I had an interesting conversation with Ben Lehman the other day. We were talking about Vincent Baker’s Gamie-Games Contest. Ben’s actually already written one game, and Shanghai Poker looks pretty cool. In the course of our conversation, Ben expressed that he would be interested in writing another entry.
Since, in spite of my significant discussion of roleplaying stuff on this blog, I find myself tending to be more strongly drawn to straight-up game design, I asked Ben if he had any interest in a collaboration. Ben’s response was that he finds it difficult to design games collaboratively since it is not clear where the buck stops when conflict opinions arise.
This was an interesting observation, and to me, somewhat startling. Startling because a good bit of my game design has been collaborative. For instance, Pips was a collaborative effort between Will and I. We worked closely together during our extremely educational stint working on Trithofar, and on the various incarnations of Influence, and we pushed the extremely clever Zone of Control up to playtesting before real life (and our lack of solid prototyping skills) tripped us up.
Further, Will and I are currently collaborating on a customizable card game called Conclave and a short-play (three sessions) roleplaying game called Familia. So far it’s been nothing but positive. Together we generate much better ideas, and while the games in question have, perhaps, not met either of our original visions, they’ve been incredibly good games.
Then it dawned on me: Will and I could be relatively unique. The interplay of our ideas, our specific personalities, and our long and close friendship may be skewing my perspective. It is entirely possible that the results of our collaboration are atypical in game design. Consider how few other games you see designed in collaboration…
Yet we see collaboration in other fields, both artistic and systemic. Collaborative novel-writing, while not ubiquitous, is relatively common, especially in certain genres. Engineering and computer programming projects (below a certain scope) are often collaborative (above said scope you tend to have a project director). My limited understanding tells me that movie scripts are often collaboratively written.
So the question to you, gentle reader, is this: is collaborative design an overlooked, and powerful tool for game design, or are the constraints it imposes too limiting for its widespread use (perhaps it takes a rare meeting of personalities or shared vision, or perhaps the disadvantages outweigh the benefits). Have we not seen much collaboration because we do not tend to think of it as an option (tradition), or because it just is not a very good option?
Thomas
Tags: Applied
Having a good co-collaborator is worth its weight in gold. I don’t think I’ve found one yet among the indie kids I’ve been hanging with. After attempting to work together a few times, I think I found that Shreyas and I work better bouncing ideas off each other than trying to actually work together. And Ben and I think too differently on a lot of crucial points to be an effective team. Eero and I might be able to do a game together, but we’ve never seriously tried. I’d love to do a game with Annie or Mo or Brand or Andy K, but who knows if any of those team-ups would work. Just because people are really awesome doesn’t mean an effective working relationship is possible.
For what it’s worth, my negative reaction to collaboration is totally personal. I had two very negative experiences with it, which basically led me to swear that I was never going to make a creative product based on someone else’s work again.
It may be great for other people.
yrs–
–Ben