So we as a design community have a problem, which I think has been sort of flailingly addressed on Story Games, but it is a real problem and I think it merits serious thought.  It's a problem with our design community, it's methods, and most particularly the social structures surrounding it, so I think it should be discussed here, on the Forge, because the "us" I'm talking about is the participants on this site, which I include myself as a member of.

Here's the problem: People are publishing half-baked and unfinished games.  These games are thus confusing and frustrating to play.

(Note: I don't want to talk about what role, if any, other "diaspora" sites like GameCraft, knife-fight, or Story Games have in this problem.  I want to talk about the culture here, at the Forge.)

Also, just to let you know, I have no proposed solutions for these problems.  I don't even know where to begin to resolve them.

I think that the primary reason for this problem is a result of unplaytested games, games only playtested in awkward circumstances (one-shots, on-line play, etc.), and most especially games hurried out to get them ready for GenCon.

The first two are deeply related, and I think may be inextricably tied to the internet nature of the forum.  The internet is attractive to "lonely gamers" who would like to play, but can't because they don't have a play group.  I think we've seen a lot of games come and go here which are largely designed because the designer is bored and wants to be playing, and unplaytested or playtested poorly because the designer has no group to playtest it with.

I don't even know where to start with these two.

Here's the third one: The rush to get a game out at GenCon.  I think that this is a lot more thorny problem than those of us who have already published games and sold them at GenCon think it is.

Being a designer, here, has a lot of social status.  It's a complicated social status, compounded by when you joined the Forge, who else likes your game, how your sales are, if you're doing anything that's seen as innovative, etc.  But it's definitely there, and designers have a privileged role (their own forums, for example.)

I don't think that this is a bad thing!  Social reward for good behavior is an awesome thing, it's what makes communities (particularly creative communities) go, and that's all good.

I think that there are three things that distinguish insider and outsider social status at the Forge.
1) Have you published a game?
2) Have you met in person with a bunch of other high status people and gotten to know them?
3) Is your game, if you have one, financially or play-wise successful?

I think it's pretty obvious that all three of these things push people to having a game to sell at GenCon, our largest social event as well as a really good opportunity to kick-start your sales and actual play, as well as a chance to get your other games playtested and polished.

See, the thing is, it's all well and good for me or someone else who's already got a known, published game to go like "don't rush this game out the door for GenCon, sit back and polish it!  I mean, look at me!  I've spent three years getting Bliss Stage ready."  But that's beside the point.  I don't have a lot to gain from that: I already have the social status of being a designer.  To someone who doesn't, rushing a game out is a great idea, because the quality of your game is not nearly as important as the status of being a designer.

So how do we address this problem?  We're going to have to take a really hard look at how we apportion social status in the community, decide how maybe we ought to apportion it, and make an effort to try to re-align our thinking into a new social hierarchy.  We'll need to take a look at what it means to have joined the Forge when, what it means to be a designer, what it means to have a successful game, and what effects that has on our behavior and social interactions.

There are some positive steps: The Nerdlies, Go Play directionals, JiffyCons and Forge Midwest provide us with a new, intimate, social arena, where non-designers and others can pick up respect and social status.  The Ashcan Front could be *huge* in this respect but I worried that its reputation amongst those designers it's trying to reach has been undercut by its presentation.  But I think that we need to also think hard about how we interact here, on the Forge, and who we listen to and why.  That's hard!  Are we willing to do it?

yrs--
--Ben

All good points, Ben.  The push to finish something by a convention date is not just because of prestige, but also wanting to have the books there to actually hand to people.  I really wanted to have our game done by Gamestorm, our local convention, so I could have a stack of books to sell instead of just handing out little cards with our web site on it.  I didn't make it because a) feedback from our game at Go Play PDX necessitated some tweaks and tinkering, and b) it took one more proof than I anticipated to get the printed versions just right and iron out last-minute issues.  But I'm glad that we decided to miss having it at the convention rather than having an inferior product. That said, I can say for certain that we lost a couple of sales because of it.

Now, I personally know people who would love to develop their games further but who have the hardest time finding playtesters. The "lonely gamer" type you mention might apply. Already, on Story Games, people are trying to come up with a playtest/critique exchange network, and that's a good first step. I've also gauged the interest in the yahoo indie PDX group about doing more playtesting, and plan to alternate between playing published games and playtesting something for someone who can't get a group together on their own.

Someone said that local activity might be better than internet activity for playtesting, but you need not only to find people you can run the game for, you also need to find a group separate from you and your established friends who can test the game on their own using only the draft you have.  For example, when we playtested Sign In Stranger (at Go Play PDX II), Jake had played it before, and that colored our interpretation of the rules a little. It's best to have a completely separate, uninfluenced group, but how do you find that?

Maybe the ashcan front is a good idea in that regard. Though again, that's much easier for the established people to do. I'd buy a Paul Czege ashcan copy sight unseen. Would I buy one from someone who hasn't published a game before that I have and enjoy? It'd be a much harder sell.

Also, yes, we people who benefited from the Forge in our early days are still not giving back enough. I'm trying to get back to that, now that my own project is not consuming all of my time anymore.

This actually was a big topic at Forge Midwest.

I think you hit on the same fundamental source of the problem we did:  Social Reinforcement.

There's alot of ego stroking that goes on in the blogosphere surrounding new game designs.  I think there's less of that at the Forge because social posting is so strongly discouraged here.  But in sites where social posting is the norm you get a lot of "you're teh awesome", and "I cant wait to get this game" kind of stuff piling up.

Over lunch on Sunday we actually compared the indie game design culture to indie cookbook culture.  Both are books designed to be used as "how to" manuals, and both get alot of buzz generation from the internet.  On one of the cook book forums its become common practice for people to respond to almost anything with "hearts, hearts, heart, cupcakes, cupcakes, cupcakes".  We looked at each other and said..."yeah, there's lots of 'hearts and cupcakes' that go on on indie RPG forums".

So I think its more than just the cred of designers hanging out with other designers.  I think its also the near continuous verbal bombardment that "your game is awesome" that makes it very difficult for a designer to realize that...no...their game is, in fact, very much NOT awesome...yet.

When you combine the pressure to release at GenCon with people declaring you and your game as awesome, its no wonder that folks will conclude that the game is ready for prime time.  This will lead to taking various short cuts...like cutting down on outside playtests...or ignoring critical feedback from your outside playtesters.  I mean if you have 4 guys telling you your game is broken and needs some serious fixing, and you have a dozen people on line telling you your game is "teh awesome"...and addressing the playtest critique means you miss GenCon this year...who are you going to listen to? 

Of course the right answer is you listen to the friggin' playtesters not the rah rah chorus.  What a surprise then when the decision to release anyway is made that months later all of the forum posts and errata surround the exact same issues that those playtesters brought up that got ignored.

Changing the culture I think a couple of key changes.

1) we need a culture of open and honest criticism.  Even people who are giving critical feedback tend to try to soften it so as not to appear rude.  This is not doing the designer any favors.  If you're a designer you WANT your outside playtesters to be rude...in the sense that its not their job to spare your feelings.  Its their job to help you fix your game.  Sugar coating it doesn't do anyone any good.  Direct, honest, unsoftened criticism.  We need to give it to each other and we need to be prepared to accept it from each other.  This will be a splash of cold water in the face of people who've grown accustomed to basking in the warm glo of fan praise.  But its critical.  Fan praise comes AFTER you release a kick ass game...not before.

This criticism should be open and in public.  Not only does discussion (even critical) about a game serve to generate buzz, but part of building the culture is letting other people see what true feedback means.  "yeah, we played, and it was fun" is not feedback.

2) we need to reward the later stages of design as thoroughly as we reward the early stages.  We've all seen the various game design endeavors.  From the venerable Game Chef, to the Ronnies, to a variety of variations on Story Games; these contests almost invariably reward the "big initial concept".  Who can come up with the best hook in a short period of time presented in reasonably passable fashion.  These game contests are FABULOUS at getting games from "idea in my brain" to "Alpha Test Ready".  Unfortuneatly, that's where the culture ends.  The games languish in Alpha status, or with some half hearted internal playtesting get modified into a playable Beta.  Playable Beta's are Good Things...EXCEPT when they are polished up real nice and sold as a finished product.  One of the crucial advantages we have as indie designers is we have no external forces forcing us to publish.  We have the luxury of NOT publishing until the game is as perfect as we can humanly make it.

Ashcan Front is EXACTLY the sort of thing that the indie design culture should be eagerly embracing.  When I discovered this weekend that exactly NOBODY had committed to it other than Matt and Paul, I was shocked and horrified.  It really says something about the cultural that we've allowed to develop around game design...and not something good.  From what I hear there are several game designers who declined Ashcan Front because they're planning to be at the Forge booth GenCon 2007.

I'M going to be at the Forge booth GenCon 2007.

Its looking increasingly likely that once again Robots & Rapiers will NOT be there.  There's just too much left to finalize...possible but not probable.  And I'm TOTALLY ok with that. 

I've had Robots in design for over 4 years.  Its gone through 3 seperate rounds of killer "this isn't working yet" playtesting.  I COULD have released it a long time ago as an 80% finished design and gotten the cool buzz of bringing out new product.  I didn't.  Because it wasn't freaking ready.

Last year there were several Beta Level games being sold at the booth and I didn't say anything.  I bought into the "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" paradigm...which means I actually helped contribute to the problem.

This year, if you're bringing a game to the Forge booth...it had better be your "A-game".  It had better be as perfect as you are humanly capable of making it. Cuz if it isn't you're going to hear about it, hurt feelings or not.  Screw hurt feelings...every indie game designer's reputation is at stake every time someone publishes a game that isn't ready for prime time. 

If you're considering being at the Forge booth this year...and you aren't RIGHT NOW THIS VERY SECOND certain you're going to have your "A-game" ready by then, then you had better get your ass signed up at the Ashcan Front.  Cuz, if you're betting on getting the final bugs worked out between now and then...you aren't ready.

Before delving into this in detail, Ben: which games are you thinking of, here? There might be a problem with half-baked games being published, but the only one during the last year that particularly springs to mind is Cutthroat, and that's something of a special case where I can easily see that it has little to do with the community, and lots with the extremely ambitious publishing plan Troy is trying out. Another potential one is Shock:, now that I think of it, but I consider that more of a spot of sloppy editing than bad design; nothing that couldn't have been fixed by a good read-through, anyway. (There might well be others, I know well that I can't anymore be familiar with every indie game coming out of the Forge-related circles, especially as many of these folks don't even advertise here anymore.)

That aside, I agree with your analysis of the factors that might motivate one in seeking higher social status. I know that I used to have a huge self-esteem deficiency towards other people here when they published games and I spent my time in community building and translation work. You yourself have, among others, told me to not worry about it, though, so I'm not. I'm also sceptical about full-bore social engineering doing anything to these tribal value evaluations (which seems to be what you're proposing here); people are as people do, and any pressure to publish is definitely only in the heads of individuals, it's not like Ron has told anybody to publish or get off the can.

As for concrete solutions, I'd say that the problem of bad games is self-correcting in the market-place, nobody should have a particular motivation for publishing bad games. If there were a reason to catch the rotten apples during the design phase, I guess that reason would be to protect the designer from making an ass of himself - and there you're asking quite a bit, you're asking a stranger to provide a safety net for a designer and risk his ire. That is certainly possible - I know that I myself will tell anybody frankly whether I think their game is publishable - but it's not a simple and value-neutral proposition you would demand from the community. I wouldn't be forced into reading and evaluating any and all games for this purpose, for instance.

So... I guess my solution amounts to "be sure to tell a guy if he's publishing a bad game and doesn't know it". That doesn't help if you never find out about the game before it's published, but then the problem is definitely in the other end, and it's nothing we can do anything about.

--

I agree with Ralph about the social reinforcement thing, by the way; I follow the diaspora only just enough to keep aware of where the discussions are happening each year, but participating is something I'd just find arduous with all the socializing going on. Much nicer here, where it's all business, even if that means less buzz.

Actually, reading Ralph's cross-post through... I agree with him about most of the other stuff as well. Although I am a bit sceptical about the urgent necessity of protecting the "Forge brand" and the good name of indie gaming from crappy games. Those are happening all the time anyway all over the internet-land, as a short stroll through any pdf store can attest. If you want to disassociate from the crappy games, it might be easier to do that in the sales step; for example, I only sell & translate quality indie games in Finland (or if I've made the mistake and bought a game I don't feel up to my own standards of play, I tell that to the customer in my store review or in person), so there's a certain view among the clientele that I should be trusted as a brand of quality. So as far as our retail business is concerned, Sturgeon's Law can apply all it wants, it still doesn't force me to retail a game I don't feel sufficiently finished.

