I recently saw a post in the Board Game Design Lab Community Facebook group that I keep thinking about, so I wanted to share it and a few other thoughts for my fellow gamers.
The quote was heard and paraphrased by Jonathan Chambers. Here’s how he remembered it:
“There is a game within a game. The inner game is trying to win the game that you’re playing right now. But there’s a metagame happening at the same time. The metagame is NOT trying to win as many games as possible, but trying to be invited to play more games.”
I’ve heard stories, experienced firsthand, and even been guilty myself of behavior at game nights that either quickly or slowly decreases the chances of future invites. I’ve seen the opposite too: The first time Joe attended a game night, he taught a game and ended the evening by filling my dishwasher. He proceeded to be a regular attendee for years, and now he’s our Director of Communications.
I’ll definitely think of this in the future when I’m at gaming events. In general, my goal of any game is to have fun with the other players–I’m just as aware and concerned about their fun as I am mine. At least, I try–it’s those times that I don’t quite succeed that I will remember this quote.
Along those lines, I have a few other quick thoughts/ponderings for my fellow gamers, though mostly from my perspective as a publisher. These are essentially an extension to the Open Letter to Gamers I wrote a few years ago.
- When you ask a question about a specific card, please type out the text of that card (or, if possible, share a photo of it). I can’t even count the number of times someone has asked something like, “If I play the Gardener card while using the Mafiosi special worker meeple, does the vine card go to my hand or the discard pile?” (This is a made-up question…I’m not even sure if there is a Gardener card.) I’ll see this question somewhere–maybe on my computer, maybe my phone–and at best I have to hunt through various folders on my computer to find the card(s) in question before responding. At worst, I don’t have access to my computer or the game at that moment, and a question that could take 10 seconds to answer ends up taking hours, which isn’t helpful for the person asking.
- If you ask for more “player interaction,” do you actually mean it, or are you specifically referring to direct conflict/combat? I think this distinction could make a positive impact on players, designers, and publishers. I see this request all the time in forums about games–Stonemaier and non-Stonemaier–that absolutely have player interaction. Even the delightful 2021 game Cascadia has player interaction: If I claim a card/token combo, I’m removing that option from all other players. I think I even heard people saying that Clank doesn’t have player interaction even though you’re literally running all over the board grabbing tokens that other players then can’t take for themselves. I think the problem is that people too often conflate the lack of direct conflict/combat with player interaction. Player interaction is a big umbrella encompassing any reason that you may need to pay attention to other players. Direct conflict/combat is one of many subsets, but it’s just a subset, so I think it’s really helpful to specify if that’s what you’re referring to (if that’s truly what you want). Here are some examples of my favorite subset, positive player interaction.
- How much do you really care about the replayability of campaign games? I didn’t even consider replayability in my recent post about the future of campaign games, as it’s simply something that doesn’t cross my mind. I’d never ask a grocery store about the re-eatability of a chocolate bar–I want to enjoy it once and then move on to something else. I think this question stems from (a) the game’s value relative to its price and (b) the potential for someone to fall in love with a game and not be limited to a certain number of plays. If it truly is important to you, ask away. But I’d almost rather put the “burden” of replayability on the player instead of the designer. We’ve all watched our favorite movies more than once, right? It’s the same film every time. Just like a great designer, the director crafted each scene a specific way, and that’s what makes it great–I don’t want my choice of 5 different options for every scene in The Incredibles. I honestly don’t want to discourage questions like this (or player interaction); rather, I want to encourage people to think about the consequences. The thing you think you want may not make the game better, and it could even make it significantly worse.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this potpourri of topics!
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28 Comments on “The Game Within the Game (and Other Notes for Gamers)”
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I think replayability often gets confused with reusability. People don’t necessarily want to replay, they want to pass or sell on.
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is reusable but not replayable. Once you know the solution, you can’t go back.
Pandemic Legacy is a fascinating series for this. You can replay Season 1 if you buy another copy, but your experience will be very different as you know what’s coming, and to some extent the game leads you do things that make life hard for yourself later on. Knowing what those are means you approach it differently. It’s still fun, but it’s not the same experience as the first play. And crucially, it wasn’t designed that way. It was designed for that first play. It’s not at all balanced around players knowing what is coming.
