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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

#111

Post by 99_00 »

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.

Is that the main problem with the article, or is it the main point of the article.

>voluntary teams of users...are driven by different incentives and motivations

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#112

Post by irrational »

technics256 wrote: post #20

Does anyone have any board games they recommend for groups of 3-5? Something that isn't too terrible to learn, and lasts max an hour?

You'll probably get better responses by asking your question here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/l7kypq/daily_di...

However, some of my recommendations include Parks, Wingspan, Splendor, Azul, Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Potion Explosion, Kingdomino, Lanterns, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic: Iberia, Carcassonne, Concordia or Concordia Venus, Quacks of Quedlinburg, Treasure Island, etc. There are literally thousands of games that could meet the criteria of 3-5, simple rule set, 60 minute play time, and fun game play.

See also this ranked list of family board games:

https://boardgamegeek.com/familygames/browse/boardgame?sort=...

Pretty much every game on the first page of that list would meet your criteria.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#113

Post by irrational »

InitialLastName wrote: post #30
tuzemec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoy Wingspan ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266192/wingspan ) It's not that hard and it's beautiful.

Wingspan is a beautiful and fun game, but the instructions are incomprehensible. I don't have concrete examples, but I needed to read the entire book twice to have enough context for info at the beginning to make any sense. In a lot of ways, this is because of the thing that makes the game great (deeply interlocked systems) also makes it hard to find a point to insert the read pointer for the explanation.

Watch the How to Play video instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgDgcLI2B0U

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#114

Post by tubularhells »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #101
IAmAtWork wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's because they aim at normies, not boardgamers (normies are the risk/monopoly crowd). Also they were on the market 'first' with a mass appeal. They are, however, not good games.

A million flies eating shit doesn't make shit good.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#115

Post by bobbyi_settv »

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.

Definitely disagree. There are other successful games that use deckbuilding as an element of a larger game (in the vein of Clank or Quest for El Dorado), but no pure deckbuilding game has come close to overtaking Dominion as top dog.

If we use logged plays for the past month on BGG as one datapoint, Dominion has more than than Aeon's End, Ascension and Marvel Legendary combined.

Sure, there is a specific population of people who log their plays and it differs from the gameplaying public as a whole, but if anything it veers more towards "cult of the new" and away from people who still play an older game because it's what they have.

EDIT: It looks like Star Realms has almost as many logged plays this month as Dominion, but I would still maintain that Dominion is in no way "superseded" even if it is no longer the only relevant game in its genre.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#117

Post by ballenf »

toyg wrote: post #78
ballenf wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predicting second- and subsequent order effects accurately is basically impossible for any non-trivial issue. Here I'd argue that the effect may instead be that professionals are able to figure out what the amateurs are doing differently and incorporate it into their discipline. If you hold up the research trying to figure out which second-order effect is more likely, you'll never get any research done on anything of…

Suppression, no; but choosing priorities carries an element of ethical responsibility. You can choose to dedicate your time towards improving chemical weapons or towards improving harvest yields. Better chemical weapons will likely come about anyway, but why hasten their arrival?

Isn't that a first order effect though?

A second order effect would be researching a life-saving drug for a lifestyle condition. You research means people have less incentive to live healthily and end up dying even sooner from some other diet-related disease. The disease you cured would have scared them "straight" diet-wise.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#118

Post by smogcutter »

mikepurvis wrote: post #108
smogcutter wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enjo…

Totally, I don’t think any one perspective is complete & sufficient.

What I like about the 8 kinds of fun is it pushes back against an approach I think you see a lot in “serious” board game circles of a kind of “model/view” perspective on games. The mechanics are the model and the only part worth paying serious attention to, and the setting/fluff/etc is the essentially interchangeable view. The “8 kinds” perspective is a reminder that people engage with games in a lot of different ways, many of which really live in the interaction between the model and view.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#119

Post by GuB-42 »

meheleventyone wrote: post #98
grawprog wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Genuinely curious about porn games. They all seems to be either a show of pretty models with somewhat controllable animation or a "nothing special" game with explicit scenes thrown in for your enjoyment.

Some of these games can be excellent, I am thinking about some Japanese visual novels here, but they all seem to be rather formulaic.

Maybe I am missing something big here. I am not too much into porn games, and you are unlikely to stumble upon them unless you are actively looking for it.

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