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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

#91

Post by krok »

toyg wrote: 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…

If person A wants to get paid to do something and person B wants to do the same thing to a similar quality for free as a leisure activity, isn't it sort of expected that it will become hard for person A to make a living? Doesn't it make sense that to make a living they will have to either produce something far better than the amateur, or do the parts that amateurs don't want to do, or differentiate themselves in some other way?

It seems to me that it would be an odd society which didn't even allow people to ask questions about the relative merits of person A and person B's work, in case they found out something which would be disruptive to person A's business model.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#92

Post by phnofive »

jonplackett wrote: post #7

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.

I mean, this is such a generic concept - there are parallels in viral evolution we see in the real world.

There is such strong survivorship bias in comparing the top slice of amateurs to all professionals, who of course have different goals.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#93

Post by tialaramex »

TeaDrunk wrote: post #90
tines wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.)

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.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#94

Post by smogcutter »

m_eiman wrote: post #27
mikepurvis wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cohe…

"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…

Look 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.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#95

Post by travisporter »

What 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

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#96

Post by JKCalhoun »

60654 wrote: post #56

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 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 measur…

"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".

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#97

Post by scollet »

grawprog wrote: post #82
60654 wrote: post #56

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 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 measur…

>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 desig…

I think you both are hitting on that thin slice; the Venn diagram of strong design, managerial pressure, and resources.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#98

Post by meheleventyone »

grawprog wrote: post #82
60654 wrote: post #56

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 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 measur…

>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 desig…

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.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#99

Post by JKCalhoun »

mumblemumble wrote: post #81
60654 wrote: post #56

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 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 measur…

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.

When a game does put a novel mechanic to best use ... was the novelty overrated? Or the game that first introduced it (poorly) overrated?

Regardless, I think we both agree we want novel games. No one still wants to be playing Senet. ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#100

Post by JKCalhoun »

tines wrote: post #88
mumblemumble wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more meant to be an, "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything," kind of sentiment.

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.

Agree, life and the internet have taught me that "nothing new under the sun" is true.

Novelty and ideas are golden. There would be no good execution of said idea if the idea wasn't put first first (of course).

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