In other words: the only guy who can completely eliminate the problem Ben brought up is Ron: he could, if he wanted, start a vetting process wherein he'd only accept games of "sufficient quality" at the Forge booth. There are pros and cons in that kind of decision, but it seems to me that that's the only efficient method for saving yourself from having to associate with bad games, apart from starting your own booth/brand/retail.

... eh, I don't know, I feel like you're discussing something I don't completely grasp here. Is this just about reminding each individual designer about the importance of playtesting as a part of the design process? Because if it is, rock on. I agree 100%, and should really be both writing up my latest Bliss Stage session and the notes from reading through Robots & Rapiers instead of trying to figure out this mystery of crappy games ;)

--

Apparently I can't get this post to end. One more thing: horrible to hear that about the Ashcan Front. If I were on, you know, the same continent, I'd so be there just for the principle of the thing. As I already told Matt and Paul, I totally approve, and am independently setting up something very similar for Ropecon here in Finland.

I don't design; I don't go to cons.  So it always baffles me at the sheer number of Forge-y games that come out each year.  As noted up-thread, there are a million opportunities to develop games, and few opportunities to really road-test them and get the kinks out.  Sometimes I get the impression that the author(s) don't want to road-test them: every moment spent play-testing, refining, or improving the game is a moment that could be better spent coming up with a funky mechanic/premise combo. 

I've heard that poetry is the only art form where the creators outnumber the audience, but sometimes I wonder if that isn't true for Forge games too.

A while back, I considered starting a "D&D Adventure Design Contest," where everyone designed little scenarios in a Game-Chef-like way.  Upon thinking about it further, though, I realized that the exercise really shows, "Damn, D&D doesn't make scenario generation very easy."  But maybe a similar "scenario generation" contest for other games would help people see conceptual holes in their games?  It's a little easier than playtesting, because it doesn't require lots of people.  It would also generate a couple example scenarios to slap into the back of the eventual book/use in real playtesting.

More critical actual play postings would be useful. Now there is a sort of "if it didn't worked for you don't talk about it" attitude that make me suspicious of every game that don't gets a lot of actual play threads ("if nobody talk about xxxx, it has to be because it sucks!") that hurt many more games than the ones who would be hurt by pointing to their problems...

(and really, if someone talk about a game saying that has two big problems, and the author come out with a solution for both and post it on his site, I would buy that game more readily than another game that people don't talk about)

You beat me to it, Ben. I'll be writing more about this later. I hope to see others weighing in here as well as in actual play. We need to return critique, thought, and clarity to the entire culture.

Best, Ron

Could we please take the "it's all the fault of those molly-coddlers at Story Games!" talk to another thread?  I'd be happy to talk about it with you there, but I don't want that argument and line of discussion in this thread at all, because complaining about what other people do is an excellent way to feel good about yourself while not getting anything done.

I'd like to use this one to talk about pressure to publish, particularly for first time games, and what, if anything, we can do about that.

There's a lot of defensiveness here.  I'm looking at you, Ralph, who just embodied my statement about how already-published designers have the luxury of taking a long time to complete their work.  First time designers don't get to enjoy high social privilege while they slowly toil on their masterpiece.  I would go so far as to say it would be impossible for you to do what you've done with Robots and Rapiers if you hadn't already finished Universalis -- people in this community would have long since given up on you as a hopeless diddler.

I'd also like to point out that this is a huge problem with this community historically (what games released in 2002 were playable without talking to the author?), and it's been getting better, not worse.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't focus on it, it just means that we should take historical context into account.

Heya,

Ben wrote:
There's a lot of defensiveness here.  I'm looking at you, Ralph, who just embodied my statement about how already-published designers have the luxury of taking a long time to complete their work.  First time designers don't get to enjoy high social privilege while they slowly toil on their masterpiece.

I think the question of how to get more useful playtest is the biggest one when it comes to moving along on a design. It's an enormous obstacle that's difficult to overcome.

Clinton, Jason, and I have a strict, formal, 'No Playtest' rule for our games. This came up because we playtested a few games and they were really not fun for us. We have limited time to play together, and we didn't want to spend it struggling with an incomplete design. I also don't think we gave much useful feedback on the games we did playtest.

How do you get over this? How do you encourage people to sacrifice their fun for your sake without already having a reputation? I ask because I'm about to embark on my first design, and as someone who has only playtested local games in the last year, I don't feel like I especially _deserve_ to have my game playtested.

At the same time, it has been my experience that playtesting well is very, very hard. I'm not very good at finding conflicts in taste (which can be deadly to any game, no matter how finished) and problems with rules. I suppose the answer here is to playtest more.

Finally, I worry about the critique process. I think critique is more effective if there's some basis of trust between the participants. I am not saying mollycoddle people, I'm saying make sure you're at a point in your communication where your concerns will be heard clearly. If I get a blast of strongly-worded fire from someone I barely know, I will probably decide to ignore that person. This may be a personal failing on my part, but if the critique process is so scary it chases people off, it doesn't serve anyone.

How do you get playtests? How do you playtest? How do you communicate the critiques from playtest so they are heard?

I'd like to tell a personal story, which maybe will illustrate this.

In 2004, I volunteered to be a booth monkey at the Forge.  Okay, technically I was Driftwood's demo coordinator, but I was a booth monkey.  As a coincidence, I also had a half-baked, rushed out game published that year as well, called Over the Bar.  It was published in the No Press Anthology, it hadn't been playtested, and it was generally just a joke made in response to a game design challenge on the Forge.  (Hey, people who are looking down their noses at the Game Designer Challenges thread at Story Games -- we used to do that on the Forge all the time.  In fact, I'm not sure why we don't anymore.  Good topic for Endeavour.)

While I was there, I made friends with a bunch of people: Mike Holmes, Scott Knipe, Vincent Baker.  I mention these particular people because they are key to my experience, not because they're the only friends I made.  You see, I had this game I had written for Game Chef that year called Polaris, which I was kinda bummed didn't win, and had been idly poking with the development stick while I worked on my real project, a game called Tactics.

Mike took me aside at one point during the Con and asked if I was developing Polaris at all.  "Yeah, kinda," I said.  "Good," he told me, "because it's an incredible game."  (This was before the game had any of that trendy "key phrases" crap, too.)  Hearing this from the guy who marked my game down for not using "assault" clearly enough was a huge thing.  Even huger was talking with Scott (who I downright *worshipped* for Charnel Gods) about depression, metaphor, and the end of the world as a literary device, and having him take me and my game seriously and directly.

Also, I made friends with this guy, Vincent Baker, who I totally loved because he wrote this bitching game Hungry, Desperate, and Alone.  There's a funny story about that, but it probably doesn't belong here.

So, later, I'm bumming around in a post-college haze, and I realize "hey, wait, Vincent lives in Western Mass.  I'm in Providence.  I can totally take the commuter rail out to somewhere near him."  Because I'm friends with him, I can write him and ask if I can come out and visit for a couple of days.  "Yeah, sure," he says, "let's play Polaris."  "We can't play Polaris!" I said.  "It sucks!"

And that's how Meg, Vincent, and Emily became a key support community for me: Helping me out through playtesting, game design discussion, and such.  Without them, Polaris would never have been published.  It'd still be a half-baked game that I kicked around once in a while.

There's a direct line here: Without the social bonding that came from working at GenCon, I would not have had to resources to bring Polaris to completion.

--

How can we make this more accessible?

I can think of a few things:
1) Recruit booth monkeys again.  I have no idea if this is feasible or not, but it would help this problem enormously.
2) Open up our social scene at GenCon more than a little bit.
3) Continue to expand and participate in events like the Double Exposure cons, the Nerdlies, the Go Play Directionals, JiffyCon, and Forge Midwest, while working hard to make these cons opportunities for neophyte game designers to make professional and social connections with experienced designers who can help them through playtesting and publication.
4) Consider the privileges that being a "designer" gives online (and, let's face it, that often means "person who sells at GenCon"), and open those up to more people.

I'm sure there's more and other things to be done.  My goal is to point out the problem, not to dictate how it should be addressed.

yrs--
--Ben

Eero wrote:
...but I consider that more of a spot of sloppy editing than bad design; nothing that couldn't have been fixed by a good read-through, anyway.

Hey Remi,

I think the solution is for the designer to meet you half way.

I happen to love playtesting. Maybe more than I love playing published games. And if the "I'm really looking forward to The Ashcan Front" emails I've received from folks can be construed as evidence, so do lots of indie designers.

I become a better designer by trying to solve the design issues of games with mechanics and subject matter that capture my interest, because I think these games are an opportunity of design issues like those my own brain is inclined to create. (With someone else having done the work of creating the problems I can fast cycle my abilities by not having to create a bunch of broken games in order to get better at solving design issues.)

The problem though, is that the online landscape is increasingly littered with unplaytested games, and it has become difficult to really know the creative commitment a designer has for a given game. Yes, playtesting and working out solutions to design issues is fun in and of itself, but actually having helped a designer make creative progress is a euphoric and powerful order of magnitude more satisfying.

So my strong suspicion about the enthusiasm published designers are expressing about The Ashcan Front is that it comes from a recognition that our ashcan recipe represents something akin to qualified sales leads for folks who love playtesting and want to help others make creative progress. That is, you can know from the way someone crafts an ashcan what kind of feedback they need, and that they're serious about taking feedback and creatively committed to design goals they understand.

And for you personally, I think ashcans with overt language about a game's design goals, and directly calling out mechanics that need validation and/or refinement represent an opportunity to become a better playtester.¹

Paul

¹ The motto of The Ashcan Front is "fighting for the hobby". And what we mean by that is the hobby in which we're all designers. Anyone who stuck with the roleplaying hobby through the 80s and 90s is a designer, and had to be, because playing games required making constant judgement calls about the rules. Those are design decisions. Industries have consumers and producers. The Ashcan Front knows we're all equals.

>>1) Have you published a game?
2) Have you met in person with a bunch of other high status people and gotten to know them?
3) Is your game, if you have one, financially or play-wise successful?

I think it's pretty obvious that all three of these things push people to having a game to sell at GenCon<<

Hi Ben,

Yes, published dozens of games. Yes, met lots of well known folks within the industry. Yes, every game we've published has enjoyed some degree of varying fiscal success (each one has turn at least some kind of profit), but I never ever rush anything out for Gen Con or any other con. We, for the most part, don't even attend cons anymore. In the past they simply didn't provide a good enough return on investment as a marketing option.

I do agree, when you publish that very first game all game designers feel this huge sense of accomplishment. Every last game designer within the industry, regardless if they are a part time indie designer or the president of a top tier manufacturer, has had that sense of accomplishment upon successfully concluding and publishing their first game. That feeling never goes away completely, though with each additional game you do, it certainly diminishes. These days while I am still proud of the game designs I make, I feel a sigh of relief when a game is done with design and into production. That mostly because the work load on my plate, seems a bit lighter for a bit...at least until the next new design gets lumped onto it.

Anyway, this problem you are describing is a universal one within the games industry, though it happens for different reasons at different companies at different scales of operation.

1) Indie companies generally make no representations of running full time operations. Their owners have day jobs and while many indie companies do strive (and sometimes achieve) to make profits, that in itself is not necessarily the primary motivating factor. So in forums populated largely with indie game designers, you generally don't get huge credit and rep for publishing fiscally successful games. You get rewarded, socially, for being an active and vocal participant in the community and by having published a product that has new and unique features that many within the community recognize as innovative. With the social recognition being a major motivational driver for many indie game designers, it is only natural they would rush a project to completion so it is available at Gen Con (or insert other major social event here) because those events happen only once per year and an opportunity to showcase their new design accomplishments is an missed opportunity to score social cred; one that will need to wait a whole another year before it comes again.

2) My experience has been among the full time staffed companies and small press companies attempting to fit within the "mainstream" of the games industry, it is a social networking for the sake of social networking, in the large part, with only a secondary concern with regards to design aspects. Though publishing a particularly flashy looking product, obtaining a media license, or getting to hobnob with select industry socialites brings a bit of extra cred. So too do things like Origin Award nominations, which are essentially ONLY useful for industry cred and not consumer marketing. Within this segment of the industry social structure, doing something particular innovative or original does not bring social accolades. Rather, it tends to bring out harsh feelings from others because it is introducing an unknown into the extremely fragile social hierarchy this core group accepts and desires to fit into. An unknown might lead to the next Magic the Gathering and the fiscal success of such a thing can lead to fundamental shifts of who is kissing who's rear end and the mere prospect of such an uncharted potential shift will earn social enemies. Yes, folks scratch, claw and bite their way into those social niches and some marginally successful ongoing sales presence in a game line can help maintain them there, so don't dare bring a product to market that can threaten that. Really. Ever watched those movies about social jockeying among mothers in a PTA group? The game industry can be far worse. lol. Anyway, with that rant done, for a successful small to mid sized company that comes to a Gen Con with a major presence it requires some major cash expenses in marketing, travel, and exhibit costs, so games MUST get completed in time to be sold there or it can lead to both a fiscal and social crisis for the owners. So half completed, non play tested products among some of the larger operations get rolled out each year too. Its not just an indie thing.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

I'm going to put this thread on a specific track now.

