I am a gamer. This does not define the whole of my existence, but it definitely encompasses a large piece of me. My interaction with games is a major portion of the filter through which I see the world (expect an eventual post on perception filters). The amount of time I spend thinking about games generally leaves me predisposed to seeing the rest of the world in a similar light. What are the rules? How do I win? What is my opponent trying to do? These are questions that I ask myself far more frequently than I think most people consciously do. Before this post turns itself into the tangential discussion of filters let me skew it back in the direction I want to take it: game design. What makes a game good and successful?
In my mind the best game out there is Magic: The Gathering. Yes, I'm going there, please follow (or don't, your loss). Pretty much everyone who reads this is going to know the basics about that game, but just to summarize, Magic is the original collectible card game. It came out in 1993 and literally spawned a genre all of its own. Over 15 years later it is still going strong. It is played around the world with localized versions of the cards made for many countries. It has a professional tour with tournaments that regularly pay out ~$100k in total prizes. At the same time, the vast majority of its players meet casually around the kitchen table.
There are several reasons that Magic is so appealing to such a wide audience, but to my mind the primary reason is their extremely robust design and development process. On the official Magic website (in the links on the right) they have weekly columns written by both the head of Magic design and the various developers. In my experience there is no better window into the creation of a successful game than the weekly columns of Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic. I've actually met Mark a few times (stories and context for another post, gosh, I'm promising a lot of those aren't I) and he is a really smart guy who honestly cares a great deal about his game.
Maro's (MArk ROsewater) columns break down a different aspect of design each week and have been very influential in my understanding of what makes a game tick. I think his greatest contributions have been his articles that define the psychographies of gamers. The three articles that do this Timmy, Johnny, Spike, Timmy, Johnny, and Spike Revisited, and Melvin and Vorthos break down gamers (and people, but more on that in a later article) into three distinct types with two addendums tacked on. Everyone should probably take some time to read those articles, but understanding that most of you wont I'll give brief synopses of each psychography.
Timmy likes big splashy effects. He (/she, but its one less letter to type so I'm sticking with "he" in the gender neutral sense) doesn't care so much about winning as he does about doing something "cool". He'd rather throw 100 Hail Mary passes and be successful on 2 of them then grind out 4 yard runs. It's not that he doesn't want to win, it's that for him, "fun" is defined more by something big and memorable happening. Timmy is the Atlanta Hawk's Josh Smith who tried a between the legs dunk in last night's game. It didn't work, it didn't help them win, but boy would it have been cool if it had. That's the mindset of a pure Timmy.
Johnny wants to show how clever he is. He wants to create the perfect mousetrap. He wants to pull off the play that no one sees coming and then all of a sudden destroys you. He's the A-11 offense in high-school football. He wants to win, but only if he can do so on his own terms. He tries to take the most obscure pieces, put them together and come up with something effective that no one has ever seen before. Of the three I have the least Johnny in me, so I'm sorry if I'm not explaining it well.
Spike just wants to win. For him, winning is fun, losing is not. As Maro's articles state, if he goes 9 for 10 in games he's upset about the one he lost. To borrow from football, if running works, he'll run. If passing works, he'll pass. He'll take an "ugly" 6-3 field goal fest if he's on the 6 side. Al Davis' espoused "Just Win Baby" is his mantra (although Al is really a Timmy pretending to be a Spike). This does not mean that Spike is the best at his game, it just means that he is less constrained than the other two psychographies in the methods he will employ to win a game.
Vorthos and his brother Melvin are less pure psychographies than Timmy, Johnny, and Spike, but for where I'm taking this discussion they're very important. Vorthos cares about the flavor, the fluff, the overarching world in which his game takes place. He calls himself Vorthos because that's the name of his character (14 bard / 6 thief Half Elf I believe). A Vorthos can be a Timmy, Johnny or a Spike, but if he primarily self identifies as a Vorthos its the art, literature and overall world that he most cares about.
Melvin is the opposite end of the spectrum from Vorthos. He cares about the rules and design of his game. The fact that the A-11 offense works in football because it's a punting formation fascinates him. The subtle interplay between rule A and effect B is what gets his juices flowing. The fact that rule C can exist for years, and then game piece P comes into existence, reinforcing the importance of rule C is for him the coolest thing in the world. I have a lot of Melvin in me.
