Building a Career in the Games Industry

I saw this on Youtube and thought it was pretty great. Marcelo Figueroa is a veteran of the Edition Wars, an AEG alum and knows what he's talking about. It was an enlightening talk (even if I'm sort of late to the game, seeing it some three years late), and it hopefully has something in it that will appeal to you.

Also, as an industry professional who is looking to further his career in sales, marketing and management, if someone in the know could fill me in on the Weasel List and Gamer High - assuming these institutions still exist - that would be great. 

God Damn You, Wil Wheaton

I have a new nemesis.* His name is Wil, and he's this ridiculously popular Internet guy. He did some really cool stuff in the 1980s as an actor and now he is a blogger and writer and game designer and basically too cool for school.

He's been doing this thing lately, and it's a thing that is really good for the games industry, and I hate him for it because it makes my life moderately more difficult. He has been reviewing games. Good games. Games people then want.

And then I can never buy that game for my store again.

See, Mr Wheaton, being the incredible nerd icon that he is, has a lot of reach when he reviews a game. He gets a lot of people interested in his game, and then I have people asking me for it. Except, I'm not the only games retailer in Canada. I'm one of hundreds, and all of them are calling the same distributors trying to get a bunch of copies of whatever was just reviewed. In the past six months, I haven't had one request for Castle Panic. This week, I've had a dozen or more. And I know I'm not the only retailer who has to deal with this.
So my distributor runs out in the sudden deluge of orders, and then they have to wait for more from the producers of the game, and the producers need to wait to reprint because Wil Wheaton is something like a localized board game Armageddon.

What the hell, Wil? How am I supposed to sell people a game I can't get anymore? Why do I have to look like an idiot because you decided to like a game nobody's asked me for in months? At least send me an e-mail or something, letting me know you're going to be publishing a review of Game X so I should stock up In a big way. Or, y'know, return any of my calls. Or just to chat or whatever. Dick.**






* For the record, I actually dig Wil Wheaton, and wish him and his all the best in all of their endeavors, even those that have me fielding calls for games I don't have, or have enough of. What he's doing is great for the games industry and I'm really happy that he's devoted some of his time and energy towards introducing people to games they don't own.

** Wil Wheaton isn't actually a dick. And I've never actually sent him emails, nor phoned him. Though, having a retailer Advanced Warning list would actually be awesome.

The Ghost of D&D Third Edition

Wizards of the Coast announced yesterday that they were going to be re-releasing the Dungeons & Dragons Three point Five core books. I’m sure there are a lot of people who are tickled pink by the news, and as a person who sells D&D books for a living, I’m certainly not against having the version of the game people want to play on my shelf. But it seems like a strange marketing choice to me, especially with D&D Fifth Edition currently in the pipes.

When the PDF battle was at its highest pitch, I came out swinging for the minority opinion that it would be deeply silly of Wizards of the Coast to release digital copies of earlier editions of the books. There’s a pretty vocal group of people that are suggesting that it makes good business sense to have all of the various versions of D&D available at once; they’d like to be able to buy First Edition core books and modules and things, and so they assume that there is a sufficient audience to warrant those books’ continued availability. And while that might actually be true, it doesn’t address the fact that Wizards of the Coast is a company that survives primarily by publishing books you don’t own, and that to continue to be successful, they need to be able to sell new and interesting material. You’re quite a bit less likely to buy something new if you can still get the thing that is familiar to you. Pathfinder proved this in a big way, by continuing to support the most recent version of D&D while Wizards of the Coast did its best to kill it so that D&D Fourth Edition could be successful. Pathfinder is a continuous best-seller, not just in my store but in many others, while Fourth Edition languishes under poor reviews and the persistent clarion shriek that it’s “Just like World of Warcraft.”

And it’s not because D&D 3.5 is a better game than D&D Fourth. It isn’t a better game than D&D Fourth, though they are radically different in scope and tone. It’s a different game from D&D 3.5, and different isn’t something people, and gamers especially, deal with very well. This fear of change is exactly the reason that D&D Fifth is going to have the same six attributes that the game has had since the beginning of the hobby. It’s the reason Vampire the Requiem is largely vilified when it is just better at what it sets out to do than any version before it. It’s one of the big reasons RIFTS books continue to sell like crazy. People generally don’t like to do new, different, weird things, and the games we play need to account for that trend if they want to be popular.

It doesn’t take a marketing genius to see that this is a catastrophically silly move on the part of the company. All of the potential issues that come from releasing PDFs of earlier editions exist here (piracy only marginally less so), with far greater impact on future sales. At this point, putting out a 3.5 Player’s Handbook both detracts from your current line and actively supports a game that has been gnawing away at your player base. This cannot possibly be anything more than a desperate grab for popularity in a beauty pageant Wizards of the Coast has already lost. It stinks of fear and distress from a company that has made a number of critical marketing mistakes in the past few years. The small gains to be had from re-releasing a sure-seller are certain to cause problems in 2013, as the marketing machine for D&D Fifth starts rolling out in earnest.

If you absolutely must try and sell older versions of a game, it makes much more sense to at least package those older versions with the edition you’re currently trying to make a market for. Put out a new core set for all four editions of Dungeons & Dragons when Fifth Edition hits stores. When you buy a core set, you get one Fifth Edition book packaged in with it. First Edition comes with the Player’s Handbook. Second Edition comes with the DMG. Third Edition comes with the Monster Manual and Fourth Edition comes with a setting book for whatever the assumed setting of D&D Next is. At least that way, if you sell an old edition of your game to people, they’re getting the thing they want and a pretty decent incentive to give your new game a try. I mean, hey, we’ve already got one of the books, right?

So You Wanna Work in the Games Industry

One of my most valued co-workers has put in his notice. He’s moving on to bigger things, and I wish him the best in his new ventures. He’s good at what he does, and whoever steps up to take his place has some big shoes to fill.

