On Inventing Games
You said something to me when we met in London that fascinated me; that you were perhaps the only professional abstract game maker.
Perhaps, yes - in the sense that I know no other game designer who is focused solely on abstract 2-player games and does nothing but that.
On the one hand I should feel fortunate, because it could well be that exactly that is the reason why I'm so lucky to make a living out of it, and, on the other hand, it is a sad indication that abstract games aren't doing well. There are thousands of game designers, but at least 99% must have given them up.
So: Is the time of the abstract game past?
The big question ... And so much to say about it ... But maybe I'm not the right person to do that because I'm too much in it. I mean, for me that became irrelevant because no matter what the answer is, I will always act as if they have a future. At least, that used to be my attitude, but I'm not sure how long I will be able to hold onto it. I'm getting pretty tired.
You know, I've put myself in a delicate position. In the beginning things were easy: I was a game designer, period. But the more I was confronted with the lack of interest in abstract games, the more I got involved on different levels.
Now I'm also a bit of a publisher, a bit of a distributor, and bit of an organizer of game events, etc. The result of all that is that more and more of my idealistic statements became suspicious, as if I'm using deontological arguments for commercial purposes. Sometimes I even feel embarrassed when I start talking about abstract game with my normal enthusiasm.
| "After having had a look at my games, he said: "Not bad, but as long as chess exists, there will be no room for them." |
How did you get started on this tough road?
When I visited the Games Fair in Essen for the first time - in 1987, I believe - I had three abstract games with me. It just happened that they were abstract, I really don't know why.
Any way, I walked around with my games, did not know what to do, yet somehow managed to get a few appointments with publishers. And it went badly, very badly. I think the end of the eighties must have been the absolute low of abstract games. They were death, done and over with.
That in itself I could have accepted - after all, I was new and knew nothing about the game business - but I heard so much nonsense that I simply refused to accept that abstract games were so commercially worthless as the publishers were telling.
Especially after having had a look around and having seen so many absolute non-games, I got caught by a profound disbelief. On the way back home the idiot in me expressed the wish to deliver the proof that there still was a public for abstract games.
There's one thing that I remember very well - said by a man, by the way, who is still in charge of a big company. After having had a look at my games, he said: "Not bad, but as long as chess exists, there will be no room for them."
This is probably the most stupid thing I ever heard about games in general. If I would have shown him a board game with a theme, he could have said just as well: "No need to come back for as long as Monopoly exists."
So have you finally managed to prove your point - that there is a serious audience for abstract games?
No, the proof is far from delivered. In the beginning I wasted a lot of time by just thinking in terms of quality. Now I know better. The only valid way to measure quality these days is through sales records and sales records are looked at on an annual base.
| "Often they don't even know how a game works anymore; they just look at the box, turn it around once or twice, shake it a few times and ask themselves aloud: 'can I sell it?'." |
Apart from the fact that sales numbers are not suitable to find out more about quality, abstract games also need more time than a year to start selling; they need a longer incubation period and that doesn't fit in the current commercial tendencies.
Everybody knows that investments must yield a return in as little time as possible. But if it was only that, the problem could be tackled. Unfortunately the situation is much more complex.
How complex? What other kind of obstacles do abstract games face?
Well, to give you just one example… A few decades ago the R&D department of a publisher took the decisions about which games were going to be published. Their main question was "is this game good enough?"
Then Marketing & Promotion took over; the question wasn't any longer "is it good enough?" but "can we promote it?". Meanwhile it looks as if the sales reps and even the retailers are becoming more and more important.
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| Part 2 of the GIPF Project
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Often they don't even know how a game works anymore; they just look at the box, turn it around once or twice, shake it a few times and ask themselves aloud: "can I sell it?".
I mean, shaking the box became a kind of "quality check". And why do they check it that way? Because that's what an average buyer in an average game shop does to make up his mind.
I know that I'm making a caricature of it - fortunately other criteria are used, too - nevertheless the consequence of all this is that a few basic notions have been re-defined over the last years.
"Quality", for example, can mean anything between "a lot of intrinsic value" and "something you buy after having shaken it". In theory the intrinsic value is still the more important, in practice the shaking has gotten the upper-hand.
That is a reality. Both are plausible these days, which makes having a discussion about what a game should be quite difficult.
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