I’ll never support another Kickstarter in my life, I swear! There, I’ve said it. I’ve shown myself to be a heathen, an anti-developmentalist and probably an internet-hater as well.

Or I might have come to some conclusions about myself.

See, I’m bad at recognizing games. Some people are great at it. I know several of them. D. can look at a new game and go “oh, it’s a cross between Candyland and World in Flames”. He doesn’t even need to skim the rules. A. reads the rules and has a perfect image of not only how the game plays but also of the winning strategies. S. watches a gameplay video and can tell you if the game is broken. Me, I’m a chump. (more…)

I hate downtime. I’ve always done it. But recently I realized that I really don’t.

See, there’s several kinds of downtime. I’ve always thought there was but one but in retrospect it’s easy to see that there’s always been two and, if one draws the analysis a step further, three, and I hate only one of them.

I’ve taken the liberty of naming them plan time, dead time and rest time. (more…)

Gaming has a cost.

I don’t mean the dollars or pounds or kroner you’re likely to spend on the game, the shipping, the gaming table and the popcorn. I’m talking about what it takes to put a gaming session together, the mental, physical and emotional effort it takes to assemble a group of like minded people in the same space and at the same time, i.e. what’s required to organize your standard gaming session.

But that’s not all we’re requiring from our players. In fact, while that’s the visible part, we’re requiring quite a lot more out of them. (more…)

There’s a big difference between novels and short stories, beyond the obvious ones. It goes beyond word length, beyond character arcs and sub-plots. It resides in those final moments when you know that the story’s ending but you see that the ending will leave you wanting more.

In a novel that’s mostly fine, in fact it is desirable. Wanting more is all right when you’ve gotten a major emotional payoff from the resolution of the main, and possibly sub, plots. It’s the feeling of “I love this restaurant but I’m so stuffed that I don’t want more right now”; it’s what makes readers come back and buy the sequel. But as short stories that give that kind of major payoff are rare (and a lot of them go on to win multiple prestigious awards) the short story ending often end up feeling lacking.

The same is true for games. Most games are short stories. Only the largest, most complex games, can assume the mantle of being the play equivalent of novels. And those games don’t get played a lot, or at least not by many people. Even here on the Geek, where the most rabid gamers come, how many of us sit down to 20+ hour games on a regular basis? (more…)