That’s put some of my own focus on what it takes to work in the games industry. I’m pretty happy with my job as it is, and while I’m looking at moving on myself in a year or two, whatever I move on to will be involved in games and gaming. It’s an industry I know and I’m good at what I do. There are a lot of people who want to work in this industry, though, and to be perfectly honest, most of them aren’t going to and aren’t suited to it. For those of you reading who would like to work in the industry, whatever piece of the industry you’re looking at, I’ve compiled this post to aid you in that endeavour. Hopefully, it helps.

 

You Don’t Need a Degree, Go Work at McDonalds

The co-worker who is leaving us has a degree in English, and it serves him fairly well. I don’t have a degree in anything, and that’s served me fairly well. What we both have is experience working shitty jobs. And that’s really important, because what you’re applying for at the entry level in games is invariably a shitty job.

You’re going to be a lackey to begin with. You’re going to stock shelves or alphabetize games or dust or shrink wrap millions of books. Sometimes you’re going to have to lift heavy stuff. None of this is glamorous, none of it shows up in your school transcripts, and we can’t really tell what sort of a worker you’ll be from a blank resume.

If you want entry-level work in the games industry, you need to work shitty jobs first. Those are what we’re looking for: are you willing to do occasionally crappy work, and are you good enough at that sort of work that you can keep a job doing it for a while?

 

You Need to Know Your Stuff

This one should probably speak for itself, but you need to know what you’re talking about. Play games. Play a lot of games. Read gaming blogs. Keep up on news and rumours. Become involved in forums. Talk about game design. Talk about organized play. Get involved in organized play. Learn. Actively go out and learn more about what you’re aiming to do.

I’ve been working in the games industry for just over five years, but I have over twenty years of experience with hobby gaming. If you want to steal my job, you will need more than that (and you’ll need to convince my boss that you’re worth more to him than I am, and if that’s true, we can’t afford you). If you want to get a  job selling Dungeons & Dragons, you need to play some Dungeons & Dragons.

Likewise, if you’re going to write dialogue trees, you should probably be a solid writer. Designing systems? Might want to know something about design. And games. And games design. And math. Programming a computer game? Best know some programming. And even selling D&D requires that you know something about sales, and specifically the sale of intangibles (because while the book itself might be an object someone can buy, what you’re really trying to sell is fun). If you want to work in a specific job, you need to know how to do most of that job.

Note that I didn’t say you need to know how to do the whole job. I didn’t know everything there was to know about being a games manager when I started being a games manager. I had to learn some stuff on the job. Merchandising, event management, ordering, these were new things to me. But I knew games and I knew how to sell stuff, and that’s the biggest part of the job. If you don’t know how to do at least the basics of the job, no one is going to hire you on.

To learn those things, sometimes you need to do stuff that isn’t directly related to the job you want to be doing. I used to sell timeshare. That was where I learned to sell stuff and got some experience under my belt.

 

Know Your Abilities

Not everyone is a salesman. Not everyone knows how to program. Not everyone is a writer. Not everyone is an artist. But you, you are good at something, and that something can probably translate into the games industry somehow. Find out what you’re good at, and get as good at that as you can be. Then find ways to apply that thing to the world of games.

A lot of people start out in Quality Assurance when they’re trying to break into video games. And for a lucky few, that’s a good way to break into the games industry. For a whole lot of others, it’s a lot of backbreaking labour in an industry that doesn’t care about the guys doing the backbreaking labour. When’s the last time you heard of a famous game tester? How about a famous game designer?

But Quality Assurance isn’t the only entry-level position at a game company, and if you’re not classically “entry level,” you increase your chances of getting a better job exponentially. If you’re a pretty good programmer, you should apply for programming positions. If you’re a decent writer, apply for positions in design or writing. If you’re a kick-ass salesman, sales and marketing always need more feet on the ground. And all of these positions are going to come into contact with the parts of the company you’re actually trying to break into. And if you want to break into a career in games that has a few different options going forward, why not do something that doesn’t suck as a baseline?

 

Know Who You’re Working For

I knew about Warp One long before I’d ever walked through the door. Back in the nineties, a friend of mine used to run a comic shop called Front Page Comics in the thriving metropolis of Stettler, Alberta. The shop did pretty well for itself, and was my first real introduction to nerd culture as a whole. When I was looking to get into the industry myself, I foolishly thought the best way to do that would be to open my own store, and I went about thrashing around like an idiot for a few months trying to do just that. When I went to Jeff for advice, he told me “If you want to make money at this, be like Warp One.”

Fast forward a whole lot of years, and I live a few blocks away from Warp One, slinging pitas at the local Pita Pit. It’s not a terrible job, and it’s a pretty great place to live, and one day my girlfriend comes into the Pit and says “Warp One is hiring. You should drop off a resume.” I’d been in there a handful of times, picking up a copy of Secrets of Xen’Drik for Eberron and a horrible 3.5 Africa-inspired rulebook, but it hadn’t even occurred to me to drop off a resume. When I finally did, I was hired on the spot.

I included a list of all the games I’ve played and/or still play on the back of my resume. It was a long list.

 

Be Awesome

 

I can’t really teach you this one. Ironically, I think it’s the most important point. You are going to need to fit in with the rest of the crew where you work. A lot of employers don’t hire for talent or education, especially in the games industry. They hire for personality. You need to be personable. You need to be generally likeable, or convince whoever is doing the hiring that you can be, and if you force it, people can tell.

I’m not the hiring authority at our store, but I take in a few resumes a week. Some of them get put in the File. Others get put directly into the garbage. The difference is the first impression they gave me. The ones that get put into the File are the ones that I could possibly see myself working with in the future. The ones that go into the circular file have probably failed somewhere, and it’s usually at this point.

When we keep a resume on file, by the bye, it’s kept in an enormous stack of other resumes. Sometimes for a really long time. Sometimes forever. But if you made it that far, that means that either someone who doesn’t think like me got your resume in there, or someone at our store thought you were cool enough to vet.

