Are designers artists? A complaint in 3 parts

Recently, in a panel of established board game designers, these statements were made: "You're a game designer, not a game artist," and  "I don't think of myself as an artist; I think of myself as an experience designer." Obviously, these views are not espoused by this blog. But I would like to spend some time unpacking why. 

Who gets to be called an artist?

First, let's look at what practices fall under the heading of "fine arts:" painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, architecture, music, poetry, theatre, and dance. Art house cinema could also be included. I hope we can agree that all of these things listed are art. 

However, fine art or high-brow art implies the existence of low-brow art. In this case, I do not mean poor quality art, but rather art that is accessible to the masses, both thru its reproducibility and it appeal. Spoiler alert: low-brow art is more commonly referred to as entertainment, as in "Arts & Entertainment." People working in 'art' fields often have the same skills as people working in 'entertainment' fields. Frequently, they're the same people. Patrick Stewart is both a trained Shakespearean actor and a superhero movie actor. 

For what it's worth, I believe board games to fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, due to the limits of production, cost, and consumability (learning rules limits the number of games people can play in day). Neither fine art (except for certain games as art installations) nor low-brow art (except for mass market games).

Saying that only the people whose work is in museums and art history textbooks get to be counted as artists is gate-keeping. Rigidly defining what counts as art always leads to the arts losing funding. For the purposes of this blog, if the purpose of a work is creative expression then it is art. And yes, mechanics-driven designs are still creative expressions of a designer.

Are designers artists?

If you want to read my definition of design, go here. I hope we can all agree that graphic designers are artists. Architects are just building designers. Choreographers design dances. The use of 'design' as a term usually signals that functionality or practical concerns were a large part of the creation process. I fully admit that part of the confusion is that design means something different in STEM fields. But games are not feats of mechanical engineering; they are entertainment. And entertainment is art. And in the arts, designers are artists. Whether they want to call themselves that or not. 

Why does it matter what term we use?

In the examples at the top of the post, the designers were responding to a question about how to balance perfecting your game versus just handing it off to publishers/getting it finished. The implication of the question and the responses is that artists are ego-driven and don't know how to deliver product on time. Or, more charitably, that people who describe themselves as artists (instead of designers) are that way. Either way, this perpetuates stereotypes that result in disrespecting and harming professional artists. 

The word for an artist who never finishes a project is 'amateur.' I don't mean that to be derogatory, either. Professionals turn things in on time and get paid. Amateurs tweak and fiddle and don't get paid. Both are valid if your goals line up with your strategy. Assuming artists are all perfectionists is tantamount to calling artists amateurs. Which is pretty insulting to the illustrators and graphic designers who work on board games. It's also insulting to artists who design board games. The conflation of artist and amateur also feeds into the stereotype that we don't have real jobs and thus are not deserving of real benefits and protections. 

Board game designer is an exact term that is useful. Board game artist is a hazy term that could mean a number of things. But just because 'chemist' is more exact than 'scientist' doesn't mean both can't be true at the same time. 

In conclusion, by staunchly refusing to call designers artists, you are saying something about designers and about artists and how the two ideas need to be kept separate. I work in a field professionally that has a similar dynamic. In spite of having 'artist' in my job title, I may not be included as part of the creative team. I'll delve into this more in my next post on art vs. craft. However, the take away is that how members of creative teams are viewed affects how much they get paid. So I have a financial interest in educating people about harmful stereotypes in the arts. 

Artists aren't (necessarily) amateurs. Designers are artists. 

Development Directions and Ways to Stand Out in a Crowded Market

The saying goes that these days a game needs to be great not good in order to succeed. In this post, I'd like to look at some of the ways a game can stand out from the crowd and the possible downsides of different methods. 

