Lessons from Iron Chef

[Valamir]

Eero asked such a great question at the end of the Son of Iron Chef thread that I took the liberty of transposing it over here where it won't get lost amongst all the design and smack talk.

 
If there's something I've taken home from this competition design-wise, it's the strength of system color. I've tended towards abstraction in design myself and saved the color practically last, to be applied when detailing the finished product (or not applied at all, as the case is with these hurried competition entries). There is a number of games here that take the opposite route with extremely good results. It's almost comical how overdeveloped systems my games have compared to virtually any game in the competition, which all focuse and limit play in sensible ways. Compare to my designs which all three have customable skill systems for essentially scenario-based games. How dumb can I be, when I realized the fact about three days after finishing the last game? There's a clear blind spot for me.

Anyway, that's that's only one thing I learned from the competition. It's a great way to get to compare your thinking to that of some great designers. Did any of you others learn of any fundaments here?

Hopefully our Iron Competitors will chime in with equally fine nuggets of hard won wisdom.

[Jonathan Walton]

I think my lesson, finally beaten into my head after 3 of these competitions, is that I shouldn't be so... impulsive, I guess, with my designs.  Since there's a time limit, I usually just go with the first concept that pops into my head, running with it and developing it along the way.  This is true of most of my designs actually, and may be the reason I have so many different types of projects planned, instead of a few that integrate different concepts together.

The Pale Continent: Occidental Adventures, from the first Iron Game Chef, was a great concept that just never got worked out in practice.  The game mechanics were gimicky, instead of solid and playable.  Likewise, the early version of Argonauts from Iron Chef II was based on a cute gimick.  I feel like most of my designs are either 1) based on some cute flavor-of-the-month idea, which I just came up with, or 2) trying to prove something.  They're games with chips on their shoulders.

For instance, Seadog Tuxedo is both at the same time.  First of all, there's the cute icecube mechanic, which was the first thing I thought of when considering how to make a game about icebergs (combining the ice and island elements).  Secondly, it intends to prove something about resolution mechanics and the Lumply Principle, which is, basically, that you just need some system that allows players to challenge or cause difficulties in the narration of other players, and that will run the game by itself.   It's part of the whole "minimalism" kick I'm on, also evident in all my designs from Humble Mythologies to Nine Suns Will Fall (a.k.a. the Shang Dynasty game).  Finally, like all my games, it's a Color-slut.  Everything is about Color.  Color, Color, Color!  Breathe deep and taste the Color!

So, while the games that I admire more and really want to play are the stuff Shreyas, Walt, John, Zak and the like turn out (Color-based, mechanically-solid, elegant games with heavily interconnected systems), mine tend to excercises in "No Myth design," if you follow the metaphor, just starting with something and going with it.  This means that they often need to be heavily revised and picked apart before they're completely servicable.  Lots and lots of revisions, instead of just building a solid foundation in the first place.

So, I guess that's what I've learned: take your time.  Starting out with something solid is much better than building yourself into a corner.

[quozl]

They're games with chips on their shoulders.

I think that's interesting and also appropriate to these types of events.  I like to see experimental avant-garde designs and these sort of events seem to be the only place we see them anymore.

So please do keep submitting games with chips on their shoulders.  My own submission has a rather large chip on its shoulder about the nature of RPGs and how they can be played.  I think putting it in writing and "publishing" it in this event can only help myself and perhaps other people's designs.

[hanschristianandersen]

I'll second Jonathan's "Color-slut" thang.

My pattern, in half-a-dozen proto-games in my notebooks, seems to be to first isolate the color or genre that I want to produce, then come up with a list of five or six things that I would need the system to cover, then come up with a simple mechanic that expresses something common to the setting, and then shoehorn the five-or-six-things into that mechanic.

You can see that in the Snow Day! posts - The teaser blurb talks about Snow Forts, Ice Monsters, Snowball Fights, Neighborhood Kids, and Hot Cocoa.

