The Play This Thing article on Mythoria questions the value of games, specifically a video game that would work well as a physical game.
The notion of making money by selling real, tangible stuff is one that I’ve toyed with, and it’s interesting to see it noted elsewhere. I still need to finish Alpha Hex‘s video game iteration, but I’ve long had ideas for making it a physical card game as well. I printed up some cards to playtest it during design, and it proved to be very helpful… and it plays fairly well in tangible form. I’d love to use the Game Crafter to sell a base Alpha Hex set and expansions if occasion permits, but leave the digital version free and open source (if they ever support hexagonal cards, I’ll jump on it). I’ve even made card designs for both formats, and written some story and lore with an eye to making physical card-specific art, not unlike that MTG thing. It might even be a “wheel within a wheel” for some other game designs I have in mind.
To me, having a physical game, ready to play if the digital world goes offline, is a valuable thing that I’m willing to pay for. There’s a retro appeal to buying stuff with my money, instead of… digital, ephemeral… nonstuff. (Especially when draconian DRM means the providers can deny me the privilege of playing at a whim.)
My wife and I have collected many board and card games, and many times, they are more fun to play than popping in another video game. We don’t need electricity or a connection to the internet, just some light, a level surface and somewhere dry to play. There are no patches, no permissions, no waiting for the Dungeon Finder to work its magic. That freedom can be good for the soul, even if it’s just a periodic thing, another tool in the toolbox of the larger world of “gaming”.
I’ve designed three board games and two card games in the last year or so, and I’d love to get them out there and make a bit of money from them. There’s even a place for making one of my board games into a nice hardwood coffee table offering… even if it’s just something I do for Christmas gifts. (Though it would be great if they were commercially viable.)
These video game things can be good fun, to be sure, but sometimes, it really is great to hold game cards in your hands, to move pieces on a board, and to play with people face to face, rather than through anonymous filters, monitors and cables. It can even be instructive when trying to design games for the digital realm. Offline games have been designed and played for thousands of years; there’s a lot of good data there to sift through with an eye to why games work.
Paper Dragon Games has a tangential take on things; their headline offering, Constellation, is a game that is designed to have a “board game” feel, but is entirely digital. We can certainly automate setup and some mechanics digitally, making some game mechanics easier. The digital version of Alpha Hex benefits from automated ownership tracking and attack resolution, for instance, and the XBox Live version of Settlers of Catan is far easier to set up than the board game.
It can be very useful to make a game digital… and it can be useful to go the other way, too. It’s harder to pirate a card game, for one. Sure, photocopiers work, and I’ve even offered a PDF version of Alpha Hex, but if the cards offered for sale are of sufficient quality and the game is good, there will still be a market for the “real thing”. I probably won’t ever make a living purely on card game sales, but it’s worth offering the option to anyone interested in the game.
There is certainly room in the “game tent” for both digital and physical games, sometimes even different iterations of the same game, as with MTG. When I look at monetizing my game design hobby, though, I can’t help but think that it might be a good outlet for me to take some of my game designs that could work in either format (or both!) and offer a physical version. It’s one more way to break up the demand curve and reach out to different people.
Parallel product lines can also help build a brand, which can be useful for indies. We even see things like the merchandising efforts of the Blizzard WoW team, what with the card game and the miniatures game. They didn’t pan out to be as popular as their parent game, but they are solid offerings, and likely at least partially profitable for Blizzard.
Sometimes, it pays to make the game real.
…even if it’s only because you get to use house rules…
Tish Tosh Tesh 
I absolutely love having a physical object to interact with, which goes a long way towards explaining why I’m one of the few PC gamers who will actually go to EB Games and hope to find a boxed copy of the latest release. Being able to hold something far outweighs the convenience of a digital download, in my books.
Likewise, I love physical board games, but have never been able to get into any of their electronic counterparts (aside from Culdcept, which was ONLY digital). Same with puzzles – my wife and I adore doing puzzles…. I’ve tried some digital puzzle apps and it’s just not the same. Magazines too – I can’t get into online mags, but I love to subscribe to the dead tree copies, and read the exact same articles in that format.
You just can’t replace tangible things with digital. At least not for me.
Agreed. I still have a library, after all. (OK, just three bookshelves jammed with books, but still…) There’s just something satisfying having something real in hand to read (or play with) instead of it just being another webpage or PDF. I’m pretty sure I’d not get the same satisfaction from a Kindle either, even as cool as they are.
