Being mean to other people is actually really good and cool. Sorry, I meant in board games. I should have been more clear about that. Being mean – significantly and intentionally setting back other players – has developed an unfair reputation as being a universally bad thing in board games.…
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The “Tragedy of the Commons” is a component of economic theory first put forward in the 19th century and eventually named by Garrett Hardin. Investopedia did a better job of writing about it than I can, but to summarize it here, it’s a situation where everyone making the “rational” decision…
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Richard Garfield wrote an article in The Kobold Guide to Game Design advising game designers to play as many different games as they can – not even board games, but video games, traditional games like tag, and even sports, as well as watching things like game shows and analyzing them as…
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The “attention economy” is a sociological and economic term that has gained increasing relevance as users gain near-constant access to media channels via smartphones. Herbert A. Simon summarized the concept as “…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the…
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It’s fairly easy to enjoy a game, even a bad one, if you’re winning really hard. Even in situations where your lead was determined by luck and it’s so unstoppable that you can do literally anything and coast to victory, there is something satisfying about smugly wishing the other players…
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While it’s entirely possible that what makes a game fun is 100% subjective, I’ve noticed that some things are almost universally regarded as “fun” or “good design”, and some are almost always considered “bad” or “unfun”. Having to do math beyond simple arithmetic is in the latter category, for instance;…
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The inspiration for my new game, A Perfectly Normal House!, came on the Monday before Halloween, when I was alerted to a buck-wild 3D real estate walkthrough that was making the rounds across the more online parts of Twitter. What struck me is that it was scary, not because it put…
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The salt air stung my eyes as I awoke, tied to the mast of an anachronistic sailing vessel. Five pirates, with about 7 eyes and 8 legs between them, stared back at me. “Please don’t kill me,” I begged them. “Haven’t I praised Libertalia enough?” “Yarr,” the oldest one said…
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This is not a game analysis. Game analyses cover both the positive and the negative an an effort to create a more holistic view of the game, and I have zero interest in writing anything negative about Sentinels of the Multiverse. This isn’t to say that Sentinels doesn’t have flaws – it has…
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As of now, I have not been lucky enough to experience demand for a game that pushes me to create an expansion. However, I’ve certainly played many games with expansions, and the idea of releasing expansions for successful games is universal enough that I decided to put effort into thinking…