Season 2 (and Seafall) go even further in this direction. The foreknowledge you have actually allows you to overcome and trivialise certain game elements, as they’ve very dependant on finding specific things. If you can remember where they are then the game is much easier.
In these cases, it doesn’t make sense to me for a publisher to try and make the game replayable. I get people want to sell on the secondary market, but that shouldn’t be a driving factor in design.
Any game that uses novelty, surprise, hidden elements etc. should actually embrace those elements and do cool things with them, not limit them so the game still works if you know what’s in the envelope.
Replayability:
When I watch a film, I might only watch it once. The waste produced from that is almost meaningless — even a VHS cassette was a small amount of waste, but a DVD is utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It is as much waste as a take-out container. Is it good to toss it? No. But if I have to because it just isn’t worth watching and has no value for selling, I’m not immensely concerned about environmental impact. With the ease of streaming now, I can also just go rent it and have even closer to zero waste.
When I play a disposable game like “Exit”, that’s almost entirely some paper. I don’t really like those games BECAUSE they’re disposable, but still, pretty insignificant waste there, and most of it can be recycled.
Now think about most Campaign games. They’re big. They’re heavy. They take enormous amounts of energy to both produce and ship. They’re filled with plastic miniatures, tokens, etc. Books are often plastic. Binders are plastic. You *ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE* a plastic (or possibly wood) insert to effectively store the game so that it can be played. All that, 100% of it, is just waste if it isn’t replayable/resaleable. This is a little better if tokens are wood, but even then it is still waste, albeit more biodegradable waste.
Imagine the amount of waste generated if Scythe was one-and-done.
I appreciate your sustainable view on this. But Scythe isn’t a campaign game–replayability matters to Scythe because it’s designed for players to start over from scratch every time they play. Campaign games are the opposite: The best campaign games are designed to tell a memorable story from start to finish. While pretty much every non-legacy campaign game CAN be played again, I don’t think replayability is nearly as important for them–you’ve completed that story, and if you want another story, the best place to look is another campaign game.
I was just trying to think of a Stonemaier game on the same level of component complexity as a Gloomhaven/etc. to illustrate, since you KNOW how much material goes in to your own games.
Granted, Charterstone is a more direct comparison, but it doesn’t have nearly the same level of unsustainable waste as most one-time campaign games, and you also provide a refresh pack to help mitigate that.
For sustainability, couldn’t the same be said about campaign games with dozens and dozens of scenarios? Our surveys indicate that most people prefer around 15 games per campaign, so if you’re targeting replayability or longevity with, say, 50 scenarios, that’s potentially 30+ scenarios that the majority of people will never play. Though, to be fair, a few pages in a rulebook about a scenario don’t add much waste, but scenario-specific figurines and tokens do.
A single DVD isn’t a great comparison to a 20-hour campaign – if an average movie on DVD is 2 hours, then you’re comparing with 10 DVDs (including packaging) which is a lot closer to something like Charterstone. VHS tapes were much worse.
Yes, food packaging represents a lot more waste than disposable boardgames or DVDs do, but it’s still a valid consideration.
And the comparison between campaign games and other games should take account of how much play the non-campaign games see. It’s one thing to have the ancestral game of Cluedo where all the detective notes are covered with multiple layers of cryptic marks because they’ve been reused so many times, but the majority of boardgames struggle to get played a full dozen times.
One thing about replayability that I think is important is resalability. Once I’m done playing, can I repackage it and sell it or start over? More and more gamers talk about reducing plastic and garbage that will get thrown out when you open the game, but if the whole game becomes garbage after the campaign then it’s even worse.
I’m a big fan of Legacy games, but I’m really happy when there’s an easy way to reset the game either for myself or to resell.
I see where you are going but in this case the question should not be “is it resettable?” but more around “how feasible is it to pass the game around when finished?”
Just to put an example, Charterstone is technically speaking resettable, but you will throw away a lot of things (cards, the reset pack box, etc) and can only be reset once. If the main concern is environmental I think it fails at that.
