge rooms, but gamers like TV audiences are fickle and easily bored and are ready to change channels. Streaming has certainly put a lot of new terrible pressures on television but the quality has only gone up along with the quantity. The only thing that is threatening TV right now is too many streaming channels locking off content, but people are willing to pay. The cost though is it is easy for great stuff to be missed. Every single TV show is reduced to a tiny rectangle in a long strip of rectangles, and few survive the first episode. If you’re very very lucky people will watch the whole series, which is now the most important measure of success, what the industry calls “completion”. TV therefore is now full of shows with mystery that NEED to be watched all the way through. Board games have done the same thing: more legacy games, more campaign games, more story games. The appeal of something like Gloomhaven is for once, you know what you are playing every Thursday night. That’s exactly what people like about television: the choice hurts. They want to just go “oh it’s Thursday, the show I like is on” – or at least a new series has dropped for me to binge.

But still, we need ways to navigate TV, and board games. Music used to use the hit parade to keep people informed of what was “hot”. Movies had big critics and reviewers (now completely broken by review bombing and youtube manosphere lunatics). And note: there hasn’t been a time before when there were so many movies that you felt even the reviwers were behind. But nowadays, this is the situation with both TV and with board games. TV critics are mostly ignored and just pointing to things as they drive by. Community sharing has evaporated. TV used to be about the water cooler moments, as they said in the 90s – people would gather at work to talk about the thing on TV last night. Every now and then a show drops bit by bit and for a brief moment the world feels a shared connection: there was some kind of beautiful moment of community I felt when a lot of my friends were watching Wandavision. This is also I think why people have reacted so strongly to Taylor Swift tours: it’s a shared experience. But quickly it faded away and TV no longer has this. It’s not a shared hobby any more. Few people are enjoying the same thing at the same time. So there’s no social proof in the medium. No authority because of the death of reviewers. And no scarcity at all. Although the new fear of deletion is real, we still think like we have been taught to: everything will be online forever. That’s why DVD sales are so low. Who needs to own things?

This means there’s no commitment either. There’s a lot of internet memes about how thing X has been completely forgotten by culture, so it must suck, but we can’t commit to a thing if it burns out in eight episodes but is simultaneously always available. I’m old enough to remember the need to circulate VHS tapes to see our favourite shows: that kind of desperate scarcity created commitment. You HAD to be a fan or you couldn’t even see the show. This is why again big companies know they can’t sell you on character X or film Y: they have to sell you on a franchise that maybe they can hit you with on every single platform. If they don’t, you’ll lose interest. Star Wars is fucking everywhere, but it has to be, or you’d forget about it.

The exact same trend has occurred in board games. We’ve gone from around 250 games coming out a year to 5000 in the space of ten years. Reviewers and critics cannot keep up. Tastemakers who were the kings two years ago are fading already. And although prizes matter, the Spiel Deh Jahres judges recently admitted that they have to play games five days a week to even get through 10% of the releases of a year. So slowly awards are failing to be useful. There goes authority. Since people aren’t playing the same games with the same groups, there’s no commitment and there’s no consensus. Since there’s so many games, it’s even becoming hard to follow your favourite designers, so Liking is drying up. And scarcity is a joke: the whole problem is owning too many games.

So here’s the problem: our six usual ways of finding out what we might like do not operate well inside this new environment of total abundance. When there’s a ton of money it turns into the minnows and whales option like movies; when there’s a different financial model it turns into a sea of rectangles like television. So far, TV hasn’t really solved this, except by going back to word of mouth. We ask each other what’s good – our friends being the only Liking and Authority that we have left. TV is trying to get us with algorithms which aren’t working well and – as social media has shown – really dangerous, so we tend to distrust them. Board games can’t use the algorithm as they are now, because we have to go out and buy a box. And while word of mouth is good, only a few of us play in-house with our families. But I certainly think that is the dream now, and where the biggest games tend to succeed. We want that TV experience in things like Gloomhaven: this will be for me and my significant other to play regularly, reliably. (In this area, I think RPGs can do really well, too.) We can see what products are good – but we don’t know how to solve the problem of finding them.

That’s what I mean by a different question. Since this keeps happening, since abundance is changing mediums so that Cialdini’s principles aren’t taking off, what comes next? Is there a way to navigate a cultural scene that works in this different way, without it turning into silos of cultists doing their own thing, or minnows and whales? If TV hasn’t solved this, it’s unlikely board games will soon. So I don’t have the answer. I just want to make sure we’re asking the right questions. The question is not “do we have too many games”. The question is: yes we do have too many games, just like we have too many TV shows, and we need to figure out how to navigate that. Let’s see what we can come up with.

The Seasoned Gamer Challenge

Posted on by dconstructions
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I love learning new games. In fact, it might be my favourite thing about games. I think learning the rules is not just part of a game it is a kind of game in itself. One I’m great at and love. A big part of gaming is exploration and that’s what learning is: finding out what you can and can’t do, what you want and don’t want and how to get the former and avoid the latter, and seeing how the game communicates all of that and gives it meaning. It’s like diving into an ocean: a whole new world of physics to grapple with and levers to pull.

For the young people, this is Salt-n-Pepa, the world’s greatest rap trio. This is a pun on “seasoned.”

