What is random? If I draw a card, will it yield a random result? If I roll a die, will that lead to a random result?

The answer is: we don’t know. The deck of cards can be stacked, the die may be false. And yet, as humans, we tend to believe that we’re pretty good at both seeing randomness and generating it.

Looking at it psychologically there are three main parts of randomness: that events aren’t dependent, that events are consistently likely (meaning that their chance doesn’t change much over time) and that the outcomes match what we believe about the system.

For example, we believe that die rolls are random. But if we roll ten sixes in a row we tend to believe that we shouldn’t roll another one (the Gambler’s Fallacy), that it’s “time” for a different result. But if we are told that the system has been rigged we’ll tend to believe that those sixes are a result of that rigging, even if we don’t know what that rigging consists of or whether it exists at all. (more…)

I’ve got a game design in progress, a very simple one, where kids race snails around a track. It’s aimed at the 4+ age market with a very simple mechanic: chose a card depicting a snail, reveal simultaneously. Cards are the snails you want to poke. If your snail isn’t poked it moves one step. If it’s poked exactly once it moves two steps. But if it’s poked two or more times it gets scared and crawls into its shell. Easy enough that a small child could understand it.

I’ve got a game design in progress, a very simple one, where kids race snails around a track. It’s aimed at the 4+ age market and I couldn’t “#¤!”# understand why it didn’t work.

With two players it worked like a charm, letting the players play each other, letting you try to guess if the other would play their own snail, yours or none. But once I added in a third player the whole thing fell apart and I couldn’t understand why.

Here’s a hint: A beautiful mind. Yeah, the movie with Russel Crowe (if you haven’t seen it, go do so now, I’ll wait). It’s a great dramatization of John Nash’s brilliant mathematical theories and subsequent fall into schizophrenia. Except that it gets the math parts wrong because the game theory situation depicted in the movie isn’t a Nash equilibrium. (more…)

Welcome, dear hopefuls and hopefully soon to be published brand name designers, to the third installment of our “Pitching for Dummies” series (and I promise, it will be the last one for a while). Last week we deconstructed the following pitch and saw that, lo, it was a good one:

Dear Jane Publisher,

My name is Gregory Amedesigner and I’d like to interest you in my game Sell It, which is a Eurogame similar to GreatEuro, published by you last year but aimed at a different audience. Sell It is a semi-casual party game for 2-6 players that plays in 45 minutes.

Enclosed, please find a sale sheet and game rules as PDF attachments. A complete prototype is available upon request.

Best
G. Amedesigner

This week we’re going to do stuff to it. Evil stuff. Dangerous stuff. Stuff that will make it crawl, bleed and beg for mercy. Ready? Here goes. (more…)

Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing… I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times… The first draft of anything is shit.
– Ernest Hemingway

All accolades to the master and all that but Hemingway is quite wrong. The first draft of anything is glorious.

That’s because the first draft isn’t the one you set down on paper. It’s the one you see in your head.

The first paper draft of anything is shit, but the first glimpse of your idea, the first vision, is amazing. (more…)

Last time I used an example:

Dear Jane Publisher,

My name is Gregory Amedesigner and I’d like to interest you in my game Sell It, which is a Eurogame similar to GreatEuro, published by you last year but aimed at a different audience. Sell It is a semi-casual party game for 2-6 players that plays in 45 minutes.

Enclosed, please find a sale sheet and game rules as PDF attachments. A complete prototype is available upon request.

Best
G. Amedesigner

This week I thought I’d dissect that and say why I think that it works. If you want to know why I wrote it, and in what context, please see Submitting your game 101: Don’t waste the publisher’s time. Otherwise hold on to your hat, here goes. (more…)

This is going to be the greatest blog post you’ve ever read. No, really. I’ve shown it to my mom, best friend and dog and they all agree that it’s the greatest thing since sliced Pedigree Pal!!! Come on, read it already!

Feeling enticed yet?

There are many problems in that first paragraph but there’s a cardinal one: it’s a waste of time. (more…)

Starting is the toughest part of it. Inertia is a very real condition, and getting started when you would rather be in bed or at the beach or anywhere except there at your desk takes guts. I am going to let you in on a secret: Only the writers with guts succeed. Have you ever wondered why writers of mediocre talent get published while greater talents do not? The answer is guts. Drive.

Perseverance. Talent is not enough. You must have the drive to overcome all obstacles, including your own inertia.

Judith Krantz put it this way: “To be successful you must have talent joined with the willingness, the eagerness, to work like a dog. I write seven days a week from ten until four, and I begrudge every minute I have to spend on the phone or away from my typewriter.”

– Ben Bova

I admire people with persistence. Mostly this is because I haven’t got much of it myself. I tend to dither around, collect belly button lint and dream about how great things will be when I’ve managed to do whatever it is that I’m procrastinating about.

So I decided to train myself to be more of a doer. And while I haven’t managed to go all the way yet I do crank out a lot more work than I used to. How? Simple. (more…)

Remember that great idea you had? The one that felt so fresh, so clean, so bleeding marvelous that it sprouted tiny butterflies and the cast of Disney on Ice came by to sing the theme?

The one you put off until you finished whatever you were doing? The one that you tried getting back to, only to discover that it was marvelous – a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?

Inspiration has a best before date. Pass it and it’s gone, burnt out on imagining instead of doing. You can still see your idea, but you can no longer feel it the same way. (more…)

Imagine you’ve got a company. You’re sitting in your office when you realize that it’s become quite cramped. And that storage room next door really isn’t all that useful. So you google the best deals on pneumatic hammers and start taking the wall down.

Or not.

Unless you’re in construction chances are you’d call someone who is. And that’s the way to do it – find someone who’s an expert and get them to do the job. But when it comes to our hobbies and private life we’re reluctant to do that. Monetizing what we’re doing outside of works somehow feels wrong.

I’m no better. I was brought up in the tried and true male “Ugh-go-bash-dinosaur-on-the-head-himself” format. Yeah, that’s fine in a subsistence economy but I’m not growing my own food (actually I am, but that’s another subject altogether).

But that’s going to change. It has to change if I want to have the time to design and playtest. (more…)

What does too random mean?

I hear it all the time, I even say it. This game is too random, that action is too random. There’s too much random going on. But hold on, what does too random really mean?

I remember a session of Advanced Squad Leader where there was a Heavy Machine Gun firing down a street and whole platoon ran across the street and nothing. Not a single hit. They were probably jumping and waving and throwing their berets in the air while they were doing it too. Then a commissar walks by and shouts “boo” and the HMG picks up and runs. My opponent was laughing his ears off.

So ASL is very random, right? There’s loads and loads of dice and markers and stuff. But I’ve never heard anyone call ASL random (OK, I have but I’m not going to admit it).

So there’s something more to randomness than die rolls. And that something is decisions. (more…)