And if someone at our store thinks you’re cool enough to vet, other nerd locations are going to think you’re pretty cool too.

Playing Games for a Living

 

The people who work in this industry don’t do it for the money or the glamour. You aren’t going to make more than a decent living wage in this industry. Working in timeshare, I made a lot more money for a lot less work (and those of you who know me personally know how little work I must be talking about here…), but I choose to do this because I love it. I love games. I love gamers. I love events that bring people together and create shared experiences. And I get to play games for a living, which is pretty great.

If you’ve got what it takes, maybe you can too.

Con Merchandizing for Lyndsay

One of my favorite stories about convention merchandising is about Robert Khoo. Whether or not it’s true, I have no idea, and I’m telling a half-remembered story that I read many, many months ago, but the general idea went like this:

Scott Kurtz has been to a lot of conventions, and when he’d show up at one, he’d arrange his books on the front table in chronological order. People would buy lots of the first book and lots of the most recent, but a lot of the stuff in the middle was skipped. He figured people just wanted to start the series from the beginning or pick up the new product, but fewer people wanted to jump in during the middle and just assumed that’s how his sales would always work at conventions.

One of the many years he was placed next to the Penny Arcade booth, Robert Khoo rearranged his books. He came over from his booth on the last day of the convention and set the books up chromatically. Suddenly, books started flying off the shelves that hadn’t sold more than a couple of units at a convention. When sales started to die wind down again, Khoo came over and arranged them based on the size of the piles, making a pyramid of books. Again, there was a surge in sales. The third time he came by, Kurtz asked him “What are you going to do when I’ve only got three books left?”

“Don’t worry,” Khoo said. “I have a plan.”

When people began to filter out of the con for the final time, Khoo came over to find a smattering of books left on the shelf. He propped them up in such a way as they were facing the direction of the people leaving. When the convention was over, Scott had sold all of his books for the first time ever.*

What’s the moral of this little merchandizing fable? The key to good table marketing is to try new things.

What spurred this little storytime? The lovely GeekyLyndsay** of Dragon Chow fame is going to a convention and doesn’t want to use a table to display her dice bags. Which makes all sorts of sense because, if you’ve ever tried to find an effective merchandizing solution for dice bags, you know that tables, display cases and shelves are basically the worst possible furniture in the world. The problem comes from the nature of bags, I think. They defy shelving units, their strange shape making it damned near impossible to display the full awesomness of the bag. If the bag is lying flat, it looks boring. If you have them propped up so you can see their tops, they lose any sort of clear identifiable qualities. Nothing about this is good. So to be able to display dice bags more effectively, you need to think outside the box some.

My most fervent suggestion is to have people carry them around the con and show them off. This comes with two really key components: product champions (those people who love your stuff and want to sell it for you) and mobility (because they don’t have to be at the table when they’re showing off the bags). It gives people the opportunity to touch the bags, to interact with them, and more importantly to interact with people who like them. Each individual carrying the product provides a testimonial to your product’s awesomeness, and they can go into more detail about what makes your bags more kick-ass than the bags getting sold by Random Steampunk Booth #7. Rather than let the bags speak for themselves on a personality-free shelf, you have someone there to sell, not only the product you’ve made, but the services you’re selling (I believe Lyndsay is still doing personalized bags, for instance). Product champions are incredible people, and I think Dragon Chow has enough fans that it would be easy to convince a number of them to run around with sacks of them.

Another option: Hang them from the ceiling. Get some very long twine and some clothes pins and make a display of dice bags that can be seen from across the convention hall because it’s the only display that has a billion colors and goes all the way to the top. Color-code them so that people look over and see a blast of colors that go from floor to ceiling, and make sure you’ve got multiples of each bag hanging around at the bottom of the display so that you can sell them without having to climb an enormous ladder to get them.

Even more option: Make designs out of them on the cubicle walls of your booth. Use clothes pins to make an attractive design or pattern that will have people stopping in to at least check out what the hell it’s made out of.

Yet more option: Have people wear the bags as hats. Give a free bag to any customer who wears their bag on their head for an hour for you acting as a de facto booth bunny.

One More Option: Get a bunch of spinning racks, like the ones they use at bad jewelry stores that are made of slat-wall on a spinner. Put hooks in, and hang your bags in an easy-to-navigate pattern on the floor. This option is quite a bit more expensive, obviously, but the spinning racks would belong to you, and you could use them at other conventions in the future.

There are a lot of ways to merchandise your dice bags without putting them on a table or arranging them on a shelf. The key, though, is to keep switching things up, keep giving people something new and interesting to look at. Rearrange by color, size, shape, number of items, popularity of items, difficulty in making the product, scent or taste, whatever. Just keep giving people a reason to come back to your booth every day (or make your booth come to them) and make sure that when they do, you pounce on them like a half-starved tiger on a helpless gazelle. Because customers love the attention.

*For the record, I have no idea whether or not this story is true. I also don’t know if it was actually about the people I think its about if it is true. But it seems like a very Khoo thing to do, and I don’t at all think he’d mind if it was added to his already expansive Legendary Character.

**This article was edited to reflect the fact that I am terrible at alternate name spellings. With a name like Kristoffer, you'd think I'd be more conscious of stuff like that.

Mini Anger

It's like Hors D'oeuvre Rage

So, we got in our order of Pathfinder Battles miniatures today. We don’t get to sell them until the 11^th, but I got to take a look at them and I have to say, I’m not particularly impressed. It seems that the good folks at Paizo haven’t learned much from the mistakes Wizards of the Coast made in their own miniatures lines, and in fact are moving further from a model that would actually be useful to the consumer. 

The product is a single random miniature per box, at $5 a pop, or a larger miniature for $7. The paint job is mediocre, the sculpts are passable, and the price point isn’t terrible. What rankles is that they’re a single random miniature per box.

Game Masters, the people who are known to buy the most role-playing game product, do not want random miniature packs, guys. As a person who stands behind the counter at a game store, I hear this refrain constantly. As a Game Master myself, I understand their lament. Game Masters don’t want random anything, they want a sack full of painted goblins. They want a sack of Generic Evil Dudes. They want a sack of zombies.

