Greetings Malstrom,

I’m a long time reader of your articles and they really opened my eyes to so many things regarding business, gaming and much more. For that I thank you. This is my first e-mail to you and it’s not only a thanks card for you to know that you helped me understand more about so many things that are going on.

Let me begin by saying I’m a game developer from Brazil (so pardon my english if you notice a few grammar errors here and there) and I was browsing your older posts and I saw a comment by you about how video games are related to board games and I’d say you hit the bull’s eye on that one. When I began the game design course on a university here the final project of the semester was to build a board game and, behold! Almost all of my fellow colleagues wondered what was the purpose on making a board game. Little did they know that board games are, in fact, one of the most powerful game design labs. I didn’t finish the course, if you’re wondering, for I came into conclusion that there was something wrong with the course after spending 3 semesters there of its total of 8 and changed to Music Composition. (There were some programming classes, a few art classes here and there, but the game design itself was taught by experience, there’s no classes that can fully create a game designer and I think that’s why there was so few classes dedicated to this on the course. That’s when I got out to venture myself out of the academic limitations to create games that were not only theorical… When you have to spend 6 months to make a single flash game using in-depth research and with 4 professors telling you to re-do the design of the game from the scratch because it didn’t fit with obscure theoric values, then there’s something wrong there. It strikes as something like you said about businessmen and showed that “Back to School” videos.)

Well point is: There’s one more kind of game that can be thought as a game design lab. RPG. The good and ol’ D&D, or any other rpg system, is deeply connected with the crafted with game design as I see. The dungeon master is not playing as the “evil dictator who wants to get ride of the players”, the DM could say a meteor falls from the sky and everyone is dead, end of the story, alas, the DM does not.  What the (good) DM does is making sure everyone is having fun, making the challenges at the right level for the players and, most important of all, listening to what the players want. It’s pretty much what you said about oldschool game developers making games for their friends and then they think about selling them. Needles to say that a power-drunk DM (or game designer) is one of the most sad things to see. The story of the rpg does not revolve around the DM’s (game designer) vision, it revolves around what the players (consumers) want.

That is topic one of this e-mail in a nutshell: There’s a relation between being a DM and game designer. I’m both and I’ve questioned a few DM and game designers on that, they also see a relation. I wanted to hear your opinion on that since I saw you talking about similarities on board games and video games.

Board games are very important to the soul that is video games. The first video games were very much from people who loved board games. M.U.L.E. is an example.

There are two things that really stand out with board games. The first is that they are all social. There is no such thing as a single player board game. OK, maybe there is, but that is not why people play board games. This is why I think all this ‘Social Games’ craze is really just games being what they have always done. The Game Industry overshoots in a direction and is ‘corrected’ by being yanked back to the standard. They went too far with cinema (which meant single player type experiences) so the ‘Social Game’ craze is just the vacuum asserting itself. In time, the Game Industry will overshoot the ‘Social Games’ and be yanked back from a growing vacuum. I don’t know what it would be but something Social Games will forget. AI?

The second big thing is that board games rely entirely on imagination. The people gathered around the game are all using their imagination. The dungeon master’s job is to surprise and keep people’s imagination alive. Of course, that is the job of a good game designer too. The game designer’s job isn’t to bathe in HIS imagination but to use his imagination to excite the players’ imaginations.

Let me tell you about one cool game that I beta tested. This board game was made by someone who was struggling to get his board game made and published. Just how there are many wannabe video game makers, wannabe movie makers, wannabe writers, etcetera, this guy wanted to break into the board game business. So you can imagine these guys printing and cutting little pieces of paper, making their own board, and trying very hard to get attention to their experiment. This guy got lucky in that his experiment got seen by someone at Steve Jackson games and they decided to publish his game. It was selling so strongly they made an expansion.

The game is called Revolution.

The game impresses me in that it gets closer to the end goal of what games should do: melt the game away and leave only the psychology of the players. Also, the game has no dice, no random chance. I hate that in board games. The game is simple enough to get into, but there is much going on that keeps you playing.

The components of the game are also very nice. Nice and heavy.

I’ve played more of the game’s expansion and did so with six to eight players. This geek review below is a little scary but he is right on about the game.

Here is the game’s creator’s blog site where he talks about his trials of going from his ‘experiment’ to publishing the game.

Anyone interested in video games should take a look at board games. I recommend going to a convention where they have many board games there and you can just observe or play ones you never have before. Of course, it is going to be a nerd fest so beware.

Topic two is: Did you notice how restrictions are proportional to creativity? Take, for example, the songs of the oldschool games. I grew up during the 16-Bit console war and I can say without a doubt that music back in the day was more memorable than most of the things I hear today. The composers had acess to VERY FEW midi instruments back then, how it comes that today, with so much instruments at their disposal VG composers had such a drop on quality? My guess is that they have so much liberty that they got crazy with it. They gazed at all the possibilities that it holds and started creating epic songs… The problem is that they got so addicted to that amount of possibilities that probably forgot how much impact fewer instruments can deliver. What is good creating a epic song for a game if it doesn’t stick to my mind and I can remember of the song as soon as I remember of the game?

