Last night, I was at a dinner party at which a middle-aged woman, a friend of my ex's, mentioned that her son was attending school at "something called Digipen." This struck me as relatively extraordinary; there are places in this country where you can overhear casual conversations about game development or people in the game industry, but New York is not one of them. Indeed, when people ask what I do and I say "I'm a game designer," I often have to explain what I mean.

Over the last few years, we've seen a huge increase in the number of places offering game development programs of various types--some vocational, as with Digipen or Full Sail, others on a more theoretical 'game studies' level. Doubtless, this will ultimately have a major impact on how new hires happen in the field, and will presumably shift some of the cost of training from developers to educational institutions, but given how few experienced game developers are in the academy, I don't have any particular faith that it will result in better games.

But the conversation did get me to thinking: I think it quite likely that I attended the world's first course in game design.

In the early 70s, perhaps 1972, an issue of Strategy & Tactics magazine contained a cardstock insert saying that the staff of SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.) was planning on having a course on game design that would run, one night a week for several hours, for several weeks--I think six or so, but I'm not positive. It was mainly to be an internal conversation among the staff, a form of internal training, in essence; but the subscribers of the magazine were invited to apply to attend the course. Openings were limited, and there would be a $100 fee.

I was 13 at the time. In some trepidation, I took this to my parents, fully cognizant that $100 was a staggeringly enormous sum of money, and somewhat to my surprise, they agreed to allow me to apply.

I had been to the SPI offices several times before, mainly to purchase games at the front desk there (they were still mainly a mailorder operation, and retail distribution was limited). Jim Dunnigan, the company's founder and president, and ultimately the designer of more than 200 commercially published boardgames, sent me back a note (which I still have in my files) saying that I was certainly younger than the people they had anticipated applying, but inviting me to come to his office and discuss the matter.

So I did; I'm not sure whether he had asked for a sample or not, but I brought along a game I was working on at the time. I don't remember the title or much about it, but it was some kind of vague post-holocaust scenario set on a map of the greater New York area. One of the game's major powers was the Babylonian Empire, whose capital, of course, was Babylon, Long Island. I remember sitting in Dunnigan's office--plastic tubes covering one wall, hamsters scurrying through them; he sitting on an office chair, no socks under his shoes, cross-legged, looking at my game-map. I don't really recall the conversation, but the upshot was that he agreed to allow me to participate.

If I recall correctly, the only other non-SPI employee who was involved in the course was Rich Berg, who subsequently became (and remains) among the most highly regarded designers of board wargames. A dozen or so people participated, crowding into one of the playtest rooms at the SPI offices at 44 East 23rd Street; Dunnigan, Simonsen, Berg, Frank Davis, Tom Walczyk, Irad Hardy... not sure who else was there.

Naturally, this being the early 70s, nothing (quite literally) had been written on the subject of game design as an artistic endeavor, nor was there any real body of knowledge on the subject. The course was focussed, therefore, mainly on categorization of techniques that had been developed in the board wargame industry, and on what you might call "tips and tricks" that different SPI developers had stumbled on.

As an example of the former, consider the zone of control. Board wargames are normally played on maps overlaid with a hexagonal grid; the six hexes surrounding a unit are called that unit's zone of control. The zone of control has an effect on other units; in most games, for example, a unit that enters an enemy unit's zone of control must stop moving, even if it has movement points unspent, and may move no farther that turn.

However, board wargaming had already experimented with a wide variety of different zone-of-control rules, and SPI had developed a terminology to describe them. For example, if a unit that begins a turn in an enemy zone of control is forbidden from moving out of that zone of control, so that units, once engaged, can disengage only as a result of combat, the zones of control are said to be "rigid." If a unit must stop on entering a zone of control, but can move out of a controlled hex into an uncontroled one at the beginning of its turn, the game has semi-rigid zones of control. And if a unit can move from one controlled hex to another, but at an additional charge in movement points, the game has fluid zones of control.

This may seem like minutia, but in the context of a board wargame, these sorts of minor variations make for very different games. Rigid zones of control are appropriate for games in which commitment to battle is hard to reverse--World War I and the Napoleonic era, for example. Semi-rigid zones of control work in somewhat more fluid settings--the Civil War, for example. Fluid zones of control are appropriate for wars of maneuver--the Second World War, for example.

As an example of "tips and tricks," consider this piece of wisdom from Jim Dunnigan: units should move about seven hexes. In a typical wargame, with its 2' x 3' game-map, and 16mm hexes, the ability to advance roughly seven hexes in a turn provides a sense of reasonably rapid movement while enabling players to respond to each other in a reasonably logical fashion. If movement rates are much slower (say, 3 hexes a turn), the game feels slow and wooden. Contrariwise, if movement rates are much higher, the game can feel chaotic.

The problem with these kinds of ideas is that they are not generalizable; if you're working on a board wargame, they're very useful, but they don't really help if, say, you want to produce a Diablo clone. It should be remembered, however, that at the time, the only extant game styles were mass market boardgames, classic games, military miniatures, and the board wargame. For SPI's purposes (and mine at the time), the course was extremely useful... Indeed, an intellectually exciting time.