That last is great, because it’s a product that actually exists, one that was rather popular. It wasn’t for role-playing games, though, it was (unsurprisingly) for the board game Zombies. And they had their shit figured out, guys. They made a sack of zombies, and they sold a bunch of them. Then they made zombie cheerleaders and zombie dogs and zombie clowns, and all of those sets sold really, really well. They weren’t even painted, and they flew off the shelves. 

And it’s not all that difficult to understand why. A sack of themed dudes is invaluable in a role-playing game. It means you can buy a single product and be ready to sit down and play. It means that you can throw down with a bunch of similar baddies. If you’re going to randomize your miniatures, why not make it like Chessex’ Pound o’ Dice? Throw a bunch of random dudes in a sack and sell it as a separate product.

Players don’t want randomized miniatures, either. A player wants to find that One True Miniature that perfectly captures his or her character, that one miniature that says “Olgreth.” And buying a crapload of randomized boxes is frustrating, expensive and generally futile. He or she ends up with a bunch of miniatures he or she is never going to use. 

So the product we actually need, the product we would actually use, is three different products.

The first is a quarterly-released Sack o’ Dudes, a 100-pc. bag of plastic miniatures around a theme. You only need about 5 different types of monsters to make that worth it. Here’s your list for the first three years: Sack o’ Goblins, Sack o’ Orcs, Sack o’ Elves, Sack o’ Dwarves, Sack o’ Warriors, Sack o’ Mages, Sack o’ Cultists, Sack o’ Victims, Sack o’ Zombies, Sack o’ Kobolds (dragon-type), Sack o’ Oozes, Sack o’ Generic Evil Humans. You’re welcome.

The second is a painted miniature with Pathfinder branding that has a single miniature in it packaged like the pewter miniatures currently produced by Reaper. Those miniatures will be the player character miniatures, the Big Bad miniatures, the I-will-only-need-one-or-two-of-these miniatures. Clear plastic in the front, cardboard in the back, pre-painted plastic miniature in the bubble. Put out two or three of these every month. I already bring in the Reaper Pathfinder miniatures, and I would happily put a pre-painted, plastic alternative right next to them. And people would gladly buy both. Some people like painting, and others want something they can use out of the box. Providing both of those groups with good options is just good business.

Finally, the third product is something akin to the D&D Beholders and Dragons sets. A single-purchase item for a miniature or set of miniatures that is fucking incredible. I want Colossal Red Dragons again. Or a Jabberwock. Or a Bandersnatch.

This isn’t rocket science, and I’m really dismayed that this product went all the way from design through to my storefront without someone pointing out that randomized miniatures for role-playing games had been tried, and failed. And when someone puts out a miniature line that actually makes sense, you can bet that’s where my money will be going.

What Wizards is Doing Wrong, Part 86x10²³³

We all love to rag on Wizards of the Coast for fucking up our amazingly wonderful awesome incredible game. And to be fair, they fuck up a fair bit. Not enough that they’ve gone out of business, mind, but enough that they’re hurting us, and enough that they’re hurting their market share. According to ICv2 (which is brilliant), the good folks at Paizo are a close second in the role-playing game market, and they’re selling a game that Wizards of the Coast invented. Anyone looking at this should be able to understand the problem pretty quickly: Paizo is making nearly all of its money off of an intellectual property developed by their direct competitors, and they’re doing it legally, and it’s eating a healthy stack of Wizards’ lunch.

Most of the time, I don’t give business advice to the folks at Wizards of the Coast, because they’re supposed to know what the fuck they’re doing. These are some smart folk, the best and brightest that the gaming world has to offer. They’re supposed to understand that there is a very simple solution to this problem: they need to sell what Paizo is selling, and they can make more money selling it than Paizo can.

Back when 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons came out, a lot of people were pissed off that the company was replacing the best role-playing game in the world with some new, weird thing. They complained and they argued and there were some solid edition wars going on, but eventually most of the 2nd Edition folks came around to the new way of doing things. Why? Because they had no choice. It was getting harder and harder to find Dungeons & Dragons material for the edition they liked the best, and this new version was still Dungeons & Dragons, right?

This Edition War has a different flavor, though. There’s a new factor, and that factor is that you can still find material for the version of D&D you like better. You can still find 3rd Edition support from the folks at Paizo and their allies, and that means that the grognards of 3rd don’t need to eventually filter over to D&D4. I think what Wizards was hoping for was that the Dungeons & Dragons name would carry through for them, that people would rather play “Dungeons & Dragons” than “Pathfinder.” And to a degree, they’re right. I get a lot of waffling in my store. I have a set of the three core rule books for 3.5 sitting on my shelf, and it’s priced at a whopping $275. I don’t think I’m going to get that much for it. Yet. But eventually someone is going to come down to my store hoping to find some D&D3.5 core books, and I’ll say “Well, there’s Pathfinder over here…” And they’ll let me know that $275 is a steal for the Dungeons & Dragons name on the edition of the book they’re looking for. But a lot of people walk away, think about it, talk to their gaming buddies, and decide that they’d rather pick up Pathfinder than 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. The name means something, but if it’s the same product in a different wrapper, a lot of folks are going to buy. If it’s the same wrapper around a new, different product, they’re not so sure. Obviously, this is doing Paizo fairly well.

If Wizards wants to capitalize on this shitty situation, the solution is pretty simple. They need to open up their backlist. They need to put the entire collection of 3.5 D&D books on the idevice book apps for a dollar a piece. They need to print black-and-white perfect bound versions of the core books and put them back in circulation at a much lower price point than Pathfinder’s core book (say $25; it works for Palladium). They need to put 2nd Edition and 1rst Edition books up as .pdf files for free, and run that site on advertising packages. The most expensive part of making 3.5 D&D is paid for; all Wizards needs to pay for right now is reprinting and inventory, and both of those things are super-cheap compared to the loss of market share Paizo is currently representing.

