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Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
41–50 of 150 posts
Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
#42The 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 comp…
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.
Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
#43This article sure could do with some pictures!
Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
#44Sometimes 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…
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.
Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
#45Just 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.
Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
#46I 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.
Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
#47> 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.
Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
#48This 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.
> 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)
Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
#49It 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.
Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games
#50This 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.
A group of 20 year old musicians wrote a better song than professionally trained composer with 40 years of experience... once.