Why Isn't Anyone Playing Your Sophomore Milestone Game? - the full-text abduction of paul czege

Why Isn't Anyone Playing Your Sophomore Milestone Game? -- 03/31/2008

In working on Acts of Evil lately I've found myself thinking a lot about sophomore milestone games. And by "sophomore milestone" I mean the second game a designer produces as a project of the same or larger scale as the effort behind his or her freshman signature game. So Bacchanal, for instance, the second game I put out in print, doesn't satisfy the "same or larger scale" project requirement. And Soul of Man, which received a lot of development and playtesting, was never "produced," because I shelved the project. My sophomore milestone game will be Acts of Evil.

Ben Lehman blogged recently that Bliss Stage is selling slower than Polaris did after release. I can see that it's getting less actual play. I see Nine Worlds not getting much actual play. I see Burning Empires getting less actual play than Burning Wheel. Etc.

We playtested a supers game that Scott Knipe was working on last year. It had some structural similarities to With Great Power, except Scott had pared back on the enrichment scenes in favor of more screen time for the villains. And the result was a less fun game for the players.

My feedback to him was that the best indie RPGs are the ones created to be games the designer wants to play. And it was clear he was creating a game he wanted to run. This motive behind a game design project (game-I-want-to-play vs. game-I-want-to-run), I'm thinking, is fundamental to the game that gets produced, and I think it warrants some reflection on the part of the designer.

I think the key social challenge faced by a game that wants to be played is, and has been as long as I've been a gamer: How do you hook the player? The best, most engaging blogs are the ones where the writer manages to be consistently personal and honest, not a manufactured identity. But write your game-I-want-to-run rules text honestly and who do you hook? Answer: a prospective GM.

And then...he or she tries to create some player enthusiasm.

I've heard the lower incidence of actual play for more recent games attributed to an increasing crowding of games for the attention of indie gamers. Back in the 2001-2003 timeframe, indie game designers were so frustrated about unsatisfying play experiences in the 90s, and excited about new possibilities, that what we designed were games we wanted to play. But...having first written the games we want to play, and high then on the endorphins flooding our creativity, do we go on (without thinking about it) to write the games we want to run? Games that carry a fundamental challenge to actual play?

Posted by Paul Czege at 16:39 | Comments (6)

Defined tags for this entry: design, rpg

Comments

Huh. I like your hypothesis. And yet, I have some data that's contrary to it's underlying data.

Let's not conflate sales and play. Looking at my e-mail, I think that Bliss Stage actually gets considerably more play than Polaris per unit sold. Of course, there's no real way to measure how much a game is played, I can only see the records of it in forum posts, blogs, my e-mail, and sometimes via watching a game spread locally on IPR (if I sell a copy of Polaris to Sometown, and then three months later I sell two copies in Sometown, I infer that some successful play has occured.)

What does seem to be happening is that it is getting played, largely, outside of the circles I run in online. Which, given that I have a totally different target audience than Polaris, is a reasonable thing. I'm as likely to see people talking about a playing Bliss Stage on a fanfic community or on Livejournal as I am on the Forge.

So in terms of play, response, and so on I'm happy with the game.

My failure to have good sales I think is a result of not pandering to the dis-satisfied gamer (something all the best selling games do, in spades) and a complete and total failure of marketing the game, on several levels (failing to market well to my pre-existing audience, failing to market well to the target audience, failing to differentiate my release plan from an ashcan system, etc.)

Which I hope to write about soon.

But is Bliss Stage the game I want to GM, rather than wanting to play it? I'm not sure. I have to ponder that one, looking at a lot of my experiences with the game. If it is the game I want to GM, I have some very odd preferences for GMing.

yrs--
--Ben

#1 Ben Lehman (Homepage) on 2008-03-31 20:33 (Reply)

I experienced the phenomenon with Passages (assuming Dawning Star was my "first game"). I did a thread on it at S-G ("Why is no one talking about Passages?") and got a lot of responses. In the final analysis, I think there are two fundamental issues. First was a failure of marketing similar to what Ben mentioned. The second was a critical failure in the design methodology that left the game in a very difficult gray area between d20 and indie fare.

Interesting post, Paul.

#2 Justin D. Jacobson (Homepage) on 2008-04-01 00:55 (Reply)

Yup, same here. Sons of Liberty is selling really slowly compared to Full Light, Full Steam. Despite the fact that SoL is oodles easier to run than FLFS, I'm not hearing any AP reports.

However, Sons is much more a game-I-want-to-play, and FLFS is much more a game-I-want-to-run, so I dunno how my data stacks up to your hypothesis.

#3 Josh Roby (Homepage) on 2008-04-01 02:33 (Reply)

Hey Paul,

It's a challenging game to play. Do you want to run it? Is that what you're questioning?

I think you may have an audience waiting for the finished product. I know I get several hits a month on my site of people searching for Acts of Evil. Besides say Psi Run that doesn't happen for the other folks I've interviewed. Typically they are searched for by name, which happens for you too also.

#4 Clyde L. Rhoer (Homepage) on 2008-04-04 03:10 (Reply)

Actually, in my case, this isn't true.

Not counting MNPR:RPG (which, like your Bacchanal, is not of the same size/scope as DEAD INSIDE), TRUTH & JUSTICE has been much, much more successful than DI, in terms of both sales and play.

Maybe it's a feature of my doing a bit of freelance writing in the industry before publishing DI, but I've always tried to design games that I'd want to both play and run.

But in this, as in so many others, I think I'm an outlier. I think your theory here is worthy of more thought.

CU

#5 Chad Underkoffler (Homepage) on 2008-04-04 09:22 (Reply)

Hrm. I consider Annalise my sophomore game, and it's GM-less. I always get to play! Two birds with one stone?

It's not ready for the world yet though, so I have no idea how sales are gonna work out. I anticipate that it will sell better than carry, mainly because it has a much wider target audience. But, who knows!

#6 Nathan Paoletta (Homepage) on 2008-04-07 03:40 (Reply)

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What I'm Hearing

"The devil doesn't need an advocate. The brave need supporters, not critics."

Seth Godin

What I'm Saying

"My own personally significant take-away from the Dancey interview was the realization that the frustrations of indie publishers at the traditional hobby games publishers are as mis-applied as the frustrations of traditional hobby games industry notables at indie publishers. We aren't the market disruption that's hurting them, and they and their customers aren't a stony ignorance that thwarts us. The community of gamers has fragmented under the "good enough" distractions of video games and other entertainments. We are designing for the "challenge and create" community that's left incompletely satisfied by these other entertainments. And because, as Dancey says, the partake and reinforce gamers have always been the decider of what games get played, nothing we design warrants the approbation of the traditional hobby games publisher, because nothing we design can bring partake and reinforce gamers back from their other entertainments. So the traditional hobby games publishers are left to their fight for the attention of the shrinking partake and reinforce community. And our adherents can only get a game to happen with non-gamers or others also in the smaller challenge and create community."

Paul Czege