1) What is your game about? Supernatural demihumans conspire in the shadows to manipulate the unknowing world as the apocalypse descends.

2) What do characters do? Well, there are lots of characters, not all of them owned by the players, and at any given time a player might be playing any number of them. So. The supernatural Others pull strings and use their influence to make things happen in scenes, or very occasionally get to bust out and go crazy with their supernatural potency. Facades try to deflect attention from one supernatural Other and bring somebody else into the light, instead. The Chosen One tries to find out what’s happening and end it — although they may not uncover all of the Others involved. And lastly, the “normal” characters all bump around, doing their own thing and getting Fed on and getting terrified and manipulated and coerced.

3) What do the players do? Players manipulate a web of index cards and strings that represent the game’s situation. On their turn, players frame scenes, assign roles, and choose their audiences. In scenes, they forward their address of the situation. As audience, they judge which addresses are ratified. In everything, they try to expose the other players’ conspirators while keeping their own hidden in the shadows.

4) How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about? The setting is always derived from the situation, which is developed in play. This allows the supernatural conspirators to have broadly-applicable and terrifically potent powers at manipulating things from “behind the scenes”.

5) How does Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about? There is no separate character creation phase. Conspirators, in fact, are defined as a penalty to the controlling player — they prefer to remain undefined, in the shadows. Other cards are defined through play, as needs and desires arise. Characteristics and connections are revealed, corrupted, bound, and severed. Cards that are “Fed” on are left with an indelible mark.

6) What types of behaviors/styles does your game reward (and punish if necessary)? The game has both immediate and long-term strategies involved, most of which rely on misdirection and shady alliances. Allowing your conspirator to be exposed — and having its characteristics defined by the other players — drains resources. And while everyone is trying to stay in the shadows, the mounting Tension means that not everyone will be able to do so — and many actions that might be used to scramble further into the shadows only increase Tension.

7) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game? On your turn, you must pay tokens for every characteristic defined on your conspirator. As an audience member, you may spend tokens in conflicts to tempt the other players to spend tokens, as well, which you are then able to harvest when you ratify the scene’s addresses.

How are responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game? Players take turns framing scenes — the framing player assigns roles and chooses one or more people to play the audience. Those with roles to play roleplay “as normal” although without a GM running NPCs, for one scene. In-scene task-based resolution is provided by bidding chips, and the audience can provide adversity through this means. At the end of the scene, the audience members ratify one or more of the roleplayers’ addresses to the situation.

9) What does your game do to command the player’s attention, engagement, and participation? You either have a role to play and an address to push or your are in the audience, making the others push their addresses and deciding who succeeds.

10) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like? Uh, see #8.

11) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about? The baseline of the game is that something is going to happen and everyone at the table has weak tools to affect what that is going to be. You can propose or you can decide, not both, and you don’t get to choose which one you get to do. So there’s lots of subtle (and not-so-subtle) pressure happening, lots of deals and forcing people into situations where they must help you to help themselves, and the like.

12) Do characters in your game advance? If so how? No. This game plays out in one session.

13) How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about? The game is about the end of the world. You play it, the world ends. So you play for keeps, and without ‘holding out’ for being all badass in some later session in the hazy land of tomorrow.

14) What sort of product or effect do you want the game to produce in or on the players? Gleeful backstabbing and hidden agendas, mostly, under a thin veneer of moody shadows-and-candles gothy stuff.

15) What areas of the game recieve extra attention or color? Why? Everything is framed in conspiratorial language, and in fact only the interactions between players (heavily dosed with selfishness and shameful intentions) have any real detail.

16) Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Manipulating the situation directly through the cards on the table. I so want to see if this actually works.

17) Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t? As this game was created as a response to games which promise eldritch shadowy conspiracy and can’t deliver, this game takes players into the realm they’ve been unable to access. This puts players in positions of very compromised power, with clear long-range goals and totally obfuscated short-term goals.

18.) What are your publishing goals for your game? I’m shooting for microgame format like Conquer the Horizon, although it may have outgrown that basinet. If so, I may actually lay it out, manufacture it, and charge real cash money. However, the props needed to play (hole puncher, string, et cetera) may make it an infeasible commercial product.

