Game Design, Part 1: Why I'm a gamer

So one of the things I'm really interested in, and if I could find a way to actually do it for a living I would, is game design. And while I'm interested in how one things about game design in an electronic medium (PC/Wii/360/PS3/DS/etc obviously), I'm far more interested in tabletop design. Specifically board and card games.

The origins of this are pretty simple: my dad's family is made of a group of gamers, and my dad is probably the most prolific of them. He grew up playing Acquire, High, Stocks and Bonds and various other old games and moved into bookshelf games (especially WW2 strategy games) later on. For those of you who have been to my house, you can see the evidence of this in our downstairs closet and the bookshelf in the den where there are several versions of various Panzer games.

One of the biggest family traditions is that all of the grandchildren (and now I suppose great grandchildren with Isabella) gets a game at Christmas. That night and most of the next day are devoted to playing the new games and seeing which are good and which are not. Sometimes we've already looked to Board Game Geek but most of the time it's based on instincts. By this point, we're pretty good at it.

Before John moved to Seattle, he and I were particularly interested in learning the mechanics, usually far more interested in that than actually winning the game. Which mechanics made the game fun? Which were in other games? Was there anything new that we hadn't seen before? Why does this rule exist, or that restriction? It was always an analytical exercise, because for us that was an interesting and fun endeavor. Even now we tend to have extremely long phone conversations a couple days after Christmas analyzing all the new games we played and what worked and what didn't.

I think after all this time, I've learned a good amount about game design and what works and what doesn't. But more than that, my interest in game design has led me to some general conclusions about philosophy. For example, Patti and I were talking about whether or not history is inevitable the night I started this blog. My conclusion was that history cannot be entirely inevitable because choices by individuals have to matter, because that's not an interesting design if history were a game. I'll start to explain how I came to that conclusion in the next post on gaming which will come approximately whenever I feel like it. But the fundamental lesson is this: the best games are about interesting choices.