Then they need to change how they’re doing 4th Edition entirely. Their focus is currently divided between online content and published content, and that hasn’t been doing them any favors. My coworker Ian and I were discussing the myriad ways Exalted and White Wolf have been sucking donkey balls for the past few years, and one of the ideas he put forth sort of struck home with me. Wizards of the Coast needs to put out two different versions of Dungeons & Dragons. On one side, they need printed product to support their organized play initiatives and to get most of their new playerbase involved. People become involved with D&D because someone passes them a book and says ‘This shit’s great, let’s give it a go.’ People need to have a thing in their hand before they become properly invested in the product you’re selling.

But Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a product as much as it’s an idea. It’s information, and if nothing else has been proven in the last few years of gaming, it’s a fluid idea. It’s a living idea, and the print medium is not best suited to that sort of document. Wizards should by all means continue to publish print books, but only the print books that fucking matter. Core rule-books. Setting information. Monsters. Things you need to sit down and play with your friends for a few hours.

Then they need to publish the most comprehensive online role-playing game experience ever attempted. They need to build the Google+ of role-playing games: huge online database with every word of every book, organized, searchable, integrated with a new character builder, an adventure designer, a monster-builder. Every power, every character, every dungeon tile, every sentence, all living in the cloud. The game’s errata occurs immediately. Characters are updated as the rules are. Player-built content lives side-by-side with official data so that every player can draw from every other player that uses this new set of tools. Online chat with video and audio capabilities, as well as an online table built in java allow for online play. Charge us more money for an actually robust online game, and we will gladly fucking pay it.

What problems does this solve? It means that product printed a year ago isn’t out-dated, it’s just the introductory product and it doesn’t represent the game as a whole. It means that errata can happen at the drop of a hat when something is proven to be broken. It means that you no longer have to pay scads of cash to publish high-quality book when you can pay less money by far to have a game that constantly reproduces itself, constantly updates itself, and never goes out of print. It means you stop having to deal with distributors, because you can send the logins that grant you access to this new and wonderful game to the same people running the D&D Encounters and D&D Dungeon Delve initiatives (which means that people who don’t have credit cards can still buy and enjoy your online offerings). It means you make more money, you spend less money, you increase your market share substantially, you make a lot of players much, much happier with you, you stop dividing your attention between print and online media, and you have improved the public opinion of your company with a huge division of the folks who currently hate you.

If someone at Wizards would like to hire me to fix their busted shit, they can reach me at friggert@hotmail.com. I’m not cheap.

Yu-Gi-Oh! is a Bad Game (But Doesn’t Have to Be)

This is a really long post…

As a person who plays games for a living, I take them pretty seriously. And usually, I can check my emotions at the door about a game; the fact that I dislike a game does not make the game “bad.” Whether or not I like a game is a matter of personal aesthetic, and I’m willing to recognize that. To be fair, there are a bunch of games I like that aren’t good. I’m quite fond of Exalted, for instance, and for all that I laude the Game Master’s Guide, 7th Sea, as a game, kinda sucked.

There are a few games, though, that are both Games I Dislike and Bad Games. They’re pretty few and far between, honestly. FATAL. Racial Holy War. That role-playing game about the bishonen boys with sea anemones for penises. All three of these show up on any Worst Role-playing Games Ever Published list. The Star Wars collectible card game is on my list. Steve Jackson’s non-collectible Burn in Hell was atrocious. Most of these games, though, don’t have a huge fan following, either because they are bad, or because whatever cross-market synergy the designers were trying to build never really got off the ground. (For example, I love Star Wars, and I love collectible card games, so a collectible card game about Star Wars has to be the next best thing to perfect, ne?)

Yu-Gi-Oh! is the beneficiary of one of the most successful cross-market synergy campaigns ever created. There is an animated series based on the already-successful manga, there are video games and toys. There is really no better way to tap into their target market than to toss a cartoon at it. Chaotic tried the same thing, and for a while the game was wildly popular (the game was kinda meh, and the production schedule mishaps kept it from attaining any real popularity).

So Yu-Gi-Oh! is wildly popular. In the mass market, it’s the most popular collectible card game in the world. Sadly, being popular does not make the game good.

Understand that my issues with Yu-Gi-Oh! have nothing to do with the game’s rules. Honestly, if the game were played as it was originally designed, it would be pretty solid. The rules are simple and elegant, and the strategy has the possibility of real depth. I remember being pretty impressed with the game when it first came out (back when there were a lot of creatures with no abilities, and trap and spell cards were the tits). There are some things that strike me as entirely arbitrary (monster levels, for instance; you could simply separate monsters into three different levels: normal, tribute, double-tribute, and be done with it), but none of those things are enough to break the game in horrible ways.

No, the issues I have with Yu-Gi-Oh!, the reasons I think it is a bad game, are these:

1) Card and Set Irrelevance
2) The Banned List
3) Game Speed
4) Solitaire

1) Card and Set Irrelevance

In any given pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, there is a miniscule chance that you will open a card that is good. This isn’t to say that the card you open is amazing or jaw-dropping, just good. I sell packs of Yu-Gi-Oh! in my store, and I cannot count the number of times I have found entire packs of cards just sitting opened on tables or counters, nothing having been taken from them because even the rare card in the pack isn’t worth anything. This is a problem frequently encountered in eternal-format card games. Only two or three cards released in an entire set of Yu-Gi-Oh! are any good. Out of over a hundred cards per set. And sets are released every three months or so.

Imagine how many trees have died to produce cards people aren’t even using in their decks.

And it’s never the commons that are any good. It’s always the rarer-than-rare cards, the so-called Secret Rare or Ghost Rare. You might find one of these cards per box. Which means that twenty three other packs of cards are a complete waste of paper, foilwrap and money. When each booster pack costs $5, that turns into a lot of cash, fast.

