Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games | Hacker News Reader

Hobbyists beat professional designers in creating novel board games

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220 pointsArtWomb148 comments

Gamedev here. Sigh.

One, the measurement of novelty is bad: it's basically the measure of whether the game exhibits a novel mashup of mechanics according to the BoardGameGeek ontology of mechanics.

This is a terrible definition of novelty, as it ignores all of the other aspects of game design, both in gameplay (interesting systems, challenges, loops) and non-game play (fiction, setting, presentation, etc). Who measures novelty as "mashup of mechanics"?

Two, the measure of knowledge diversity is based on BGG reports of how many genres the designers have worked in. This is, again, not only questionable, but also leads to weird effects: imagine knocking Salman Rushdie, JRR Tolkien, or Umberto Eco for having low knowledge diversity because Amazon says they write books in only one or two genres!

But fine, even assuming that, the actual effects are not strong. Looking at the figures, the scatter plots are all over the place, and the trend lines fit poorly.

And finally, the main problem is: sure, if you compare hobbyists (who make what they want for fun) with professionals (who are making a product that needs to sell more than a small handful of copies), of course you're going to find that hobbyists are more free to experiment with wild permutations of mechanics. But in doing so, they conflate personal ability with situational constraints. What about professional designers if they were able to work without commercial constraints, like hobbyists?

I know what you mean. I have same issue with card games now and rts craze before. It is insanely hard to properly balance a game and when I see people going crazy over one man made card game I already know what reviews will be. This is not to diss any indie developers. I am one of them. But can we actually talk about game design theory and how games are designed. Can journalist check Gamasutra nad gdc vault before writing blog post on genre

>Can journalist check Gamasutra nad gdc vault before writing blog post on genre

No because if they take time to do research they'll miss the views they could have gotten if they just slam out a piece and (basically) nobody is going to pay extra for a journalist who's also an expert on board game design.

It's the biggest problem with journalism today.

Is this the vault you are referring to: https://www.gdcvault.com/ ?

> But can we actually talk about game design theory and how games are designed.

That is antithetical to how I view art.

Let the people playing the games sort the wheat from the chaff. There's a reason why "Settlers of Catan" and "Ticket to Ride" are on big box store shelves now.

It's because they aim at normies, not boardgamers (normies are the risk/monopoly crowd). Also they were on the market 'first' with a mass appeal. They are, however, not good games.

A million flies eating shit doesn't make shit good.

Nah, Catan is an EXCELLENT game, especially in the context of what was available when it was created in the 90's. I don't play it anymore because I've played enough for three lifetimes, as of ten years ago. But it's good enough that I have played it that much!

Ticket to Ride is entirely forgettable, though... It feels like Candyland, but without the meta-commentary on the illusion of free will.

You say that like Candyland is a bad game.

;-)

Catan breaks when I have all the wood and you need wood to win but I refuse to trade with anyone. It's a very aged and crummy design. Many people just don't know better.

That's hilarious. The Root discussion forums are an endless mess of issues like this, for which the answer is uniformly 'pay attention to the other players and don't let that happen!' (With the added problem of being Root, so that knowing what other players are up to takes about two dozen games if experience.) And yet root is still a pretty high rated game...

There's also a part of me that wonders if novelty is overrated. I'm less familiar with the history of board games, but, at least in video games, my impression is that many really clever ideas never really go anywhere, and, of the ones that do, the first game to incorporate a mechanic rarely ends up also being one of the ones that put it to the best use.

Your argument sounds something like, "Mining is overrated, the true source of our materials is smelting."

It's more meant to be an, "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything," kind of sentiment.

Strong disagree. Good ideas are rare, and nobody knows how to come up with them reliably. (For example, in the world of cinema, see how the writers of the subsequent Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and the people around them, had no idea what made the first one good.)

An idea without execution is still valuable, but execution without an idea is worthless.

> An idea without execution is still valuable, but execution without an idea is worthless.

FIFA?

(Not trying to be snarky, but genuinely motioning to something I believe to be execution without novel ideas.)

The international association football/ soccer governing body? Or the video game series?

FIFA the organisation was much more corrupt than you'd expect, and so I suppose to the extent this organisation was novel (there are a lot of international sports bodies) the novelty was apparently undesirable.

But I think the FIFA video game may have been the first to introduce several awful ideas, which were nevertheless novel. Blind buy "lootboxes" were introduced to the FIFA games fairly early because fans were familiar with the idea of buying a pack of "trading cards" in the real world which are also blind buy.

I know what you mean. But I don't think that disproves my point, it just shows that people like garbage.

And that's ok. I love garbage sometimes, there is absolutely zero harm in garbage. But that doesn't make it anything other than garbage. The harm comes when you think the garbage is gold.

Agree, life and the internet have taught me that "nothing new under the sun" is true.

Novelty and ideas are golden. There would be no good execution of said idea if the idea wasn't put first first (of course).

> the people around them, had no idea what made the first one good

That's easy - Johnny Depp in black eyeliner.

> > Ideas are cheap, execution is everything

> Good ideas are rare, and nobody knows how to come up with them reliably.

The operative word there is "good ideas are rare". The claim is that you don't know whether a idea is good until it's been executed on (which seems plausible, and at any rate you haven't contradicted that), and that good ideas are rare, so most ideas are crap (which you yourself just asserted). Thus, the expected value of a given idea (absent execution) is very low, aka cheap.

I mean, I think it's obvious that the OP meant "good ideas" when he said "ideas are cheap." His entire point was "novelty" and "many really clever ideas" are not worth anything without the execution to go along with them.

> The claim is that you don't know whether a idea is good until it's been executed on

I don't think his claim was just epistemological the way you're interpreting it, and if it was, then I will withdraw since it's not the idea I meant to engage with.

> I mean, I think it's obvious that the OP meant "good ideas"

Eh, I consider "Ideas that are known for a fact to be good (ie useful) are useful (ie valuable, provided they aren't already devalued by ubiquity[0])." to be sufficiently tautological that I would not expect someone (intellegent and good-faith enough to be worth engaging with) to be arguing against it. Although note the distinction between merely good ideas, versus ideas that you actually know are good, since the work of turning the former into the latter was what I assumed they were attributing to execution.

