To paraphrase a quote: the only reason to write a game is because all the games out there aren't good enough.

Graham

I write games to help me deal with immediate personal issues.

I like making stuff.

And if I can make stuff that helps other people make stuff?

And if the stuff they make is the kind of stories I like?

Bonus.

And a game that helps people make exactly the kind of stories I like didn't exist, so...

A) I like playing with systems and mechanics. Though I like playing with rules, I don't generally like rules heavy games, so creating and reading smaller games lets me think about and manipulate how rules affect player behavior and such.

B) I like seeing thing sin fiction that I have never seen before. I first was drawn to the fantasy and sci fi genres because they offer things other genres cannot: various things that don't exist. Periodicially, I'm exhausted on those genres when tropes seem to outweigh new, original ideas. But in gaming, I can constantly be creating new cool stuff. And in game design, I can force others to create new cool stuff, or create new cool stuff and imagine how others would play with it.


The specific game I'm working on right now is based half in Game Chef's restrictions and half in thinking about a radical, possibly unwieldy conflict resolution.

Sometimes just because I want to, for whatever reason. Sometimes to fit a specific goal or target audience.

Right now, I'm working on Lærelyst. I didn't decide to create it! Rune Andersen did, and made the first version. I heard about it some years ago, and have been interested in and excited about the project ever since. Then, when I was given the opportunity to work on it, I jumped right in - I'd be crazy not to. It's a paid job; I get to meet kids occasionally, and interact with the educational system; I have an audience for my design (!!!); I get to Design What Matters, and it's sometimes surprising what actually matters - and what doesn't.

To paraphrase Jane McGonical: I wake up in the morning with a mission, with allies, with a sense of being a part of a bigger story, part of a system that wants me to be happy. I try to impart this feeling through the games and scenarios.

For me, game designing is about creating something that's not been done before or... improving on (or putting a twist on) things that have come before. I'm a systems person and really love mixing things together to get the desired result. I have played in a lot of different gaming systems and liked parts of them, but they weren't for me as a whole. And so i created a system and setting... FOR ME, and then i hope that others will like it too. :-)

-Oni
http://www.thirdeyegames.net

I guess I'm a "me, too":

GLASS - Played in a series of contact LARPs and saw what I felt were a TON of flaws, systemically, for both logistics of play and for empowerment of players to do what they want, how they want, and be heard/seen. Wrote down a list of Goals and began to crunch through what basic (sim) elements are critical to cover the most possible play situations. I am, at this point, utterly stalled for lack of playtesters--LARP systems take a BIT more time and buy-in to really check all elements and interactions, even with a "Test Plan" designed to hit everything, in as many relationships as is reasonable.

Pyramid games - Typically, I'm just fumbling around with my Icehouse pieces at the pub, flicking them here and there, stacking them, considering relationships... and BAM, a game notion comes out and I begin to noodle with it further. I'm at about a 40% completion rate on such games--playtesting can be hard to arrange (I have lame "gamer" friends, who only touch game stuff maybe once a month, if that).

ASCII @HACK - Was playing ToME and talking about it with a buddy, when it occurred to me that the random dungeon thing could be handled with instantiation, using resources (a la Universalis). Then, as a big fan of generic systems, I thought about how to reduce "gear and loot" to the bare essentials--DitV Traits; buy what matters; invoke however, if not vetoed (Challenges). A bit more polish and she's gonna be good to go. (Ever, the playtesting issue.)

For Mature Audiences - Game Chef, Ashok Desai's disturbing art, and Meg Baker's "I Will Not Abandon You" notion dialed up to 11. Add in the idea of blurring the line between character and player (Jeepish?), and BAM! FMA was written in about a day. Needs more work--might never get it done--but at the time it felt powerful and dangerous. A "dangerous" role playing game ought to have SOME niche, somewhere, I figure. Just gotta polish more (is there an echo in here?) and playtest (echo?!?) and get some AP photos of mangled plush dolls to replace Ashok's work (as he's flaked on me or utterly forgotten).

So the whys are several: to "fix" a lame and confusing system; just because an idea occurred to me; to move a fun game type to an utterly different medium and mode of play; to push every presumed ("traditional"?) boundary of what a role playing game entails.