19) Who is your target audience? Folks who like horror movies not for the startle-scares but for the looming sense of dread, those who want to explore the “dark side” of society, and those who are willing to experiment a little to get there — this is not a standard roleplaying game.

I always wanted to roleplay Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. GURPS even came out with a supplement for it (following the very nice formula of recycled art = lower production cost). Of course, the questions raised by the video game — the transhumanism, ecoextremism, social commentary, the basic “how shall we live?” and so on — are difficult if not impossible to raise using GURPS as a chassis. The GURPS book will allow you to roleplay in the world of Alpha Centauri, but it doesn’t support playing Alpha Centauri. In precise terminology, it does not encourage the address of the question “how shall we live?”

That’d be neat to play a game that answered that. Shock: comes close, but it’s more “How will this affect our lives?” and has less to do with making personal life choices.

Mark Causey over on Runic Empyrean is doing an interesting thing, reconstructing his Gaming History with insights as to what stayed with him from his earliest gaming experiences. Mine is about a thousand times more verbose and long as hell. Sorry about that.

Genesis

My first gaming product — not counting legos — was the esteemed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, working off of the abyssmal Paladium house system. Tangentially, I’m constantly surprised by how many gamers I’ve met for whom this was their gateway product. In any case, my friend Robert bought the book not for the game rules but for the wealth of illustrations inside, because at the time he and I spent inordinate amounts of time drawing the Ninja Turtles ourselves. It took us over a month to say, “Hey wait a minute, this book is, like, a game that you can play.” And thus was an obsession born.

Despite being built off of the class-based and joylessly uncustomizable Palladium system, mutant animals had a pool of “Bio-Energy” points that you could spend on cool stuff. That was wicked fun, and I no doubt made about five times more characters than I ever actually played. Sadly, I cannot remember the first game we played or the first character that we made, but one of my first and most cherished characters was a mutant porcupine because Spine Armor was seriously and disastrously overpowered and broken. In a world where the biggest sword did 3d6 damage, my porcupine’s body block did 4d6. His name was, cleverly, Spike. On the other hand, which animal you were was determined by rolling percentile dice and comparing to a big chart. Base attributes, too, were randomly generated by rolling 3d6 seven times. Our house rule was that you had to roll your attributes, animal, and background with dice… but there was nothing stopping you from rolling and rolling and rolling until you got what you wanted. I also remember turning the dice to the result I wanted while Robert’s back was turned; I’m positive he did the same to me on more than one occasion, as well. Amusingly, I found my old copy of TMNT&OS recently, and at the top of those four pages of percentile charts was one little solitary line that we must have overlooked: “Players can choose one of the following or roll percentile dice…” Of course, at thirteen, rolling on tables was fun, and besides, the tables were much larger than that one little line, so obviously they must have been more important, right?

The combat system was baroque; the skills were bland; the experience system was a source of never-ending exploitation for us, and the characters never really did advance as fast as we wanted them to. There was this big long list of “Things that get XP” that ranged from ‘using a skill - 25xp’ to ’self-sacrifice to rescue a large number of people - 1000xp’. One of the starter adventures in the book presented a hostage situation, and so of course that qualified for the jackpot thousand XP, and we ran every new character through that adventure first, until we knew it like the backs of our hands. I could probably still run it from memory. On the other hand, one of my favorite old broken memories of that game was when Robert insisted that he bring in his Kangaroo from the post-apocalyptic Australian sourcebook to the modern-day setting that we were playing in. Because we were in seventh grade and he whined, he was allowed and we were annoyed at him. After the big badguys were dealt with, he also insisted on rolling his Land Navigation skill to get that coveted 25xp. He failed the roll — and so I, as the almighty GM, ruled that the kangaroo was lost getting back to Australia and he could never play that character again.

Robert was into comic books, and also picked up Palladium’s Heroes Unlimited which was for superheroes and used the same system. There was no BIO-E to spend, however, just long lists of powers and abilities from which you were allowed to pick once or twice. Outside of the superspy organization rules (more point-buy building), the game never really got off the ground.

