What should we put here?

Fez Flip is about two month in on our tiny journey down the well trodden path of geek culture internet blogging. I think things are going pretty well. It is fun to have a place to write about random topics. The constant pressure to keep on writing hasn't been oppressive. Most of our pageviews probably come from me obsessively refreshing the page, but we just started cross posting and providing other ways to get into the blog. I know that consistently providing interesting post that challenge our readers is the best way to grow the audience. So tonight while staring at the blank page I have decided to make a distinctly boring navel gazing post. Who needs readers? Instead of writing something cool, I'm going to write about all the cool things I could have written.

Something thinky: These posts tend to just be whatever I'm thinking about at the moment. I almost wrote about my love hate relationship with narrative rpgs, and I probably still will. These kinds of posts seem the most self indulgent but they are also the best way to get across a particular take on a subject. I worry that what I have to say isn't that interesting, novel or well put together, but making a blog at all implies that I think I have something to say. As to the point of well put together, that is something I need to work on. Rather than writing the night before I need a post up, I really have to start doing a couple of drafts. Look for improvement on this front.

Reviews: Fezzypug and I were talking about this tonight. Reviews are good content and I think it is something that we want to do. We are working on a format, or at least talking about one. So far I think we are leaning toward shorter overview articles without any kind of numerical score. Another thing we agree on is only reviewing things that we like. If we are talking about something it probably means that we liked it. It would be nice to have some kind of gimmick, but well reasoned opinions are more important than being quirky. I think reviews of everything should be on the table, movies, video games, board games, music, rpgs, food, beer, tv, comics, novels. The other benefit of reviews is that they can be cross posted easily and try to pull some eyeballs our way.

Mining: The mining articles I really like. They allow us to talk about things that arent' necessarily great, in positive way. And it helps show our process when it comes to filing away those game ideas. They are also easy to write because they don't require original content. We are just butchering a movie or whatever and laying out the choice cuts of meat. I probably should have done one of those about the directors cut of Nightbreed.

Adrift: Adrift is our series of rpg games that will never be played. I think I want to expand this into game that are beyond my capability of even making. Why stop at rpgs I don't have time to run? Why not talk about ideas for computer games or board games?

PC posts: There is a ton of Gm-centric material out there. I think because most of the people writing content tend to be Gms rather than players, but also because it is much tougher to create good content for players. Players have considerably less control over your average rpg than a gm, but I think this is a subject worth covering.

Now on to some things that I think I might want to do that require a bit more work.

Monthly adventure: I'm thinking it might be fun to try to put out some kind of larger rpg content once a month. This could be a generic (or specific) scenario. Fezzypug mentioned putting together NPC profiles for games. Those could make good individual blog posts, or be bundled into a monthly pdf. Or both! I have a bunch of background material from my short lived Fort Pitt game that I would love to do something with.

Videos: One thing that we talked about tonight was video reviews for RPGs, it doesn’t seem like there are a whole lot of them out there. RPGS are a bit tougher for video reviews in the sense that they don't have as much to show. Board games have bits, movies have trailers, but an rpg book might just be a few pieces of art. So I was thinking that an rpg review really needs a quick bit of actual play to spice it up. Is it possible to effectively sum up an rpg in 5 minutes of game play? I wouldn't want it to go longer than that. The big drawback I see to this is it works against my other big plan.

Samurai game dev posts: I've been working on this samurai western game for a while now, and it seems mostly in a playable form. What I need to do now is playtest the hell out of it. There are a ton of moving parts to it and I know for sure it needs to be streamlined. What aspects of a game to keep and what to cut can only really be figured out by contact with the player characters. There are plenty of things to write about it for sure. As my friends can attest I will talk about this game to no end. This is really the project I should be dedicating my time to, but procrastination reigns supreme.

So if you are one of our 3 readers, what kinds of posts do you like? What do you want to see more of? What don't you like?

All those tiny glass screens

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.

Smart Board games in the age of screens

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!