On a whim, I decided to use d20's because I have a sparkly d20 in my collection, and it's sort of snowball-like.  The "Age" mechanic was a flash of inspiration borne from procrastination at work;  Just roll under or over your age for Reality or Fantasy checks.  With the added bonus that a Fantasy/Reality opposition in a snowy landscape is straight out of Calvin & Hobbes.

Then it was just a matter of going down the List and writing up rules for each thing.  Where a new thing couldn't be adequately covered by the Age system, the overriding goal for new sub-mechanics was that they be able to play nicely with the uber-mechanic.  Hence Hot Cocoa and Slush Points.

---

And with that, I'll drop out of Iron Game Chef Stance (it's like Author Stance, but more pompous) and tell you my own personal Iron Game Chef Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique:

Read Paul Czege's My Life With Master.  I've never played it; I'm hoping to remedy that soon.  Just reading it, though... wow.

I've read and GM'd both Inspectres and Wushu, both of which made me go "Huh, I wonder if I could do something as good as this".  Then I read MLWM, which made my jaw drop and made me think "If I can make a game that's one tenth as wonderful as this, it'll be worth the time and effort."  It's... so... wow.

So, go get it, and read it, and be inspired.  (Thanks, Paul!)

[Shreyas Sampat]

In my last IGC concept, I didn't have any mechanical idea whatsoever for my game. Boom, no game.

This time around, I had a mechanical idea - I wanted to make a slightly opaque Gamist number game - and I had Color to wrap around it - hey, Japan has islands, and it's cold in Korea, and iaijutsu duels...

So then the game just sort of snowballed from there - as soon as hanschristianandersen nudged me to start using Japanese-language terms, I just couldn't stop writing. Even now, I'm working on the "for Eero" version of the game, where there are more points of contact between the two character groups. Honestly it's not a great entry, in my opinion, because it only barely grazes the edge of fantasy, and it uses the ingredients at several removes - on Iron Chef, does it count of you use wine when the theme ingredient was grapes? But I'm very proud of it as a game.

So what I'm saying is that IGC has taught me holistic design - a game is, essentially, all of its parts, and just as importantly, its mettle will be proven in the way that they interrelate.

[talysman]

I had been thinking, myself, about writing something up about the lessons of Iron Game Chef. it seems to me that writing games that please Chaiman Holmes isn't too different from writing games to please a larger audience: in a sense, the RPG market *is* an Iron Game Chef competition, where the gaming public has chosen what generic game type they want to see and which 3-4 concepts they'd like worked into it.

the only difference is: we don't know what concepts and game type the public is looking for; we just know what has been selected in the past, and that is no longer valid.

but there are other lessons to be learned from pleasing Chairman Holmes that I think apply to pleasing this mysterious gaming public. for one, note that setting is not really the clencher in these contests. this shouldn't be a surprise, since there's even a standard rant about cool ideas. and yet, we always get too carried away in describing the coolness of our setting, without remembering that this is a *game design* competition, not a *setting design* competition. it's the reason why my Iron Game Chef Simulationist entry Empedocles: Daemons of Strife and Love didn't make it: too much reliance on the cool idea of reincarnating greek philosophers and not enough translation of that setting into actual rules that tend to produce the desired feel.

that's what you have to focus on: making rules that will generate setting, rather than rules you can use in a cool setting. I think that's why my first Iron Game Chef design made it: I came up with a rule that produced an interesting setting. motif matching encourages a very dreamlike setting by virtue of its mechanics, instead of by exhortations in the flavor-text. contrast this to my most recent entry: IceRunner's weak point is that there's too much setting description that should have been converted to rules that produced the desired setting as a consequence.

now, while writing this, I checked the thread and notice that other chefs are mentioning more or less the same thing, but in different words. the "color slut" approach was something that occurred to me, too; I think it was Jared that warned us never to have more that 2 or 3 weird rule twists/gimmicks in a game. less is more. now, I haven't read all of Tuxedo Penguin, but I think Jonathon is being a little too hard on himself, because it actually seemed to be not too bad in terms of the "less is more" principle, although it is definitely very focused on its color and thus loses some flexibility. my main worry about the game was that it only allows nonalcoholic beverages for the underage. also, I'm not sure if Eat Me Foods still makes Rat Bastard Root Beer.