And older sets are completely irrelevant now. There are boxes of the earliest sets that have one or two cards that used to be good but aren’t anymore that will sit on a shelf forever. Legend of Blue Eyes White Dragon packs are worth almost nothing save the nostalgia value of opening a pack and seeing a bunch of monster cards with no effects and trap and spell cards that simply aren’t very good. Entire sets of cards have been obsoleted, making the eternal aspect of the game completely ridiculous.

2) The Banned List

When I play Magic: The Gathering, I play Limited formats or Type 2 (Standard). I like having a smaller, more stable card pool, and there hasn’t been a time in recent memory that they’ve had to ban a card from Standard (skullclamp being the example I can think of). Having a limit on the number of sets allowed in a format means that there are fewer ridiculous synergies to look out for when publishing new cards, so the development team can focus on rooting those synergies out, and then worry about longer-winded formats later. You can work on balancing a set against itself and the most recent iterations of the game.

Yu-Gi-Oh! solves synergy problems by banning them. When a particular card or deck becomes too powerful, the players who have invested in those cards and decks no longer get to play them. Sorry, Monster Reborn, you’re just too good. Bye bye, Judgement Dragon, you’ve appeared in too many decks. Oh look, Lightsworn is getting too powerful, let’s ban half the cards on the list. I don’t even play Yu-Gi-Oh!, and this pisses me off. People pay for those cards, people search for them for months, just to have them torn from their fingers because the card is too good. At least with a rotation, you can plan for it; you can see that a set is going to be leaving the format soon and sell the cards that will no longer be legal for that format. Or retire them to a casual-deck pile. Or set them aside for a different format that you play.

3) Game Speed

Last year, there were three or four decks that could kill you on turn one in the Yu-Gi-Oh! metagame. That is terrifying. That isn’t a game of strategy, that’s a game of chance. A couple of weeks ago, one of my customers went to the Canadian Nationals. He finished third, and told me that the deck that had beaten him did so on the first turn of games one and three. This was after a huge banned-list update that had gotten rid of all the previously discovered first-turn-win decks in the game.

A first-turn win is the first indicator of a broken meta-game, in my opinion. Even at its slowest, Yu-Gi-Oh! sports a consistent turn-three win strategy. It’s too fast. There’s no time to strategize, it really comes down to whether or not you’ve drawn the cards that will allow you to “go off” on the earliest possible turn. I don’t need to worry about attack or block positions, what traps or spells you’ve set, or what you have in hand. If my deck goes off, I win. If yours goes off first, I lose. Which brings me to point four, and my biggest issue with Yu-Gi-Oh! as a game.

4) Solitaire

One of the biggest reasons I think Burn in Hell is a bad game is that it rarely effects your opponent’s side of the game. You collect your bits, you make the best sets you can, and your opponent does the same. You strategize and plot and plan, sure, but you do it independent of your opponent’s actions. A good game needs to be interactive on all sides. I need to be able to effect what my opponent is doing in a meaningful way, set them back, make them lose the board advantage, make them ditch cards from hand, or from the top of the deck. And they should be able to do the same sorts of things to me. In a game like A Game of Thrones, there’s a lot of that; the whole game is about interaction with other players, from the job I take at the beginning of the new round (“Oh, sorry, you needed to be the Hand this turn? Oh, and look at that, you’re supporting me…”) to stealing Power from an opponent’s House card and then beefing it up with Renown. Every part of the game involve some level of player interaction, and that is what makes A Game of Thrones so incredibly deep as a game.

Magic is actually a pretty poor example for this, because combo decks don’t really rely on interaction at all, and combo decks are a long, proud history in Magic. When your deck goes off, you sit on one side of the table playing it through, doing whatever it is that wins you the game, and your opponent just sits there and takes it for a while. One of the most gracious thing I’ve seen a Magic player do is start running their combo, look across the table to their opponent, show the opponent their hand, and then ask: “Do you need me to play this through?” It wasn’t asked as a snotty remark, it was a concession that watching a combo deck explode in your face fucking sucks. There’s nothing fun about watching someone play solitaire while there’s nothing you can do about it.

Every good deck in Yu-Gi-Oh! is a combo deck. It is designed to kill you regardless of your own actions. It has answers to all of your actions, so that you don’t even get to make them. I watched a guy recently throw down a combination of cards that removed everything his opponent had on the table and then swung in for lethal damage. Just to make sure his opponent had no answer. On turn three. If that were a Magic game, his opponent would be pissed, and rightfully so. When a Dragonstorm deck goes off, and a million things happen on one side of the board on turn three, and someone loses, it’s a piss-off. But what makes these two decks different is that the Magic deck was legal for a couple of weeks before the key cards rotated out of the format. And as soon as the deck was in the meta-game, for those few weeks people developed answers for it. Dragonstorm didn’t take the Worlds because it was amazing; it took the worlds because no one saw it coming. It was a masterful metagame call. In Yu-Gi-Oh! it’s just the state of the game.

So how do you make Yu-Gi-Oh! good?

Anyone who frequents my store and plays a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! has already heard me rant about this, and it’s nothing I haven’t been saying for months. The first and most important fix is that the organized Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments need to branch into multiple formats that focus on different releases for the game. The organized play that is currently standard should stay; there will always be people who love playing in eternal formats, and there’s nothing wrong with them. But for those players who are new to the game, or those who are looking for strategy that goes deeper than “My deck goes off, you lose,” having a smaller card pool makes the game a lot more entertaining. It slows the game down, as well, because the crazy one-turn-kill synergies exist spread out across a bunch of different sets from all over the Yu-Gi-Oh! timeline. My personal suggestion has been “Go two years back.” The cards that have been released in the past two years, those cards are legal in the narrower format; this includes all of the new booster sets, the new starter decks, the new premium packs, what have you. If it’s been printed and sent out in the past two years, you can use it. For a slightly broader format, go back five years.

Where the organized play goes, the casual play will follow. Though, to be honest, casual players will play whatever the fuck they want anyway, with no thought wasted on what’s going on in the tournament scene (past: this is a good deck, so I will thief it).

