The personal, political art of board-game design
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See this recent Sit Up & Shut Down review on his game John Company for a great video intro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykrqCX2_mhU
Or Space Biff (aka Dan Thurott, mentioned in the OP) for a written review of his game Molly House
https://spacebiff.com/2023/10/17/molly-house/
Amabel Holland's publishing company Hollandspiele is also an interesting case study in how much creative people can benefit from having full control. She previously published via other publishers but now self-publishes. AFAIK none of the self-published games are remotely as popular as e.g. her Iron Rails series that Capstone publishers. But she's said that she makes more in a month from Hollandspiele than she makes all year from her non-Hollandspiele titles.
> the success of An Infamous Traffic, a game by Cole Wehrle about the opium trade in China, allowed them both to go full time
> Escobedo, in turn, had learned about the company only because it had previously published a title by a big-time designer named Cole Wehrle
-- Mark Tatz and Jody Kent (1978), _Rebirth: The Tibetan Game of Liberation_: https://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setID=1524
-- May-Ying Mary Ngai (2011), "From entertainment to enlightenment : a study on a cross-cultural religious board game with emphasis on the Table of Buddha Selection designed by Ouyi Zhixu of the late Ming Dynasty": https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses...
-- Jingyi Yuan (2021), "Blurring the Boundary between Play and Ritual: Sugoroku Boards as Portable Cosmos in Japanese Religion": https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/etd/r/1501/10?clear=...
In Europe, many parlor games had some moral, didactic, or personal aspect to them:
-- Innocenzo Ringhieri (1551), _Cento giuochi liberali, et d'ingegno_ gave players 100 different games that were kind of complicated and often didactic in themselves, but the idea in making them complicated was for players to make mistakes they'd pay for at the end by answering questions that often had a moral dimension. I've made a rough translation here of seven of them that were translated into French in 1555 and that have to do with classical mythology: https://wobbupalooza.neocities.org/1555
-- One specifically political parlor game that I can recall off the top of my head is the variant of Avocat that GutsMuths gave in 1796 called Parlament, in which players become King, Chancellor, Secretary, etc. to address strategic matters of state such as "whether one should be allied with the [Ottoman] Porte, recognize the [French] Republic, continue the war, [or] levy a new tax or not," the trick being to respond to the question in lieu of a partner: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Spiele_zur_Übung_und_Er...
-- But that's pretty close in time to the 1804 astronomy board game that Margaret Bryan consulted on: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O26305/science-in-sport-o... / https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-264736 / https://www.cultureandcosmos.org/pdfs/16/Saridakis_INSAPVII_...
Doing some light Googling, this seemed to be a good writeup by an academic on the subject: https://piccionep.people.cofc.edu/senet_web.html
> The history of Monopoly can be traced back to 1903,[1] when American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie created a game that she hoped would explain the single-tax theory of Henry George.
Maybe it's worth adding they descend from the didactic gambling game Shengguan Tu, which had its origins in the 9th C. and remained continuously popular enough that you could still buy it in the late 19th C. US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shengguan_Tu
I hate complex board games. I just don’t have the time or interest level in spending hours learning rules that probably make the game less fun.
Genius is a board game that has super simple rules and is easy to play and still has depth. Perfect example is Carcassonne.
I don't think I've had a single gaming night lately where there isn't some explanation stage to every game, where it is eventually decided that "it will make sense once we start", yet frequently everyone agrees that it will be a lot better next time.
Then you have games like Root where learning about the insanely intricate rule-set and how the different factions interact is almost half the point and fun of playing it, still a process after multiple sessions. I've never played that one, however. Seems too daunting.
The only one I can recall that really would require multiple plays just to learn the rules is this: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/329716/eleven-football-m... which I tried to play through at Essen but it has a crazy number of disconnected rules. I played 40 games at Essen and that was the only one where the number of rules made it unplayable first time round.
For example here's a rule:
* The king must always stay between the guards. If a move would end with the king not between the guards it cannot be performed.
How can you "know" that rule but not "understand" it?
Also: the first sentence says the king must always stay between the guards but the second sentence implies that it doesn't apply while the king is moving. This is contradictory.
How far away from the king can the guards be for him to still count as "between"?
Do diagonal placements count as "between"?
I already don't understand your rule!
Please, here are some materials that explains the differences between knowing and understanding:
- https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/30091/on-the-... - https://www.diffzy.com/article/difference-between-knowing-an... - https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-knowledge-a...
> You're making a weirdly pedantic distinction.
> I feel like that's almost all games? Which ones are you thinking of that can't be understood on the first play?
Well, I made that distinction because of the implications of that remark: that rules of a game can be understood by reading them. As you mention in another comment that's not always the case and in my experience that's more often not the case that it is. On a side note, regular players can grok rules faster because mechanics are common to games but it's not how it works for casual players but I can see why it gives the illusion to regular players that rules can be understood just by reading them but they ignore that not only they are reading the rules but they are also seeing the underlying mechanics they are already well aware of.