What I Took Away From Palladium: Spending points to build a character (rather than select one item from a list) is fun and allows for all sorts of customization and tinkering. More abstractly, no premise is too silly to create enjoyable play — Teenage Fucking Ninja Turtles!

Exodus

And then one day we went to the comic store that was our supplier, money in our hands for some new Palladium book (although not the Fantasy books, because they had demons in them, and we were good Christian boys), but lo and behold — there were no Palladium books to be had. None that we didn’t already have, at least. And so somebody went and bought the GURPS Basic Set. As I recall, we mocked him, whoever it was that bought it, for wasting his money. About two weeks later we were playing.

Because point-buy builds, man! Everything was available and bought with points! Then we found GURPS Supers and Oh-Em-Gee there was even more shit to buy with points! And then we got GURPS Vehicles and Jesus Christ, you could build vehicles and superships and shit, too! If you got GURPS Space you could build planets and solar systems! Amusingly, GURPS Space also had rules for building civilizations and cultures, but I never really got into that — mostly because I don’t think I understood what they were talking about. What’s the difference between someplace being an Oligarchy and another one being a Dictatorship? Either they’re the bad guys or they’re not, and they either have the McGuffin or not, and what matters is what keen spaceships and superpowers and stuff they had to defend it. Every single game was Go Fetch the McGuffin. Every game.

We played GURPS Fantasy (I can still draw most of the Yrth map) a lot. Later, we “branched out” and played in fantasy settings of our own creation. We played GURPS Space a little — the combat rules were just too deadly and it was just too easy to die. We played GURPS Time Travel (and the adventure where you go back to the Titanic to rescue some people while the team from your rival future timeline tries to rescue other people is still one of the best published adventures I have ever seen). We played lots of GURPS Supers. There was always some monolithic metaplot built into the campaigns by the GMs, and the entire world was in dire jeopardy and only the PCs could save it. Most commonly, however, we would get about thirty percent of the way towards saving the world, and then lose interest in favor of something else — cause there was just way too many neat options available. Somehow, it never occured to us to write up short-run campaigns. Without ever having read The Lord of the Rings, we wanted to create these big epics with twenty-point plot arcs and take our characters from 100 points to… some indeterminate number that no doubt represented total badassery.

My brother got ahold of Shadowrun around this time, and while I never actually played it — its character generation was so arcane compared to GURPS as to appear downright stupid — it certainly affected our GURPS play. There was also, as I seem to recall, a Sega Genesis game that we concurrently obsessed over; I’m not sure which one came into our field of interest first. One of the last campaigns we played in the GURPS days was a very cyberpunkish fantasy (we called it manapunk) set in GURPS Tredroy. For a fleeting moment, I (being the GM) had a good go at incorporating mood and feel and a certain vibe to the otherwise vanilla-and-concrete flavor of GURPS.

What I Took Away from GURPS: Tools to build worlds are more useful than the worlds themselves. Rephrased, player creativity is more fun for players than the game designer’s creativity. GURPS’ distinction between the Power (fire damage at range) and the Special Effects (it’s a green fireball) has also stayed with me. And lastly, universal currency for character creation and advancement, a lesson I didn’t fully appreciate until later.

“Growing Up”

And then I went to college. A nice Christian college where I was somewhat concerned about openly looking for other gamers, lest I be labelled as a devil-worshipper, or worse, a weirdo. Besides, all the gamers that I did happen to find were all into D&D, which I knew was utter crap, having no character points to spend and using levels and classes and other forms of total bullshit. I actually might have drifted away from roleplaying games altogether if it was not for a very strange confluence of unrelated items: (a) I grew up thirty minutes away from Disneyland and my family had had annual passes for a couple years before college, (b) I met a girl who was all into this online roleplaying thing called MUSHing, and (c) there was this MUSH called Dark Metal, set in a post-apocalyptic future Los Angeles… complete with an abandoned Disneyland. Dark Metal was, strictly speaking, very near the lowest rung of slum you could get to in MUSH terms. It was also running a combination of Cyberpunk 2020 and… wait for it… World of Darkness. Yeah, there went my soul.