First I designed games only as a creative outlet, while waiting for my poetic self to awaken again.

As my poetry got recognition I saw that I could not stop designing games.

Now I design games for exactly the same reasons I write poems.

I really don't know why I write poems, though.

Posted By: Jonathan WaltonAgon would work surprisingly well for going whaling

Or caribou hunting, or cliff-egg-gathering, or umiak building, all collective enterprises with individual components. I'd love to see a craft hack, so you can have a massive parka-mending battle.

Decide?

You mean I could... not put data to screen when I have an idea?

Erm....

Posted By: Elizabethhow can I make people understand what happens to soldiers when they come home?

Saw "In the Valley of Elah" earlier this summer. A great movie on this theme.

I'm writing a game to get me into Adams pants.

Sadly, people don't need to write games to get into my pants. They just need to be in a playtest of a game with me. But that's a long story involving a very special GPNW.

I can't get into a lot of my pants, because they don't fit me any more.

But I'm not sure writing a game is going to fix that. Rather the opposite, in fact.

(edit: nm my first try here was dumb. Totally different)

So, I'm seeing a lot of "cause I had a cool idea!" Of those people, I'm curious, how many of the "I had a cool idea!" games actually got done?

Why do I ask? I tend to *start* games because I have a cool idea, but I only *finish* games related to the a personal issue I'm dealing with.

Posted By: Ben LehmanSo, I'm seeing a lot of "cause I had a cool idea!" Of those people, I'm curious, how many of the "I had a cool idea!" games actually got done?

Done to what point?

In my own case, the "I had a cool idea" typically starts with a mechanic or two I want to play with, often something out of another game that I wanted to mess about with in a very different context. Other stuff that strikes me as going well with that accumulates. About 90% never get past this first 'clipboard notes' state; they get broken back into bits.

The other 10%ish make it into play with my own friends. About half of those (5% of the original) are actually a lot of fun for us. The ones that are fun for us, I type up and sent out there in some form.

Beyond that, my feelings toward a game, and work on it, fluctuates based on how "done" other people think it is, and if I feel like I can actually address what they say about what it needs.

I wrote Under the Bed because I'd tried writing bigger, more complex games in the past and it wasn't working out. I wanted to write a fantasy game that had the conventions of the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, rather than Tolkien or whoever. So I did, and it was fairly successful commercially and monumentally successful to me as an exercise. My impetus was technical.

I wrote Shock: because I'd wanted to play it since I first played Cyberpunk. I'd always wanted to play real science fiction, but for some reason, our science fiction games never came out that way. In retrospect, the reasons were obvious. But it took writing Under the Bed to make them obvious to me. I wanted to be able to do political speculative fiction. I wanted to talk about society inlarger-than-life terms. I rewrote Shock: because it wasn't communicating to a lot of people how it was to be used. My impetus was personal expression.

I published Beowulf because I've always wanted to do an edition of Beowulf, the poem (I love making books. That's a big part of all of this.), and I'd thought about how to make a Beowulf game be interesting and hadn't come up with anything. Then Vincent started telling me how he thought In a Wicked Age was going to work, and I started hopping up and down. My impetus was primarily aesthetic.

There are several games I've started but have been overgrown by other projects.

The Grim Game is a game about freaks, stage magicians, and escape artists who are secret agents. Believe it or not, it's based on Harry Houdini's real story. I played it with The Mountain Witch and my krewe and ... that was that! I didn't really need to do the game any more. I can't really say what my impetus was, which is probably why I didn't finish it.

Wings of White, Sea of Grey (which will probably get a new name if it ever starts to fly) is a game of sea combat with persistent characters and bargaining, so it has role-playing aspects, but it's fundamentally a game of naval pursuit in the 18th century. Think Master & Commander around Cape Cod. This one is a big baffler to me. I think it needs some playstorming. The idea is that there's Pursuit, Cannonade, and Melée. At each phase, you can win or lose, but the stakes get higher each time you come out at a draw. I need to read more about how sailing ships work and naval combat, in particular. My impetus is to get the charge I get when I watch Master and Commander.

