A few months ago when I was on an indie RPG kick, I came across the lovely forum story-games. Its a great place. One of the first posts I did there was part of a “5-minute” RPG challenge. Just come up with a new game…Quick!
The game I came up with is not worth mentioning (few 5-minute ideas are) but I wrote a couple posts that rehashes things I talk about regularly in real life but I don’t mention much online. Because of the length of the posts I am breaking them into two blog posts. This first one deals with the importance of playing with game design but though a very meandering path beginning with ruminations on my profession. The next post deals with why I so greatly value design development.
Late in the discussion TomasHVM, the initiator of the 5 minute challenge wrote:
I have the impression that a lot of those posting a game in the challenge, “published” their first game in that thread. And that too, to me, is significant. Putting a game out there is something very special to do. Having finished and published a game, however small, brings you to a new level of thought as a game-smith.
From this I take that a bunch of game-smiths have taken a small, but significant, step further by meeting the challenge. And that makes the challenge a small part of the greater movement of developing role-playing games for the future. To make role-playing games grow as a form, we need to have a good supply of new blood. Challenges and competitions are ways of inviting new blood into the ranks. Having more game-smiths actually turning out games for people to see, is great for the culture. It infuses it with new thoughts and greater confidence, and helps raise the intellectual level of discussion. Being peers with hands-on experience in design, is a good fundament for constructive dialogue.
Here was my initial post to the discussion:
Like all architects, I have an tortured relationship with my own profession . On the one hand, I have a very strong professional pride, with specialized skills and knowledge which I utilize to proudly earn a living. On the other hand, there are enough atrocities in the built environment, usually by architects, that I question the value of our profession when it comes to pure design. If you boil things down, the government recognizes us as a special profession because they think it is important that buildings are designed in a way to give its inhabitants an opportunity to safely escape the structure in the event of a fire. Officially, aesthetics isn’t a factor.
But still, I want to think that all my years in school and aesthetic training means something more than expeditious fire escapes! In my travels I have been to some awesome spaces designed by justly famous architects…but I have also been to some awful spaces designed by equally famous architects. My current office is in a skyscraper by I. M. Pei with cramped lobby and an insipid urban plaza! When I think about the built environment, the places that evoke my fondest memories are organic vernacular growths – the market street near grandma’s apartment in Hangzhou, a quiet residential street in Berkeley, the surging density of Manhattan, a nondescript cafe in Paris.
What’s missing in architecture school – and thus in much of our professionally designed environments – is a healthy respect of the fabric of our environments. The occasional iconic structure is important for our civic pride, but a city of icons is nothing but a jumbled mess – a jumbled mess that suppresses the expression of a vital social life.
However, other arts are not concerned with the vernacular fabric that surrounds it. We go to an art museum to experience great iconic paintings, not to ponder the torrents of mediocre visual productions that fill our dentists’ office. You don’t need to worry about audience participation, you don’t want the fat drunks in the stands to actually affect the results on the basketball court. It means nothing to the great artist when the random plebe dabbles in their art, Kobe doesn’t give a shit if you shoot hoops in the driveway after a long day at the office. In some ways, games fit in this type of individual art. There are great iconic games with great designers, and it doesn’t really affect their lives nor change their art if their audience occasionally dabbles in game design.
Then again, story games are not a passive art. This is a social activity, you don’t sit there and just watch pixels dancing on the monitor, you have to get in and participate to make it worth everyone else’s while. A great movie is still awesome in a half empty theater, but with these games, if the audience is flat the end product will be weak – no matter matter how awesome, how elegant, how conceptually beautiful the game design. Understanding rules and mechanics is merely scratching the surface, and the beauty of these games is found in the moment of emergent wonder when everything snaps together to create a memorable experience. For that to best happen, you need an active, educated and involved community of people who invest themselves into the art.
I presume that the most important way to become a good game player is to practice gaming, but I also believe that it is a useful exercise for everyone to dabble in game design. Instead of working with material that is handed to you, one should occasionally confront a blank page and be forced to come up with something, anything! You learn through designing; things you can’t notice by just playing games. The act of design is a powerful exercise, and even if someone decides that game designing is not to their liking, at least they will walk away with some insight into what it takes to create a game.
I think the difference between some of the earlier, downer comments and Tomas’s enthusiasm boils down to this. Yes, ideas are cheap, and if one was to look carefully at the actual 5-minute games I’d suspect most of them are pure crap. It takes a lot of work to turn an idea into a decent game and even more to turn it into a product worth publishing. But to completely dismiss the exercise is overstating the case. Very few people have the dedication to go through the effort to become an accomplished game designer – this comes with real personal cost. However there are valuable lessons to be learned in designing a game, even in just a few minutes.
This paradox is the essence of the exercise, let’s make the act of designing a game as non-intimidating as possible in order to encourage people to play with the process of designing game. Of course one will earn more valuable lessons with sustained effort, but you gotta start somewhere, and the 5 minute game design was about exactly that.
Also posted on Boardgamegeek.com