The one thing I did take away from the course that's proven useful in thinking about all kinds of later game styles, however, was Simonsen's discussion of the interplay between graphic design and game design, and how thinking about effective use of components and effective layout can improve gameplay. As a demonstration, he showed us his own version of Avalon Hill's Anzio game. In essence, dissatisfied with the game's rather clunky use of charts, and the use of a text list for a reinforcement schedule, he had redesigned the game, producing his own components: Much better organized charts, on a separate component; holding boxes for reinforcements; and so on.

In a sense, what Redmond was showing us was the value of information architecture--a term not to be invented for another 20 years.

Still and all--unless Sid Sackson held some symposium of like-minded designers back in the day, or the Prussian military once convened a study of kriegspieler, this was probably the world's first course in game design.
posted by Greg at 1:05 PM

You don't often see thoughtful pieces about the financial side of the games industry, one reason that Gordon Gould's post on the need for alternative sources of capital in the industry is interesting. (Gould is an entrepreneur, founder of UPOC.)

To recast Gould's argument a little bit, in the terms I tend to think in:

Small and medium-sized publishers have, over the last decade or so, suffered badly. At the level of an Activision, Acclaim, Eidos, or Take 2, you only have the resources to publish a handful of products each year, and the game industry, like all entertainment industries, is hit driven. If you generate a big hit, a smaller publisher can do extremely well, because a single hit title has a much larger impact on the bottom line than it would for an EA. Which is why Take 2 has done so well off of GTA. But if you go too many years without a hit, you're going to suffer very badly; witness Acclaim and (to a lesser degree) Eidos.

That's why larger publishers have an advantage; they publish a broad enough slate of games that they have a better shot at generating a major hit in any given year.

(This is what Gould means by portfolio theory.)

The problem gets worse as budgets rise, because the same amount of capital covers fewer and fewer A-level titles. This leads to the obvious conclusion that the game industry needs to find alternative source of finance--something I've been saying for years, by the way.

In this regard, the game industry looks very primitive by comparison to the film industry. In the game industry, there's only one real source of development financing: publishers, and they can only acquire capital in straightforward corporate ways (equity and debt). If you look at the film industry, sure, studios risk some of their own capital--but they also bring in all sorts of money by preselling rights, and through co-investment with operations like Silver Screen Partners. Silver Screen is, in essence, a series of equity funds that raises money from investors to invest in a portfolio of movie productions.

Bringing this model to the industry, which is what Gould is proposing, is a no-brainer, and I'm surprised no one has done it yet. Call it Phosphor Screen Partners, if you will.

How would such a venture work? Well, if I recall correctly, it was Silver Screen's second fund that hit big, and it was based on a deal with Disney. Essentially, they had a Disney deal lined up before they raised the money, and the money was used to invest in a series of Disney films (at a time when Disney was doing very well). This makes sense from an investor's perspective, because you're investing in an intrinsically risky business (all entertainment businesses are highly risky), but by partnering with an operation of Disney's quality, you alleviate some risk (while taking on perhaps a bit more portfolio risk, because working with several studios wouldn't tie you so closely to the fortunes of one).

So one approach would certainly be to tie up with an existing publisher, allowing them to produce a larger slate of titles by laying off some of the capital cost on your investment group.

From my perspective, that is, as someone who wants to encourage innovation in the field, this is not all that exciting; booming budgets breeds publisher conservatism breeds lack of innovation, and even if publishers are betting 50% with someone else's money, I'd be surprised if they become any more imaginative.

As I've argued before, the strongest hits in the industry usually come from highly innovative work: SimCity, The Sims, Command & Conquer, Doom, Myst, etc., etc. (Yes, in every case, you can point to prior work that contributes to these titles--none sprang full-blown from the brow of their creators, like Athena from Zeus--but none were me-too products slotted into well established genres, either.) And since games are a hit-driven industry, and one big hit outweighs dozens of marginal games, you are best off going for a home-run by funding innovation.

So there's a strong argument for partnering with high-quality developers, rather than publishers, and specifically looking for innovation.

Of course, making that argument to investors would be difficult; investors paradoxically both look for risk (because high risk = high reward, by classic market theory) and for ways to alleviate risk. By even looking at something as goofy and hit-driven as the game industry, an investor is already taking a big risk, and his or her instinct is going to be the same as the publishers': be conservative in what you fund.

Pity, that.

Gould is right, though; the industry needs access to alternative sources of finance, and he's probably right that such sources are going to start showing up, although exactly when, how, and who are open questions. And I'd like to believe that this development would help us overcome what I see as the central business challenge of the field--which, to my mind, is not spiralling development costs, but increasingly narrow categories that close off games to what's potentially a much larger market. (That conservatism is, of course, driven by spiralling development costs, but it's an ephiphenomenon.)

I'd like to believe so, but, well, probably not. It probably just means bigger budgets for the same-old same-old.

posted by Greg at 10:06 AM

...Spent some time today updating my links page, where I try to keep track of anyone doing anything remotely game-related in New York. Doing this is usually depressing, but I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I was adding more promising new companies than deleting lame dead ones... Maybe things are actuallly looking up.

Speaking of which, I'm hosting a meeting of the "Gamoids," the NYC IGDA chapter in a few weeks... If you have a professional interest in the field, and are in the area, let me know.
posted by Greg at 7:02 PM