> I don't think his claim was just epistemological the way you're interpreting it, and if it was, then I will withdraw since it's not the idea I meant to engage with.

Fair enough; I'm not sure we even have a disagreement over facts so much as over how we're categorizing things and the terminology therefor.

0: Eg, "writing" or "general-purpose computers" are almost incalculably valuable ideas, but they're not worth anything in a supply-and-demand sense because everyone in the world already knows about them.

It sounds more like, "Mining is overrated, 90% of the work in getting useful materials is smelting.", actually.

When a game does put a novel mechanic to best use ... was the novelty overrated? Or the game that first introduced it (poorly) overrated?

Regardless, I think we both agree we want novel games. No one still wants to be playing Senet. ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet

> the first game to incorporate a mechanic rarely ends up also being one of the ones that put it to the best use

This definitely applies to board games. Dominion was the first deck-builder board game and is still fairly popular, but it has been superseded by many other superior deck builders that came out afterwards.

I have yet to come across a better deck builder than Dominion.

It is so pure and focused that it is absolutely the best deck builder there is IMO.

So many other deck builders either completely mess up the extremely careful calibration of chance that exists in a deck builder or the 'other' game that is tacked on to the deck building engine interacts badly or in very swingy ways.

Definitely disagree. There are other successful games that use deckbuilding as an element of a larger game (in the vein of Clank or Quest for El Dorado), but no pure deckbuilding game has come close to overtaking Dominion as top dog.

If we use logged plays for the past month on BGG as one datapoint, Dominion has more than than Aeon's End, Ascension and Marvel Legendary combined.

Sure, there is a specific population of people who log their plays and it differs from the gameplaying public as a whole, but if anything it veers more towards "cult of the new" and away from people who still play an older game because it's what they have.

EDIT: It looks like Star Realms has almost as many logged plays this month as Dominion, but I would still maintain that Dominion is in no way "superseded" even if it is no longer the only relevant game in its genre.

Novelty is overrated due to a selection bias - it implicitly tends to mean "novel and at least good for a change of pace".

Adding in a feature that say previous winners become the new boss and losers get a bonus inheritance from their prior run could be hailed as novel and doing good things for pace.

Having to randomly roll 10 dice x 365.25x days x 18 years for events to create your starting character would be very novel. Especially if it is a commom occurance that all four players to die before turn zero due to childhood disasters resulting in the winner being the one who lived the longest at eight years old before dying of cancer would be terrible to actually play.

>And finally, the main problem is: sure, if you compare hobbyists (who make what they want for fun) with professionals (who are making a product that needs to sell more than a small handful of copies), of course you're going to find that hobbyists are more free to experiment with wild permutations of mechanics. But in doing so, they conflate personal ability with situational constraints. What about professional designers if they were able to work without commercial constraints, like hobbyists?

This last paragraph reminds me of the video game world and common arguments on indie games vs AAA/big studio games.

Indie games with their hit or miss experimentation, AAA games with their formulaic selling strategy.

But in the video game world there have been professionals who have stepped back into the indie world to make something lower budget and more experimental. Those end up being about as hit or miss as the 'actual', for lack of a better word, indie games.

So I guess my point is, I think the constraints themselves do play a part in hobbyist type games and a professional under the same constraints is likely to produce the same kind of thing.

Something experimental that may be awesomely fun or it could be kinda lame.

I think you both are hitting on that thin slice; the Venn diagram of strong design, managerial pressure, and resources.

A big part of the actual success of a game is the aesthetics and the marketing. How good the actual game is doesn't necessarily correlate.

Indie games these days are as conservative as regular studios. Loads of a proliferation of the last big thing etc. The real standout indie genre is porn games and even those stick to a generally similar design.

The problem for developers from larger studios is that the bizdev side of things is largely kept apart from them. So they might make something within a niche that's great but is never going to find an audience.

Which is a long winded way of saying no one bar hobbyists or people taking an extreme roll of the dice are operating without commercial constraints.

Genuinely curious about porn games. They all seems to be either a show of pretty models with somewhat controllable animation or a "nothing special" game with explicit scenes thrown in for your enjoyment.

Some of these games can be excellent, I am thinking about some Japanese visual novels here, but they all seem to be rather formulaic.

Maybe I am missing something big here. I am not too much into porn games, and you are unlikely to stumble upon them unless you are actively looking for it.

Honestly I defer most of those questions to someone that understands the landscape better. It was an underserved market though and lots of people enjoy unrealistic depictions of sex so combining that with games is hardly rocket science.

The bit I find interesting is despite the porn industry in the west being big on tech like streaming and VR it’s not really there on games. Too much reliance on real people or something?

More generally I think it’s super interesting how puritanical the games market is in comparison with books or movies. Even within serious games.

One problem, I think, is that making good porn games is difficult. Sex is all about contact, and just look how messed up physics can be, even simple physics in AAA games. If something like throwing a punch is difficult to do right, even thought there is a single point of contact, imagine how hard a sex position where the entire body is in contact can be to simulate. To make things worse, sex (usually) deals with human bodies, complex objects we are very familiar with, and therefore, small errors can get us right into the uncanny valley.

A solution, of course, is to use prerecorded scenes. But if you lose interactivity, you might as well watch a movie, something there is no lack of and can be cheaply produced.

So while the idea is not rocket science, the execution may very well be.

Of course, there is always the solution of taking an existing game genre (visual novels are a common one) and add porn to it. But as good as the game might be and as hot as the porn can be, it isn't very interesting as a concept.

Not my area of expertise, but I've heard, through the proverbial grapevine, there is a popular mobile game making the rounds that allows thirsty players to "send nudez" in which the full image can only be unlocked via solving a classic N-puzzle sliding game. Reluctant to search for it myself, but shouldn't be too hard to find ;)

Regarding Japanese porn games, I've played a few which were based around RPG gameplay (classic, dungeon crawling or SRPG). I remember also some puzzle and match-3 games. But it seems like the majority of them are visual novels.