Apparently, what many of the second generation of the Forge community has missed, was that nearly the entire first generation utilized the ashcan process.

Sorcerer was sold as an electronic file from late 1996 through early 2001. InSpectres was a free download, then a PDF, for years. The process varied in terms of publicity/access and in terms of commerce, but it was a staple feature. You can go through all the independent games which made the big splash between 2001 and 2004, and you can see this done, over and over. We all used the ashcan process.

You see, it's not just about editing and presentation, and it's certainly not just about "playtesting." This is where you're missing the point, Eero, and Remi as well. It's more than just playtesting and getting feedback. It's letting the game be itself for a while, but also subject to criticism and use. It's letting go of it for a while, and recognizing that one may or may not develop it further later. It's letting the game as a project recede from your current attention. You play it, others play it, and information accumulates. You do not plan to get it published further for a while. Then you return later and really bring your own attention and all the information that's accumulated back upon it as a project, in full knowledge that you might decide not to. You look at it and decide now what to do with it.

There is a really terrible, destructive assumption that many people seem to have brought to the independent publishing process - that you settle upon publishing a game, and once you do, well, you get that game published no matter what. This is distinct from the admirable creative and even commercial determination to publish one's work - why? Because it throws out the crucial variable of judgment.

At some time, one must look at one's game, no matter how much work and sweat and whatever has gone into it, and say, "is this good enough?" And even more important, even if it is very good, "do I actually want to take this into a more aggressive marketing model?" which is to say, a book format.

If you don't accept that the answers to these questions may well be "no," then you're throwing the key role of judgment - your judgment - out the window. Sometimes, that turns out to be OK because your answer would have been "yes" anyway - that's the situation for Kevin Allen and Primitve, in my unconstructed opinion. In the case of Perfect or Carry, it means the book ended up having small gaps or flaws that made it a wee bit harder to use, but the book can indeed be used and the game itself is solid. In the case of Shock, it means the book is completely inadequate to the task of explaining the existing game. In the case of Mortal Coil, it means that the book is sufficient to explain the game, but the game does not function well.

Yeah, I'm naming names. I'm going to be doing that a lot soon, specifically in reference to actual play. Why? Because when you publish Shock or Mortal Coil, you pick the customer's pocket. You just do. It's bad business. Never mind how it affects me or Adept Press publishing; you owe me nothing. But as I hope to show with my actual play account of Shock, it's a disaster for glyphpress.

Shock as a game is the only science fiction RPG ever published. It's innovative, fun, and powerful. Shock as a book is an ashcan, despite its physical design. It should have been presented as an ashcan, under whatever business model, and treated by you, Joshua, as an ashcan, as I describe above. With that key and undetermined-length time period of plain old setting it aside for play and letting it recede from attention as a project. You didn't. And it just so happens that unlike (say) Perfect, the primary flaw of this particular draft/ashcan is that it fails 100% actually to explain how to set up play. By not doing so, we bought an unusable book and you picked our pockets. That is the only reason why Shock is not being played by dozens and dozens of groups worldwide, and garnering the accolades and financial success that the (invisible) game deserves.

It is stupidity. It is arrogance. It is shooting for the quick buck. It is piggybacking on the work of others. It is intellectual laziness. It mistakes effor tfor achievement and social accolades for confirmation. It is the beta level of the independent RPG phenomenon, and it's time to identify the exact reason and to call out the main examples.

I'll be writing a lot more on all of this. I strongly suggest that you, the reader, save whatever fulminations and defensive cries and basic internet bullshit for your blogs and other websites. Here, I will not be fucking around, and I expect critical self-reflection from all participants.

What it comes down to is creative, intellectual, and social honesty. I've been watching the level drop steadily for about three years.

Remi, I have a suggestion for you - review the play-history of the Durham Three and your podcasting. How honest is it? When you say, "it was awesome!", was it? When you say, "we had fun!", did you? Before weighing in as a playtester, you need to reflect on what you guys were doing at the table, and how you presented it publicly.

Best, Ron

Ron,

In the spirit of critical self-reflection, do you think that Sorcerer, with its long period of development, lives up to its potential straight out of the book for most people who bought it?

Christian,

Whatever Sorcerer is to the people who bought it, it's not because it's half-baked. If anyone thinks I picked their pocket, then it's because the book - what it is, as game or text - isn't what they wanted or isn't good in some fundamental way.

Sorcerer went through the ashcan process. If it's no good now, or not good ever, or not well-done, that's a feature of its real, up-front nature. It's due entirely to my own deficiencies, not to a failure of the process itself. I own what it is, I can't say, "oh whoops, forgot that bit, sorry, I wasn't thinking."

This is key. I'm not guaranteeing that anyone will produce the world-class spiff perfect game if they pay attention to this point I'm making in this thread. What I'm saying is that recognizing and valuing the ashcan step makes it more likely that you will put out the game that you want to, which then can be judged on its merits or lack of merits without missing pieces, broken pieces, or weird shit of that sort.

Best, Ron

P.S. Ben, you might be interested to know that Universalis was ages in appearing. Or, for that matter, so was Legends of Alyria. Waiting for a game is no big deal, except if one buys into the poisonous and wholly adolescent status-culture that seems to have sprung up over the last three years. ("What game did you publish?" "Oh, you don't have a game?" smug nod) That culture is a blight and needs to die.

Fair enough :)

>>Waiting for a game is no big deal, except if one buys into the poisonous and wholly adolescent status-culture that seems to have sprung up over the last three years. ("What game did you  publish?" "Oh, you don't have  a game?" smug nod) That culture is a blight and needs to die.<<

I agree. Its actually quite amazing that is has developed at all. In this age of desk top publishing software and POD printing technology absolutely anyone who cares to publish a game can do so. The simple fact that one is published does nothing to guarantee it will be a good game, a game designed as intended, fiscally successful, or any other measure of quality or success that can realistically be applied. I know a bunch of industry veterans that will be happy to tear down such self appointed designer snobs if anyone feels one becomes too obnoxious about it. :)

Ron, regarding ashcan versions of games. I don't really agree. A good design process and plenty of third party play testing can weed out most flaws in a design. I do agree with you that there is no better way to find everything thats wrong with a game than to "put it out there" and leave an open channel for consumer feedback. However, I see nothing wrong with publishing a first edition and then if a game develops enough of a following to justify it, come back later ad correct anything that turns up with a second edition or a first edition with minor corrections.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

Hi Ryan,

Good point. I know I'll need to present my outlook in several steps, and you're providing an opportunity to move forward to the next one.

Which is: everyone's process may be different. Some people, or perhaps nearly everyone some of the time, can rely mainly on fairly short-range testing and reflection. It worked for me with It Was a Mutual Decision, I think. It may have worked for Kevin with Primitive, although perhaps I'm just ignorant of his process and maybe it had an ashcan-like stage I don't know about. Sometimes the vision is so powerful, forcing one to sit up in bed in the middle of the night, or just stop still in the shower, dripping soap, that the road to "done!" is almost like demonic possession. When that happens, well, who's to stop you or say what you should do? More power to you if you think you can make it.

But I don't trust it very well, and the data across all these years is clearly indicating that an ashcan step is better.

Again! Not everyone's ashcan process is the same! The only requirement is that step I mentioned before, letting go of the game as a project for a little while, and perhaps enjoying and playing it for what it is. Then one comes back and then, entirely then, decides whether to move the thing into another level of production value and marketing, and if so, with what changes.

Before 2003, such a process was basically mandated by technology. We published spiral-bounds or pamphlets, in hard copy, and PDFs. The exact nature of the step isn't important. In fact, several ashcans I can think of were published as books because the author thought he or she was done, and it's only lucky that they didn't break the bank in doing so. Most of us were prevented from that risk on the basis of budget alone.

It was a fortuitous constraint! It produced the valuable attitude around the Forge community that publishing meant "make it available" in any form, in any economic model including free, and that the book version was an add-on option rather than a baseline expectation.

That's what's been lost. The book version as an add-on option rather than a baseline expectation. Much as I value Lulu's existence, its ease leads people astray. But it's not Lulu's fault; the fault lies with that vile culture I spoke of, the thing that makes Ben a higher-status dude than Jason, but then Jason published, so now they're both higher-status than Christian, et cetera. Even aside from the inherent shittiness of such interactions, the core attitude I just described is then lost, and if a person misses that core attitude, they miss out on what made Forge-ish games reliably usable and inspirational prior to the last couple of years.

To be clear: it doesn't matter what your ashcan step looks like or what format it's in (hard, electronic, whatever). It doesn't matter whether you monetize it, or how. It doesn't even matter if it's wholly public (Paul's so-called playtest My Life with Master was an ashcan, shared among about fifteen people, I think). It doesn't matter whether you remain the center of the process, or whether you really rely on the feedback or even direction of others. Your ashcan process is yours to manage, per person and per game. What matters is that it happens, with that key notion of stepping back, then coming to the thing as it stands and choosing to develop it, from what is now scratch, into a new form.

With the all-important point that for whatever reason, one might choose to say "no" and to keep it as is, and to move on. I wrote Trollbabe in early 2003, I think. It's a monetized ashcan. When I sell it at cons, it looks like one (photocopied, comb-bound, clear plastic cover. I've never pretended it was anything different. I fully realize it's a good enough design to be upgraded, and that it would require an artistic and organizational revision. So far, my answer has been "no." Why? Lots of reasons and none. To quote Napoleon D. I don't fffffeel like it. Control of this big No is a huge, huge thing.

Does any of that make sense, to anyone?

Best, Ron

In his book On Writing, Stephen King talks about what he does after finishing a novel.  To wit, he puts it in a drawer for six weeks and doesn't look at it.  Then, after that time period, he comes back to it and reads it.  By that point, he is far enough removed from being the writer that he can actually read what he has written as a reader.  At that point, he begins poking at stuff that doesn't make sense.

This is the principle that I'm hearing from you, but applied to games.  Walk away from it for a bit, then come back and check it out.  Am I restating your point accurately?

That culture is a blight and needs to die.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King talks about what he does after finishing a novel.  To wit, he puts it in a drawer for six weeks and doesn't look at it.  Then, after that time period, he comes back to it and reads it.  By that point, he is far enough removed from being the writer that he can actually read what he has written as a reader.  At that point, he begins poking at stuff that doesn't make sense.

Yeah, I'm naming names. I'm going to be doing that a lot soon, specifically in reference to actual play.

Yeah, Universalis didn't have a published distributed "Ashcan" the way Ashcan Front is envisioning.  I'm not sure how many people actually saw the early texts outside of Mike and myself, but it was a pretty small group.  Maybe half a dozen.

But it did go through the "sit-on-a-shelf" process several times.  A process that typically looked something like this.

"I'm getting really tired at trying to make this game work.  Oh look Civ III just came out...sweet"
...weeks go by...
"Hmm, I should pick up Uni again, people have been nudging me...holy crap...this is terrible..."
...fix fix fix...
"Hey Mike, look I fixed Uni again...its cool and shiny now"
...<Mike gives me the electronic raised eyebrow>
"Ohh...so THAT'S what you were talking about 6 weeks ago that didn't make any sense and I said wouldn't work...I basically just reinvented what you'd already told me."
...repeat...something like EIGHT times.

Basically there's such a thing as being too close to the project.  You spend so much time thinking about it that the way you've been thinking about it gets emblazoned on your brain, like wearing a trail across a lawn.  People give you good helpful feedback, but because your thoughts are stuck following the trail you can't see / grasp / understand / appreciate the feedback as much as you can once you've been away for a while. 

One pretty killer way to accomplish this forced removal is to get the game into a form that ready to be tackled by a broader audience.  Once its out there in other peoples hands...you can just let go.  There's nothing more to do for a while...you're forced to move on.  Move on and let the grass grow back.

And after it's been out there for a while, you do a revised version. Like Universalis, Primetime Adventures, Dust Devils, The Shadow of Yesterday, Conspiracy of Shadows, Burning Wheel... and Dungeons&Dragons, Vampire-Werewolf-etc., GURPS, Hero Wars, Das Schwarze Auge, ...

I think this is a really interesting topic and is something I have been mulling over in my head for a while now.

It seem to me that there is a problem a lot of the time with hype being built up before a game comes up but not enough based on the actual realease. I would like to provide an example of my own like Ben has.

I went to Gencon US for the first time in 2004 and met lots of cool people, got my game ripped apart by Mr. Crane and Sorenson (they were great) and played lots of demos. I heard lots of good things about a lot of games and I bought several of them. One of them was 'Capes'. Now Capes was getting a lot of love and I had a demo based on that hype. The demo was fun, tony made it interesting, but I was none the wiser as to how the game worked.