Xenon: Alien Science Fiction Just had its first playstorm. It does what I want to do — pretty well, in fact — but it might be overly focused, which, ironically, makes it weaker. This one will probably be finished at some point, once I figure out some systems that liven up player/character identification without detracting from awe about the world you're in. The idea is for it to be like National Geographic, where Sign In Stranger is like the Peace Corps. My impetus is aesthetic: I want to make something like Wayne Barlowe's Expedition or Dougal Dixon's After Man.

Kobayashi: "I write games because I love to hear or read people building stories upon them. Yeah I'm a bit self-centered."

Self-centered? Nah... you, like many other game developers, just feel a real great sense of pride in your work when others enjoy what you wrote. That's another LARGE reason why I've written for such a long time.

-Oni
http://www.thirdeyegames.net

Ralph there is replying to a series of whispers about Wings of White, Sea of Grey, by the way.

Kobayashi, those are totally legit reasons to design games. If you're not doing it for the reasons that satisfy you, personally, irrespective of how other people feel about them, then you either won't be able to maintain it, or you'll write crappy games.

Posted By: Ben LehmanSo, I'm seeing a lot of "cause I had a cool idea!" Of those people, I'm curious, how many of the "I had a cool idea!" games actually got done?

For me, all have gotten to playable test stages. Of my pyramid/Icehouse games, about half get finished--often the simpler ones which are easy to test multiple times in a single play session. Of my RPGs, so far none have been published to print, though one is just some playtesting away (A@H). GLASS (as I said) needs a LOT of long hours in battle kit, with more than a handful of folks and a LOT of sample scenario tests and pre-gens (to spread the test plan)--gonna take me really making it a part time job for a few months and being VERY persuasive amongst LARPers in my region (or being willing to travel a lot). For Mature Audiences prolly won't ever go beyond its Game Chef stage (plus some feedback-driven additions and explanation), mainly because I doubt anyone would really play it the way it's intended, outside of very close committed relationships. Lacking one of those currently....

Stacktors! is an edge-case, as it's a combination between a wargame and an RPG with a lot of abstraction because it uses only pyramids for character and challenge representation as well as mechanical resolution and rewards. Basically a minis game with questing and puzzle solving, but also with a way to do things like "duels of wits" (putting mechanics behind persuasion or argumentation RP) and "condensed" conflicts (a series of otherwise-dull tasks rolled into a single challenge). It might see the light of day, after a lot of playtesting, as a single-sheet, color (obviously), laminated, folding (if possible) product, as well as free-to-download PDF.

Three Stooges Role Playing (d30) was my very firstest game, back in 1985-ish (?). Played great with my friends at the time; built to be two teams against each other in some wacky situation; very, VERY stats and rules light (think Toon with less stats and powers) but I think it would be a great con game, if I ever resurrected it. Of course, a name change (or significant IP license-wrangling) would have to occur--Keystone Kops is in the public domain, I think; or I could go generic and call it Slapstick, to capture everything from Buster Keaton through Laurel & Hardy and the Marx Bros, up to the Nobel Three (actually Five-and-a-Half, at last count). I leave cartoon slapstick to Toon, as it does it so well (and human slap doesn't/can't do some of what toons can, obviously).

Everything else--from house rules for mana (BEFORE the mana system came out for D&D) to my Shadowrun 1E "system parallelization" reworks that predated SR2E's similar rules streamlining--exist only as notes and hand-drawn charts... as in, with a ruler and/or graph paper--this was before anything but ASCII-art charts and fixed-width font text was possible with a PC/C64 and my Epson printer. (Man, was it a killer day when I got the new printer that had TEN fonts from which to choose, for output, some of them VARIABLE WIDTH!!! L33t!)

None of this includes paid or for-credit design or writing work on other RPGs, board games, or computer games--all of which got finished.
[edit for typos and minor expansion]

The anabasis game is called 10.000 (link to the pdf).

It's a 63 page illustrated PDF.



Problem is... it's in french.

I was thinking about making an english translation of it, if anybody's interested send me a whisper.

(sorry for being off topic)