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Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

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Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#11
post #2

> 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.

Presumably most bad hobbyist designs don't make it to market, and most hobbyists develop their best idea once and that's that.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#12
post #9

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…

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?

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#13
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

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#14
post #12
post #9

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…

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?

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.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#15
post #5

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.

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.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#16

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.

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

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#17
post #13

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

> 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.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#18
post #2

> 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.

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

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#19
post #3
post #2

> 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.

does creative imply good, though? that's the real question

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.

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