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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

#121

Post by Nasrudith »

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.

Novelty is overrated due to a selection bias - it implicitly tends to mean "novel and at least good for a change of pace".

Adding in a feature that say previous winners become the new boss and losers get a bonus inheritance from their prior run could be hailed as novel and doing good things for pace.

Having to randomly roll 10 dice x 365.25x days x 18 years for events to create your starting character would be very novel. Especially if it is a commom occurance that all four players to die before turn zero due to childhood disasters resulting in the winner being the one who lived the longest at eight years old before dying of cancer would be terrible to actually play.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#122

Post by tines »

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.)

I know what you mean. But I don't think that disproves my point, it just shows that people like garbage.

And that's ok. I love garbage sometimes, there is absolutely zero harm in garbage. But that doesn't make it anything other than garbage. The harm comes when you think the garbage is gold.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#123

Post by tines »

a1369209993 wrote: post #107
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.

> > 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). Thu…

I mean, I think it's obvious that the OP meant "good ideas" when he said "ideas are cheap." His entire point was "novelty" and "many really clever ideas" are not worth anything without the execution to go along with them.

> The claim is that you don't know whether a idea is good until it's been executed on

I don't think his claim was just epistemological the way you're interpreting it, and if it was, then I will withdraw since it's not the idea I meant to engage with.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#124

Post by InitialLastName »

irrational wrote: post #113
InitialLastName wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree, that's a much better way to learn it. I've also had no problem teaching people the game without the manual.

Lastly, the "new player" card pack that comes with the game works well to get someone up to speed and competitive quickly (and is an idea other games could afford to learn from).

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#125

Post by theabrax »

fallingknife wrote: post #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.

Interesting. Please, elaborate why you think that is and how this - against the background of the paper - would bias the results.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#126

Post by a1369209993 »

tines wrote: post #123
a1369209993 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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). Thu…

I mean, I think it's obvious that the OP meant "good ideas" when he said "ideas are cheap." His entire point was "novelty" and "many really clever ideas" are not worth anything without the execution to go along with them. > The claim is that you don't know whether a idea is good until it's been executed on I don't think his claim was just epistemological the way you're interpreting it, and if it was, then I will with…

> I mean, I think it's obvious that the OP meant "good ideas"

Eh, I consider "Ideas that are known for a fact to be good (ie useful) are useful (ie valuable, provided they aren't already devalued by ubiquity[0])." to be sufficiently tautological that I would not expect someone (intellegent and good-faith enough to be worth engaging with) to be arguing against it. Although note the distinction between merely good ideas, versus ideas that you actually know are good, since the work of turning the former into the latter was what I assumed they were attributing to execution.

> I don't think his claim was just epistemological the way you're interpreting it, and if it was, then I will withdraw since it's not the idea I meant to engage with.

Fair enough; I'm not sure we even have a disagreement over facts so much as over how we're categorizing things and the terminology therefor.

0: Eg, "writing" or "general-purpose computers" are almost incalculably valuable ideas, but they're not worth anything in a supply-and-demand sense because everyone in the world already knows about them.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#127

Post by cookie_monsta »

itronitron wrote: post #55
dalbasal wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A group of 20 year old musicians wrote a better song than professionally trained composer with 40 years of experience... once.

or just compare "White Rabbit" to "We Built This City"

I don't think I even have a starting point to make that comparison

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#128

Post by theabrax »

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.

Well, to be fair, the article doesn't say anything about that the chosen set of mechanics (novelty) have to provide fun. Actually, this seems to be the usefulness part of creativity, or as they describe it, how "playable and entertaining" "appropriate observers" perceive the game.

As you already refer to LeBlanc's "8 kinds of fun": he also is one of the authors of the MDA framework - a framework to analyze games - which states, that the mechanics of a game are the only thing game designers can influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDA_framework (the article itself is linked in there)

While the authors don't state it directly as this framework, they refer to the framwork as an explanation of why they use mechanics.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#129

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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.

90% of everything is crap. 90% of the 'consistent' games are also more crap.

Idie developers came up win Pandemic, Dominion, Settlers of Catan etc. Novel game mechanics that changed the board game world.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#130

Post by theabrax »

travisporter wrote: post #95

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

Did you actually read the article? ^_^"

Nevertheless, it's seems that the more knowledge diversity a team has, the MORE novelty and LESS usefulness. It's all about communication, sharing ideas, interpretation of knowledge (mental models), and self-regulation.

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