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

71–80 of 150 posts

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#71

Post by Tepix »

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?

Check out "Deep Sea Adventure", a cute fun japanese micro-game where you try to salvage stuff from the ocean floor while sharing the limited oxygen supply with your competitors.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169654/deep-sea-adventur...

You play three rounds, if you're fast you can even squeeze it into the lunch break.

This game manages to be fun and also teach you a lot about human greed.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#72

Post by Tepix »

theshrike79 wrote: post #38
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?

Love Letter and its variants (I like the Batman one myself). You can explain it to a person who's two-three beers in and they'll get the rules well enough to start playing. Rounds last 5-10 minutes depending on how much people start analyzing the cards on the board. You can play as many rounds as you want.

Love Letter is great, i like the variant "Lovecraft letter" even more!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/198740/lovecraft-letter

I've got to try the Batman variant!

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#73

Post by jonplackett »

xpe wrote: post #70
jonplackett wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good thing about that is you're not expecting too much - the secret to happiness is low expectations. But it's not a great method of doing business!

Well, I don't think it is "the" secret, and probably not a "secret" at all. (At least, I hope not.) Regarding happiness, Maslow's model [1] is well-known and makes sense to me. As I understand it, happiness is built on a foundation by satisfying: 1. physiological needs 2. safety needs 3. belongingness & love needs (i.e. connectedness) 4. esteem needs 5. self-actualization Though, per Wikipedia: - "There is little sci…

I found this to be a much better explanation and takes into account the weird ways some people seem to be sad when they should be happy vice versa.

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_surprising_science...

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#74

Post by Hoasi »

Maybe there is something like the burden of knowledge at play here. The more you know about design, the harder it is to design unpredictable games. In other words, because they know less about game design, hobbyists have less fear, are less judgmental, and can come up with more mercurial results.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#75

Post by IAmAtWork »

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 writing blog post on genre

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#76

Post by krisgee »

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…

>Can journalist check Gamasutra nad gdc vault before writing blog post on genre

No because if they take time to do research they'll miss the views they could have gotten if they just slam out a piece and (basically) nobody is going to pay extra for a journalist who's also an expert on board game design.

It's the biggest problem with journalism today.

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#77

Post by andredz »

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…

Is this the vault you are referring to: https://www.gdcvault.com/ ?

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#78

Post by toyg »

ballenf wrote: post #64
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…

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?

Re: Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

#79

Post by toyg »

PeterisP wrote: post #44
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…

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 shoul…

See my other answer to the sibling comment.
Post reply on HN