Innovation is a surefire way to generate excitement about a game. Innovation in the board game sphere is generally seen as related to mechanics (or components that help implement mechanics). On the one hand, it is incredibly hard to develop completely new (or new feeling) ideas that work really well. Innovation is very hard. On the other hand, too much innovation in a game can be a bad thing. Too many novel mechanics can make a game hard to learn and hard to play because players don't have a foundation of similar elements as a jumping off point. Generally speaking, the rule of thumb (according to Geoff Engelstein and others) is one innovative element per game that players have to learn. Another downside to innovation is that often the first design using a certain mechanism will get improved upon by later games, so innovation does not guarantee an evergreen title. Keep in mind that innovation requires researching what is already out there so you know how your game is different. 

Many games are developed with niche audiences in mind. Having more complexity in a game is a strong draw to dedicated gamers. Combining lots of mechanisms can make a game feel innovative even when it isn't. These games are more likely to get in depth reviews (for good or ill) and common knowledge says that BoardGameGeek has a bias towards rating heavier games more highly. The downsides are that heavier games are harder to design, develop, and playtest. Adding complexity to games also adds cost more often than not. Because the audience is fairly narrow, any heavy game that doesn't stand out in other ways is unlikely to be picked up by a publisher. 

Increasingly, gamers are drawn to games that tell stories. Adding story elements to a game increases player investment by raising the stakes—instead of playing to beat your friend, you are playing to help your character triumph on the battlefield over their foes or save the world or build the best town or...  Story can alleviate some rules complexity by spacing it out and contextualizing it. Stories can keep more casual gamers engaged in a game they might otherwise 'check out' of. Story-based games tend to suffer from either too much writing or bad writing or both. Chapter breaks can feel disruptive to game play. Often the writing feels unnecessary to gameplay or worse, unrelated. Rule of thumb: hire good writers and show restraint. 

Integration of theme and mechanics is a relatively new area of focus. Games are praised when they feel like the theme. Integrated themes contextualized rules without adding lots of text. Strong theming can bolster the emotional arc of gameplay. Good integration will add some cost due to custom components (cubes rarely feel thematic). Thematic integration requires designers to understand both game systems and their emotional content to avoid ludonarrative dissonance. The biggest downside is the lack of design language in the hobby around theme and its implementation. This is an area ripe for exploration and a major focus of this blog. 

On the publishing side, higher production values have raised consumer standards for buying games. To stand out in this arena, games must have quality art, graphic design, formatting and editing, components, and packaging—boxes, inserts, and punch boards. Obviously, this can be expensive. However, consumers feel better about spending eighty dollars on a game if it looks and feels like a quality made product. High production values should not be confused with more components. The amount of components should be in support of the content of the game. More content that exists only to add more components is widely panned as 'bloat.' Finally, while table presence is important to a degree, games that feel gimmicky are eroding players' trust in flashy games put out by untested publishers. There may always be a market for an overproduced Kickstarter game, but I predict a bubble burst in the near future. 

Ideally, a good product would contain multiple of the above considerations. However, trying to be excellent at everything is a recipe for failure. Instead, focus on one area and incorporate that into your design vision. Work to avoid common pitfalls and weaknesses of similar games. If your game still isn't standing out, try refocusing by exploring other directions. (Maybe your story-based game works better as a thematic integration game.) Cut what doesn't work and focus on what does. Once you are sure of your focus, playtest to see if the experience is there. Don't just playtest mechanics; test your theme or story or components. 

There is no one formula to make a game that stands out from the crowd, but there are many paths to explore on your journey. 

Design Practicum: Monopoly

 Yep. In this post we're diving into the design choices in Monopoly. Because while it's easy to dismiss it as "just so very, very bad," becoming a better designer means being able to think critically about design choices, good or bad. There is a lot to talk about with Monopoly, so I am going to break my critique into categories. If you have already read one too many reviews of Monopoly, skip down to my conclusion. 

Quality: This is one of the most mass-produced games. As a result, most of the components are middling-to-bad by hobby gamer standards. Notably, the best components, the tokens, are also the most iconic to the game. Additionally, the art and graphics really aren't up to hobby standards. 