but back to the lessons learned. focus more on mechanics and less on setting, as I said. try not to design the game while writing the game might be another good lesson, because that's how inconsistencies creep in (I think I may have changed the way rerolls are handled somewhere in the middle of IceRunner; I definitely came up with the Curse Dice rule for hallowed ground after I'd already posted the list of places that invoke Curse Dice.) Situation is the most important element; go with a simple mechanic to begin with, then figure out how to modify it to produce the kinds of Situations you want in the game. since Situation arises from Character in Setting, those two are also important, but not as much. instead of a game with cool characters, you need characters that will get in cool situations.

there's bound to be other things I'll think of later.

[Bill_White]

So what I'm saying is that IGC has taught me holistic design - a game is, essentially, all of its parts, and just as importantly, its mettle will be proven in the way that they interrelate.

I think this articulates the lesson I took away from IGC as well.  In the second version of Ganakagok, the Stores you receive for hunting are essential to being able to do anything else, so instead of being an added-on bookkeeping kind of mechanic, the rules for Stores become an important motivator for in-game activity (at least in my head).

So the principle that emerges for me is tighten, tighten, tighten.  That is, strive for fewer mechanics more tightly integrated with one another.

One of the other things that I was trying to explore with Ganakagok was the extent to which maintaining the GM's privileged position with respect to the ground truth of a game-world (What  is going to happen when the Sun rises?) can yet result in a strongly character-centered game.  I don't know that I communicated that effectively in the rules write-up, but I envisioned a game where players would strive to have their characters make sense of the changes in the game-world and set upon some grand plan to deal with those changes.  That grand plan might be to build a whalebone ark to carry the People to a new world, lead the people to the secret garden of the Ancient Ones deep within, or fight back the Sun on behalf of the Stars--but it would be driven by players' choices as they faced changes imposed by the GM's timeline of the approaching dawn.

So another lesson that I'm still trying to fully articulate has to do with principles for creating rules that enable meaningful player choice.  The phrase "connecting the characters to the setting" springs to mind, and I think you see that in some of the designs that I like the best in the contest:  Polaris's knights burning out as they move from innocence to experience, Snow from Korea's love-struck samurai, and even Seadog Tuxedo's cartoon characters (who are made 'real' to me by the inclusion of the token inverted-loyalty characters:  okay, I could play a penguin that was in love with a pirate girl).  The way that Icerunner has characters indicate both how they fit in the demi-monde and the "normal world" they're hiding from/fighting against is a great example of the sort of thing I mean.

Bill

[John Kim]

 There is a number of games here that take the opposite route with extremely good results. It's almost comical how overdeveloped systems my games have compared to virtually any game in the competition, which all focuse and limit play in sensible ways.  

OK, I haven't followed or taken part in the Iron Game Chef threads, so pardon any ignorance.  I have a question.  How are we defining "extremely good results"?  i.e. When we talk about lessons learned, is that based on how the games look at the end of the contest, on subsequent playtesting by other groups, or what?

[Eero Tuovinen]

OK, I haven't followed or taken part in the Iron Game Chef threads, so pardon any ignorance.  I have a question.  How are we defining "extremely good results"?  i.e. When we talk about lessons learned, is that based on how the games look at the end of the contest, on subsequent playtesting by other groups, or what?

The definition is based on the "do I want to play this game" factor, which is about the only thing we can at this stage talk about. I for one fully intend to play these things come summer if I find enough people who can take on to these sublime, rarified heights ;) Right now we, and the Chairman himself, can only speak about how the games look to us. Maybe we will have different lessons half a year from now.

The lessons are subjective, too. I found the competition a strong experience because I got to see some game writing in real time and saw how other people took to the subject matter at hand. Every success humbled me by sheer strength of vision. In some sense I was battling against some thirty other designers, and came out better than when going in.