I explained that on song, but of course this can be put into a number of another analogies. Mario himself is the son of a number of restriction, as I think you know: he have a mustache because they coldn’t make a descent mouth back then, he wears a hat because the hair wouldn’t be right, his clothes are designed to contrast with each other… Another example is Samus morph ball, back to Metroid they wanted to make her kneel, but that would mean they need to make animations of he kneeling and I’m not sure who had this insight, but someone then said “Why don’t we turn into a ball?” Hence came the morph ball. Now I wonder… Is the anomaly of the 3D mario just another variation of that restriction removal? I’d risk to say yes, it is. Miyamoto own words seems to show this to, in my opinion: “I’ve made those games before. I don’t want to make them again.” Sounds like even now this world of 3D is captivating him and making the voices of the millions of consummers shouting “GIVE US THE DAMN 2D MARIO ALREADY!” fall on deaf ears.

With Miyamoto, you have to understand that as you get older, you become aware that you have less time in life. He is… in his fifties? He wants to maximize the time he has left.

You know the stereotypical angry old man who yells at you to get off his lawn? The old man may appear bitter or angry. But he isn’t. He has no time left. He isn’t going to put up with anyone’s BS. With the few remaining years you have left on Earth, would you put up with the old BS and frolicking niceties? I think not.

I don’t think Miyamoto or any of the elder developers at Nintendo realize just how precious people hold 2d Mario. They did not grow up with it as, say, the NES generation who is now in their 30s. It is something so precious that you are finding the phenomenon of the older generation plopping their kids in front of 2d Mario to give them a similar childhood experience. 2d Mario defined childhood for many people.

If there was any time I could be a fly in the wall at Nintendo Headquarters, it would be during December 2009 when Mario 5 was beginning to actually sell out and the company was going through their entire Wii stockpile. They knew the game would sell strongly based on the DS incarnation. But I don’t think they realized that Mario 5 would push hardware (and it does push hardware, look at Japan’s sales as that is the only thing propping up the Wii).

2d Mario is bigger than Mario Kart. It is bigger than Zelda. It is bigger than Wii Fit. It is likely even bigger than Wii Sports.

Now, Miyamoto doesn’t have to oversee every 2d Mario game. But I think it is silly not to continue 2d Mario. Iwata asked how they can get younger developers to know things that the older developers know. This is the answer. Put them to work on 2d Mario. Miyamoto can keep doing new things, but Nintendo can still keep making 2d Mario.

Now that the 2d Mario on console eruption has exploded, is there any other old school eruptions waiting to erupt? Well, I consider Wii Sports to be a continuation of the NES/Atari sports games line. Wii Tennis is like a twenty first version of PONG in a way.

Zelda is awaiting to explode. But it is the Zelda arcade action that you saw in games like Link to the Past. This Puzzle-Zelda is nothing at all what Zelda used to be. Of course, such eruption won’t be as big as Mario 5.

I actually wonder if there is an old school Final Fantasy eruption awaiting. Square has made some games they say that is like the old school ones but they are anything but that. I remember someone at Nintendo, maybe it was Miyamoto, saying that young people want to make games they grew up with like 2d Mario and Final Fantasy. Well, with how well 2d Mario went, maybe they should let the kids try out an old school Final Fantasy game. That would be interesting coming from Nintendo.

Could there be a Star Fox explosion? I don’t know on that one. Star Fox was never as popular as Mario or Zelda. However, it would be a safe bet for Nintendo to make. Starfox is a game that both the N64/Gamecube crowd would like as well as the Old Schoolers. Of course, if they make Starfox Wii to be about a love story between Fox and Crystal, then consider the future for that title grim.

The only game I cannot pin the past is Wii Fit. That is truly new. There were games like Track and Meet, but Wii Fit is very different in context. Wii Fit is really doing some game things to help your fitness where, before, it was doing fitness things to play the game.

But about your point about more restrictions leading to better creativity, I agree. And so does Clayton Christenson of disruption fame. He says that too much money is ‘bad money’ and that a company, in order to innovate, must lop off part of itself and then starve it. Force them to act. I think Iwata did something similar to this with the making of Brain Age by assigning three guys only three months to make the game. “They tried to argue, but then they realized they didn’t have time!” Iwata recalled, laughing over the incident.

I think greater restrictions forces these guys to use their imagination more to get around the obstacles. And the more they use the imagination, the more cool things result like Samus turning into a ball.

Perhaps game makers could try to recreate such innovation by forcing such restrictions on themselves? I have heard of some of them doing this.