At first I was pretty much an asshole on these games. The players took everything so seriously that it was amusing to, for instance, create a pair of Malkavians with my friend Ben, name them Jesus and Nicholas, and then have a loud fight in the middle of the street outside a popular hangout (hint: Nicholas believed he was a Saint). My Cultist of Ecstacy “Austin” was also amusing, in a disrupt-everyone-else’s-fun sort of way. Eventually, though, we fell into the trap of trying to actually accomplish something on Dark Metal, and the steel jaws of the trap snapped shut. I bought the Mage book, and then… yeah, every other Mage book available, and eventually started in on Changeling, too. In any case, our quest to accomplish something, as the Mage book implies the game is all about, led us to run headlong into the double-thick brick wall of Game Staff and Game Rules. In a game about changing the world, Mage offers you no method for actually, you know, changing the world. And the staff of any MUSH is invested in the world they have created over literally years of play. Nothing that we could do in-character ever significantly changed anything — not even dropping a house-sized meteor on the bar that housed the Elysium.

When game staff got so damn tired of us agitators and actually banned me off of Dark Metal (a staffer’s PC happened to own that bar), I migrated to other MUSHes. This is actually a little tidbit of MUSHness that I didn’t go into in my prior article A Short History of MUSHdom — the migratory nature of MUSH players. A typical MUSH has a lifecycle of about three years, with a rise in population and activity, a crest, and then a crash. I cannot even remember the names of all the MUSHes that I played on through the five or six years that I MUSHed. Nearly all of them were World of Darkness games, and I played almost exclusively Mage, and when it became patently obvious that it was impossible to actually “change the world”, I moved onto Changeling. For years I was searching for the perfect game — a combination of which games were allowed (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, Changeling, and *shudder* Mummy, Demon, etc), which house rules were in use, what other players were participating, who was on game staff, what the game world was like, what kind of “plots” were in use, and the like. On more than one occasion I joined staff to try and turn an existing game into the perfect game, and on a few occasions I actually built and ran MUSHes from the ground up. Curiously, I never did find the perfect game.

What I did find were people: lots and lots of people. And while I am sort of jumping the gun on the “What I Took Away” part, over time I learned something: these people are insane. Red-eyed, slavering, canon-thumping, rules-mongering, social-game-dickering, rhetorically extravagant, bankrupt of anything resembling restraint, obsessive, petty, and abusive psychos. You would be too, in their place. Consider: there’s perhaps two hundred World of Darkness MUSH players, which is not that many. Most of the World of Darkness books present a setting which is at worst schizoid and at best it offers many options. Individual players pick and choose among the options for what they like the best, and to them this is what the game is “about”. Throw them all together with absolutely no reliable means of communicating or negotiating their expectations. Shake well… for three to ten years. To say that Agenda Clashes were common is like saying Africa has a little problem with AIDS. Taken individually or in small groups, most MUSHers were kind, considerate, well-meaning, and creative people. In fact, ‘cliques’ of like-minded players were perhaps the only viable means of playing MUSHes for any length of time. Going ‘out on the grid’ was fucking dangerous — because, as I said before, those people were insane, and you were too once you had to start dealing with them.

Round about this time, my wife (the girl who got me into MUSHing) pointed me at the Introduction to GNS essays, and they made perfect, immediate sense to me — not necessarily the labels, but the phenomenon — people want different stuff from a game, some games work well for some things, and others don’t. And outside of the occasional whackjob, most gamers are kind, creative people who simply don’t have the words or tools to effectively communicate what it is they want to their fellow gamers.

What I Took Away from WoD MUSHing:
Seeing players as people and recognizing their sometimes distressing social situations as the source of their discontent. How to present (but not implement) a theme or mood that permeates a game. Making the game about the real world — however obliquely — and not simple power trips, can create player investment. Lastly and most importantly, constructing a game as a social situation of people interacting, rather than as some sort of simulation using human brains as coprocessors.