The Magic team's understanding of these different psychographies, and the fact that they took the time define them in the first place, displays a level of effort that is reflected in the product they produce.
In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a Timmy/Spike-Melvin. I love winning, but I'd rather win with a cool flashy effect than by grinding my opponent down. I'd rather see a 45-42 Colts-Patriots game than a 6-3 Steelers-Ravens game. I'd rather my dragon eat your cavalry unit than grind you down with endless basic troopers. And I LOVE the rules, figuring out what they really mean, how that one in a million interaction actually plays out.
Ok, so now that I've explained how I think about games let me move on to explain why Warhammer, the game that I probably spend the most of my time playing, should model itself more after Magic.
The major problem with Warhammer is that the people who make the game, Games Workshop, seem to only employ Johnny/Timmy-Vorthoses. Now, I'm not complaining about this because the game isn't run by my psychography. Rather, I'm complaining because the game is run only by one type of psychography. The beauty of the Magic design and development team is that they design for all the potential types of players. Games Workshop is very obstinate in their view that the game should be played the way they intend it to be played. This is a difficult business model in the first place, but would be mitigated if they weren't such Johnny/Timmy-Vorthoses. The problem with that exact psychography is that it has very little chance of putting out something that appeals to a Spike or a Melvin.
A Spike-Melvin game can appeal to a Johnny, Timmy or Vorthos. That's the beauty of those last three, they'll do most of the work to make something appeal to themselves. Anyone with an imagination and the desire to do so can Vorthos the crap out of anything they are given - just watch a little kid spend more time playing with the big brown packing box than the $200 toy it came in if you want proof. Unfortunately, that kind of trickle down does not work as seamlessly towards Spikes and Melvins.
A Timmy/Johnny designed game is going to include a huge amount of random, cool effects. If it passes the, "is that cool" test, its in. This type of thinking naturally leads to an unbalanced and degenerate game state. Lots of investors thought it would "be cool" to leverage the crap out of their portfolios and put them into CDOs and get huge returns, but unfortunately that did not lead to sustainable growth and the bubble burst. This same type of situation exists in Johnny/Timmy designed games. You get all sorts of cool effects, with little thought put into how they all work together. A Spike is going to comb through the options presented to him, pick the ones that will most reliably allow him to win, and proceed to pummel everyone in sight (Fantasy Daemons). Don't get me started on what Melvins think when they look at rules designed by Johnnys and Timmys.
Further complicating the situation is that Games Workshop (GW) has openly stated that they design their games around kitchen table, "beer & pretzel" type gamers. In other words, people who are just like them and don't want to "compete" in the game, but rather just want to "have fun". Ignoring for the moment that for some people winning is how they "have fun", what this attitude does is eliminates an entire area of business for the game. As I previously alluded to, Magic has a successful Pro Tour. It might not be the primary revenue generator for the game, but it shows a certain professionalism that's important to any game. Because GW takes the attitude that "we don't design a competitive game, don't think of it as such" they're both weakening their product and limiting their business growth.
So what can and should GW do to fix the situation. Well, like any addict, first they have to admit that there's a problem. Fantasy is currently a completely degenerate metagame, and 40k might be heading in that direction. If they admit that there's a problem then they can take steps to fix the situation. They can understand that a game designed for Spikes does not mean that Johnnys and Timmys wont enjoy it, and that a game designed for all three is the best solution. Their design studio needs to hire some Spikey Melvins to go over all the "cool" effects and try and balance them with clearly written rules. Then they need to revitalize the Grand Tournament circuit, at least in the US with clearly defined rules about what type of armies are ok to bring and what aren't, or some other form of balancing to fix the inherently unbalanced state of the game. If GW could do all of these things they would have a much healthier game, and their business would not need to cut back and limit itself as it recently has.
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Well, those are my thoughts on game design and specifically as it applies to Magic and GW games. Hopefully, if you've read this far, you have a better sense of how I see things, and maybe have a few new ideas you can incorporate into your own thinking on games and life in general.
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