You may have noticed a lack of posts, this is because I was and still somewhat am pretty ill. When I’m in this state I tend to do better posting out really “out there” ideas since I can’t focus or draw sensible conclusions anyway – so I solicited suggestions on what aspect shouldn’t be in a game so that I can theorycraft it. I had a lot of great suggestions from radioactive waste to flaying, but the one that caught my attention was fire. As a design exercise, let’s think about how one could (reasonably) incorporate fire into a game.

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I’ve written about when a game should end and discussed the merits of flexible start and end points, but in my traditional “Doing everything backwards” approach I’ve not written about a game’s start state yet. Let’s get started on that!

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So there’s this lovely article going around at the moment: Video games are boring. It’s worth a read, but I’ll summarise: The author is a video game designer who’s been excited by the recent boon in people playing games, only to find that her favourite games fell flat with her friends. However in some instances they had limited but amazing experiences with them. Her conclusion is that video game development has been driven by video gamers for a very long time and has failed to break outside of a mould preferred by that group. It could be a much more vibrant field if it had more voices from a different backgrounds. It could be more if it had games that keyed more with the experiences most people are having in their lives. Games can and should be more than they are. So my question for the day is: Are the same things true of board games?

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One of the advantages of pulling an index of all of my games writing together was that it means I can see the gaps. I’ve hinted before that there are several different motivations for playing games, but never really dug into the idea. I was first persuaded of the notion in an Extra Credits episode. The computer games industry is light years ahead of the board games industry in terms of deep research into why people play their games. That shouldn’t be too much of a surprise since the amounts of money being thrown around are so much larger, there’s more to gain from that sort of study. We can use their findings.

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