But I also like exploring games further. I may not be a gamer who plays something on BGA two hundred times in a week so I’m absolutely sure on the win to pay ratio of cards x and y. But exploration isn’t just the first dive in. Exploration is also the languid wanderings and deeper longer looks. The whimsical experiments down winding paths and the mistakes and getting lost. It’s a conversation with the rules, the designer, the art director, with yourself and with your players. It’s also a feature in your life. I remember the years we we played Warhammer and Shadowrun every week, that one afternoon where we played Settlers of Catan four times in a row, that period where we couldn’t wait to get Dominion back to the table with new people and new combos. I remember the year we got Pandemic and cards like One Quiet Night and Airlift became part of our language and thought processes, shorthand for good things we craved and things we felt in our blood and bones when they arrived. Likewise we played Arkham Horror so much we had our own in-jokes and barely had to think about our opening moves. We built up our own mythologies about how hard it was to get a job on the newspaper and why the Woods were so dangerous

And meanwhile I don’t remember the day at a con when I played six new games.

We all have too many games. We know this. It’s why terms like Shelf of Shame exist and why someone invented the 10×10 challenge (aiming to play 10 games 10 times each in a year). Both of those don’t address the core problem though: we’re BUYING too many games. No matter how much we try to keep playing, more games are coming in. I’m in a weekly gaming group now where we never play the same game twice. Why not? Because it’s unfair. Everyone has a shelf of shame ten feet high and wants their games to get to the table. We can’t circle back, it would be special treatment.

And here’s the real talk part: the fact that we buy so many games is bad for the hobby. It’s bad for design. Kickstarter and crowdfunding have been amazing for access and getting more games out, but it created more and more a trend where buying is more important than playing. Because with crowdfunding we can never try before we buy, and that means, inevitably, companies focus on what gets you to buy, not what gets you to keep playing. They know the average number of times a game is played is creeping closer and closer to 1 and might even be below 1 now. So they don’t need it to be good. Or different. Or robust. I’m not saying design is getting necessarily worse. But there is a lack of pressure on it to be better.

Meanwhile, the sheer volume and the need to appeal to the familiar means games are getting more homogenous. Since you aren’t going to play 100 games of your favourite trick taker, and find all its wonderful variations, you can play 100 different trick takers…but each one ends up feeling the same. I don’t mean variety for the sake of variety but every thing I play is starting to feel the same.

Or worse: just very middling and uninspired. Homogeneity means we keep reusing tools that work, but we’re not actually choosing the exact right tools, nor are we shaping them to fit. We’re just cutting things up and putting them back in, like a movie made only of cliches from other movies. This can get the job done but it’s not really good. And so so many games I find just leave me hollow. They are workable, but not great. Not quite finished or not quite playtested enough with enough different people. Mistakes haven’t been picked up. Rough edges aren’t smoothed off. Fiddliness not resolved into elegance.

I know some people won’t care, or think I’m an old man yelling at the cloud. In the same way I know most people don’t care about bad movies or bad books. They just want them to be there and take up space and maybe have a cute dragon in them. And that’s fine. But I do care. I care very much. And if nothing else, I think we should talk about it, which is what I hope this post encourages.

So here’s the challenge: I think every game worth its salt should be played at least fifty times to get the most out of it. I think I’d like to see the average for every game get up to fifty. But when I actually think about it, I’ve probably only played Ticket to Ride 20 times and that seems a lot. So let’s halve that. 25 times. Actually, you know what? Pandemic Legacy, if you won every chapter, was only 12 times and it was a masterpiece. So let’s say I want you to play every game you buy 12 times. Not every game in the world, mind you: JUST THE ONES YOU BUY.

And let’s assume you’re a seasoned gamer. This is something of a hobby for you. So we might assume you play games once a week. You might skip a week now and then, but you also might play two or three or four games on a night. Or a whole bunch at a convention. The average of one a week seems fair. So this means if you buy a game every three months, you can play it for twelve weeks then buy a new one. And therein lies the name of this challenge: you, the seasons gamer, can buy a game once per season.

Note you can PLAY as many games as you like. I don’t care what you play. But if you buy any games, you get four a year. One per season. Note this also doesn’t include free games, or games you borrow or games from a library. Only ones you pay money for. You get four of those a year. You get to decide if it counts when you back the kickstarter or when it arrives, but you only count those once. Also? If it comes from a charity shop it doesn’t count. Second hand purchase? You can count that as a half. And if you SELL a game on or give one away, it wipes out a purchase. If you donate it or put it in a street library, it can wipe out two! Because that’s stopping others from buying.

And I know, as a game publisher, I don’t want to be the one not encouraging sales. But I’m going to do it anyway. Maybe this is stupid of me. Maybe I’m missing the point. I’ll take criticism because it might just get this more talked about. Because I do think we’re just buying too much, and I think it’s bad for us, it’s bad for the industry and its bad for design. It’s probably not great for the environment either. It’s a consumerist mindset too, of valuing ownership over enjoyment. I think if we buy less we might actually share more. And believe me, I also know how much I want to be the nerd who owns the thing, so I can take it home and stroke it and feel special instead of having to look on from the sidelines. It is lovely to own things. But that turns this hobby into an endless game of consumership and oneupmanship, a game we can never ever win because there will always be another game that someone has and we don’t. We’re not just not playing our games, we’re robbing ourselves of every part of the joy. We’ve turned gaming as a hobby into nothing but collecting and owning, and then ripping the joy away from that as well because we can never really get enough.

Plus, it can be a whole different kind of lovely to open a game someone else has loved as well, with little notes on the scoresheets and bumps of love on the corners. Having fun with it then passing it back. and talking about how it went. The truth is games were never meant to be hung on the walls like art: they are meant to be like books, showing the wear and tear of hundreds of readers that came before, and will come after. And even if you do love having things to hold and admire, wouldn’t you rather curate that down to the very best? The most meaningful? The things that you really love?

So there it is: the Seasoned Gamer Challenge. Buy one game a season, and no more. If you set yourself this challenge this year, post about it. #seasonedgamerchallenge If you make it, or don’t, talk about that too. Talk about how buying things can end up running and ruining our lives. Because once we talk about this, we can figure out what to do about it.