In Which We Kill Tribe 8

I should also add in that period of time where I was writing for Dream Pod 9’s Tribe 8. This actually overlapped portions of the above segment. You can be a gamer, playing lots of games and buying lots of books and even following your favorite writers, but once you step across the threshold to actually designing games, your entire understanding of your own hobby changes. This goes doubly so if you start working for an established game company on an established game line. You’ve heard the thing about laws and sausages, right? That applies to books, too.

A group of friends and I wrote what amounts to a year’s worth of a game line, which was five (six?) books, both sourcebooks and campaign materials relating to the game’s metaplot. We were given assignments and parameters; we wrote within those parameters. We didn’t always agree with those paramters; we wrote within them anyway. We dealt with lots of fans and even talked with some players, too. We heard what they said that they wanted and we saw their reaction when they got what was published. We also dealt with our fellow writers on the game line — you know all the people who bicker on RPGnet about what a game is “supposed” to be about? Yeah, the writers are having the same arguments, and that influences what gets into the books. It’s not uncommon for the writers’ arguments to become the fanboys’ arguments once the books come out. As I mentioned before, we wrote what we were told to; some outspoken fans really really really didn’t like it. They blamed us. The beleaguered game line floundered the next year. Hence, “we killed Tribe 8.”

One of Tribe 8’s most intriguing elements was its metaplot, built into the game line and revealed in a sequence of campaign books. I like to term it an ‘experiment’ these days, because it failed, which tells you something about how gaming and the gaming market works. When we were writing, pretty far into the metaplot, we had lots of difficulties with the fact that folks who had been playing the game through the first three or four campaign books had wreaked changes that were not envisioned by the writers of those books. Consequently, when we wanted to involve some of the setting’s characters, the campaigns at home may have already made them dead or disgraced or leaders of renegade religions or the like. This was, basically, the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast writ large: the game company could not “control the story” if the players at home were “controlling the characters.” The games diverged until the campaign books were all but unusable, and stopped selling. However, the games that I played in with my fellow writers, who knew large portions of that metaplot and where it was going, diverged even further and made profound changes to the setting. I’ve only recently started to realize the implications of that one.

What I Took Away From Tribe 8: Game Design is a terrible, terrible business to get into, with impossible expectations and little reward. A game designer does not, will not, and cannot dictate the experience of play at the table. One useful technique I learned: we made sure that every single thing that was put into our books was a “plot hook” (an imprecise term; now I use flags, situation, et al) and could be used in an actual game. Let me repeat that: every single thing printed could be used in an actual game.

Gettin All Indie

I’ve skipped over lots of one-shots and games that didn’t really impact me very much — I’ve played in exactly one D&D game, where I played a halfling corsair in Al-Qadim, with his dual scimitars dragging along the ground behind him. I played very briefly in a MERP game, and then convinced the GM to convert the entire thing to GURPS. The big ones, though, were TMNT, GURPS, World of Darkness, and Tribe 8.

These days, I’m fiddling with indie games, and the reasons why and my reactions to these games are strewn all over the rest of this blog. Further, reminiscing on something that I’m in the middle of is kind of silly. So no ‘What I Took Away’ here, since I’m still in the process of pulling the interesting stuff off the walls. Suffice to say, I am enjoying these games far more and far more regularly than I enjoyed any gaming I’ve done beforehand. Here’s hoping I continue to learn from these games, and am able to apply what I take away to even better gaming yet.

This weekend a friend of mine who plays in a game I’m not in was telling me a tale of woe and how she was getting rather frustrated with her fellow players. My friend wanted to frame a scene that would develop the ongoing narrative — bang, here’s the information we need to move forward with the story. Her counterpart across the table, however, didn’t want to “skip” to that scene without delving through all of the fictional details that the characters would have gone through, regardless of the narrative impact provided by those details and the sifting between them — otherwise, they were just cutting out large parts of the story.

In my design group last night, one of our members discussed his goals for the game he’s designing. He wants the system to develop epic plotlines and encourage intricate characterization, both over the course of multiple game sessions, with a heavy emphasis on living the character and experiencing what it was like to be the character in these exciting situations and how those situations affected, challenged, and grew the character. And what word did he use to describe all of what he wanted? Story.

