Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

sciencedirect.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 150 posts

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#101

Post by JKCalhoun »

IAmAtWork wrote: post #75
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…

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 wr…

> 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.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#102

Post by LolWolf »

"Hobbyists beat professionals of [x] in [x]"

No they don't.

-----

Look, I know we can go down the rabbit hole about what constitutes a good epistemology, how these notions are correct only some of the time, or how the metrics can be wrong. Here's a simple rule of thumb: if the result is completely counterintuitive in basic scenarios, then it's probably not true.

Yes, yes, of course, the new response is "but wait quantum physics is utterly unintuitive, yet it is correct! So is chemistry! etc, etc" but look both you and I know that this is beside the point. Our simple and obvious priors are much more useful than we think, and they are right a lot more of the time than any of us want to give them credit for. Surely, there will be times when it's flat-out wrong, but those times are very few and far in between.

Reading the paper, this certainly looks like the basic knee-jerk "No" is right by most useful metrics.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#103

Post by JKCalhoun »

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.

Thats okay though. Alexey Pajitnov's "Tetris" was all he ever needed to do, all the world needed.

Perhaps though I don't treat games like music where I need a new fix constantly, am happy to find a new game I enjoy every year or so.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#104

Post by a1369209993 »

whatshisface wrote: post #85
mumblemumble wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your argument sounds something like, "Mining is overrated, the true source of our materials is smelting."

It sounds more like, "Mining is overrated, 90% of the work in getting useful materials is smelting.", actually.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#105

Post by irrational »

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.

> the first game to incorporate a mechanic rarely ends up also being one of the ones that put it to the best use

This definitely applies to board games. Dominion was the first deck-builder board game and is still fairly popular, but it has been superseded by many other superior deck builders that came out afterwards.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#106

Post by irrational »

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.

> the people around them, had no idea what made the first one good

That's easy - Johnny Depp in black eyeliner.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#107

Post by a1369209993 »

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.

> > Ideas are cheap, execution is everything

> Good ideas are rare, and nobody knows how to come up with them reliably.

The operative word there is "good ideas are rare". The claim is that you don't know whether a idea is good until it's been executed on (which seems plausible, and at any rate you haven't contradicted that), and that good ideas are rare, so most ideas are crap (which you yourself just asserted). Thus, the expected value of a given idea (absent execution) is very low, aka cheap.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#108

Post by mikepurvis »

smogcutter wrote: post #94
m_eiman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I would say that the mechanics tags are more of a weak negative signal for me. There are lots of games that I don't enjoy despite them featuring mechanics that I like; for example, I should like Scythe based on what it is, but across about two dozen playthroughs I just don't— the pacing is wrong for me and I'm never satisfied with where I end up.

On the other hand, there are certain mechanics that I either don't enjoy (dice battles) or am sick of (deck building) which if present makes it much less likely that I will enjoy the game as a whole.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#109

Post by irrational »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #53
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.

The mean quality of amateur designs is lower, but the variance is much, much higher. When a creative market reaches a scale where thousands or hundreds of thousands of amateurs can experiment with new designs, the number of outliers surpassing the quality of professional designs is significant. The challenge is finding a high-throughput way to filter those amateur board games. We like to think the best games will ris…

> We like to think the best games will rise to the top, but at scale this becomes a popularity contest.

There are 5,000 new board games released every year (and that isn't even including expansions to previously release games). The challenge is sifting through thousands of new games to pick out the wheat from the chaff. The games from popular designers are much more likely to be successful than from up and comers. I often wonder how many gems among those 5,000 games never get noticed.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#110

Post by Marazan »

irrational wrote: post #105
mumblemumble wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the first game to incorporate a mechanic rarely ends up also being one of the ones that put it to the best use This definitely applies to board games. Dominion was the first deck-builder board game and is still fairly popular, but it has been superseded by many other superior deck builders that came out afterwards.

I have yet to come across a better deck builder than Dominion.

It is so pure and focused that it is absolutely the best deck builder there is IMO.

So many other deck builders either completely mess up the extremely careful calibration of chance that exists in a deck builder or the 'other' game that is tacked on to the deck building engine interacts badly or in very swingy ways.

Post reply on HN