I bought the book and read it on my way home. Still none the wiser. I lent it to a friend who is into games as much as I am and has a good head on his shoulders. He was none the wiser. I have since come to the following conclusion. 'Capes' is really poorly written. It forward refrences about 7 times per page and is impenetrable to anyone who hasn't played the game fully with Tony. There may be an awesome game under there but i really can't get to it and from others I have spoken to about the game I am not the only one.

Shock, I have not read, but it seems to have suffered from the same problems: lots of hype beforehand, when you actually get the game in your hands you are left thinking 'what?'.

If we as a community continue to hype things a lot before they come out, and don't base that hype off the finished product we are going to end up with punters buying product that is completely inferior when compared to the hype we have manufactured.

Cheers

Iain

Hi there,

Seth, you're pretty much on target, with the proviso that empirically, feedback on the game from others is especially powerful during that exact cool-down phase.

Jeff, I think we're agreeing pretty well, but I can see people struggling over the term "finished." The ashcan step is indeed finished in the specific sense that it has taken the creator(s) as far as they can go based on the initial inspiration, its immediate results, and its momentum. And it's crucial to understand that it can be in any format, and in fact, is probably better off not being a book (although in POD and Lulu-terms, that's maybe not a big deal). But any format, as long as it's available.

One's a publisher at that point, yes. Yes indeed. This isn't about competing with one another for book-prettiness. James V. West was an RPG publisher with less than 2000 words on an HTML page; it's called The Pool.

So the book/marketing, after that point, is gravy. That's the real concept, which I think is related to but distinct from (and more profound than) King's fairly pedestrian point.

Best, Ron

Hmm... I was thinking about writing in this thread yesterday. Decided to let it rest for a bit. Then I just now wrote a long post about unfinished designs. The main point of my post was the difficulty of really judging another person's satisfaction and success as a designer. As in, how does Ron or me or Ben know that publishing 90% completed games isn't actually a viable tact for a given publisher? After doing that, I read again what Ron wrote about publishing unfinished games, and I think I'll just save everybody the headache of slogging through my confused ramblings. It is pretty clear that in cases like Mortal Coil or Shock: excellence and ease of use is actually intented, so the generic question of whether publishing difficult books happens to be viable is rather besides the point.

The lesson being, kids: think before you post, like I do ;)

However, I think I'll draw attention to a spot of analysis that helps explain the phenomenon under deliberation: the actual tools offered to the designer/publisher here at the Forge and by modern publishing technology in general are very much enforcing the phenomenon we're seeing here. In other words, the very process advocated by Ron and the Forge for years has clearly pointed towards the erosion of the publication threshold; thanks to modern technology and know-how spread at the Forge, it's very easy to get your game to print. That alone is a pretty vapid observation, but there's more: the viewpoint advocated at the Forge has never been just that it's easy to publish. The viewpoint has been that publishing should be done in a controlled manner and small steps, with no particular publication threshold for the finished product. The oft-cited publication history of Sorcerer with it's small ascending steps towards full-fledged book status (now conscisely termed "ashcan process") is a clear inspiration here; you don't so much publish a product, you sneak up to having already published.

There has also been the strong idea that actual play and design of roleplaying games should have close ties to each other. I see this message as the obvious ancestor to the current phenomenon: what we're seeing in Shock:, Mortal Coil and others is not, I think, simple crappy design. It's design directed towards the community. And that's pretty natural when you stop to consider how Forge advocates a low publication threshold combined with a tight relationship of actual play and design. These games are directed to other designers, and therefore they conform to different expectations of product quality!

Now, go back and read the first paragraph of my reply to Ben near the beginning of the thread: what I'm saying there is that I can't think of any particularly bad games being published during the last year or so. I did mention Shock:, but even then I didn't think that it was that bad, just somewhat vaguely phrased. Refreshingly so, in fact; I kinda appreciated how light and ethereal the book was when I read it and later on played the game. Definitely not my style of design and writing, but fun to read and easy to understand. The other examples Ron mentions I didn't even acknowledge, even when I have read and played some Mortal Coil and read carry.

OK, so why I wasn't seeing bad games, while Ron was? It's not just that I'm vapid while he's not, it's that I was judging these games as directed towards the Forge core and therefore me as the target audience. Shock:? Perfectly playable with my background. Mortal Coil? You can search the forums for my interpretation of how the game was supposed to be played from when I first read it. I didn't even stop to think of how to fit those parallel and perpendicular actions together, it was obvious to me after having played my share of The Mountain Witch.

Now, looking at these games like Ron is doing, as something that should be comprehensible for a general audience, I agree that they lack polish. Simultaneously, I can totally see the thought process that resulted in publishing these games anyway: Joshua is writing for me when he's explaining the rules of Shock:. It's rather easy to follow and fill in the gaps. I can totally imagine how he never even stopped to consider how narrow an audience he's actually assuming in his text. The text shows in all ways how it's directed towards another Forgeite and as a continuation of the internet discussions that have taken place during the years of development.

My point: ascribing this phenomenon of eponymous "half-baked games" to simple status hunt and short-sighted laziness is not the fair and complete truth about what's going on here. Rather, I'm pretty sure that a considerable part is played by the fact that the designers are, perhaps instinctively, expanding their everyday community discourse in the form of games. And why not? They communicate with each other constantly and can instruct each other in how to play the game. They are well-invested and competent to bridge the holes of the game themselves. From that viewpoint, a game like Shock: or Mortal Coil is completely functional, it does exactly what it's supposed to do.

--
All this, of course, doesn't mean that we shouldn't be schooled on the finer points of the ashcan process. Obviously it's an ashcan that a designer should create for the purpose of community communication, not a generally publicized publication. So carry on, Ron.

Ron wrote:

Shock as a game is the only science fiction RPG ever published.

Eero wrote:
...but I consider that more of a spot of sloppy editing than bad design; nothing that couldn't have been fixed by a good read-through, anyway.

Eero wrote: Rather, I'm pretty sure that a considerable part is played by the fact that the designers are, perhaps instinctively, expanding their everyday community discourse in the form of games. And why not? They communicate with each other constantly and can instruct each other in how to play the game. They are well-invested and competent to bridge the holes of the game themselves. From that viewpoint, a game like Shock: or Mortal Coil is completely functional, it does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Science Fiction with Meaning

The glint of flexing steel skin and the challenges it brings to its owner. An alien language, whispered in a dream telling truths no one wants to know. Towers a thousand miles tall populated by coarse corporate overlords and surrounded by its impoverished workers. Explore the hopes and dreams you have for science and technology. Plumb the depths as they go awry and turn on their masters.

Shock: Social Science Fiction is a fiction game that gives you the tools to tell those stories, to build a world and people it with the characters that make it work the way you want it to.

Author Ben Lehman's original story Who Art in Heaven, taken from an actual game of Shock: is included with running rules explanation.

Grab that raygun and put it in the service of your ideas.

For 3 to 5 players. 

Ack, that last para should read:

Maybe designers should talk to consumers a little more, from where I'm sitting I think that (although there are tangential issues in this thread I strongly disagree with) the core point that people are releasing incomplete games for reasons of community status is spot on.  In the long run, that could really damage your whole movement, as people will buy stuff and be disappointed and may extrapolate that disappointment to other indie rpgs undeservedly.

I did read it through before posting, but didn't pick up that it was ambiguous whether I disagreed with tangential issues or the core point.  I agree with the core point Ron and Ben and others are making, I didn't speak to the tangential issues I disagree with because they are tangential.

I come from a slightly different perspective because I use a different publishing model, but I will focus here on the problems I perceive with some indie games playtesting. The most important thing to remember is that the actual play derived from the text should approximate the intentions of the designer. It should not require contact with the designer, discussions online or not with other people who have experienced actual play, nor should the game be transmissible solely by actual play. Playtesting must have an absolutely perfect focus on the nature of the play which arises purely from your text.

This does not mean, of course, that the designer should not thoroughly and informally develop play through in-house playtesting, or even online. It does mean that you should make use of playtesters who do not know anything about your game, who do not have the opportunity to discuss your game with other playtesters or read the comments of any cheerleaders. You need a well developed set of playtest questions which focus on the playtester's experience of play and not on their concerns about what might happen in circumstances which do not arise in their play. Examples of phrases to crush:

"Less experienced GMs might find..."
"I could imagine some players might feel railroaded..." (this GMs didn't)
"Players were concerned that they might run out of points" "Did they?" "No"

Once you have reworded the text to make sure your originally intended meaning carries across, or adjusted the system where it is broken, you will re-playtest. This will be both with the original playtest group, but also with a completely new generation of playtesters. You should reuse your tried and tested groups but always find new ones. Repeat this process until you are happy that people understand how to play your game from your text, even if they don't like it.

Finding such large groups of playtesters is difficult and time consuming, but I think it is an essential part of game creation.

Simon Rogers
Pelgrane Press Ltd

Max, you've brough up your disagreement with my stance twice now. It's fine with me if we disagree, but you should realize that there is no regulating body that guarantees some predetermined level of intelligibility for gaming products. I see nothing morally wrong in writing a game that requires community participation to be intelligible. It might be culturally harmful or difficult for outsiders to navigate, but that never stopped Blizzard from selling World of Warcraft in game stores. Complaining about a game being directed towards a certain community culture is like complaining about mathematicians being jerks for not writing their textbooks in a way you can understand.

Also: I'm talking very much as a consumer when I say that Shock: has a bit of sloppy editing, but nothing that prevents me from utilizing it. It might be that I am a designing consumer or a consumer who doesn't mind some fiddling in his game experience, but I should imagine that that's as valid a consumer expectation as anything else. When a guy who bought The Mountain Witch from me last summer wants to buy Shock: now, I have no trouble at all selling it to him: he'll figure it out, and if he doesn't, I can point him to the right direction. I'm comfortable selling that level of product to roleplaying hobbyists, even while I strive hard to do better in my own work, so as to breach new markets and reach new people.

(By the way: linking the idea of pickpocketing with a certain discernible level of product intelligibility or playability-out-of-the-box in the rpg context is outright ridiculous, considering the spotty history of the market and tremendous swings in product quality. As a rpg consumer, the least you should expect when buying product is that you might have to do some thinking and research before you can play the game. Shock: is easier to get into playing order than almost any traditional rpg design, despite being somewhat vague compared to some other games. If Shock: is pickpocketing you because you think it's too difficult to play, I've been pickpocketed by every single rpg I bought before Dust Devils in 2004. And frankly, DD only gets the pass because I'd been educated into playing rpgs and that particular kind of rpg pretty well before I read it, so it didn't have any appreciable gaps for me at that point in time.)

Of course, it's pretty much a given that Joshua and others have not been actively trying to write games that really are only for their friends and co-practitioners, but that's what they've managed to create. Which, for me, is a matter of productizing: you make the kind of products you want. I want to make games that are playable by newbies, mainstream people, non-nerds and such, so I take exquisite care to formulate the game in a complete and clear manner. Despite that, check out any of my playtest documents: they are just like Shock:, skipping over the "obvious" (that is, obvious to me) and outlining only the pertinent rules. The crafting of form comes later, and it comes, because the kind of product I'm making requires that step. So you can clearly see that with different priorities, different phases of the process gain in priority.

Which all has nothing to do with what Ron is discussing (it might have something to do with Ben's original viewpoint, though): the proposed ashcan method and cooling-off (I think of tempering steel here, myself; just like a steel implement, you need to temper a game, perhaps multiple times, to get to the highest level of quality) are useful methods whatever your target audience, as long as you're shooting for that highest level of quality. I was just pointing out that a part of the perceived lack of quality pretty obviously stems at least partially from different expectations as to what the product is. It might not be smart to write rough-edged community discourse products and pass them off in the general market, but then, they do it in certain poetry scenes, so I don't know that it's completely without precedence. I definitely know people who's career pretty much consists of forcing the audience to make the effort buy-in if they want to be part of the scene. One might say that Gary Gygax is one of those. Might be completely sensible for a certain set of priorities.

Eero wrote:
Max, you've brough up your disagreement with my stance twice now. It's fine with me if we disagree, but you should realize that there is no regulating body that guarantees some predetermined level of intelligibility for gaming products. I see nothing morally wrong in writing a game that requires community participation to be intelligible. It might be culturally harmful or difficult for outsiders to navigate, but that never stopped Blizzard from selling World of Warcraft in game stores. Complaining about a game being directed towards a certain community culture is like complaining about mathematicians being jerks for not writing their textbooks in a way you can understand.

This thread has, at this point, been totally derailed from my original purpose (what can we change about our culture to make fast-release less rewarding).

I'm done with it.

Ron wrote:
I'm going to put this thread on a specific track now.

Apparently, what many of the second generation of the Forge community has missed, was that nearly the entire first generation utilized the ashcan process.