Konami needs to rethink the way their sets are released, as well. Each set needs to have something to offer to whatever decks they want to support from now on. If Gadgets are going to be a thing, every set is going to need to see some Gadgets. If Lightsworn is the new hotness, having some Lightsworn cards in each set doesn’t seem like a terrible idea. But it’s more than deck archetypes, too. The Magic guys have figured out what players want from their game, and they try to provide those things in spades. There are cards for guys who love smashing face, and cards that need some creative thought to break into something good. There are cards for people who love to lock their opponents down, and cards for people who want to stop that from happening. When you know what your players want, and you design your game’s expansions around those things, the sets you produce become a lot more cohesive. Also, understanding the new formats is important so that you can design cards for each of them; giving the eternal formats a bomb (for the sake of funny, let’s say there’s a new Toonworld printed that is strictly better than the current Toonworld), the narrower formats aren’t going to be able to use it effectively, which is fine, but you need to provide the narrow format guys some love, too.

And having a healthy testing/development team together to make sure that the cards aren’t broken before you release them is a much better strategy than simply banning the cards that are too powerful. When a card like Judgement Dragon is able to take over the game because it is simply that good you probably shouldn’t have released the card in the first place. This happens occasionally in every large-format card game (Bitterblossom, I’m looking at you…), but the chances of it happening are far reduced when you limit the synergies available in most organized play events. Fully testing your cards before you send them out to the public is a good way to trim down an already glutted banned list, reducing the number of cards that cost $700 two days ago and are now just a chunk of foiled cardboard.

Mixing a narrower format with better set design increases card relevance, too. When I open a pack of Legend of the Five Rings cards, there is something relevant in that pack for nearly everyone. Honestly, though, L5R is a bad example of card relevance; a lot of people only play in a single clan, and if you don’t get any good cards for your clan in that pack, it was a useless pack for you. It’s still more likely to be good than a Yu-Gi-Oh! pack! This is because commons and uncommons are relevant in L5R in ways that they are not in Yu-Gi-Oh!. The number of good common cards in Yu-Gi-Oh! in the whole history of the game is drastically close to zero. The few that are “good” are often barely playable, and will more likely than not be replaced by a Ghost Rare that does a better job of whatever it was the common did. Making each card relevant is important in a collectible card game, because it increases the chances that the metagame will need to account for it. If every card in even a single set is relevant to the most common format, then the number of deck archetypes will explode.

Honestly, people should be able to play a game directly out of two packs of cards. I should be able to sit down with two packs and play a game of Yu-Gi-Oh! against an opponent who has done the same thing, and have a good time doing it. This is the narrowest of all possible formats (barring playing out of a single pack, which in Yu-Gi-Oh! would be impossible because of the size of a pack). When you can have fun playing out of fresh packs of cards, your game will probably be good.

*For the record, I don’t own the copyright to anything except what I’ve written on this post. Every game I’ve mentioned belongs to someone else, and I am making no threat to their copyright at all.

Pinning Down the Art Form

In response to my post about muggles, Erin brought up an interesting point:

I'm confused, I loathe improv theater, both as a spectator and a participant, but I love table top role playing. - Erin

Part of the problem with communicating what exactly a role-playing game is, is that role-playing games aren't really like anything else. They're an artistic goulash that borrows from a wide range of arts. When I'm talking to new or potential players, I usually fall back on high school drama class, and the improv theater games we played there; in a role-playing game, you make up your character, speak for him or her, act out his or her actions (either through description or through demonstration), and create something that is very much like an impromptu play. 

But role-playing games aren't actually improv theater. For one thing, theater assumes an outside audience, a group of people who are not active participants but who are instead passively entertained by the action on stage. Role-playing games don't typically have an audience that is separate from the people who are involved (there are exceptions of course; sometimes someone "Just wants to watch," and then the theater analogue gets it a little closer). Moreover, the director of an improv play has a much smaller role in the direction of the narrative than does your average Game Master (again, with the exceptions, though: GM-light games or games that don't have a GM at all, exist, and those games are definitely role-playing games. I suppose the closest a role-playing game could be to improv theater would be a game with an outside audience in which the GM plays an ancillary role). 

Role-playing games are often compared to traditional storytelling, as well. If you've never met a professional storyteller, you're missing out; they're intense, and it is my personal belief that they would make both the best and worst Game Masters on he planet. In the best tellings of a story, the storyteller is both a performer and an improv artist. The storyteller has a story more or less memorized, but will include the audience in coming up with the details as the story is told. This adds a personal element to the telling of the story, and makes each telling a unique and interesting experience. Depending on the story (and the teller) the same tale can be told in wildly different ways when the audience changes. But storytelling, too, is not role-playing. For one thing, the audience is invited to invent details, plot twists, small things that can effect the flow of the story, but they do not play the protagonists. The storyteller controls all of the characters when weaving his or her tale. There is no question of authorship in traditional storytelling; the storyteller has all the control, a perfect railroad to the end game.

In some ways, that may seem like very bad role-playing. In fact, sometimes it is. When GM fiat gets completely out of control, it stops being a role-playing game and starts being a storytelling session in which the players have little or no control over what their characters do or how their characters act. And that is an integral difference between traditional storytelling and role-playing games. In the former, the storyteller is the performer, and the audience is a (mostly) passive force in the story. In role-playing games, the entire group make up both performers and audience, and the story belongs to the party. 

Others have drawn similarities to the production of a television series, or a comic book, or a collaborative novel, or a shared world series of stories, or a million other things.

Not to mention the fact that many role-playing games include a tactical miniatures game. While the role-playing bits are all great and good, when the dice start flying, the art of the thing is replaced by a half hour of rolling dice, checking stats, doing some quick arithmetic, moving little toy soldiers around the table, and snacking on Cheetoes. This is a phenomenon you won't find in either improv theater or traditional storytelling; it has more in common with chess.