>>> professionals who have stepped back into the indie world

This immediately reminded me of Notch and the birth of Minecraft. What's amazing is that the private alpha launch is recorded for posterity in the TIG forums:

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0

The gameplay mechanic is everything. On day one, players were mining rocks, building castles. And a decade later, that same intuitive territorial need, that taps into primitive desire is still alive. Players are mining rocks, building castles (and much more)!

I also think about the classic card game Uno. We've now got like four generations of fiercely competitive players in my family. There's decks in the kitchen, the living room, even in the car. It's so simple to start a game. Infinite replayability. And the latest innovation: blank cards. So you can literally draw an "Eat my Underwear" for infinite expansion.

That endless replayability in gameplay mechanics can then be considered to be the crux. Headshots in FPS are just as satisfying in Valorant as they were two decades ago in Counter-Strike. Perfect information, turn-based strategy games are all variants of millennia old Chess, which is experiencing a renaissance. One of the best things on the web today is the 3000+ Stockfish superhuman lichess.org WASMX real-time analyzer with 8-ply depth search. It's a portend of things to come for the coming era of AI-mediated design.

So what we are really talking about is an exhaustive exploration of the gameplay mechanic space. With the criterion that if it is endlessly replayable, it will be "fun" forever.

Great discussion all around, I really enjoyed reading everyone's comments. Welcome counter-programming to all the noise in the current noosphere ;)

> What about professional designers if they were able to work without commercial constraints, like hobbyists? Exactly, they should look at indy developers like Nate Hayden, Hollandspiele and others who make niche games, but professionally.

"A camel is a horse designed by a committee." (Although I heard it as 'A donkey is a horse....'.)

I don't question the professional designer's skill sets: just that they have a committee that has to vet the idea/game. And that's where things could sour.

As I have heard professional artists (writers, film-makers, musicians, journalists) describe it, the professional begins to self-censor: not even pursuing ideas they perceive will likely fail to pass muster with the "committee".

Is that the main problem with the article, or is it the main point of the article.

>voluntary teams of users...are driven by different incentives and motivations

Yeah, even a glance at the graphs is enough to raise significant doubts. This has the smell of p-hacking to claim/find a correlation where there is none.

IMHO it is not as flawed as the way you present it.

>>> One, the measurement of novelty is bad: it's basically the measure of whether the game exhibits a novel mashup of mechanics according to the BoardGameGeek ontology of mechanics. >>> This is a terrible definition of novelty, as it ignores all of the other aspects of game design, both in gameplay (interesting systems, challenges, loops) and non-game play (fiction, setting, presentation, etc). Who measures novelty as "mashup of mechanics"?

Using the mashup of mechanics to measure novelty seems logical for two reasons. First, in creativity research, it is quite common to measure novelty as uniqueness or as distinctiveness regarding already existing "solutions." One way to do so is using the combinations of the base elements of the creative output. There is also similar research doing the same with patents. Second, the authors refer to the MDA framework in their method section as an explanation of why they use mechanics. Following this framework, mechanics are not only the core elements of a game but also the only thing a game designer is able to influence - not the dynamics (i.e., run-time behavior, which seems to be "gameplay" in your wording) nor aesthetics (i.e., emotional responses of the player, which seems to be "non-game play" in your wording).

>>> Two, the measure of knowledge diversity is based on BGG reports of how many genres the designers have worked in. This is, again, not only questionable, but also leads to weird effects: imagine knocking Salman Rushdie, JRR Tolkien, or Umberto Eco for having low knowledge diversity because Amazon says they write books in only one or two genres!

Why do you think using genres to measure knowledge diversity is questionable? What is your concern about doing so? Please elaborate if you seem to have such a strong opinion on that.

Again, there is quite some research (esp. in creative industries) about how working in specific genres might influence how you think/understand things, i.e., how you come up with solutions, what solutions you come up with, how you talk about them, and so on.

Regarding the proposed weird effect: you (illogically) compare a single author's knowledge diversity with a team's diversity. However, the authors do not compare a fantasy author against a fantasy/horror author, but how a team with low diversity (3 Tolkiens) would compete against a more diverse team (Rushdie, Tolkien, and Eco - for the sake of the example).

>>> And finally, the main problem is: sure, if you compare hobbyists (who make what they want for fun) with professionals (who are making a product that needs to sell more than a small handful of copies), of course you're going to find that hobbyists are more free to experiment with wild permutations of mechanics. But in doing so, they conflate personal ability with situational constraints. What about professional designers if they were able to work without commercial constraints, like hobbyists?

Although the last question might be interesting to answer, what you describe before is the direct effect of being a hobbyist, resp. professional on creativity. However, being a hobbyist, resp. professional is the moderation effect, hence the paper looks at "how the effect of diversity on creativity changes because being a hobbyist or professional."

All this, however, is described or at least referred to in the paper.

Ah, a technical discussion! :) Sure, I'd be happy to dig in further into the details.

> Why do you think using genres to measure knowledge diversity is questionable? What is your concern about doing so? Please elaborate if you seem to have such a strong opinion on that.

Sure. Basically I treat a genre as a family of design solutions to a particular set of constraints, reified as artifacts. A genre will carry with it answers to a lot of question around who the player is, what is their role in the world, what kind of actions they can take on what kinds of objects (i.e. mechanics) and so on. In a sense, the choice of a genre answers a lot of the broad questions, letting the author delve deep into more detailed questions.

Going back to the author metaphor - it's like saying, Eco is lacking knowledge diversity because he mainly wrote books that tackled issues around meaning and semiotics. Sure, he never wrote any comic books or young adult novels. But that by itself is not a problem - that doesn't mean he had low "knowledge diversity" - especially since when he wrote about meaning, he dug deep into everything that related to it.

So in my design practice, I don't see deep expertise in specific genres as equivalent to "low knowledge diversity". Very much the opposite.