Ask a hundred gamers what it is that they really like about their game, and eighty-seven of them will tell you it’s the story* — but what one gamer means by “story” will bear little resemblence to what another gamer means when they use the exact same word. Not coincidentally, a lot of RPG books purport to provide “story” — and can you blame them, considering that 87% of the market wants “story?” But because when it comes to RPGs, where books are only written by gamers with delusions of grandeur, what that guy means when he says “story” is almost guaranteed to be something completely different than what you expect when you play the “story” game that he made. Conversely, when you, gamer-cum-game-designer, make your game and slap “story” on the cover copy or put it in the title of the game itself, you are doing the exact same thing — building a nice venus fly trap to lure customers in thinking that you’re offering what they want because you’re using some nice-sounding words. What you are not doing is actually communicating what you are offering. That is a bad, bad idea.

A Fun Take-Home Exercise!

In response to our community’s little problem with the word “story” I am proposing an exercise: excise the word “story” from your vocabulary. Not permanently, mind. Do it for a week. Try it out; take it for a spin. Try and rewrite your Introduction To My Keen Story Game without using the word “story” anywhere. See where it takes you and, if you don’t like where you end up, go back to using the word.

The first thing that you’ll get out of excising “story” is that you will put into words what you actually mean when you normally use the word. When you can’t say, “players tell a story” you have to get specific. You say “players relate their character’s actions to fictional events described by the game master” or “players each add details to an imaginary world” or “players take turns narrating what happens next.” All three of those might normally be construed as “story” but are in fact completely different things. While they may all, in the end, produce something that someone might recognize as a story, they are different processes that happen to create similar things.

Now that you’ve got a better handle at what you’re doing, it becomes easier to write precise, step-by-step instructions for your procedures of play. If the game is about reacting to the GM’s events, then you can make procedures for reacting to events. If the game is about adding details to a communal world, you can make procedures for adding those details. Rules for reacting will look fundamentally different than the rules for adding details. Assuming you can write clearly, players will have an exacting list of things that they can and should be doing in pursuit of a goal that they hold in common, not wandering around in the fictional world trying to find something interesting, getting lost in the cloud of idiosyncratic details in their heads, or fighting over what ’should’ happen, all in the hope that they’ll eventually arrive at “story”.

But most importantly, most King-Kong-sized screaming-madman-in-your-face importantly, you can stop presenting the game you’ve designed as having something to do with “story.” You can present the game as this other thing, this specific, precise thing like “collaborating to create a fictional world in motion” or “rising to an imaginary challenge” or “developing an intriguing character and sharing it with your friends” and then — this is the important part — and then actually give that to the people who respond with interest. You can say “I will give you X” and then give them X. How much cooler is that than saying “I will give you the awesome” and then giving them something that you think is awesome and maybe they will, too, but probably not?

A Step Further

Now, I don’t know if I’m alone on this or not, but generally speaking, I like roleplaying games of every stripe. I like me the juicy moral crises and tough choices, I like building up a shared world, I like cleaving to a world presented in teevee or fiction. I like gritty tactical combat, I like deep characterization, I like quick and fast play using characters as little more than pawns. There really is very little out there that I can’t sit down and play and enjoy myself doing. The one thing that I really need out of any play experience, however, is knowing what I’m doing so that I can appreciate it. I sit down at a Dogs game with a different mindset than I sit down at a Capes game, much like I have a different mindset when playing Monopoly, Scrabble, or Jenga.

What I’m getting at here is that, most likely, I’d really dig on whatever it is that you call “story”. I could probably hear your “this creates stories!” schpiel, sit down at your game, and eventually enjoy myself. That ‘eventually’ is the kicker, though. Sometimes it takes a long, long time for me to figure out what it is that I’m supposed to be enjoying — “Oh, this is all about pushing my character into tough choices” or “Oh, this is all about fiddling with technobabbly space drives and stuff” or “Oh, I’m supposed to maliciously leave my character open to getting hurt in new and interesting ways.” The real question, though, is how long that ‘eventually’ takes. It can be half a session, it can be three sessions. If it takes too long, I may lose interest before I get to the good parts. But if the game is designed and presented with a clear, precise goal, that ‘eventually’ can be cut down to ten minutes, and I can sit down and have fun right now.