Sorcerer was sold as an electronic file from late 1996 through early 2001. InSpectres was a free download, then a PDF, for years. The process varied in terms of publicity/access and in terms of commerce, but it was a staple feature. You can go through all the independent games which made the big splash between 2001 and 2004, and you can see this done, over and over. We all used the ashcan process.

You see, it's not just about editing and presentation, and it's certainly not just about "playtesting." This is where you're missing the point, Eero, and Remi as well. It's more than just playtesting and getting feedback. It's letting the game be itself for a while, but also subject to criticism and use. It's letting go of it for a while, and recognizing that one may or may not develop it further later. It's letting the game as a project recede from your current attention. You play it, others play it, and information accumulates. You do not plan to get it published further for a while. Then you return later and really bring your own attention and all the information that's accumulated back upon it as a project, in full knowledge that you might decide not to. You look at it and decide now what to do with it.

There is a really terrible, destructive assumption that many people seem to have brought to the independent publishing process - that you settle upon publishing a game, and once you do, well, you get that game published no matter what. This is distinct from the admirable creative and even commercial determination to publish one's work - why? Because it throws out the crucial variable of judgment.

At some time, one must look at one's game, no matter how much work and sweat and whatever has gone into it, and say, "is this good enough?" And even more important, even if it is very good, "do I actually want to take this into a more aggressive marketing model?" which is to say, a book format.

If you don't accept that the answers to these questions may well be "no," then you're throwing the key role of judgment - your judgment - out the window. Sometimes, that turns out to be OK because your answer would have been "yes" anyway - that's the situation for Kevin Allen and Primitve, in my unconstructed opinion. In the case of Perfect or Carry, it means the book ended up having small gaps or flaws that made it a wee bit harder to use, but the book can indeed be used and the game itself is solid. In the case of Shock, it means the book is completely inadequate to the task of explaining the existing game. In the case of Mortal Coil, it means that the book is sufficient to explain the game, but the game does not function well.

Yeah, I'm naming names. I'm going to be doing that a lot soon, specifically in reference to actual play. Why? Because when you publish Shock or Mortal Coil, you pick the customer's pocket. You just do. It's bad business. Never mind how it affects me or Adept Press publishing; you owe me nothing. But as I hope to show with my actual play account of Shock, it's a disaster for glyphpress.

Shock as a game is the only science fiction RPG ever published. It's innovative, fun, and powerful. Shock as a book is an ashcan, despite its physical design. It should have been presented as an ashcan, under whatever business model, and treated by you, Joshua, as an ashcan, as I describe above. With that key and undetermined-length time period of plain old setting it aside for play and letting it recede from attention as a project. You didn't. And it just so happens that unlike (say) Perfect, the primary flaw of this particular draft/ashcan is that it fails 100% actually to explain how to set up play. By not doing so, we bought an unusable book and you picked our pockets. That is the only reason why Shock is not being played by dozens and dozens of groups worldwide, and garnering the accolades and financial success that the (invisible) game deserves.

It is stupidity. It is arrogance. It is shooting for the quick buck. It is piggybacking on the work of others. It is intellectual laziness. It mistakes effor tfor achievement and social accolades for confirmation. It is the beta level of the independent RPG phenomenon, and it's time to identify the exact reason and to call out the main examples.

I'll be writing a lot more on all of this. I strongly suggest that you, the reader, save whatever fulminations and defensive cries and basic internet bullshit for your blogs and other websites. Here, I will not be fucking around, and I expect critical self-reflection from all participants.

What it comes down to is creative, intellectual, and social honesty. I've been watching the level drop steadily for about three years.

Remi, I have a suggestion for you - review the play-history of the Durham Three and your podcasting. How honest is it? When you say, "it was awesome!", was it? When you say, "we had fun!", did you? Before weighing in as a playtester, you need to reflect on what you guys were doing at the table, and how you presented it publicly.

Best, Ron

*delurks*

jdrakeh wrote: If somebody's game sucks, please for the love of god, let them know about it. They might not be your buddy after that, but at least they'll be refining a game that shouldn't be published as-is.

Levi wrote:
In a perfect culture of design, your buddy already knows that when you try his game, you are going to first, tell him what you see as the good thing the game does or could do.  And then, you're going to tell him where he does and does *not* meet that goal.  Your buddy would feel betrayed if he ever discovered that you saw, and chose not to point out, clear flaws, in order to make him feel good.

This thread is for people for want to help solve this issue and no one else.

Max and Eero, you are being a pain in my ass. Take it to private email.

Max and Levi, you two are particularly good at following the Forge discussions and nursing grudges about the community (or tolerating them and validating them elsewhere), then jumping in as soon as it looks like you have a chance to complain. I'll tell you now: if you had a beef or comments about any of this, you should have brought it up on your own, on your own two feet, not sidling in when it seems safe. As is, you're merely taking the opportunity to throw stones.

You want to be heard here for real? Post the fuck in Actual Play.

Justin, it seems as if we are agreeing pretty well, along with Jeff and others. What I don't know is whether Ben agrees, or if I, especially, have drifted his thread. We'll wait for Ben.

Best, Ron

Ron wrote: As is, you're merely taking the opportunity to throw stones.

You want to be heard here for real? Post the fuck in Actual Play.

Regarding Ben's initial question about changing the culture of game designI have no idea if this is a practical suggestion, because I've never been to a convention.

But would it work if there was, like, a Time of Playtest Judgment at the convention? And at GenCon, all the new games get played by newbies (preferrably, non-indie-gamin' newbies, as a good control group for someone who doesn't already know how these types of games work).  The game's designer cannot participate in this event.

And hanging out, perhaps organzing the play, is one or two of the Old Hands (for various definitions of "Old Hands"), trying out the new game and seeing how it works.  But mainly, to sort of observe how the new players cope with this game, and whether it functions for them.

Note that:
* Poor play may equate to the Old Hands dissing you: you look foolish in their sight.
* Poor play also may harm sales at the Con.
* A game that doesn't get this vetting... well, maybe it's okay, but what's the designer hiding, huh?

Like I said: I have no clue if this would work, given the realities of the Convention experience and the ego's of the people involved.  Most worrisomely, by the time the game has been rushed to GenCon it's already too late to fix it.  But on the other hand, it would be an extra incentive to make sure your game is really, really ready.

I do think that something like the ashcan or its equivalent is probably a simpler solution, but if this trial-by-fire is the alternative, maybe it will encourage people to test their games a bit more rigorously?

Ben wrote:
See, the thing is, it's all well and good for me or someone else who's already got a known, published game to go like "don't rush this game out the door for GenCon, sit back and polish it!  I mean, look at me!  I've spent three years getting Bliss Stage ready."  But that's beside the point.  I don't have a lot to gain from that: I already have the social status of being a designer.  To someone who doesn't, rushing a game out is a great idea, because the quality of your game is not nearly as important as the status of being a designer.

So how do we address this problem? 

You can read my offer here:

http://eyebeams.livejournal.com/318834.html

Or, if a focus on such things must exist, praise people for original design concepts, but not merely "publishing". In my own time in the hobby game industry I have seen "HUNDREDS" of small companies introduce some new RPG, miniatures game, card game, board game, etc, come and go. Most companies manage to get 2 or 3 releases out the gate before giving up.

So, for a reality check, if you've published 2 to 3 game products THAT ALONE doesn't make you anything special. The list of people who accomplished that much in a wide range of "almost" achieved something good there to "spectacular failure" is very long indeed.

As designers of games, reward innovation. Absolutely. The designer in all of us can appreciate something cool and original. But I don't need to see something "published" to appreciate that. Unless by published people mean they've posted their innovation up on the web for free or shared a photo copy of it with me. I mean, I would need access to it in some form to even know it existed.

Bit to me, the kudos for publishing don't come in until such a time that you've accomplished something extraordinary. That means massive fiscal success, the development of a rabid fan base, a change in culture shift or a change on the design of games or some other major, profound, impact. And just for the record, 99% of games don't achieve that.

Me, personally, I'll give a nod of respect to anyone who can grow and manage a successful company in this industry, but that's just because I am come to appreciate the difficulties of the task.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

Hm.

I think that's the thing Ryan.

The way to get noticed is very often to get published. How many people hear of you when your material is there for free on the net? It's been talked about that if people don't pay for your game they add it to the list and very often forget to actually read/play it, which is why the games in the Ashcan booth have been given directives regarding their pricing.

But yes, that is the way, to acknowledge innovation and content before stage of content. And as Ron said earlier, "Published" used to mean even those of us with free content up, including beta-test level content.

Okay, Ron has asked me personally to come in and redirect this thread, so here I am.

As far as I'm concerned, everything since Ron's second post in the thread has been a derailing, with the exception of Marco and James (thanks, guys, it means a lot to me.)  Ron's post is on-the-fence, at best, for reasons I'll get into.  (What I'd like him to do is to make a follow-up post about what he wants to be done that isn't just "I'm going to be huffy if you do this.")

First off, this thread is to talk to designers about the culture of designers.  Are you a pissed off consumer?  Great.  Go start your own thread.  I'll post in it.  You're welcome to post here if you're not a designer, but understand that you're entering a professional conversation and not an internet forum bitch-fest.

See, what I was trying to do with the thread is get people to talk about *us* and what we could change about ourselves.  What has happened is you've all moved into talking about *them* and what they could change about themselves which, understandably, is a much more popular and easier topic to talk about, because it involves no personal sacrifice.

I'm honestly not too concerned about this problem.  I think that it has been the case -- to greater or lesser degree -- that some things are published half-baked since the beginning of the Forge, the beginning of RPGs, the beginning of bound books.  The reaction to the problem, though, is worrisome to me in the extreme.  I've got two observations I want to share, which hopefully will highlight how bad I think this is.

Observation 1: Let's look at two reactions to a crisis.  The first reaction is to look at yourself, and your own community, and what you can change about it to make things better.  The second reaction is to find a community that you don't wield enough influence in to make a change, tell them that they need to change or everything will be horrible, watch as everything continues to be horrible, then smugly retire to your mountaintop, content that you did the best you could and if those fools had listened to you everything will be fine.

I feel like the "blame the blogosphere, blame Story Games" crowd are doing exactly the second.  This is *regardless* of any truth value of their claims about whatever culture they perceive and its impact (which I think are also pretty tenuous.)  The simple fact of the matter is that we have to change our culture, here, in solid ways, to get any results.

I'm happy to have a conversation about "them" rather than "us" but it will not happen in this thread.

Observation 2: If we have this situation.  "Here is a suitcase with $10,000 in it.  If you pick it up, it's yours to keep, but we'll all glare at you."  I expect that most people will pick up the briefcase and keep the money.  I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation, and I think that's equivalent to what all of you have been doing.  "Be a good boy and don't rush out a game, please?" is going to be a frighteningly ineffective disincentive.

If blaming others and reminiscing about the good old days is our community's reaction to a crisis, we're dead in the water.  Let's not be dead in the water.

yrs--
--Ben

Hi Ben,

I guess for me, I don't see too much of a problem. Its a publishing strategy and one of choice and people make that choice is being made both by indie designers and multi million dollar corporations. You can not and will not be able to affect a change in this reality so long as the fiscal pressures remain that force some companies to decide to move a project along a little faster than might otherwise be ideal.

For the record, our own company hardly ever does conventions, does not use distributors and does not begin marketing a title until the first set has been printed and is sitting in our warehouse. Our primary marketing strategy continues to be on brands and core, existing products for those brands. New releases are usually just a short term outreach to grab the attention of a specific focus group. As such our company has no outside driving forces to push a project along and the only internal one is the desire to be done with it and to move onto the next interesting task. As such I'll post our own internal development process and let you guys pick it apart, if you care to. And you can post why or why not you see this process as a part of the problem you have raised.

1) Game concept. The very first stage of development is that initial inspiration that lends us the game concept. At this stage its merely a desire to do a game based on a them, topic, period, etc. The idea is presented at the next company meeting and if no good reason can be seen why it shouldn't be pursued, it gets the green light.

2) Stage two is the creator decides if any of our existing game engines will be suitable and if so, how it will become a part of the brand. How the game system must be tweaked to make it fit to the topic or theme on hand is figured. If its going to require an all new game system, then the creator has the freedom to pursue whatever system design they feel will work for the game.

3) The system requirements and design elements. ala, all the primary features of the game are presented. Unless anyone in house can poke a hole in the game system, concept on how the game will be played, it continues onward. This is usually the stage where others in the company will offer suggestions on how aspects can be improved. The designer has the go ahead to chose to implement them or not. If there is a potential big flaw, it gets addressed more rigorously.

4) The game system gets its production estimate established. This mean, we determine the size of the game, the components it will use, its artwork and design requirements, and come up with the production guide. Unless otherwise impossible, the game will fit to these design specs. Some aspects like the addition of another game chart, bigger page count for rules, etc, remain flexible and not fixed in stone. Basically, we're just pegging down the costly elements of production to arrive at a close estimate on production costs and establishing a benchmark on MSRP, box size, etc. If outside artwork needs to be commissioned that happens now.