Every once in a while I still read while taking a walk. It’s a trick I learned while a grade school student to make the most of my travel time. I actually itch to read real books when I get stuck in one of my extended ‘web research sessions.
Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but I like it. 🙂
One of the games I designed is a Mancala-ish sort of marble moving game, and kids love it. It’s just not the same, moving stuff on a screen. There’s something curiously… grounding, having a tactile game.
…and now I’m oddly reminded of research that suggests that babies need physical touch of tender caregivers to properly develop mentally and physically. Something about our neurology needs touch.
Excellent post! I have already bookmarked gamecrafter and will be taking a second look at them. Physical board, card and book games are unquestionably better in my mind, but I have long been an exclusive video game player for a couple reasons:
– The novelty of having moving graphics and a built-in rules parser. Between seeing pretty spell effects and not having a 2 minute battle take all night (rolling dice, looking up tables, waiting for the elven ranger to get off the phone with his mom/girlfriend), video games especially in the 80s and 90s were a highly compelling choice.
– The convenience factor of just being able to sit down and play then get arbitrarily get up and walk away from the game. Co-op multiplayer games like a lot of MMOs have started making this point moot, though.
But when I think about the difference between (for example) playing Warhammer 40k Dawn of War and playing Warhammer 40k on a friend’s pool table, with the rows and rows of carefully painted miniatures lined up for battle … there is no comparison. The smoke-filled billiards room sessions win every time.
Oh, yes, computers speed up the rules lawyering and dice rolling in a HUGE way. They also allow players to play games solo that require multiple players in “real life”, like Catan on the XBox, and yes, pausing and walking away is hugely useful. There are always tradeoffs between formats. That’s one reason why it’s sometimes nice to have a solid game represented in a couple of ways. 🙂
There are no patches [for physical games].
No, just errata and different editions that you have to fork over the full amount of cash to get. In this case, I prefer patches, thanks.
I’m sure they feeling of a physical board game is an issue for some people, just like some claim they want the feel of the physical book in their hands. I’m not one of those.
For me, it’s convenience. A paperback is readable at takeoff and landing on a plane, whereas your laptop or other electronic device is restricted. The book is easier to hold while reading in bed compared to my laptop. For games, there’s not a display large enough to really hold some of the larger games.
There’s also cost. I was looking at the digital version of Iron Dragon, one of my favorite crayon-rails games. The physical game itself is was $50 at a game store. The digital version was $20 per seat. Even if you only play with 3 people, you’re instantly spending more than the physical version. Not worth it for me.
But, I think eventually we’ll get to the point where these factors aren’t always the case. Then I’ll happily start grabbing unencumbered digital versions instead of clinging to physical versions. It’ll make it easier to move, at least. 😛
Hmm… speaking of patches and errata, I can’t speak for everyone, but when I design an offline game, the trouble with patching non-live offline games means I have a greater impetus to get it right the first time. Conversely, I suspect that devs working on online games might be tempted to be lazier because hey, they can always patch it later, right?
I have a “library” too, Tesh. And that’s exactly what my wife & I refer to it as. I love my four shelves of books, and look forward to a time when I have space for more.
I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time concentrating when reading electronic media – anything longer than a screen or two and I usually have to print it out if I want to comprehend it.
“There’s a retro appeal to buying stuff with my money, instead of… digital, ephemeral… nonstuff. (Especially when draconian DRM means the providers can deny me the privilege of playing at a whim.)”
I so agree with the brackets – how you don’t own anything, really.
See, what I’d call this is ‘folk gaming’. It’s like folk music – it is very organic, rather than relying on a huge inhuman infrastructure. It’s what we really own, as individual humans, rather than pretending we own something that we merely contribute to as a group and have some level of access to.
And that’s important if you put your heart into something – because if you don’t own it, then someone else can withdraw what you put your heart into.
Also with your boardgames (sounds cool) have you looked at kickstarter.com? You might get crowd funding for a launch?
My wife and I have collected many board and card games, and many times, they are more fun to play than popping in another video game. We don’t need electricity or a connection to the internet, just some light, a level surface and somewhere dry to play. There are no patches, no permissions, no waiting for the Dungeon Finder to work its magic. That freedom can be good for the soul, even if it’s just a periodic thing, another tool in the toolbox of the larger world of “gaming”.