The best praise that I have for any game is that it says what it does and it does what it says. Dogs in the Vineyard says you’re God’s Watchdogs and hands you gameplay about judgment and making things right. Capes asks “Power is fun, but do you deserve it?” and then makes you prove that you’re worth the power. The thing of it is, using the word “story” to describe gameplay makes all of that collapse into a heap. It does not communicate anything, and consequently, players have little expectations or more likely incorrect expectations — which makes it difficult-to-impossible to fulfill those expectations.

So ditch “story”. Get rid of it for a week or so. See what the world looks like without that tint to your glasses. I’m betting that things will take on a much sharper focus, things will be clearer, and most importantly, you will be better able to talk about those things in sharper, clearer terms.

—

* The other thirteen will tell you that they “love the setting” (5), “like the feel of the crazy dice shapes” (3), tell you what Creative Agenda they “are” (3), or tell you how Forge theory is stupid and never actually answer the question (2). Needless to say, all of these numbers are illustrative bullshit.

I realized that I had links to the design blogs of a number of game designers, but not a link to their website where you can get their games. Sometimes the link between the blog and the “main site” was obvious from the blog — and in other cases there wasn’t even a mention (tsk tsk). So I added a link category for “Get Games From” and now it’s got all sorts of links to where you can actually pick up the games from these new voices in game design.

For some reason, when someone says “Marketing,” most everybody in earshot hears “Advertising.” This is a gross oversimplification. I’ll counter with an oversimplification of my own: marketing is “getting people to buy stuff.” Nearly every step of a business model is impacted by marketing, because every aspect of a business is in some way, shape, or form about getting people to buy stuff. Advertising is only a very small part of that much larger process. Marketing is not something that happens only after you have something to sell; when done best, marketing is a continual process that permeates the entire business venture, from start to finish. Which is really easy to say, and is a hopelessly tangled mess of actual practice. Here’s my attempt to explain it in its most basic terms.

Talking the Talk

In its neverending goal to get people to buy stuff, marketing focuses on providing customers utility, which you can think of as the valuable aspects of a product. Utility itself comes in five flavors — form, place, time, possession, and information. Form utility is the basics of a product’s features — its sturdy construction, great taste, vibrant color, whatever. Place utility is where the customer is able to purchase the product. Time utility is when the customer is able to purchase the product. Possession utility is the means by which the customer can purchase the product — cash, check, charge, trade, et cetera. Lastly, information utility is what the customer knows about the product. Marketing strives to increase utility — so when you publish your book with better paper, you are increasing the form utility of the book. Quickly, compare a book which is only available for purchase at gaming conventions — it has pretty low place and time utility, since it would be ridiculously difficult to get your hands on a copy. However, by putting the book up for sale online, the publisher is drastically increasing both time and place utility, since it can be purchased anytime, anywhere. Oversimplifying, selling only at Cons is poor marketing; selling online is better marketing.

Obviously, in the “getting people to buy stuff” trade, there are a thousand factors bearing on every purchasing decision. Marketers try to increase utility by controlling the four things that they actually have a hope of controlling — product, place, price, and promotion. These “four Ps” are called the marketing mix. Product involves deciding what you are selling and how your product meets the needs of a given market. Place involves lots more than just deciding where you’d like to sell your product — it involves distribution, local laws, transportation, not to mention figuring out where the customers are to begin with. Price is probably the most obvious, and the most computationally complex — how much will you sell the product for, and how much will customers be willing to spend for it? Lastly, promotion comprises all of the efforts to interest customers in shelling out their hard-earned for your product. Advertising, if you were curious, falls within promotion, along with publicity, salesmanship, special offers, packaging, and a host of other things.

