Nick Bentley over at the Move38 blog recently published a blog post about smart phone integrated
board games, and the general current board game boom we are
experiencing.
The general thrust of the article is
that, A: Part of the board game boom is a reaction against screentime
and B: This screen fatigue is a major reason that smart phone
integrated board games haven't performed very well so far.
I think that maybe there is a different
influence that phones and social media gaming have had on the current
board game boom. Cell phones are ubiquitous now, we carry them
everywhere. Having a pocket computer allows us to do all kinds of
incredibly useful things, central to the use of the phone, we can
speak with anyone anytime, can send messages and mail with incredible
ease. As secondary uses go we have an array of applications that
bring incredible utility, guitar tuners and metronomes, Appalachian
trail maps and guides, sound and light board control interfaces,
medical device monitors, every interest and industry seems to have
benefited from pocket applications. Social media is so perfectly
suited to the device that personal networking has surpassed the
original function of person to person voice communication that phones
were originally intended for. The end result is that we have created
devices that are so useful to us that in a short 20 years it is now
more common in the world to have a cell phone than it is to have
indoor plumbing. We haven't even mentioned mobile gaming yet.
Mobile gaming, gaming on a small screen
in short limited amounts of time pushes mobile games into a few
design spaces. One type are the quick simple control arcade
experiences, endless runners, flappy birds etc. Another big one is
the turn based or time sink style games, things like clash, or
farmville where you can just hop on now and again do your thing and
let the game run in the background. Where there are games there is
the need to compete as well, but the play at your own pace style of
phone games also needs to apply to competitive games as well, simple
designs, turn based, ease of learning and mastery. All of these
design elements already exist in classic board games. So mobile
developers are smart to mine board games for ideas. Words with
friends is the most obvious example, just a simple scrabble clone
that works perfectly on the platform.
So now we have a massive market,
playing games that are essentially digital board games already. It
makes sense that some number of these users are going to be reminded
of the good times they used to have with board games and go looking
for them. Back to the article linked in the move38 blog, they say
that in 2015 the board game market made 250 million dollars, (still
less than half the CCG category!) The overall mobile game sector in
the same year was 34.8 billion dollars. So even a small number of
mobile users looking for board games creates a big swing. It feels
more likely to me that rather than people fleeing screens for face to
face games, that our screens have created more gamer in general. This
is a case of a rising tide raising all ships, only in this case it's
the mobile gaming tide pulling up the board game segment.
Or more likely it is a combination of
both unplugging and new interest.
So if I'm right we should see better
performance of these smart phone integrated games. Well in fact we
are seeing good sales from these games, when they are good games and
the integration makes sense. To look at some of the games listed in
the original article we see some winners and losers. Golem Arcana is
often pointed out as an example of failed digital integration in a
board game. I was at gen con this year and attended a panel by the
main developer of GA, and my impression is that he is very interested
in the potential of hybrid games, and as such they may have pushed
the envelope too far, making the game totally dependent on the app,
rather than having the app be a tool to assist in the game play.
Alchemists on the other hand was one of
the better selling hobby board games of 2015. The phone in that game
is used more as a tool than a game engine. It is used to randomize
and moderate mechanics that would be tedious otherwise. Similarly
Mansion of Madness second ed seems to be doing well, in Mansions the
app manages the bad guys and the map, while the players work together
against it. I think the reason we haven't seen more success in app
integrated board games is that we just haven't seen that many of them
yet. We are just starting to see them and everyone is learning how to
execute them properly. It feels more likely that these games fail
because of poor execution rather than a societal backlash against
screens.
That said, I'm old and curmudgeonly
enough that I'm not especially looking forward to tech enhanced
table top games. I enjoy the pushing of cardboard bits, I like that
you have to understand the mechanics of a game instead of having them
hidden. These app games are coming though so the best we can hope for
is that they are fun. From looking at Move38 they seem to be working on it, but seeing how they are making
proprietary widgets, I can see why they would have a bias against
screens!
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