Narrative Warfare: To Do a Technology In Gaming

Tabletop games, as a medium, are not that dependent upon electronics and network technology. You open a book, or lay out a board, roll some dice and follow a set of procedures in a written manual (or on the inside of the box) to play the game. You don't need to use mobile applications of any kind. You don't even need a dollar store calculator. Yet we do see examples of game publishers Doing A Technology from time to time and this is not a recent phenonemon.

The innocent origin of this error is very simple to comprehend: the old school designers are tinkerers at heart. They made up something that they thought would be fun, and when they come up with something new that they thought would be fun they just throw it into the game without any consideration for whether or not the customer actually wanted or needed that thing.

In short, this:

The biggest excuses for new editions are the following:

• Ran out of products to sell.
• Errata built up to a critical mass.

Both of these betray a serious lack of understanding as to how the damn business runs and why the medium maintains its appeal.

The first is a self-own. It's a confession that they believe tabletop games to be a serious consumer business medium, whereby customers are required to maintain regular purchases of product because they consume--use up--what they previously purchased as if they bought groceries or light bulbs or fuses for their car engine.

This is not the case with tabletop games. A copy of Monopoly bought from a long-defunct store in 1968 is still good today so long as its pieces are useable, and that's a far lower threshold than you think.

The second is also a self-own. It's a confession of a lack of reasonable product testing prior to launch, and something that tabletop designers and publishers refuse to accept is that they need to test their product in the field for years on end--at least five--because it is nigh-impossible to find all of the exploits in-house that can and will ruin the gameplay experience for your customers.

This is sadly normal in the tabletop business, and it's been so for as long as I've been alive.

So the errata piles up as exploits are found and documented. Until the rise of digital-primary publishing, there was an inevitable critical mass point past which it became unviable to keep the current edition in print because the user had to have the current errata in addition to the actual product in order to play the game as intended. That this is still accepted now is far more to do with institutional inertia than any actual limitation of technical capacity or acumen.

Did you notice what was missing in all of this?

Look back to that Jurassic Park quote: "...whether or not you should." (emphasis mine).

There is no thought--no considerations--as to what the game should do or what gameplay experience the player should have by playing the game. You will find this (sometimes) in videogame design for no other reason than that there are higher stakes on the table and players looking to make a decent return on their investment, but in tabletop games this is sorely lacking.

And what should be considered? First, and foremost, the acknowledgement that tabletop games are a medium of Durable Goods. This means you're into "Buy Once, Cry Once" territory, where a game purchased today can still be used and enjoyed centuries into the future. That means that a publisher has to build his business model around that fact and quit crying about "running out of supplements to sell". Instead, he should be focusing upon maintaining a loyal audience of customers generation upon generation and thus focus upon long-term growth and cultivation over quarterly reports. (Yes, this means going the route of Big Corporate is a colossal mistake; structure your business dealings accordingly.)

That means that you're not selling things that are consumed. They are not even things that wear out. They are things that endure for generations on end, like making Chess or Go sets with boards, and what you are really doing is making a center of activity for people to use as an excuse to get together and socialize. Your business support needs to focus on making that happen; don't worry about selling them New Widgets, focus on giving people a reason to get together and play so they enjoy playing your game and thus have reasons to purchase their own copies.

Don't believe me? The companies that sell Poker paraphenalia don't balk at this. Why should you? All tabletop games are, to all but a fanatical few, is exactly that: excuses to gather and socialize- it's why Golf is a thing among the business class.

Therefore there is no need to introduce unnecessary technical complexity into an existing product, which is what most new editions actually do. All you're doing is making the product worse, and therefore making the experience worse for users, which is part of the reason for why the social and business dynamics of tabletop games are as they are.

And that's not accounting for other ways that tabletop game publishers lose the plot, but that's for another post.

I'll talk tomorrow about a specific example and how it went wrong.