Walking the Walk

Here’s the thing that makes me hop up and down like crazy: it’s not that people don’t realize that advertising is a small part of marketing, or that there are other things that they should be doing. It’s that advertising can only be done effectively in the context of the rest of marketing. To take the simplest example, you can make up some absolutely awesome banner ads for your product, and you could pay a modest fee to some web-advertising firm that will make sure those ads appear in regular rotation online. Unless those ads appear where your potential customers can see them, however — that is, unless you take place into account — all that effort is for naught. Nobody sees the ads; nobody buys the book. End of story.

Chances are, you’re still reading this thinking about applying all of this to an existing product. Try to take a step back and stop thinking about this in terms of “guy who wrote this game” and start thinking in terms of “guy who writes games.” Doesn’t sound like much of a difference, but it’s huge. The first guy tries to start his marketing after he’s written the game, which may work — if he’s lucky. The second guy, on the other hand, starts his marketing before he starts writing his game. Sounds backwards? It isn’t really — it just entails thinking about what sort of game he can write that other people would be interested in playing. We actually have a sort of failsafe in gaming, since it’s hard to write a game without ever thinking of other people playing it — we naturally think about our friends that with whom we usually play games, playing the game that we’re writing.

So if we’re already doing this by default, why am I bitching about the lack of marketing? It’s the context thing, again. Designers will write a game thinking about their four friends and then advertise the game on RPGnet, which their friends despise (for instance). The awareness of the implicit target market that informs the design process absolutely must be linked to the rest of the marketing process. If you make your game for your friends who are all ivory tower academics, you are wasting your time working hard to, say, distribute it through game stores that they or people like them would never enter. This works both forwards and backwards, though. Ideally, the designer should be thinking of who the product will sell to while designing the game. This doesn’t mean diluting the game to the lowest common denominator; in fact with Full Light, Full Steam, once I decided that I was shooting for an adult market I was able to jettison a lot of rather puerile text explaining the basics of mercantilism and the politics of empire. I didn’t need that drek anymore; I could focus on what was important to me!

The Marketing Firewall

This is why mainstream publishing - novels and magazines and nonfiction books and stuff — is run by editors. People all over the world sit down and write a short story or novel or thesis every day, following the dictates of their muse or whatever metaphor for creativity you want to allude to. There’s nothing wrong with this, and in fact the whole process can be really enjoyable and satisfying for the author — but that doesn’t mean it’s something that other people will pay money for. Quality does not equal profitability. So the finished manuscript is sent off to a publishing house, staffed by editors, and it is then and only then that the business really starts operating. The editors are not there to serve the authors; the editors serve the publishing house, selecting from this pool of avilable written works the things that they believe will sell. That selection process is entirely directed by marketing concerns, judging the potential utility of the manuscripts and considering potential marketing mixes for the book. Only the manuscripts that show promise are greenlighted and proceed to manufacture. The ensuing success of the product is, to be charitable, the result of the skill of the author, but the overall success of the publishing house is the result of those marketing decisions made by the editors. Good decisions create profits and protect against losses; bad decisions waste resources and opportunities.

That editorial firewall between the writing and manufacture is a safety measure — and one that self-published authors often lack. It has happened all too often that a self-published author sunk a great deal of cash into manufacturing a product that just didn’t sell. We need to turn a critical eye on our own work, and consider not “Is this a quality work?” but “How can I devote assets to this product in a profitable way?” If you’re not comfortable with such questions but don’t think that that should disqualify you from writing games, you’re absolutely right. Go ahead and write games to your heart’s content. But if you don’t like asking these questions, you should stay the hell away from publishing them.

We need to be editors of our own little publishing houses, asking those marketing questions at every step of the process, from start to finish. When looking at a manuscript, we can consider what size the final book should be, but if we start asking questions earlier, when we’re looking at ideas, or mechanics, or settings, we can consider broader questions: Should this product be a book? Would this be a stronger product as a card game? How can I make this available anywhere, anytime, and still earn a profit? Who would like to play this game, and how do I contact them? Can I increase the form utility of this product by using the hyperlink capabilities of the pdf format rather than assuming linear textuality of printed matter? How can I package this concept? How easily is that transported? Or perhaps simply: how can I get this to pay my way to GenCon next year?