> Using the mashup of mechanics to measure novelty seems logical for two reasons. First, in creativity research, it is quite common to measure novelty as uniqueness or as distinctiveness regarding already existing "solutions."

What gets me here is uniqueness/distinctiveness purely based on taking mechanics and converting them into a distance metric. There's much, much more to a game than that! A game can be unique even when it shares a lot of mechanics with its predecessors. Indeed the whole history of game development is an evolution of designs, which are in conversation with what came before them - as in all arts, really.

Again, imagine complaining that Georgia O'Keefe had low "novelty" because she used traditional painting materials and composition.

> Second, the authors refer to the MDA framework in their method section as an explanation of why they use mechanics. Following this framework, mechanics are not only the core elements of a game but also the only thing a game designer is able to influence - not the dynamics (i.e., run-time behavior, which seems to be "gameplay" in your wording) nor aesthetics (i.e., emotional responses of the player, which seems to be "non-game play" in your wording).

So, a few things. Per MDA, mechanics are the only material elements of gameplay design that designers can influence - gameplay, as in the behavior of the game once it's put into motion by players. But they're not the only material elements of the game itself! Beyond just the aesthetics of interacting with game rules (the A in MDA) there are also sensory aesthetics, audiovisual aesthetics, and other elements of appreciating the game artifact on a material level.

But on a deeper level, just because M in MDA is the material substrate that designers can influence, that doesn't mean that's the interesting level to focus on. For example, take a game like Universal Paperclips. If we focused purely on the mechanics, it's a fairly tedious game with bog-standard resource loops. But if we look at the larger loops that the player participates in, and boosted by the innovative fiction (innovative by clicker game standards at least), the overall player experience is very different from what you'd expect by just looking at the mechanics!

And we could do the same exercise for basically any game. Just looking at the mechanics is reductionist, in terms of what the game brings to the table (as it were ;) ).

So that's the main problem I have with looking at just mechanics, and proclaiming a distance vector in mechanics as an novelty metric. It completely misses the forest for the trees.

Hope this was useful! Or at least enjoyable :)

Honest questions: Wouldn't BGG ratings be a good proxy for measuring novelty? Apart from the fact that the rating system can be gamed, it does appear to have validity from the community's perspective.

This kind of thing has been shown in all sorts of creative endeavour. But it ignores consistency, which is the main mark of professionalism.

Yeah, if you disregard all rules and norms sometimes you come up with something AMAZING that no-one following the rules could ever conceive of.

But most of the the time it's just crap.

That's why it's so fun to go to things like band competitions. Everybody plays about four songs. You see so much variety there. I guess it doesn't suit those people who just listen to the radio. Same about random small cafes or bars with live music.

There is the equivalent at gaming conventions. I remember at games expo (Birmigham UK) playing an alpha version of a game in the main convention bar one evening.

While reminds me I really must try and put some of my ideas for doing a 'Allo 'Allo! / Colditz mash up

The good thing about that is you're not expecting too much - the secret to happiness is low expectations.

But it's not a great method of doing business!

Well, I don't think it is "the" secret, and probably not a "secret" at all. (At least, I hope not.)

Regarding happiness, Maslow's model [1] is well-known and makes sense to me. As I understand it, happiness is built on a foundation by satisfying:

  1. physiological needs
  2. safety needs
  3. belongingness & love needs (i.e. connectedness)
  4. esteem needs
  5. self-actualization

Though, per Wikipedia:

- "There is little scientific basis to the idea: Maslow himself noted this criticism."

- "However, it has been pointed out that, although the ideas behind the hierarchy are Maslow's, the pyramid itself does not exist anywhere in Maslow's original work."

And my views:

- I question the universality of #5. There are many people who could, technically, accomplish 'more' that are happy doing 'less'. Perhaps #5 would be better explained as "agency" -- the ability to choose a path in life?

- That said -- I agree with you -- there is something to be said for expecting 'less'. This idea is compatible with "make the most of what you have". But less relative to what? For example, should one expect to be safe from violence, at least most of the time?

- The studies around "good" stress versus "bad" stress come into play too. This is consistent with sayings such as "the bad times help us appreciate the good times" and "we better appreciate the things we work for".

- Still, I believe that people, in general, are happier and more developed if they are not unnecessarily constrained. Unpacking this idea probably would requires a discussion of how individuals relate to society as well as normative theory of justice.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

I found this to be a much better explanation and takes into account the weird ways some people seem to be sad when they should be happy vice versa.

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_surprising_science...

This is the basis of so many products on kickstarter.

Either that they have a good novel idea but lack the knowledge of the professionals to make it a polished, (and balanced in the case of games) product, or that they think they have a new idea but they don't realise it's just a bad idea that the industry has avoided for a reason.

I don't disagree that there's been some great indie games, but there's been a lot of highly advertised crap too

Keep in mind that hobbyists sometimes spend as much, or more, time than professionals at a given craft.

I've known people with incredible skill at specific trades, but they had something completely different as their day job.

So true. Microsoft Encarta was never going to out-compete Wikipedia. And Windows Shell is never going to rip out bloat as ruthlessly as dwm, or lay it on as thickly as Compiz, or be as customizable as anything other than GNOME 3+.

Good point. Einstein is probably the most famous example of this, doing his early work while working in a patent office.

Gene Wolfe (Wikipedia: "He was often considered to be not only one of the greatest science fiction authors, but one of the best American writers regardless of genre.") is another, he wrote most of his famous works while working a day job as an engineer and editor.

> But most of the the time it's just *bleep*.¹

In other words, Sturgeon’s revelation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

¹(as my browser displays it bc https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23624-profanity-filter)

A group of 20 year old musicians wrote a better song than professionally trained composer with 40 years of experience... once.

or just compare "White Rabbit" to "We Built This City"

I don't think I even have a starting point to make that comparison

Big Macs vs The Naked Chef[1] is somewhat relevant in this context.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/01/18/big-macs-vs-the-na...

The mean quality of amateur designs is lower, but the variance is much, much higher.