5) The designer finishes up the rules and makes drafts on other game play elements. Game boards, character sheets, charts, etc. Anything that will be needed to complete the game enough for it to be played. Artwork doesn't need to be completed and game boards, rules can be close drafts. It just needs to be playable.

6) Game goes out to our two play tests groups. They play it and tell us what is unclear in the rules or if they find any bugs or exploits in the game rules.

7) Input for our play test groups is brought back and tweaks are made. Artwork and design elements from the folks doing those are rounded up and final layouts begin. Different elements of the product begin getting printed as they are done with the design phase.

8) Once all the elements have been designed and printed, then we schedule an assembly period and only then schedule a marketing roll-out. The game gets officially published.

If a game has problems in stage 2 its not forced out of stage two.

If a game can't have its production elements figured out so that it can be profitably published, then the game never makes it out of stage 4. And it will stay at that stage until such a time that publishing options expand to allow to make it possible. I have one game design that has sat at this stage for 12 years.

If a game gets murdered in the play test stage then after changes are made it might go to the "other" play test group. If the changes are small, no new testing is done.

If the products gets past all those stages, we're going to publish it. After its been out on the market we take the feedback we get then, eventually, if sales warrant, we upgrade on the next edition. Most games we've published have needed some changes on the move to a new edition. Some have been minor. Some have had zero rules changes but received cosmetic upgrades as our publishing capabilities have improved. A few I wonder how they ever made it through play testing with the errors they had and required major changes.

If your question is what social or fiscal pressures could be brought to us to make sure we spend an extra X amount of time refining each game prior to publication, then I really know nothing that would. If we spent a great deal more time on the creation of each game then publishing model would quickly begin to venture into an unprofitable zone. And I believe that to be true for most game publishing companies. I don't think the question is what would force us to do what you suggest. I think the question should be, what would double or triple sales to afford companies to lavish that sort of time on each design.

If your question is purely targeted on first time designers, then I'll shut up because I haven't been that for a long time and am likely not qualified to offer input.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

Hi there,

Ryan, although all that is interesting, I think Ben has stated extremely clearly that this thread is about something very specific. If it doesn't apply to you or for you, that's great, but now's a good time to let your points wait for another thread.

So, Ben, the trouble is, you're putting pressure on me to please you with my answer. I don't know whether I can do that. Here goes with how I see it, and whether you like it or not, I don't think that's a reason for abandoning the thread, the topic, or interacting about it at the Forge.

1. The us vs. them thing, at least in my posts. It's not Forge vs. elsewhere. It's my specific community of internet dialogue from 1998-2002 or so, vs. a lot of people who came and joined that dialogue (in one way or another) afterwards. Our "us" only became separate due to "them" and their perhaps inevitable response to the existing community. Ben, you're a part of that. I remember how suspicious and even resentful you were about the Forge and Forge people. That's not some judgment upon you, it's the way things were. It's point after which the default was not joining in as a pure and simple equal (which is pretty much where Vincent, suspicious as he was, came in), but joining in as a self-perceived junior member wary of being rejected or belittled.

About right now people reading this are getting really mad, I bet. Stick with me. You know sticking with me through complex points usually pays off. Breathe deep, punch a pillow, abandon all those responses you're composing even now, and hear me out.

The thing is, no one of that first generation, I suppose we can call it, ever understood that would happen, expected it in any way, or (as I see it) contributed to it happening. It really was and is totally not on my radar screen, or any number of others', whether person X has published a game. And "publishing," as I keep saying, only means making it available. The whole point is to publish like fiends at a grass-roots practitioner level and be happy about that, with further degrees of production design and marketing being an add-on.

So any sort of "them" in my post, it's arising from that history: a deep puzzlement on my or (say) Mike Holmes' part that publishing is perceived as acceptance, or as a status marker. As far as I'm concerned, any number of people completely inexplicably began putting a huge amount of pressure on themselves to publish, and not only publish, but to do so showily and dramatically. I did not like your and Tim's contest for sales in GenCon 2005. Even as a friendly bet, there was a poisonous undercurrent there. Regardless of any lack of seriousness on your or Tim's parts, others' reactions and degree of seriousness about it - and the impact on their behavior - were not trivial.

Like it or not, that's my take on why there's an "us" in my posts. But it's not all that important! What's important is this next bit.

2. Now, Clinton and I were talking this over, and here's what we wondered: does this status-having-published, social reinforcement thing actually exist? 'Cause it hasn't happened here at the Forge. Nor do we see it laid out explicitly anywhere else; I haven't seen it at Anyway, for instance. Rhetorically: was it the 20x20 Room? Someone's blog? Some clique of would-be young turks? As I say, that's rhetorical and I am not looking for an answer or discussion about it. My point is that maybe it did have a specific origin or impact, but also, and this is important, maybe it's mainly a matter of reaction rather than a phenomenon. It is not controversial to identify gamers, heavy internet users, and people in their early twenties as all extremely sensitive to perceived slights, and especially good at projecting their worries about their own selves onto others' interactions with them. Put all three of those together and you have one of the touchiest, most self-doubting, and most determinedly status-conscious profiles ever.

I see it every so often with phrases like "But what do I know, I'm not a game designer" from people like Judd (before Mu), in the middle of a discussion. To me, that's like walking down a street and having a guy jump out of a window and go splat on the sidewalk; my reaction is always, "Where the hell did that come from?" and "What the hell does that have anything to do with what we were talking about?"

The other effect besides hanging one's head in shame for not having published a game is to publish in an imitative, formulaic fashion based on the technological and social opportunities of the day. How is it done? This is how it's done! OK, I'll do it! Which is only a negative thing if that crucial step that I talked about (with its myriad of individual processes) is missed.

So here's my call: it is, just as you say, Ben, a matter of self-assessment rather than accusation. What should a person do here at the Forge? He or she should say, "No one cares if I've published a game or not," and most importantly, "I do not care whether I've published a game or not." Feel the urge? Do it! That would be cool. But it's ultimately and constantly cool to post in Actual Play, whether it's last night's session or a remembered situation from eight years ago, and game design and publishing are a subset of that coolness.

Can I make anyone do that? Of course not. All I can do is think about it as the content moderator. See, on the one hand, I'd hope to moderate anyone who belittles someone for not having published. I don't think I've ever seen that, actually, but hey, the hope is that I'd step on it. On the other hand, there's a flip-side behavior of someone sounding off when they don't have the actual weight of experience about this or that, whether from someone who's published nothing or someone who's published for years in the non-independent context. That sort of sounding-off gets moderated too, in the same way that a fan of the UFC who goes into a martial arts gym and starts honking off about the "best style" is going to be ignored, if he's lucky, and to get thrashed, if he's not. There is a kind of input which bespeaks not only ignorance, a fine thing, but determined ignorance, which is not, and which brings consequences down upon its head.

3. So what to do, more concretely? I know what I'd like to see, which cannot be a requirement or a vetting or anything else of that kind. I'd like to see more games made available in a "well, here it is, enjoy it, who knows what I'll do with it" way, and to see a whole lot of those games get played and discussed here. That's it.

I mean, that's pretty simple, right? And it doesn't really say a thing about "don't publish" or "you're not ready to publish" or even setting any kind of ladder or procedure that one must go through to publish. (See, I actually dislike a lot of the advice on this thread so far about how you have to have an editor or have to have so-many playtests or whatever. Individual processes vary, and no one's in charge of the development of the game but you. For fuck's sake, that's the whole point of the site.) All it is, is, lots of games available in non-book form and no particular commitment one way or the other to get into that form; and lots of play, and lots of dialogue and positive community stuff about the play-experiences.

Best, Ron

Well, Ben, I kinda outlined my own stance on your premise ("what we can do to bad games as a community") up there near the beginning, but I think I'll repeat it here, being that it hasn't been addressed...

The art of being independent

I think that it is not up to us as a community to save a designer from his foolishness. I really like the tack Ron is taking about this, despite him derailing your thread slightly: instead of suggesting a course of action for the community, Ron wrote a rather nice piece (really, it's good; I hadn't noticed the importance of the design phase he explains there before) about what a designer can do to make his own games better. Not the community saving a foolish designer, but the designer himself being proactive, reading the Forge and perhaps picking out a bit of wise advice from this thread, like he's done before in other threads. The purpose of the Forge, you know. I like this much better than social engineering, which I don't even believe really works (although I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise). And if it doesn't work and isn't even any kind of a moral imperative, I'd rather just stay away from it.

Now, that's not to say that it's not a good idea to review our individual attitudes publicly, like we're doing here. Certainly everybody who's read this thread has had to think about how he or she has acted and perhaps influenced the phenomenon - and how we could, perhaps, act differently as individuals to encourage better design practice and less premature publishing from our peers. But that's a far cry from your premise: you started the thread with the assumption that we would need to take community action, so it's pretty natural that everybody is drifting left and right - only the folks who agree with your half-hidden premise are content to stay the course, others would much rather discuss the attentand side issues, like what causes the perceived bad game phenomenon or whether we want to be doing anything about it in the first place.

Doing nothing about bad games is not about being dead in the water or blaming others (where ever did that even come from, I wonder) either, by the by; rather, it's the stance you take when you recognize that something is not for you to change. And as long as Forge is not a school of art but an open forum, it seems to me that planning community action to discipline designers is very much not for us. I can see instruction (like Ron seems to be doing), discussion of individual action (like the folks who are promising to do better in instructing their peers in the future) or even formation of new communities (like the folks who suggest starting special writing workshops to improve the level of their design). What I can't see is wholesale reapportioning of community status which is what your first post calls for. (Might be that I'm just not visionary enough ;) I imagine that community status will change only via individual value choices, not by vote.

That being said...

In the interest of being constructive, even if I don't believe in community action, let's see if I can come up with anything better than "Ron Edwards ridicules the bad games and bans them from the Forge booth, so as to strike the fear of Ron into newbie designers". (That being the sardonic suggestion I gave near the beginning of the thread.)

If Ron's analysis for the reasons of the quality slump is correct, I'd like to suggest that the solution is very simple: we need to believe the analysis and start repeating it as advice in the form of a specific design technique (preferably with a snappy name). In other words, now that the problem is identified, solving it is as simple as making everybody aware of it. This has worked before: the whole Forge-centred community pretty much is aware of such principles of design as, say, Lumpley principle -based economy of system design, or writing imaginary play scripts to pinpoint IIEE. By the way of analogue I suggest that this issue of having a cooling-off period is a similar bit of design wisdom that simply needs to be internalized and accepted by the significant majority. If it's true it'll stick, and the problem will pretty much go away. As to why this is a problem now, specifically: our attention has mostly been focused on the early stage of design in terms of useful tools, so this just happens to be the first time that the pre-publication step has been given attention in terms of advicing others on how to do it.

Hmm... after taking a stance for doing-nothing that seems perilously similar to "this thread already solved the problem". But I fear that's the best I can do, anything else seems to go besides the point, even if there's never too many critique groups and whatnot.

--
Hmm... crossposted with Ron. Seems to be more or less in support of his point, I'd say.

I'd like to adress the issue at hand, by presenting my feelings, my experience within this specific community, the forge, as a first time designer, who has not yet published, who hasn't yet the status of game designer. Note that this mostly my perception, and that I may be wrong in my analysis. Here, I will be talking for myself. But, first two things :
- I'm not complaining
- There is no hand waving from my part (how come I need to justify that ???)

Since my presence on the forge, my own project has changed a lot. It has better itself. I still remember the "kick off" part of my presence here : presentation of the project, or the first thoughts/design phase. There had been a lot of interest, a lot of feedbacks, a lot of comments. But, at some points, one has to stop talking about the design : the subject needs to come to an end. But, what lies between this initial kick off and actual publishing ? A lot of playtest (AP posts), some posts in publishing, in my case.

Now, I'd like to say I consider myself lucky. Lucky, because I feel I found some people that had a continuing interest in my project, beside the initial kick off (in which, everybody likes to take part in). There are not so many, but they are there and they gave me great feedbacks. Those comments certaintly helped me better my product, but forced to add a lot of work, thus delaying the initial publishing step. And, I must admit, I feel encourage to come up with the best product possible (maybe the best example is the building of my teaser). Why do I feel encouraged ? Because I clearly see the benefit of spending more times, of adding things. It is better, it is worth it !!!

Now, for someone who is less lucky, who doesn't have those people, experienced ones, to give them feedbacks, how does it work ? How would they feel encouraged to better their product ? Strange as it is, someone could come here, have "good" comments on design with no followup. For an experienced designer, I believe things are different : they have their circle of playtesters, they know what they are doing (and in fact, as I see it, they rarely post AP about playtest, as they already have their feedbacks). When I read Ben's comments about making friends with Mikes and Vincent, I'm not surprised he doesn't especially need feedback from the forge about playtest. I mean, guys, you are lucky. It's not the case of everyone.