To go further, knowing the rules, understanding how they work and then seeing patterns in a game session and plan accordingly are three separate things.
> > * The king must always stay between the guards. If a move would end with the king not between the guards it cannot be performed.
> How can you "know" that rule but not "understand" it?
I'd have written it like this * The king must always stay between the guards. Moves that end with the king not between the guards can't be performed.* and argue that's two separate rules. Now, I know these rules but I don't understand why they are necessary and I don't understand how they apply to the game.
But I agree that for the median or even p90 game demoing at Essen, even if there's "a lot" going on, you can get it easily in one game if you have any experience with hobbyist games.
I don't think there's as big of a difference as you're drawing between "knowing the rules" and "knowing the tactics". To take one of Amabel's games as an example, I recall the rules for Aurelian being easy to understand in a literal sense (esp. having played Charlemagne), but I also recall it taking three games before I didn't wipe out disastrously just a few rounds in.
I also think if you rule any of these out you miss a lot of really interesting games.
Look at Root, a very popular game. It has one long manual just for your first play, and then an even longer manual that explains all the rules. They recommend you read that one later.
That said, there are countless games where it's not unusual to budget an hour or more for "the teach". A great one I played recently is "Hegemony": a game that simulates political economy and class struggle, where one player is The State, and the others are economic classes (Working, Middle, Capitalist). Each player has their own rules, mechanics, and goals, each requiring a unique full-sized rules reference.
I tend to treat the first play of every new game as a "sacrificial round": I expect to do poorly, but I'll grok the game by the end. But I've found some need at least two sacrificial rounds: one just to get the mechanics, terms, symbology, and flow; and then another to internalize strategy and actually play well.
So yeah, this is all going to vary based on on one's experience level and definitions. I certainly don't begrudge anyone who doesn't want to spend a whole afternoon basically just to learn a game; as opposed to a game like "Photosynthesis", which might have seem intimidating to an inexperienced player, but after ten minutes they've internalized both the rules and the strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach
>Ralph Anspach (15 March 1926 – March 2022) was a German-born American economics professor and games creator from San Francisco State University. Anspach was a graduate of the University of Chicago and fought with the Mahal in 1948 in support of the independence of Israel. He is best known for creating the game Anti-Monopoly and the legal battles that followed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly
>Anti-Monopoly is a board game made by San Francisco State University Professor Ralph Anspach in response to Monopoly. The idea of an anti-monopoly board game dates to 1903 when Lizzie Magie created The Landlord's Game, which later inspired Monopoly.
Reading Ralph Anspach's book "The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle" inspired me to design and produce a board game called "Micropoly" in 1999, about Microsoft's monopoly in the computer industry and free open source software.
(Not to be confused with "Micropolis", an old hard disk manufacturer and the original name of SimCity before it was published, and the open source version of SimCity after EA released it under GPL-3. Nor with the micro poly industrial lubricant of the same name.)
Micropoly is delightfully dated procedural rhetoric and ham-fisted interactive agitprop, as you can see by the names of the circa-Y2K companies like Netscape, SGI, and Sun, the Windows 95 motifs, $200 salary for passing the Window "Start" Menu instead of "Go", "Free Software" instead of "Free Parking", "Corrupted Registry" goto "Reinstall Windows" instead of "Jail", "Download" instead of "Chance" cards, "Open Sources" instead of "Community Chest" cards, "ISP" instead of "Utility", "Network" instead of "Railroad", "Deposition" and "Antitrust Ruling" properties, etc.
Here's a page I wrote explaining it with links to pdf files for the board and cards:
https://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/
https://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/micropoly-board-big.jp...
Micropoly is the Microsoft Monopoly Game! It's a parody of Microsoft that's fun to play, a free board game based the rules of Anti-Monopoly, and a political statement protected under the First Amendment.
This web site exists to freely distribute the full set of graphics and rules for Micropoly, in the "open source" spirit of the original folk game monopoly invented by an Atlantic City Quaker woman.
You are encouraged to download the graphics, print out copies of the game set for yourself and friends, and have fun playing Micropoly!
The Goals of the Micropoly Project:
To make a political statement about the effect of Microsoft's monopoly on the economy.
To raise awareness of the original folk game monopoly invented by Quakers and illegitimately patented and pirated by Parker Brothers.
To promote the alternative Anti-Monopoly rules, invented by Ralph Anspach in 1973, that teach why monopolies are bad.
To distribute the graphics and rules of Micropoly as a free "open source" game, true to the spirit of the Quaker who originally invented monopoly.
To develop a computerized version of monopoly, that can be customized with any local theme and artwork, and played over the Internet.
To imitate life imitating art imitating life imitating art, and so forth.
Micropoly synergistically illustrates several important points, by drawing parallels between the time of the Great Depression and the end of the Twentieth Century:
Monopolies are bad, and competition is good.