When a creative market reaches a scale where thousands or hundreds of thousands of amateurs can experiment with new designs, the number of outliers surpassing the quality of professional designs is significant.

The challenge is finding a high-throughput way to filter those amateur board games. We like to think the best games will rise to the top, but at scale this becomes a popularity contest.

Furthermore, the line between amateur and professional blurs quickly when the amateurs start selling their products. Once someone starts a Kickstarter or opens a store to sell their amateur board game, they are effectively professionals. They tend to start behaving as such.

> Furthermore, the line between amateur and professional blurs quickly when the amateurs start selling their products. Once someone starts a Kickstarter or opens a store to sell their amateur board game, they are effectively professionals. They tend to start behaving as such.

Yes, in the sense that they have to factor in "professional" responsibilities, such as paying attention to costs; e.g. production and marketing.

However, I think when many people say "professional game designer" I think they may (rightly or wrongly) include "seasoned" (i.e. with a track record).

Of course, both amateurs and professionals may be seasoned. And both may have passion and dedication to their work.

> We like to think the best games will rise to the top, but at scale this becomes a popularity contest.

There are 5,000 new board games released every year (and that isn't even including expansions to previously release games). The challenge is sifting through thousands of new games to pick out the wheat from the chaff. The games from popular designers are much more likely to be successful than from up and comers. I often wonder how many gems among those 5,000 games never get noticed.

Maybe amateurs can more easily escape local maximas because they don't know the ingrained rules that lead to them.

Yes, perhaps.

Also, perhaps expert knowledge of common tendencies can help to avoid local maxima.

Survivorship bias is also relevant -- what we can find in the market from hobbists got to be the good ones or happened to find niche markets that the professionals overlooked/passed.

But I don't have to play most of the games produced this way. So I don't experience the crap. If you make six wildly different board games, five of which are utter trash, and one is genius, I never have to play the five trash games at all.

This is the same in a lot of creative fields. Novels, pop music, video games, movies. A handful of professional reviewers might see dozens at a time, but I see a couple based on their recommendations, and maybe I like half of what I see even though Sturgeon's revelation is correct.

I mean, this is such a generic concept - there are parallels in viral evolution we see in the real world.

There is such strong survivorship bias in comparing the top slice of amateurs to all professionals, who of course have different goals.

Thats okay though. Alexey Pajitnov's "Tetris" was all he ever needed to do, all the world needed.

Perhaps though I don't treat games like music where I need a new fix constantly, am happy to find a new game I enjoy every year or so.

90% of everything is crap. 90% of the 'consistent' games are also more crap.

Idie developers came up win Pandemic, Dominion, Settlers of Catan etc. Novel game mechanics that changed the board game world.

Professional designers can't afford failure, so they make "safe" designs that are likely to work. This isn't a result about "knowledge diversity", it's a result about incentives.

That is a plausible hypothesis. However, without any research backing it up I wouldn't be so dismissive of the conclusions of paper that actually put in the legwork to test its own hypothesis, without even engaging with the content of the paper.

I engaged with the paper. They didn't do a controlled test of anything. They ran some stats on BoardGameGeek.

I am not sure that holds up at least in the German market, most boardgames are what most other industries would consider failures with maybe 2000 copies sold and hardly breaking even if you would consider all the hours put in. You make some money with semi-hits if they are licensed in our contries as you basically have no further effort for income. The only big money pot is hitting Spiel des Jahres.

If you want a game from a designer that isn't safe, check out https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/295905/cosmic-frog

This is not exclusive to board game design. When I work on a personal project, I can be really creative and produce some good looking applications. However, as a professional developer working for someone else, I have to follow some guidelines that can result in boring, generic-looking stuff. This boring, generic-looking stuff allows me to consistently make a decent living, though.

Yes. Like writing reports for a company versus personal writing. You often have to use corporate templates and follow a house writing style.

Bethesda is a great example of this. Up until Fallout 4 or so, the company kept producing games with similar versions of Creation Engine.

Despite many fans hating the buggy engine Bethesda was using, and the fact their new games were basically spinoffs of their previous work, some of them are among the best-selling games of all time.

Sometimes I think researchers do not understand second-order effects of their pet theories.

The societal/market result of stuff like this will inevitably be something like "Let's crowdsource more of these creative activities, so we can drive down the already rock-bottom compensation rates of the few jobs that cannot be automated - this research says we're not going to lose anything on the quality side anyway". In the (laudable) quest to make amateurs respectable, they might well end up stripping even professionals of what little respectability they had accrued.

It's likely that democratization of creativity is a fundamentally unstoppable force in itself (like we've seen in photography, music, video etc); there is no need to hasten its rise though.

I'm curious about what you see as the end state.

What does this possible outcome mean for the people who are making games now?

What does it mean for the entrants?

Both short term and long term. How do you see this going?

I'm not him, but looking at the other markets this "democratisation of creativity" has happened in, it seems like we're going to get more of the patronage model where the professionals and better hobbyists can individually put their work up for subscribers with some free content as advertising.

I don't know how this will work with board games which have physical products that need creating and sending. It might be the right place for distributed "print shops" with card printers, 3D printers, and laser cutters to provide the actual game pieces.

In general, researchers don't try to understand second-order effects of their pet theories, because the consequences of the theories are not relevant to the theories being true or false - it's an "is-vs-ought" distinction.

This is an article that observes and describes aspects of how X influences Y. The question whether Y and its implications are good or bad is orthogonal to that; any discussion about whether Y should be hastened or slowed down would be simply offtopic. Discussion about which other factors would hasten or slow down this effect would be relevant though.

I'd go even beyond and argue that researchers should explicitly and intentionally avoid considering such "second-order effects". Let's assume that this research is true (perhaps it's not, I have no strong opinion on that) and, as you state, acknowledging that "this research says we're not going to lose anything on the quality side anyway" will cause some unwelcome consequences. In that case, what should we do about it? Should we avoid saying the truth because we don't like it? Should we lie and say "oh, we are going to lose on the quality side" because we don't like the second-order social effects of acknowledging the truth? I'd argue that allowing the social consequences (how things ought to be) to affect your view of reality (how tings are) is anathema to the concept of science, we should instead strive for objectivity even if (and especially if) we don't like what the looking glass is showing us.

