Paste-Eating Freaks
Geeks.
Nerds.
Anoraks.
(above image from the fanpop Ralph Wiggum page)
These are my people. You see, I love boardgames. Something about shiny boxes filled with bright bits of paper, dice, and plastic figures just blows my skirt up. My happy place is the rankest corner of the local gameshop, or the epic nerdvanna of GenCon. That’s me, in the garage, huddled around an Agricola gameboard with a host of paste-eating freaks. I just love boardgames (and all the extended family thereof — go out and buy Monsterpocalypse, right now!), and like anyone in love, I can’t believe the rest of the world doesn’t share my enthusiasm. It’s especially hard to understand why my love of games (the non-digital variety) isn’t more widely shared inside the video game industry.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Any decent-sized game developer is going to have a higher-than-usual population of dungeonmasters and boardgamegeeks. But it isn’t as high as you’d think — maybe 15-20%, by my exacting analysis (which I just made up), which is quite something compared to the less-than-one-percent of the world’s population that indulges in hardcore gaming. But still … shouldn’t it be higher?
Fortunately, my own little band-of-brothers here in our as-yet unanounced digital game startup needs little encouragement to jettison trivial tasks like writing code or making art to do something genuinely IMPORTANT, like play Liar’s Dice. But even those stalwarts arched their eyebrows when I rolled out the shocking pink-and-blue gameboard of my 1980s vintage copy of the game.
(image nicked from the indispensable Boardgamegeek.com)
And their eyes glazed over as I started to explain the rules (and I’m a good game explainer, damnit, really I am!)
But we pushed through, and after a round or so we were slamming dice on the table with abandon, trash-talking, and quoting Team America: World Police. The game was alive. It wasn’t dice and cardboard any more — it was an engine for social interaction, a shared experience generator, a portal to a place of total focus where the attaining of abstract goals trumped any worldly concern. We were GAMING, O my brothers!
And when we were done, everyone wanted to play again. The guys genuinely enjoy boardgames — they just don’t play them so often as videogames.
One fellow in particular is a HUGE videogame nerd. He restores old machines and his house is practically a museum of the form. He enjoyed boardgames growing up. But somewhere along the way, he left the tribe. So I probed a bit to find out why. And I heard the usual things. Boardgames were too much bother — they were complex; you had to put in too much work to learn them; it could be a pain to get a group together; and (this one was the most telling) boardgames ceased to be fun when people got super competitive and the games turned nasty.
Wow, all true troubles. And all troubles I rarely encounter.
Why is my boardgaming a broad and bawdy journey of fellowship and self-discovery, while so many others can only remember Weird Uncle Elmo farting through Thanksgiving dinner and cheating at Monopoly? And, more to the point, can the things I find so unique and compelling about boardgaming ever be effectively conveyed to the medium of digital games?
To be continued …
(Marc-Antoine & Sarge captured by Appy surveilance camera in the act of playing Liar’s Dice)
November 4th, 2008 at 12:41 am
I never delved deeper than mainstream fare like Monopoly, Risk, or our family fave Parcheesi. But where board games lost me and my friends was when instant gaming gratification came into our houses courtesy of Atari, then Caleco, then Nintendo, then Sega. No slow startup of sameness until the game got to its most interesting center. No drawn out ending as a game with clear winners and losers wound down slowly, painfully. Turn it on, tap away, reset and replay. Could this be the reason I’m now shying away from those drawn out console games full of sameness, as kind of a full circle? This might bode well for what’s going on here.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
I hear you and agree about the relative advantage of the instant gratification afforded by videogames. And those first-generation games you mention do have a great point-of-attack … there’s no waiting around in games like Pac Man, Space Invaders, or Missile Command; like a Rolling Stones song, those games seem to start in the middle.
Most of the classic boardgames you mention are from a pre-television age where it was assumed families would take two or three hours to set-up and complete a game (and in Monopoly’s case, the game becomes infamously long when played with common house rules like collecting Community Chest fees on Free Parking — playing Monopoly “by the book” with auctions creates a crisper game). Anyway, it’s no surprise those lumbering giants were taken down by more nimble videogames. Where I think we lost something with those first wave of videogames was community — aside from trash-talking at the arcade, the gaming experience shifted from being something between people to something between people and a machine.
But now the bridge of social gaming is being built from two directions. On the one side, we see a movement back toward shorter, pick-up-and-play videogames, particularly in the hand-held/mobile space. And we’re seeing social networks emerging for videogames (primarily Xbox Live and World of Warcraft). On the boardgame side, there are a whole host of modern (and primarily European) boardgames built for modern players — games with quick set-up, 45-minute play times, and compelling mechanics that cut right to the chase and involve every player at the table right from the get-go.
What I want to see happen — and what I am going to try make happen, in my new venture — is to bring these trends together and change what games can be.
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