The original rules of monopoly require everyone to play as a monopolist. That's why companies like Microsoft and Parker Brothers like the lesson it teaches: being a monopolist is good, and in order to win you have to make the biggest monopoly. But the rules of Anti-Monopoly divide players into monopolists versus competitors, resulting in a dynamic, unpredictable, more interesting game. Competition has the same benefits in real life!
The "open source" philosophy has been around a long time before computers.
The Atlantic City Quaker woman who invented the original board game spread it around to her friends for free. She would invite people over to play, and they loved the game, so they made their own copies with crayons on oil cloth. This free folk game spread around the country and was played by many people, long before Parker Brothers knowingly decided pirated it. Today we have computer networks, desktop publishing, color printers, and the "open source" model of software development, so it is much easier to spread the free Micropoly game all over the world.
Big companies abuse the patent and legal systems to pirate and exploit other peoples original ideas.
Parker Brothers pirated monopoly from its original inventors, illegitimately patented an "open source" folk game, perpetrated an extremely successful propaganda campaign to convince the world that Monopoly(TM) was invented by Charles B Darrow, and aggressively drove other companies out of business with frivolous lawsuits.
They waged a nasty 10 year legal assault on Ralph Anspach, inventor of the "Anti-Monopoly" game, ruining his successful game company, even though his case finally made it to the Supreme Court and won!
As a result of his hard fought victory, the true story of Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle has been published for all to read, and it's safe to call a game "anything-opoly".
We are very grateful that he never gave up, and won in spite of Parker Brothers' dirty tricks. We thank him, because he made it possible for us to publish Micropoly, and generously offered to let us use his superior Anti-Monopoly rules, which so perfectly illustrate the point of Micropoly.
The similarities in the monopolistic behaviors of Parker Brothers and Microsoft should be obvious.
Micropoly Board:
https://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/micropoly-board-whole....
Micropoly Cards:
https://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/micropoly-cards.pdf
Micropoly Properties:
Some notes on Procedural Rhetoric from a unfinished paper I've been writing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric
Ian Bogost defined the “Procedural Rhetoric” game design philosophy as an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle, that explains how people learn through rules and processes, analyzes the art of persuasion, and focuses on conveying ideology by crafting laws and rules within games. Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
Procedural rhetoric. (Ian Bogost, Janet Murray)
“I developed my own design philosophy that I called procedural rhetoric, an unholy blend of Will Wright and Aristotle.” -Ian Bogost, Video Games Are Better Without Characters
Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric [1] is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. [2]
Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology.
[1] Frasca, Gonzalo (2003). “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge. 221–37 ISBN 9780415965798
[2] Bogost, Ian (2008). "The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Ed. by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 117–40. ISBN 9780262693646
For better or worse, games can deliver pre-programmed propaganda and procedural rhetoric for advancing ideologies and changing minds. Some designers push clichéd narratives, stereotypical characters, and institutionalized prejudices that normalize and encourage homophobia, sexism, racism, bigotry, and violence.
The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange.
The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability, corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and this paper attempts to explain some of the magic.
Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.
The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people, families, and communities.
The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters.
The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their own educations.
This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion, identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening.
[...]
https://docs.google.com/document/d/13u-kNaWC2AAd-L0_5OoLc_-x...
Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims 1
https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the...
>Just before the 2004 presidential election, I created and programmed a downloadable Dumbold Voting Machine object for The Sims 1, as interactive agitprop to raise awareness about the problems of voting machines. I wrote this article about it, which I’ve now updated and included some new links and videos!
>You can download and install the Dumbold Voting Machine in your Sims installation, then you can place it on a table on your lot, and click on it to pop up a pie menu to play around with the voting machine. Or you can simply read on to find out what it does (which will spoil all the surprises)!
>At first look, it appears to be a fully functional voting machine. But it actually has a lot of infuriating bugs, hidden features, gaping security holes and malicious easter eggs that simulate problems with real voting machines, and it shows illustrated pop-ups to educate players about the real-world problems and issues of electronic voting.
>The High Concept
>The high concept, from a game design perspective [i.e. “bullshit alert”]: The Dumbold Voting Machine is intended to be a simple but intriguing puzzle you can “hack into” (like the cheat mode of The Matrix video game), while learning about real issues. It integrates interactive real-life “public service announcements”, subversive “product displacements”, and constitutionally protected “free speech”. It addresses late breaking news, current events and political opinions. It’s free speech and political commentary rendered as executable multimedia software. The Dumbold Voting Machine acts out the story interactively, in a way that’s fun to play and experiment with. It breaks down in frustrating “failure modes” with egregious “security holes” that illustrate some difficult problems with actual electronic voting machines in the real world. It’s meant to stimulate discussion, illustrate how computer programming is free speech, and why all election software should be open source and publicly inspectable.
[...]