See my other answer to the sibling comment.

Predicting second- and subsequent order effects accurately is basically impossible for any non-trivial issue.

Here I'd argue that the effect may instead be that professionals are able to figure out what the amateurs are doing differently and incorporate it into their discipline.

If you hold up the research trying to figure out which second-order effect is more likely, you'll never get any research done on anything of substance. (You see, the second order effect of your suggestion is an overall suppression of research. Damn, arguing from second-order effects sure is tempting!)

Suppression, no; but choosing priorities carries an element of ethical responsibility. You can choose to dedicate your time towards improving chemical weapons or towards improving harvest yields. Better chemical weapons will likely come about anyway, but why hasten their arrival?

Isn't that a first order effect though?

A second order effect would be researching a life-saving drug for a lifestyle condition. You research means people have less incentive to live healthily and end up dying even sooner from some other diet-related disease. The disease you cured would have scared them "straight" diet-wise.

This is nitpicking. Replace "improving chemical weapons" with "improving gases that will likely only be used in chemical weapons".

If person A wants to get paid to do something and person B wants to do the same thing to a similar quality for free as a leisure activity, isn't it sort of expected that it will become hard for person A to make a living? Doesn't it make sense that to make a living they will have to either produce something far better than the amateur, or do the parts that amateurs don't want to do, or differentiate themselves in some other way?

It seems to me that it would be an odd society which didn't even allow people to ask questions about the relative merits of person A and person B's work, in case they found out something which would be disruptive to person A's business model.

I have a friend who will love to hear this. He is an engineer who spent the last six years of his spare time (together with his family) developing an ambitious board game[1]. It started as an after-school project to do with his son... then it snowballed into something big... as he started hiring sculptors, designers, illustrators... outsourced testing to board game clubs... and now he's about to face D-Day... A launch on Kickstarter to determine whether all the effort was in vain or not.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/309625/forest-radgost

That looks incredible and such a cool origin story about a father nurturing his son's idea into fruition.

Yup. Particularly the part where the sculptor modeled one of the minis after a lego prototype constructed by the son.

Prototype: https://www.radgostforest.com/images/creatures/besomarLego.j...

Sculpt: https://www.radgostforest.com/images/creatures/besomar3dMode...

> We began our data collection by identifying all board games developed by teams of game designers published and ranked on BGG between 1990 and 2018.

The entire paper is based on survivorship bias.

Interesting. Please, elaborate why you think that is and how this - against the background of the paper - would bias the results.

They missed all the amateur designers whose games were not published and ranked. So only the best amateur designers made it into the sample.

The article seems to not talk about the difference between game designers and game developers which seem quite relevant in this context. It is even explictly naming "developers" in companies but using it wrong in context, it isn't a game developer's job to come up with a novel idea, that would be the company game designer. (Though people might fill both roles). To most people the amount of changes a a publishing company makes will be quite surprising, it will change a lot to everything about a game if it arrives by an author's submission and is gonna hit the market. The author might have submitted a novel idea and interesting core, but the raw games are often bad in pacing, balance, scoring, emotional engagement and the most people would just dismiss them. Good developers will be able to turn the interesting bit into a good game and dismiss the rest.

This is a good point and probably lost on people who aren’t board game enthusiasts. In video games a “game developer” is a broad characterization that could apply to anyone on the development team. “Game designer” is a specific role on that team.

In board games developer and designer are distinct roles. If you have a familiarity with modern, you may know the names of the designers of certain games, but the developers of those games are essential for turning the raw specification of the game into the box of tokens and cards you buy at Target. A lot of hobbyist games don’t get that development work and while they might have unique ideas, they are essentially prototype.

> Overall, HHS teams are more likely than professional teams to create truly creative game designs.

That's a pretty bold statement to make in the highlights in my opinion.

does creative imply good, though? that's the real question

Yeah, there are so many criteria on which to evaluate a board game— a quick look at the board games section on Kickstarter reveals hundreds of games which pitch well— gorgeous art, great premise, but you can tell just by looking at it that the gameplay fundamentals aren't there. Either the mechanics are boring (a reskin of classics like Parcheesi or Uno) or it's a jumble of stuff cribbed from other games with no cohesion ("look here's the deckbuilding part, and over here is worker placement, and look an area control mechanic on a modular board, yay!").

And there's the whole business of how much of a luck factor you want, how much rubber banding there is to keep it competitive, how much your strategy has to adapt in response to what others are doing, etc etc. These are things that pro designers carefully iterate on in the context of hundreds of test plays, often with a community of other designers who are equipped with the necessary experience and context to think deeply about how a game works and will work across multiple playthroughs.

"look here's the deckbuilding part, and over here is worker placement, and look an area control mechanic on a modular board, yay!"

I once listened to a podcast by some board gamers who had gone way too far in this direction. They'd say the name of a game, and describe it as e.g. "it's worker placement with area control", and that was the end of their description and analysis of the game. Seems to me they're missing a fair bit of nuance and more importantly, it doesn't tell me anything about how likely it is I'd enjoy the game. Oh well, to each their own. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Look up the “8 kinds of fun” if you haven’t seen it before. It’s a really compelling (I think, at least) framework that explains why looking at games as just collections of mechanics doesn’t communicate whether you’d actually enjoy them.

I feel like a broken record posting something about this on every thread about games, but I really think it’s worth spreading around.

I would say that the mechanics tags are more of a weak negative signal for me. There are lots of games that I don't enjoy despite them featuring mechanics that I like; for example, I should like Scythe based on what it is, but across about two dozen playthroughs I just don't— the pacing is wrong for me and I'm never satisfied with where I end up.

On the other hand, there are certain mechanics that I either don't enjoy (dice battles) or am sick of (deck building) which if present makes it much less likely that I will enjoy the game as a whole.

Totally, I don’t think any one perspective is complete & sufficient.