Speaking of initial design, I'd like to say one thing and Valamir's comment strikes me :

Over lunch on Sunday we actually compared the indie game design culture to indie cookbook culture.  Both are books designed to be used as "how to" manuals, and both get alot of buzz generation from the internet.  On one of the cook book forums its become common practice for people to respond to almost anything with "hearts, hearts, heart, cupcakes, cupcakes, cupcakes".  We looked at each other and said..."yeah, there's lots of 'hearts and cupcakes' that go on on indie RPG forums".

Heya,

I mean, that's pretty simple, right? And it doesn't really say a thing about "don't publish" or "you're not ready to publish" or even setting any kind of ladder or procedure that one must go through to publish. (See, I actually dislike a lot of the advice on this thread so far about how you have to have an editor or have to have so-many playtests or whatever. Individual processes vary, and no one's in charge of the development of the game but you. For fuck's sake, that's the whole point of the site.) All it is, is, lots of games available in non-book form and no particular commitment one way or the other to get into that form; and lots of play, and lots of dialogue and positive community stuff about the play-experiences.

Hey, Ron --

Let's talk about privileges.

I'm not talking about "social benefit" as an abstract "I'm cooler than you" sort of thing.  This isn't about *fame*.  I'm talking about actual honest-to-goodness social benefit, based on being proven a skilled designer, and having made serious face-to-face social connections at GenCon.  I don't think that the existence of this privilege is bad or anything.  It makes sense that it exists, and I think it's a positive thing -- people like to deal with people who they know to be talented and have follow-through.

The fact that Ralph can find playtesters from our community for Robots and Rapiers after diddling with it for four years is absolutely a function of the fact that he's already written Universalis.  To say otherwise seems to me to be flat-out denial.  That I can still find playtesters for Bliss Stage is a privilege given to me by virtue of Polaris, and that I could get serious help with Polaris is a function of my presence at GenCon 04.  (See my previous post on that subject.)

Until we agree that this is a thing that exists, the conversation can't go any farther.  If we don't agree, that's fine, this just isn't the conversation we should be having: let's start over in a new thread.

--

Let's talk about Us vs. Them:

I'm a little flabbergasted to get hit with the "new kid" thing.  That's not what I'm talking about at all, and I'm having trouble even understand where you read it into what I posted. 

Let me be clear: I'm talking about "us" (the Forge community, in which I include myself) versus "them" (those molly-coddlers on the blogs and at Story Games).  I'm talking about Ralph, on this thread, blaming "the blogosphere" for this problem.  I'm talking about Matt Snyder on Story Games bitching about people swapping game design ideas because "that's just dick-waving and not serious design."  I'm talking about Paul complaining that knife-fight isn't sufficiently devoted to role-playing game design.

All of these people seem to me to be concretely and totally blaming someone else for the problem.  "If only you *other people* would do things my way, we wouldn't have any problem."  I think that this is simply a mechanism against having to doubt our own way of doing things, and it needs to be disposed of violently for this thread to work.

yrs--
--Ben

Eero --

Hrm...  I'm thinking that this is you exaggerating what I'm saying to make a rhetorical point.  You're not actually thinking that I'm calling for a vote, right?

If we view the problem simply as individual actors, I feel that that's insufficient.  Look at my metaphor with the briefcase full of cash, above.  I don't think that this problem can be solved by simply telling people "police yourselves, okay, done."  So I talk about the problem in terms of community.  That doesn't mean I think we need to set up a governing body.  What that does mean is that I think that all of us (even those of us who haven't published half-baked games) have some culpability in creating a culture where it is decidedly beneficial to release a game which isn't totally or even largely done.  We all need to look at what we can change about our own actions that will make that less beneficial.

I'm having a bit of trouble understanding why this is so controversial.  It seems trivially obvious to me.

Troy-- Actions are more powerful than words, yes.  But sometimes it does help to think critically about what actions to take, right?

Pells-- Thank you for sharing that.

Hi Ben,

1. Privileges. You wrote,

I'm talking about actual honest-to-goodness social benefit, based on being proven a skilled designer, and having made serious face-to-face social connections at GenCon. ...

The fact that Ralph can find playtesters from our community for Robots and Rapiers after diddling with it for four years is absolutely a function of the fact that he's already written Universalis. To say otherwise seems to me to be flat-out denial. That I can still find playtesters for Bliss Stage is a privilege given to me by virtue of Polaris, and that I could get serious help with Polaris is a function of my presence at GenCon 04.

I'm talking about "us" (the Forge community, in which I include myself) versus "them" (those molly-coddlers on the blogs and at Story Games). I'm talking about Ralph, on this thread, blaming "the blogosphere" for this problem. I'm talking about Matt Snyder on Story Games bitching about people swapping game design ideas because "that's just dick-waving and not serious design." I'm talking about Paul complaining that knife-fight isn't sufficiently devoted to role-playing game design.

All of these people seem to me to be concretely and totally blaming someone else for the problem. "If only you *other people* would do things my way, we wouldn't have any problem." I think that this is simply a mechanism against having to doubt our own way of doing things, and it needs to be disposed of violently for this thread to work.

I think that all of us (even those of us who haven't published half-baked games) have some culpability in creating a culture where it is decidedly beneficial to release a game which isn't totally or even largely done. We all need to look at what we can change about our own actions that will make that less beneficial.

Ron wrote:
We disagree that this is the case. Or perhaps it is happening, but if so, it is a new thing (i.e. past three years) and not a good thing. It is even vile.

Let's take me as counter-example. I display none of what you're talking about. I seek out new and offbeat stuff from people I do not know. I don't privilege anyone; I play games which strike my fancy. I actually prefer the spontaneous, inspired, wacky little ideas that crop up here & everywhere, which is why I ran the Ronnies in the first place. That was a roots thing, because the internet's supply of fun little ideas seemed to have dried up in favor of grandiose, status-driven projects. It's always been about finding the fun games with the good ideas, and most of the time, it's better to find them when they're still half-baked, because the general trend in RPG publishing is to fuck it up in the final stages.

Ron --

What do I want, today?

I posted this on the first page of this thread, where it got very little attention or response.

I can think of a few things:
1) Recruit booth monkeys again.  I have no idea if this is feasible or not, but it would help this problem enormously.
2) Open up our social scene at GenCon more than a little bit.
3) Continue to expand and participate in events like the Double Exposure cons, the Nerdlies, the Go Play Directionals, JiffyCon, and Forge Midwest, while working hard to make these cons opportunities for neophyte game designers to make professional and social connections with experienced designers who can help them through playtesting and publication.
4) Consider the privileges that being a "designer" gives online (and, let's face it, that often means "person who sells at GenCon"), and open those up to more people.

Hi there,

I think part of what you are struggling with is an aspect of the American culture to which many of you belong. As a foreigner, it appears to me that in America back-slapping and social acknowledgement are pretty natural to any kind of group activity, whether you play football, sing in a choir, or design indie role-playing games. My German way of getting straight down to what did not work is considered straight out impolite by most Americans, as I have learned. Because it is understood that saying “awesome” is (necessary) part of showing that you like a person, and not saying it becomes saying something else.

I think that most people here are not so stupid as to publish although they know they’re not ready, just because they want to be on a photo drinking beer with Vincent Baker, and moderate their own little Forum on the Forge. The point is that they believe that they are ready to publish when in fact they aren’t. That is the real issue, and not the social standing thing.

My personal experience with being an aspiring game publisher at the Forge is that people have been giving me credit fair enough. This may have to do with the GenCon 2005 BARBAREN! playtest which earned me a lot of reputation, with me having personally met Ben, Ron, Vincent and Eero, with me being “the German guy”, with me play-testing Breaking the Ice and posting about it, with Ron posting a lot to my Actual Play threads, and other factors. Anyhow, it worked for me, and it can work for others.

Of course some people are not being given credit on the forums. That’s sometimes because they are posting nonsense and just looking for attention, and sometimes because they don’t get heard. I think the “First Thoughts” forum has increased both effects. But still it seems to me that it’s in everyone’s hand to get taken seriously and be given credit at the Forge, without having a shiny book out at GenCon.

Right, fame is something one might aspire to. I do. I like giving podcast interviews. I like being on a photograph with Matt Machell, grinning like an idiot and holding up the preview version of BARBAREN! in front of the Forge/PrO booth at Spiel Essen. That’s fun. That’s reward, and well deserved.

That’s not to say that I don’t totally agree with both Ben and Ron. It is good that these things have been stated. Every aspiring game publisher should read this thread. However, me personally, I’m not seeing anything particularly wrong with the Forge as a community that could be changed as a consequence.

This thread stands well as a plead for more criticism and less “awesome”. Everybody, get German on each other. There’s really not much more to say.

Frank

I see your solutions as problematic and incomplete Ben, they suggest face to face meetings of people.

This is still an online forum, and most of the designers on it (by a vast majority IMO), do not get to meet everyone else at these conventions. How do you let <I>them</I> "break in"?

And no, expecting them to go to GenCon and hubnub with you is not an option, especially considering that many posters don't even live on the same tectonic plate.

Ron --

What should our community be like? It should be like that from me to you to Bob to a bunch of Bobs. I think it is more like that than it's not, considering the power and fun of so many new games every year - of which this halfbaked phenomenon is only a subset. I think it should be like that all the time, though, and that we as a community need to consider that carefully.

[ Note: I also think it's easier for Ben to find playtesters for the same reason it's easier for, say, Steve Jackson to find playtesters: because people who know Polaris are legitimately interested in what he'll do next. This is neither degenerate nor a problem--I'm eager to play Bliss Stage and it's certainly not a "clique worship factor"--I gotta think anyone reading this will believe me on that--but I'm not hunting out of my way for any IPR release that someone wants to playtest it ... unless I happen to be in the IRC channel when someone brings it up--then, you know, barrier-to-entry is so low it's "what the hell, I'll give anything a shot.

Ben wrote: The fact that Ralph can find playtesters from our community for Robots and Rapiers after diddling with it for four years is absolutely a function of the fact that he's already written Universalis.  To say otherwise seems to me to be flat-out denial.  That I can still find playtesters for Bliss Stage is a privilege given to me by virtue of Polaris, and that I could get serious help with Polaris is a function of my presence at GenCon 04.  (See my previous post on that subject.)

Hey Ben,

I was hoping that other people would talk about their own experiences and try to look into what we're doing to cause the problem and their own ideas about what might be done.

I spent $306.04 on roleplaying games last year. Not counting demos at Gen Con, I've actually played $16 worth of those purchases. And I've read, or aggressively skimmed, only $100 worth of them. If I might savage myself a bit cruelly without clearing the hall, my purchasing so far in excess of actual use is me simply trying to stay aware and ahead in the scrum for creative relevance. I can't say for sure that other designers are purchasing for similar reasons, but I bet I'm not entirely alone. It's not good for me creatively. And it's not good for the community, as you describe, because it gives status not for a designer's game's inherent qualities, but as a product of the purchaser's anxieties. I'm committed to not doing this again in 2007.

I think it's pretty interesting to compare your "the quality of your game is not nearly as important as the status of being a designer" statement with Ron's later questioning of whether that status actually exists, and his own "lots of play, and lots of dialogue and positive community stuff about the play-experiences" prescription, which I parse as advocating a culture based on actual fun. Communities are defined by their values, and both status and fun are values around which communities might organize themselves. Is it possible the UvT thing is just a subconscious recognition that folks are organizing themselves around different values?

Paul

Yeah, Frank said my piece far more succintly than I could. Good game, Frank.

As for community vs. individual, Ben, that's a tight line to balance - if what you really want is everybody reflecting on their own actions, then this thread is already pretty much the best that can be done, being that such reflection is a necessity for understanding the discussion in the first place. (Perhaps the blog-keeping folks could do a piece about it as well, if you wanted to make sure that everybody pertinent gets the news.) As I suggested earlier - the design knowledge and useful attitudes will spread from here, and six months later everybody will be taking it for granted that "Duh, of course I don't want to publish this yet, it's obviously at the ashcan stage". Knowledge brings freedom.

On the other hand, your list of community changes, while laudable per se, is somewhat off in terms of striking at the original problem of half-baked games (whether you subscribe to Ron's analysis of the reasons of the half-bakedness or not). As we've discussed already thoroughly, not nearly everybody even believes that social pressure to publish is the primary reason for the phenomenon, or a reason that should be addressed first - as can be seen from my posts, I'm much more interested in addressing the knowledge base of the designers and their awareness of the quality they're competing against, so as to give them tools to recognize the dangers of half-bakedness themselves. Addressing the problem at the social level smells like behaviorism to me, with the belief that people will just blindly go where the social pressure leads them. What's worse, it seems like unrealistic behaviorism in this case, because I can't begin to imagine how a non-hierarchical community could change it's apportioning of status in any other way than pure education. Or how do you "open up online designer privileges to more people"? That would be easier if there were any privileges in the first place.