Still, Once we have played it over 5-6 gaming nights I feel it has a good waste/fun ratio
I think Charterstone passes the “waste” test as the waste is very limited, and is (largely) recyclable.
Charterstone isn’t a great example of a “wasteful” Legacy game because you end up with a playable game after the campaign even if you don’t reset. It’s not perfect – all the cards that get stickers peeled off them end up as waste once the sticker’s gone (and the crate opened in the case of buildings) – but it’s a lot better than something like Pandemic Legacy which has no post-campaign life.
More generally, there are three possible ending states for a campaign game – resettable, playable post-campaign, unplayable. Only the first is resellable (without a pretty big asterisk) but only the last is actively wasteful.
Really interesting quote. I’m working my way through The Art of Game Design at the moment and early on it tries to define what a game is, and there was a big part on games creating their own internal value, and particularly this idea of the “magic circle” where are approach and actions inside this game world can be quite different to our actions outside it.
That made sense to me in the way I view games, which is a belief that they ‘should’ be a closed environment (in a sense, we don’t bring grudges into or out of that particular game). This was challenged recently by a long chat with a friend after a game of Twilight Imperium – he mentioned that he would always uphold a promised deal, even if it meant directly losing that game, because he wants to be viewed as trustworthy in future games. My approach would have been to break a deal if it was game winning, and equally I wouldn’t fault an opponent at all for doing the same, because my lens is that single game where his lens is all games.
That conversation came back to me with this post, as it challenged my view that, in essence, “what happens in game world stays in game world”. Even if I think that should be the way games are treated, we still carry over some impression of the people we play with that forms part of our long term association with them. I guess the magic circle isn’t such a perfect circle :)
Thanks for sharing, Ben. I love the idea of the magic circle. The way I think about it, the magic circle is an unspoken agreement between players that the game matters, that it’s important to all players for at least next 60 minutes or so. We’ll all opting into placing meaning on cardboard, wood, and plastic, and if someone doesn’t do that–if they don’t care–it breaks the experience for everyone else.
I really like that view that we’re all implicitly agreeing to place meaning on the experience. It captures a lot of the other things that derive from it quite succinctly
This is one of the reasons I have a passionate hatred for Werewolf games, which extends all the way out to Among Us. Nothing in those games stays in the games, and there is always, in every single group I’ve ever seen, at least one person who psychoanalyzes everyone else, frequently to the point of being an asshole.
It is certainly reasonable to “close the magic circle” around the game and say that nothing in game carries over to real life, and vice versa – in fact, our current Charterstone campaign found its village’s name when we agreed that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” – but it’s also reasonable to say that knowledge can carry over. In fact, there are some games where outside knowledge is essential – games like Codenames, Dixit, Mysterium, etc that rely on allusions to shared knowledge as part of gameplay require, at a minimum, that you have common knowledge like that the Sphinx is in Egypt, or that Spiderman is a superhero.
If I’m playing with a group, knowing that Robin usually wins, while Alex is playing for the first time, is information that can help me do better – if I have a choice of who to attack or who to help, attacking Robin and helping Alex is likely to lead to people finishing closer together than doing the reverse.
And I don’t think anyone seriously argues that you should forget everything you’ve learned about what strategies are good or bad in a game before you play it for the tenth time (or the second, or the hundredth) – the only way to achieve a truly clean slate would be to never play the same game twice (and even then, general experience with similar game mechanics will still offer some hints about what might or might not work well).
But it’s still a good principle that things which happen in-game shouldn’t carry over to non-gaming life – lying and betrayal in a game may make people less inclined to trust you in future games, but shouldn’t affect their trust in you outside of that – which also means that there are some things you shouldn’t invoke in game in order to gain trust, even if you’re not lying that time. If Inigo Montoya would not be prepared to swear by the soul of his dead father that he is not a Cylon when he is one, he shouldn’t swear that oath when he isn’t one either.
Hi Jamey,
I always think the same when in countless forums i see questions about the replayability of a game, and in those occasions when I have given an answer my reply goes along the following lines: whenever I have gone cinema with my friends, no one has ever asked for the rewatchability of the movie. It is assumed to be a one time experience, and if you really like it, well there is the option to buy the movie. I cannot count the number of times i have watched Natural Born Killers, and I enjoy it every single time. There is nothing I will change.