What I like about the 8 kinds of fun is it pushes back against an approach I think you see a lot in “serious” board game circles of a kind of “model/view” perspective on games. The mechanics are the model and the only part worth paying serious attention to, and the setting/fluff/etc is the essentially interchangeable view. The “8 kinds” perspective is a reminder that people engage with games in a lot of different ways, many of which really live in the interaction between the model and view.

Well, to be fair, the article doesn't say anything about that the chosen set of mechanics (novelty) have to provide fun. Actually, this seems to be the usefulness part of creativity, or as they describe it, how "playable and entertaining" "appropriate observers" perceive the game.

As you already refer to LeBlanc's "8 kinds of fun": he also is one of the authors of the MDA framework - a framework to analyze games - which states, that the mechanics of a game are the only thing game designers can influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDA_framework (the article itself is linked in there)

While the authors don't state it directly as this framework, they refer to the framwork as an explanation of why they use mechanics.

They do quality creative as meaning "novel and useful" in their abstract.

Novel can be a double edged sword but useful implies good I believe.

This matches my expectation, it's just that I'd expect the household-invented games to be novel/creative and bad on average.

You haven't been at many game designer conventions, where a lot of 'household-invented' games are deriatives of Risk, Monopoly, Chess, Game of Life and current mechanism of the year. They are still bad though.

Presumably most bad hobbyist designs don't make it to market, and most hobbyists develop their best idea once and that's that.

Exactly. And one that they can get away with making because it's not quantifiable. You can't measure creativity.

And I wouldn't be surprised if they're not truly viewing the whole indie landscape. For every truly innovative, well balanced game, there may be another 100 failed kickstarter clones of existing games, or just plain bad games

I don't remember where I've read that but I remember seeing that creativity starts to decrease when you are getting paid for it. And it decreases even more if you are getting paid less. While when you are doing it for free creativity remains at the same level over time

> remains at the same level over time

Probably true for the hobbyist, but I'd argue some professionals may do the activity more by orders of magnitude, which would affect their creativity, paid or not.

I wonder what the results are when you are being paid really well, I suspect some people would have levels of creativity similar to doing it for free and others would lose all their motivation.

There are people like John Carmack who could have retired many years ago, yet they are still creating stuff, and other people like Notch (Minecraft) lost their creativity the moment they got "fuck you money".

Does anyone have any board games they recommend for groups of 3-5? Something that isn't too terrible to learn, and lasts max an hour?

Sure, I added the following assumptions:

- stuff I play myself

- something I can explain to the 70yo parents in a few minutes before the game

- easily available (either recent, or a classic)

Here's five recommendations:

- Cacao (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/171499/cacao)

- Carcassone (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/822/carcassonne)

- Alhambra (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6249/alhambra)

- Ticket to Ride (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride)

- Samurai (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3/samurai)

Below are some common gateway games that I’ve had good success introducing with non-gamers.

Cooperative: Pandemic

Language Based: Codenames, Taboo

Competitive: Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Munchkin

Card: Monopoly Deal, Exploding Kittens

Notably absent is Catan, which has a steep gap between those who have played before and novices, with an especially punishing snowball effect.

I really enjoy Wingspan (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266192/wingspan)

It's not that hard and it's beautiful.

Wingspan is a beautiful and fun game, but the instructions are incomprehensible. I don't have concrete examples, but I needed to read the entire book twice to have enough context for info at the beginning to make any sense. In a lot of ways, this is because of the thing that makes the game great (deeply interlocked systems) also makes it hard to find a point to insert the read pointer for the explanation.

Watch the How to Play video instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgDgcLI2B0U

I agree, that's a much better way to learn it. I've also had no problem teaching people the game without the manual.

Lastly, the "new player" card pack that comes with the game works well to get someone up to speed and competitive quickly (and is an idea other games could afford to learn from).

My wife bought me Trekking the National Parks recently, which is designed by a hobbyist. It seems very complex at first, but you catch on within the first round or so. You often don't know who's won until the points are tallied at the end, which makes it intriguing.

Enjoy playing it against my 8yo but have also had a few nights playing with friends who've enjoyed it also.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/255708/trekking-national...

I would recommend going to Board Game Arena and finding a few games that seem interesting to you, then give them a try. Here's a filter roughly matching your criteria:

https://boardgamearena.com/gamelist?section=all&playernumber...

From the top options presented I can recommend

Kingdom Builder - incredibly easy to learn strategy game with just enough depth to keep it interesting over multiple plays

Love Letter - one of ourmyregular games to kick off a game night. Quick to pick up, quick to play, and fun.

Coup - similar in many ways to Love Letter, but with bluffing, which makes it much more cut throat, but it plays quickly enough that no one gets angry, they just get back at you the next game.

Colt Express - exciting game with a unique "programming" like mechanic that's very simple to pickup, and allows for some playfully grievous player interactions.

Gaia - underrated game that shares a lot of mechanics with the more popular Carcassone. Very strategic, and the advanced version amps up the competitiveness.

Carcassone - one of the most popular games around. Can also recommend Hunters & Gatherers.

Stone Age & Puerto Rico - great entry level worker placement games.

Granted, it doesn't have every game imaginable (Catan, Munchkin, Risk) but its selection is large enough to find good games for just about any group.

If you want something more advanced, this doesn't exactly fit your criteria, but I highly recommend Terra Mystica. One of my favorite games of all time.

We've been playing a fair amount of Kingdom Builder (whereas normally we'd play longer games of Terra Mystica or Through The Ages that would definitely not quality for this "under an hour" constraint)

I think with five players an hour is pushing it for Kingdom Builder, but of course this will vary if you've got players who are just generally faster at playing board games.

Note that the boxed Kingdom Builder game is actually four player, BGA is providing a five player expansion (because it's a web site, so the extra little wooden pieces don't cost anything) but if you are in the real world that's an issue for five.

I feel like Stone Age is a better introduction to worker placement than Puerto Rico but I wonder how often you'd really get a five player game in an hour. We generally take 90+ minutes for four players.