Not to mention the random element of dice.

Or the role of out-of-character table talk in fleshing out the narrative.

Or the novel-like quality of attempting to quantify reality within a system.

Or... Well, there are a lot of ways role-playing games differ from damned near everything else. 

So maybe that's what role-playing games are. They're improv theater about traditional storytelling in which the teller weaves an elaborate plot around the pieces of a randomized chess game, to an audience that participates in the creation of the story by providing the protagonists' personalities (and moving their corresponding piece about the table). Or, maybe they're something completely different. It's been over thirty years and no one has managed to really pin down what the hell it is we're doing when we sit around and toss dice. 

But I can't tell new or potential players that. It's too big, it's too much to try and understand. When I'm talking to a potential player about role-playing games, and they ask me what it's like, I always say "It's like improv theater, with rules and dice." Sometimes, the person that I'm talking to cringes when I say "improv theater." It's happened. I just have to trust myself as a salesman to pick up on that and find a way to explain that is both unintimidating and intriguing. I'll save "how to sell role-playing games" for a different blog post, though.

How to Deal with Muggles

I see this all the time. I work behind the counter at a store that sells role-playing games. The situation plays out like this.

A person who has not yet been indoctrinated into the realm of role-playing games (in the store, I call them "muggles") is standing somewhere near the Vampire: The Requiem shelf, and begins to look at the books. Usually, if someone has been standing there for a while, I'll ask them what I can grab for them (far better sales technique than "Is there anything I can help you find?" for the retail people out there). If they tell me they're browsing, I suggest that they should "Feel free to buy everything you browse past!" and leave them alone. If they ask me about the game, or role-playing games in general, I give them the briefest possible explanation I can.

Muggle: So, I've never really played one of these games before... What's it like?
Me: You ever take drama, or seen Whose Line is it Anyway?
Muggle: Sure.
Me: Cool. It's like improv theater with rules and dice.

For some people, this is enough. They get an idea of what it is the hobby is about, enough to make a choice on whether or not this is something they want to be a part of. It's an improvised storytelling medium that involves some rules, and a system for determining arbitrary outcomes in a fair way. Cool. Moving on.

Others begin to ask more questions, and that's when I'll start getting into a bit more detail. You have a "character" who you portray, describing his or her actions and speaking for them. There is a "director" who tells you the situations in which your character finds him- or herself, and who controls the supporting cast. The rules are there to give you an idea of the sorts of things your character is good at, and to handle any situations that might come up; for instance in a Vampire game, the rules tell you how sunlight will hurt your character, and how strong your character is.

For some people, this is enough. They get an idea of what the hobby is about, enough to make a choice on whether or not this is something they want to be a part of. Others will ask more questions, and I'll answer them, and the process continues until the person I'm talking to has enough information.

I know I've said enough when the person I'm talking to has stopped asking questions.

This is a technique that I've used to describe role-playing to an insane number of people. I've been playing these games for coming on twenty years, and I've played with hundreds of different people in that time. Most of the time, I didn't meet those players; I made new players. I told them what the hobby was, I answered their questions enough to give them an idea of whether or not it was something they'd like, and if it was, I'd run a session or fifty for them. This is part of what makes me a successful salesperson in the games industry (and it's why I've played D&D with as many women as men).

The only time I see problems with this approach is when there is another gamer standing around the same shelves. I'll ask the muggles what I can get for them, and they'll ask questions. I'll answer them briefly, and if they don't ask further questions, I'll leave them to their choice. Almost without fail, the gamer customer will feel the need to chime in, and it is almost always in a way that is unwelcome and intimidating.

Gamer: That game is awesome.
Muggle: Yeah?
Gamer: Yeah, man. You can be like, twelve different kinds of vampire, and they each get special powers. Like my guy has Protean, which means he can sleep in the earth without getting hit by the sun. And this one time, a bunch of werewolves were coming after him, so he had to sleep there for three days and he almost went into torpor.
Muggle: (putting down the book) Okay...

The problem here is oversharing. The reason the game is cool to you is not the reason that someone who has never played a role-playing game is going to want to try it. A person who is going to pick up a role-playing game for the first time is interested in only a few things: is it fun? is it easy enough for me to learn? will I get enough use out of it for the cost that I pay? and is it fun?

Fun is a different thing for different people. Some of us honestly don't like improv theater with rules and dice. Some of us don't want to hang out and make up stories about people who don't exist and tell them to eachother. And that's okay. But keeping it simple, and telling people only as much as they need to hear to make a choice, is the easiest way to get new people into the hobby. There is a lot of information out there, and much of it is intimidating and strange. Just because you and I know what Auspex does (or Sneak Attack, or Glitterboy armor, or a wireless netjack, or whatever), doesn't mean that a person who hasn't played wants to. Sharing your own experience with the game might help someone who is on the fence decide to get into the hobby, but unless you're invited to share, you could just as easily be turning someone off from something they would have really enjoyed had you remembered a few simple rules.

1. Basic is better: Give someone only the information they need to know first. Role-playing games are like improv theater with rules and dice. This is my standard, go-to line when telling muggles what the hobby's about.
2. If they're not asking questions, it's better to let them make the choice on their own: People who ask questions are interested. People who want more information will request it. If you're offering information that hasn't been asked for, you're probably sharing a bit too much.
3. Only answer the question they've asked: Examples are not needed. Specific rules from the books are not needed. Telling muggles the rules of the game is not telling them about role-playing games. Telling muggles about your character is not telling them about role-playing. Telling muggles which edition of Dungeons & Dragons you prefer, and why is not telling them about role-playing. If they ask "So, okay, you have a director and some characters, but how do you know what to say?" just answer the question.
4. If you think you can't handle that, let the person behind the counter deal with it: Get his or her attention if you need to. Getting people into this hobby is my job. I've been doing this for a long time, and I'm good at it. My bet is that the person standing behind the counter at your Friendly Local Game Store is probably pretty good at it, too.