Pretty damn good boardgaming article in The New Yorker

www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inqu...of-board-game-design

This is an interview with Amabel Holland of Hollandspiele, but the author lined up some serious interviews with game designers to provide deep background. Maybe the best hobby gaming article I've read to date.

ungated version
archive.is/2023.12.21-115349/https://www...of-board-game-design

"On a podcast hosted by the game reviewer Daniel Thurot, Amabel explained that she could not have made Endurance before her gender transition. “It was kind of living through my own misery and my own miracle that made me think about the odds,” she said. “Because the odds of me figuring out my shit were, like, so long.”

I never try thought I'd see Dan Thurot in the New Yorker.

Good read. I wish I liked Holland's designs better, they are certainly about interesting topics.

Gary Sax wrote: Good read. I wish I liked Holland's designs better, they are certainly about interesting topics.

she explains that, although many of her games are historical, they are not “ ‘balanced’ works of history” but “political art” and “queer rage & shitposting all the way down.”

I am not arguing against political games, or art games, or provocative games, but I do want there to be some fun in the mix, or a compelling experience that I think about for a long time afterwards.

“Saying that all games should be fun should sound as weird to us as saying that all movies should be sad,” the game designer Elizabeth Sampat told me.

This is great, and is going to end up in a conference presentation:

Some people tell Sampat that systems can’t evoke emotional responses. To them, she suggests thinking about what it feels like to sit at a particularly long red light.

“Not everybody enjoys killing monsters in dungeons,” said Isaac Childres, the designer of Gloomhaven, which is about killing monsters in dungeons.

I love the snark.

It is such a surprising thing to see this in the New Yorker. They even mention Ian Bogost. I guess the billions of dollars in the industry really change awareness.

It's part of their business model, but the games I've fiddled around with (not many) don't feel very well developed. She puts out a lot of games a year so that makes sense but...

Yeah, a lot of their stuff feels very auteur-like, in that, yes, they're dealing with different themes than the vast majority out there, but the games themselves aren't really that great. It's like they made their fortune on the back of one of Cole Wehrle's historically pointed designs and then decided that since they were now the "designer's shop", everything had to be that "elevated" in either theme or function. Obviously, a game about kaiju isn't an elevated theme, but all the talk about "games don't need to be fun" is the sound of people really too occupied with their own press releases. Wehrlegig openly engages in things that much of the board gaming world finds repellent (Oath is kingmaking embodied, etc.) but they don't try to put message or design concept over the essential playability of the game. In most cases, designers want people to enjoy their games and come back for more, rather than be turned off by how disgusting it was playing x faction and somehow value the message over the experience.

Jackwraith wrote: but all the talk about "games don't need to be fun" is the sound of people really too occupied with their own press releases.

Complete agreement here. Games absolutely need to be fun, or else they run the risk of simply waste time while following arbitrary procedues. I honestly cannot comprehend the entertainment value of quietly sitting at a table with other people and running numbers in your head instead of talking to them. Swap out numbers for themes or metaphors, and it still sounds like a waste of time that could be better spent on actual fun. Still, the article was interesting.

Table Battles kicks ass. And I have a real soft spot for Escape From Hades as well. Aurelian . . . there's some good choices in there that aren't auteur.

Sagrilarus wrote: Table Battles kicks ass. And I have a real soft spot for Escape From Hades as well. Aurelian . . . there's some good choices in there that aren't auteur.

Fair enough, then. I haven't tried a huge amount of their output, so maybe I've just run into stuff that didn't really appeal to me.

Yeah, definitely, I wouldn't claim to be an expert.

Fun can take many forms.

Friend of mine summed up his feelings of Hollandspiel game as "one trick ponies" that don't have much replayability.