Love Letter and its variants (I like the Batman one myself).

You can explain it to a person who's two-three beers in and they'll get the rules well enough to start playing. Rounds last 5-10 minutes depending on how much people start analyzing the cards on the board. You can play as many rounds as you want.

Love Letter is great, i like the variant "Lovecraft letter" even more!

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/198740/lovecraft-letter

I've got to try the Batman variant!

Check out "Deep Sea Adventure", a cute fun japanese micro-game where you try to salvage stuff from the ocean floor while sharing the limited oxygen supply with your competitors.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169654/deep-sea-adventur...

You play three rounds, if you're fast you can even squeeze it into the lunch break.

This game manages to be fun and also teach you a lot about human greed.

You'll probably get better responses by asking your question here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/l7kypq/daily_di...

However, some of my recommendations include Parks, Wingspan, Splendor, Azul, Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Potion Explosion, Kingdomino, Lanterns, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic: Iberia, Carcassonne, Concordia or Concordia Venus, Quacks of Quedlinburg, Treasure Island, etc. There are literally thousands of games that could meet the criteria of 3-5, simple rule set, 60 minute play time, and fun game play.

See also this ranked list of family board games:

https://boardgamegeek.com/familygames/browse/boardgame?sort=...

Pretty much every game on the first page of that list would meet your criteria.

"Hobbyists beat professionals of [x] in [x]"

No they don't.

-----

Look, I know we can go down the rabbit hole about what constitutes a good epistemology, how these notions are correct only some of the time, or how the metrics can be wrong. Here's a simple rule of thumb: if the result is completely counterintuitive in basic scenarios, then it's probably not true.

Yes, yes, of course, the new response is "but wait quantum physics is utterly unintuitive, yet it is correct! So is chemistry! etc, etc" but look both you and I know that this is beside the point. Our simple and obvious priors are much more useful than we think, and they are right a lot more of the time than any of us want to give them credit for. Surely, there will be times when it's flat-out wrong, but those times are very few and far in between.

Reading the paper, this certainly looks like the basic knee-jerk "No" is right by most useful metrics.

One leg up hobbyists can have on professionals is hyper-local audience targetting.

At my alma mater there is a tradition of putting on shows. They are a mixture of situational comedy, singing, and basically anything entertaining you can do on a scene. Crucially, they are by the university, for the university, and about the university. They are some of the funniest things I've ever seen. And they achieve this by having an incredible amount of injokes and references, that just wouldn't work for a general audience.

So this would be my message to hobbyist board game makers: Make one aboout your university, company, town, or maybe about your other hobby. Tell your own story. Reference people and events that will be familiar.

It is an interesting research. I can not imagine how hard it is to design multiple board games, so that every one is fresh and new.

With Summon The JSON it was easy for me, because it is a well known card game format but combined with programming learning gamification and set in fantasy world, a genre that i always loved. All of these things were known to me and was passionate about.

That was the main part of the success. But there is really a limited number of things a person can be passionate about at a given period of time.

Maybe that is why hobbyists seem to be sometimes good at designing board games.

I know a game designer who does this semi-professionally. He really spends a long time in the alpha and beta testing phase of game design with lots of playtesting in different groups. He recently launched an amazingly fun social deduction game on Kickstarter called "Feed the Kraken" with tons of gameplay elements previously unseen in social deduction games.

I think that professional designers often have a hard time competing with the amount of time invested by these enthusiasts.

Shouldn't the fact that you're paid to do it for a living give you _more_ time to spend on it?

A full timer needs to have sufficient throughput to pay bills. Someone whose bills are taken care of by a dayjob income can give their side project as much time as it needs.

There may be a huge selection bias in their study: insiders are more likely to publish their game, weather they are bad or good. In comparison, hobbyist have to propose better games in order to have the chance to be visible and then published. This would bias the study into thinking that hobbyist are more innovative than professionals.

What is the measure of novelty? This seems like a useless thing to attempt to measure, and then to claim one group "beats" another in it.

I could use an RNG to slam together a bunch of rules and I can pretty much guarantee novelty. There, I did it. I "beat" a professional designer. Is the game worth playing?

Well, you could, but then you only would have generated something "new," probably without any sense - something bizarre. That's why the authors measure usefulness, too. Only if both - novelty and usefulness - come together, you create something really creative. There is a lot of research about this, especially in the field of psychology.

Maybe there is something like the burden of knowledge at play here. The more you know about design, the harder it is to design unpredictable games. In other words, because they know less about game design, hobbyists have less fear, are less judgmental, and can come up with more mercurial results.

What do they mean by "knowledge diversity is a double-edged sword that has opposing effects on [the two dimensions of team creativity,] novelty and usefulness"

So (more) knowledge diversity = (more) novelty and (less) usefulness? or is it more = less and less

Did you actually read the article? ^_^"

Nevertheless, it's seems that the more knowledge diversity a team has, the MORE novelty and LESS usefulness. It's all about communication, sharing ideas, interpretation of knowledge (mental models), and self-regulation.

Sloppy on my part, sorry :/ but in my defense it was paywalled

There's another recent preprint out that goes into a bit more detail on the novelty concept: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02683

https://twitter.com/gengelstein/status/1353790088942153729

ok, but who moved a larger volume? they have different incentives, of course that result in different optimizations.

If you use a product, you are aware of things that people that don't use it, aren't.

If you are suggesting, that boardgame designers are not playing with the boardgames they designed, you are probably not familiar with the boardgame development process, which includes a shitton of playtesting to finetune the game's balance. If you are not suggesting this, I have no idea what you suggesting.

That's because there are more hobbyists than professional designers.

Am I just bad at reading the graphs or is the effect size negligible?

An expert is an expert whatever their title claims.

This article sure could do with some pictures!

Just reading at the next post https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364: "but then Kovarex was playing and .."

I think simply if you dogfood your own creation then you care more about it. Unfortunately, our society is built around value created for someone else (selling on the free market, with capitalist's investment), not value created for us, for our own passion.

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