If you mean to comment on my specific sentense there, let's say that I agree with you. Time will indeed give more weight to certain other things at the expence of color and elegance. I take games like Ganakagok, Ice Runners and my own games as good examples of games that are on par with the stars of the show as games (some more than others), but fail in the short term in providing the color and simplicity to really burn in the mind. All of these have potential to be great games, but some games take more time than others and we had only a week here. Some writers have good technique for fast writing, designing from color outwards or taking the time with deliberation for really selling the game. This is another of the things I learned; next time I'll try to emulate the color approach and really draw the readers to commend my game.

So the extremely good results are in pure draw. Will the reader want to play this? It's as important an aspect of games as anything, and a completely different competition would be needed to judge other things.

Let me take Myrskyn Aika from the Finnish author Mike Pohjola as an example, to illustrate how important factor this is overall. MA is a published game that bombed partly because it didn't speak with a strong voice. Nobody cared  to play it and find out how great a game it was, as the author said. It was like my IGC games in that; no draw, and thus nothing at all, regardless of how good concepts there might be. Ron always says how actual play is the important thing, but to get there the game has to sell itself.

When saying that certain games got extremely good results by concentrating on color and light playability I mean that the results are games that communicate their meaning and possibilities strongly.

[Emily Care]

Just FYI, for others who may not have read the Son of IGC thread: there will be an index thread forthcoming, allowing easy access to all the games.

Yrs,
Emily Care

[Bob McNamee]

A little note to the designers.

I'm going to run an IRC playtest of at least one of these games in May with the indie-netgamers. No idea which one at this stage. (I may go for one of the 'winners' or I may go for one that I feel confident runnning over IRC)

Its quite possible that others in the indie-netgamers will also run a playtest of some of these games as well. Several others thought it was a good idea...

I'm pulling for "May is Iron Game Chef month", perhaps for our monday night pickup games...

I'll keep ya'll posted.

[Dav]

Reading the submissions for many of the Iron Game Chef I was happily pleased that Game Design, as it stands at the Forge, is not just schlock and crap, it is also Good Stuff.

For a while, I was lamenting the death of innovation on a large scale.  I had especially felt that the Forge was becoming a bit too much theorizing without the output.  I'm happy to see people can put-up rather than shut-up.  A theory only has benefit when it can be applied... otherwise it's just blowing wind.

Now then, make more... and dammit!

Dav

[Jonathan Walton]

A theory only has benefit when it can be applied... otherwise it's just blowing wind.

Personally, I think that's a load of crap, but I don't want to derail the thread to respond to it fully, at least not here.  But to quote Chris' Ritual Discourse in RPGs (which I just wrote an article on)...

...the ideological weapon of "practicality" often comes into play in RPG discourse: because a more purely analytic model eschews normative claims in the form of practical suggestions for game design or ritual construction, the RPG theorist codes such classification as impractical, thus valueless.  This is the equivilent to a Catholic liturgist saying of an academic theorist's analysis that is is irrelevant because it does not help formulate new dimensions in Mass.

There's definitely something to be said for understanding roleplaying better, even if you're not putting that understanding into practice immediately.  In fact, one thing I've learned from Iron Chef is that I've learned a ton of stuff on the Forge.  Looking at my designs from years ago vs. today, there's a world of difference, and most of it is thanks to the discussions I've participated in here.  Also, not all theory effects design directly.  Often it affects actual play, which is, to many people, more important than game design.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Also, not all theory effects design directly.  Often it affects actual play, which is, to many people, more important than game design.

Not to derail the thread further, but this also speaks to Dav's comment on practicality.

[talysman]

Just FYI, for others who may not have read the Son of IGC thread: there will be an index thread forthcoming, allowing easy access to all the games.

a seperate thread? I though Ron nixed that idea...

another lesson learned -- a cumulative lesson, really -- is radical brainstorming is good. how many of us have tried to come up with new ideas for games and can't seem to get anywhere? but as soon as someone *else* says "make a game based on these 3-4 random ideas", we get challenged in our conceptions of what a game is supposed to be and wind up brainstorming some pretty exotic ideas.

if I had the energy and gumption, I'd use some kind of randomizer at the beginning of every month to select 5 random concepts,  pick 3 of those and create a game out of them. a game a month, for a year. it would be a good personal challenge, and I am sure I would learn a lot.