Heya,

Troy-- Actions are more powerful than words, yes.  But sometimes it does help to think critically about what actions to take, right?

As a personal point, though I'd like to "publish" (as in, make available in print for sale), I've never felt pressure to do so.

I also am aware that there are cliques, but let me be frank, there are always cliques. There are those you are friends with, and there are those you're not friends with, it happens.

I think, or like to think, I can tell if my game is ready to be published, if it'd take a dozen years, it'd take a dozen years. If it'd take two months, it'd take two months.

But the thing is, don't we always believe we know? And who says we're right?
Look at Perfect and AGON. What if they would have been mistaken?

I don't have answers, but truly, either everyone goes through ashcan or no one would.

Or more likely, it'll be as it is now. Those that feel like it, go through ashcan phase, and those who don't feel like it, don't. As Ron said, it's a personal feeling for one's game, and yes, you can be wrong.
Let us also see what can be done after the book is published and found to be half-baked, because I believe there is little else to talk about that is not wishful thinking and projected hopes.

Well, Ben, while we are in complete agreement that there is an issue with half baked games, I think you've largely misdiagnosed the problem.

The problem is not in granting "privilege to publishers".  "Privilege", where it has been granted, has been granted to contributors.  People who have made a serious impact in our understanding of, appreciation of, and enjoyment of game design and PLAY. 

Paul is not an indie-game guru because he published My Life and Bacchanal.  He's an indie-game guru cause he knows his shit and is very very good at providing advice and guidance.  Mike Miller is not "part of the 'club'" because of With Great Power, he's part of the "club" (such as it is) because he and Kat have worked their tails off contributing to the design community and organizing tons of stuff.  Judd has not suddenly been elevated in stature because he published Dictionary of Mu...he earned his stature by being an Actual Play machine and his podcasts.  Mike Holmes is not living off of "co-author of Universalis" fame.  He gets his well deserved recognition because he was one of the leading contributors to the Forge during its peak formative days and has personally provided more feedback to aspiring game designers than nearly any one else I know.

You are correctly recognizing that there are some folks who do have some heavy "cred" in the larger indie-publishing community.  I submit to you that you have made the incorrect connection that this cred is due to having published.  This cred is due to having made substantial contributions to the community.  The fact that many of those folks have also published (before, after, or during) is an independent variable. 

So no.  I do not accept that I can find play testers for Robots & Rapiers because I published Uni; and I don't accept that you find play testers for Bliss Stage because you published Polaris.

I accept that both of those happen because Ralph Mazza and Ben Lehman have been positively contributing members to the community for an extended period of time. 

If there is any celebrity status or additional privilege being granted to published game designers (particularly the "old guard" of designers) simply because they've/we've published than I further submit to you that that is an artifact of the social interactions among folks out in the blogosphere. 

And if you view that as me passing the buck cause its easier to "blame" someone else, so be it.  When designers get hard core, critical, squinty eyed, constructive feedback, the game benefits.  When the designers are getting accolades, and compliments, and hype, and feel good feedback the game suffers.  IMO its as simple and as directly attributable as that.

As for how do we change that?  I've already given my views:

Less auto-praise, more constructive criticism from others to designers.  Welcoming that criticism sans hurt feelings, on the part of the designers. 

Less auto-purchase of every great new thing by fellow designers (many new publishers have their GenCon experience paid for from sales to other GenCon publishers), more distribution of complete / near complete but unfinalized "betas / ashcans" for pay or free (but properly identified) to a broad audience or narrow.

Less "keeping quiet" when a game is published as finished when it clearly wasn't.  More holding designers accountable for games that really needed another 6-8 months of testing and didn't get it. 

Less emphasis on "idea generating" / "first pass" game design contests.  More emphasis on "continued development" / "next stage" design contests.

As an example of this last...how about a contest where all entries had to have previously submitted as a Game Chef / Ronnies / 24 hour Game / etc. and the judging criteria is based on progress towards a finished product where the winner is the game closest to being ready for prime time, and honorable mentions are given to games that made the most progress or those that reinvented themselves entirely because the initial idea just didn't work.

But it all comes down to communication...who we praise, when, why, and how much.  Its not entirely the designer's fault for going to press with a half baked game if they've been consistantly led to believe that the game is ready by an overabundance of feel-good feedback.

As an example of this last...how about a contest where all entries had to have previously submitted as a Game Chef / Ronnies / 24 hour Game / etc. and the judging criteria is based on progress towards a finished product where the winner is the game closest to being ready for prime time, and honorable mentions are given to games that made the most progress or those that reinvented themselves entirely because the initial idea just didn't work.

I think what is being uncovered is we need to not point fingers and find blame and instead do the following:

Kill any sighting of elevation of status for publishing.  The whole point of this site is a hobby of equals.  People who post in Actual Play are Rock Stars and should be treated as such. 

Support game designers who are in that middle-stuck place, where they have a playtestable draft, have played it and haven't quite gotten it right and they feel Gen Con approaching.  I have seen Michael Miller and Luke Crane in this middle place.  Luke got out of it through his posse and prodigious playtesting.  Michael got out of it through Kat.

These people who are stuck have to know that there is no pressure other than the pressure to create an awesome game.  Gen Con is not a final destination.  Games released in September will do just fine and your game will be on the floor NEXT year after nearly a fully year of AP, podcast coverage and buzz.

Sometimes these people just need a phone coversation or an IM or an e-mail.  Sometimes they will need a playtest group armed with an idea of what the game designer wants and the twin weapons of brutal honesty and an open mind.

When games come out that aren't good, and we play them, we need to not mince any fucking words.  Look at Alexander's Shock: AP thread.  That post is going to help Joshua get a better draft of Shock: out into the world.  Posts like that are fucking gold.

Talking about only good games makes no damned sense and there is a bit of a code of silence when it comes to games with flaws that sucks.  I include myself very much in this.  I'm guilty of this too.  I've talked up good AP sessions and just brushed bad ones right under the carpet.  This isn't doing anything for the craft of play or game design.

There are absolutely games that got personal and I have no interest in discussing online.  I hear that.  I really do.

But there are lessons to be learned from games that go poorly too.

(Phew. Finally got the time to read this thread.)

Ron,

I accept responsibility for the difficulties people have in play with Shock: given the state of the text. It's not even a reluctant acceptance. It's a problem, and it's a problem that I'm addressing by using at least one really serious community contact. I couldn't have gotten his help to this degree were the issue not pushed with it being already in publication. Which brings up the community aspect.

When originally working on Shock: I recognized a few things. I had 800 downloads of the playtest documents (there were, I think, 3 releases), but very few actual questions about it. The game changed radically (and for the better) between drafts as sacred cows became burgers to feed better ideas. But this feedback came from very little community feedback. 90% of the feedback came from personal playtests. The rest came from people who had already played Under the Bed.

I also recognized that, when I talked about Shock: new people got interested. I'd kept mum about UtB until it was done because I hate promising something that doesn't yet exist. Sales have been more than I expected of UtB, to be sure, but the lack of publicity could not possibly have helped. Not that I had anyone listening at the time. Shock: was promising something that people really wanted, though (as opposed to UtB: The Child Endangering), and if I'd made my promises increasingly hyperbolic, they would have gotten even more attention. (I don't care about fame for its own sake, by the way. My dad was a fairly well-known artist, and fame turns out to be a ring in the nose for the convenience of those who know how to sell it and need a handle so they don't actually have to touch the artist.) That attention turns into games sold, which turns into games sold, which turns into publicity at the table, which sells more games... All the while, these games are turning into dollars, which turn into new games...

So, if all things are functioning (design, writing, publicity, community, sales), they make a growth curve. The bigger the start of that growth curve, the bigger the fatter end. If I sell 500 books this year (a reasonable estimate) then release a new edition at Gen Con 2007, I'm starting with 500 books out showing their bright colors to people who might be interested and have heard something about the game.

This is not opinion. It's pretty straightforward: unless I've made something patently offensive and useless, I'll benefit from that burst. This is the suitcase of money Ben's talking about. As it stands, the game is stacked toward publishing early. I really want to see indie hotness that's unfinished, out for me to make dollar decisions about. But that's not what was happening in 2005 when I was at Gen Con the first time. Instead, it was a lot of "finished" games.

Would ashcanhood have helped? I dunno. The substantial difference is really only that I would have charged a couple bucks less — probably $19 — and said, on the back, "This is version 0.4 of the game. This book is a coupon for $19 off the 1.0 version."

But you know what? People at least a little more attention when I post about a game design now. Folks read my blog (when I have time to write to it), they write to me to ask me to playtest (which I'd love to do if there weren't constant social tornadoes going on around these parts), they listen to my opinions despite evidence that it's a bad idea.

This is because I made something really visible that claims to do some unique things. It does those things as a game. The quality of the text has depressed the acceptance of the game more broadly (not that sales are too shabby, but I don't see the degree of AP that I'd like because the game turns out to rely too heavily on the old culture-of-play model).

But the greatest assets I have to fix the problem?

• An actual base of people who are enthusiastic about the game, play it, and turn in bounty on errors in the form of a copy of the next edition. I don't think an ashcan would have garnered a level of acceptance that would give me a sufficient base of players.

• Other folks in the community who see what it does, how it works, and want to see it fly farther, higher, faster. They probably own the game, have played it, been frustrated by the lack of direction on some part(s) that were based on assumptions I had when I wrote it, and want to really know how to play.

I have some serious concerns that I would not have those assets were the game not on a shelf in war paint, getting talked about by Ron because it's underdone.

I think, really, this is a challenge: Paul and Matt, make Ashcan Front work. Provide community, be welcoming, and make the model make sense. Make it obvious and reproducible. Make it so that when Bob shows up and wants to write a game on his own and doesn't know what to do, the answer is, "The Ashcan model is lucrative and gains you the community you need to make it fly."

Yelling at people for talking about ideas about games isn't going to gain you the respect that you'll require to make it work. Going to Knife Fight (which is not a game design community) and Story Games (which is a dedicated "shoot the shit" community) and telling people that they're doing it wrong certainly doesn't garner any respect from me. And you guys deserve it. You're doing something that is of potentially very great value to the community. We'll know how you did in September.

Joshua, the Ashcan Front will only work if people step up and participate by buying into the booth and releasing their ashcan design.

That's it.

In no form, does it require your respect, or Ben's or any number of individuals who feel wounded and offended that Paul and I rained on the parade of online communities. It certainly could hurt the chances, but it is absolutley not necessary that we repent to succeed in August. Of course, you or any number of those individuals may not participate because, basically, you think I'm too mean and Paul's too presumptious or something. Ok.

EDITED TO ADD: And, frankly, I do not think Paul's and my comments will hurt. We've gone from having nobody actually committed after Forge Midwest to having 1 person completely on board, and 3 all-but signing up, and a handful of others knocking at the door. Us being nice on Story Games, for example, got us very little response for two months or more. Now people are talking about it, passionately, and are starting to line up. Good.

Matt wrote:
Joshua, the Ashcan Front will only work if people step up and participate by buying into the booth and releasing their ashcan design.

Matt wrote: In no form, does it require your respect, or Ben's or any number of individuals who feel wounded and offended that Paul and I rained on the parade of online communities. It certainly could hurt the chances, but it is absolutley not necessary that we repent to succeed in August. Of course, you or any number of those individuals may not participate because, basically, you think I'm too mean and Paul's too presumptious or something. Ok.

So, we're crabby. Or we're not. Whichever. How is either relevant, or how has it been for the last two weeks (or months or whatever)?

Because what I'm seeing is a lot of comments very much like this "Wow, you two are crabby! I'm totally behind this effort -- hope it works. I guess I don't have any actual objection at all for ashcans. In fact, I can't recognize any really specific criticisms of how you and Paul are doing this, but I do have a couple suggestions to add. Did I mention you're crabby?"

The criticism I'm seeing to date boils down to "I perceive you guys as being too mean. THINK OF THE CHILDREN!"

As for "hazing" or intiation or any such nonsense, I'm really baffled where that's coming from, even taking our so-called crabbiness into account.

I do not think this is stuff worth worrying about to any degree for the Ashcan Front.

Matt, man, your fight is a little one-sided here.

Do what you want. You have my support as an endeavor. Make it good.

Hey Matt and Joshua and Ben and everyone! I think we get it.

As moderator, I think the whole "what was said on other sites" business can be let drop for good here at the Forge.

Putting any detritus and flotsam from those discussions aside, this thread turns out to have some thoughtful stuff in it.

I think it might be time to call it closed, as a basis for rumination, with extreme encouragement to start new threads with specific spawn-off topics.

So if anyone really really wants this one to continue, send me a PM, and I'll be open for advocacy, but for now, let's start new threads, please.

Best, Ron