I find this paragraph odd, because it’s the exact reason I prefer to play computer games. There’s no having to schedule with friends, no having to find physical space to play in. I can play as long or as short as I want to. The pool of players I can pull from is very large, compared to the limited number of real life friends that may or may be interested in gaming right now.
To me, it seems like the inconveniences of real life gaming far outweigh the inconveniences of virtual gaming. Real life gaming is more fun, but it’s also more of pain to organize. (Oddly enough, this is the argument applied to raiding in MMOs.)
Of course, you seem to game with your wife, and that may be the difference in our perspectives. Suppose your wife decided to stop playing games, or you had married a non-gamer. How would that affect your ability to indulge in non-virtual games?
Callan, I’ve not heard of that site, thanks! “Folk gaming” is a good way to put it. 😉
Rohan, you’re right to point that out; the social factor is indeed one of the other huge differences between computer and board games. I play Puzzle Pirates with my friend, for example, when we can’t get together and play something on a console. There’s definitely a set of pros and cons to each format.
If my wife didn’t play games, and sometimes she doesn’t, I’d study or design them. I did purchase source books for Warhammer and WarMachine, for example, but we’ll probably never get around to playing it. I bought them cheap (used older versions) for reference material. I’ve also filled sketchbooks with game ideas and story lore. Gaming has long been a hobby of mine, and as I’ve transitioned into making game art production a career, it’s been a natural change to dig into game design more and more. I find it intellectually satisfying to design interesting game systems when I don’t have the opportunity to simply play.
That said, yes, her willingness to play is something that I’m blessed with, and not everyone will share that sort of blessing. Online gaming definitely makes finding other players much easier. Even so, we do tend to lose some of the social cues and interaction potential when we’re interacting through monitors and mice. As ever, it’s a balance; we get convenience and anonymity at the cost of tangibility and some (not all) social aspects. There is a similar tradeoff in game systems; playing digitally, we gain speed, soloability and automation at the cost of a more rigid ruleset and tethers to electricity and hardware. Sometimes the benefits outweigh the costs, sometimes they don’t. Some players prefer one over the other, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes players even bounce between the formats depending on mood, so it’s nice to have options.
It strikes me that there’s no One True Way to play games or indulge in a gaming hobby, and that’s one point of this article. Sometimes playing digitally is best, sometimes playing in person is best. It’s nice to open up that demand curve by offering a diverse set of options. When a game like MTG can play similarly in different mediums, or an IP like WarCraft can function in entirely different game designs, the company tends to benefit, as do the players. When I design my games, I like to think of how they might be implemented in both digital and traditional formats. If nothing else, it’s another good mental exercise in chasing down implementation implications, and how a particular game design aspect might be best served. Even puzzling out UI, tutorials and instruction manuals is different between mediums. Following those lines of thought makes for a better game design overall, and if I do get around to making a living at indie game design, I believe it’s best if I make the most of different mediums available to me.
It’s very similar to how I approach art, actually. I learn different mediums and how I can use them, building a toolbox that I can work with. When I approach an art project, I can use whichever tool is best for the occasion. I’d never do some of my projects in charcoal or conte, for example, but it’s great for some of the larger scale figure drawings I’ve done. The digital realm comes in there, too, since I’ve often done pen sketches that I’ll later scan into my computer and paint over (or under) in Painter or Photoshop. Sometimes it’s best to work traditionally with pen or pencil, maybe even watercolors (especially watercolor; it’s notoriously difficult to simulate), sometimes it’s best to make use of the marvelous flexibility of a digital art program, complete with layers and the almighty Undo. I make the most use out of the tools at hand, whether traditional or digital. I look at game design and game sales much the same way.
Perhaps taking that sort of gestalt approach means I sacrifice some specialization… and we’re back around to the pros and cons of making choices. I believe that making those sort of choices is fundamental to gaming in the first place, so at least I’m staying in theme, as it were. 🙂
Oh, and the Rampant Coyote has a great article up on selling indie games. It’s tangentially related, albeit more about how to sell digital games:
How To Sell Your Indie Game
[…] 2, 2010 by Tesh This is an addendum for my original Making it Real article, but I think it deserved more than a comment in the thread with a few […]
[…] studio, we occasionally have game nights, where we play board or card games. Understanding why offline games work (with a side order of game theory, explicit or not) is valuable information when we get […]