I think in many occasions people is concerned, as you well point out, about the value for money, and the risk that the game could become routine or repetitive. Before this argument I always bring my cinema ticket value rule: divide the price of the game by the price of a cinema ticket, and then divide the result by the usual number of players in your game night. The result is the number of times that you will need to play the game in order to have its worth in cinema time. So, a 60 pounds game that is usually played by groups of 3 people in a place where a cinema ticket is 7 pounds, will need 3 plays to be worth its cinema time. A game will never be repetitive after 3 plays! Any extra time you play it, is a bonus, increasing the time value of your game, or -equivalently- reducing the cost per play.
Anyway, just a thought…
Thanks Diego! I fixed that word as you requested. :) I definitely hear what you’re saying about non-campaign games. I like your calculation–3 plays is a great target!
My family hates direct combat, so I’m grateful for your games which have other varieties of player interaction! I really enjoy the kinds of positive interactions from the latest Wingspan expansions, for example.
Here is a link to the original. It’s timestamped for when the topic is introduced so you can hear the original quote in its full context. https://youtu.be/9Xc7DN-noAc?t=2479
Awesome, thank you so much! And thank you for posting about it in the first place. It’s a great quote. Though now that I see the video, it’s a pretty controversial video–I can’t say I agree with the rest of his views!
He’s a good speaker none the less. The things I disagree with most are often the things he has the most evidence in support of. I have to do a lot of research before I decide if I want to continue to disagree or let myself be won over.
I try to avoid listening to people I agree with, because I have nothing to learn from doing so.
I can also tell, he has a good heart. He spends a lot of time talking about how best to help the poorest of the poor, and his proudest boast is how often people tell him they’ve improved their lives from reading his books.
I won’t mention here which issues he’s changed my mind on, and which issues I remain unconvinced on, but he’d definitely get a very warm welcome from me if I ever met him in person.
The quote was actually from Jordan Peterson. I’ll try to find a source for you.
Thank you!
The player interaction question piqued my interest. Is the Platonic ideal for player interaction perhaps chess, where every move is relative to what one thinks their opponent’s next move might be? As soon as game design starts adding more mechanics and variable player counts, maybe the farther away it gets from this ideal? Maybe games with hard player counts of 3-4 players, for example, are less susceptible to critiques of player interaction, because there the game mechanic doesn’t have to account for different player counts? Just thinking out loud. Also, I wonder if this has more to do with euro-type games.
Full disclosure: I think Stonemaier Games’ brand of 1-5 player games is really fun.
Those are interesting observations about the different expectations that accompany player counts, Jay!
I really wish more people would be specific about what kind of player interaction they want. However, I see the assumption of “player interaction = combat/stealing from others” way too often, even in other designers. The spectrum of player interaction is wide and we are trying to work more positive player interactions into the games we design.
It’s been a hard road because we’ve had a lot of negative feedback about positive loops in our games. People don’t want to help others at all. It just makes me sad that the status quo and default viewpoint is being mean to others is good and acceptable, but no way in heck am I going to do any action that even remotely aids another. For example, it baffles me that so many “family friendly” games have take-that mechanics. As if the only way a family can bond over games is to be mean to each other.
I understand many games are competitive and there can be only one winner, but the way in which a person wins doesn’t need to always involve stomping everyone else into the ground.
Just my two cents.
I’m with you, Sarah. I meant to include a link to my video about positive player interaction; I’ve added it now.
Overall, I hope people just take a few seconds to think through the implications of such suggestions/criticisms. Would Cascadia really be more fun if you could destroy an opponent’s mountain? Would Clank actually be better if you could fight an opponent’s meeple? I enjoy those games because of how they currently work–if I want combat, I’ll play Kemet or a head-to-head game like Shards of Infinity.
Glad I could help remind you to include the link. :-)
I agree completely. There is a time and place for direct head-to-head combat, but it doesn’t need to be in all games. And people need to recognize that just because you’re not attacking another player, doesn’t mean you aren’t interacting with them. People seem to ignore and/or dismiss any other kind of player interaction.