Quantity: Monopoly is a price point most families can afford. The physical size of the game is about right for what it is, but the shape of the box is pretty bad. I'd wager most families are like mine and kept games in a hall closet with the winter jackets, as the only place they would fit in the house. The problem with that is accessibility- games that are hard to reach won't get played very often. This ends up reducing the prospective value of the game. The number of players works for most families, but playing at either 2 or six could make the game overly cutthroat although for different reasons. Finally, the game is too long for what it is. More on that in a bit. 

Composition: Let's get it out of the way and state that most players learn to play by oral tradition and that those 'house rules' actually make the game worse. That said, the intention of the game appears to be focused on auctions and trading of properties. The real estate theme fits the mechanics of auctions and trading, but the rest of the mechanics are not thematic. The mechanics are split between the highly random—roll and move, chance/community chest cards—and the highly economic—auctions and trades. To modern sensibilities, this mishmash of mechanics feels disjointed. While the auctions and trades bring a much needed dose of strategy to the game, the lack of structure around trades especially makes even the economic parts of the game feel random. Players can choose to simply not trade with someone if they are bent on having one player lose. The looseness of the rules around trading (and to a certain extent, auctions) also helps explain why so many play groups have 'forgotten' these rules. This is compounded in the second half of the game, after auctions have ended and trading is the only strategic recourse left for players to build monopolies. Returning to the idea that the game is too long, most players will know they have lost long before they go bankrupt. In Monopoly, it is possible to spend 30 minutes knowing you will lose, then another 30 after you have lost watching everyone else finish playing the game. Modern games have generally come to the consensus that playing the whole game with a hope of winning is the more fun way of playing. (Many of the bugbears of modern board game design—roll and move, player elimination, runaway leaders, high output randomness, king-making—are present in Monopoly.)

Dynamics: The arc of gameplay moves mainly through three emotions: boredom at the repetitive mechanics, frustration when landing on a bad spot, and anger that other players won't trade with you. This is punctuated by moments of joy when the dice finally go your way. Strategic players will tell you that the most skilled player will win every time, and they're right. But due to runaway leader mechanics, that means only one person playing (at most) will enjoy the game arc of seeing their strategy succeed. For fans of complex strategy games that may not be a defect, but Monopoly is marketed as a family game. Family games designed in the last decade are usually under an hour to play and lack the complex economic systems of Monopoly. This game is supposed to be for players age 8 and up. While some of the mechanics are child-friendly (roll and move), if you are playing to win or even to finish a game your child will likely experience the same boredom and frustration that many adults experience when playing. In my estimation, Monopoly fails as a family game. What about as a strategy game? Here, the design shows more promise. The freeform trading makes more sense in the context of competitive players used to similar mechanics in other games. The lack of art and good graphic design is also less out of place for a certain category of strategy game. The length of the game, 60-180 minutes, places Monopoly on the shorter, lighter end of the strategy game spectrum. Where Monopoly  falls apart as a strategy game is the high level of randomness. One could argue that Merchants of Venus, famous as a heavy-strategy roll and move game, has enough systems to balance out the randomness of the dice. Monopoly is too light to overcome its high level of randomness. Yes the most skilled player will always win, but the experience of doing so falls short compared to other games of similar complexity or mechanism. (The fact that Monopoly is rated as less complex than Azul on BGG is a rant for another day.)

Meta: The mixing of the theme of cutthroat real estate management and the presentation as a family game contributes to the muddy feeling that is the experience of playing Monopoly. I would argue that this disconnect is a large contributor to the 'house rules' phenomenon— families are attempting to make the game feel more friendly. This oral tradition makes the game even longer, preventing many players from ever discovering the strategy of gameplay. This in turn results in fewer board games getting played by families who 'bounce off' of Monopoly. After all, based on their experience board games are long and tedious. And after around 90 years on the market, many casual players are not able to distinguish 'familiar' from 'fun.' This is doubly true for players who haven't played a game published since 1990—they don't know how board games have evolved to be faster, easier to learn, and more accessible to families. 

Conclusion: Monopoly is a middling strategy game with mismatched mechanics and poor production quality masquerading as a pretty bad family game. However, there are plenty of people who love it and play competitively (including in tournaments). While I don't enjoy it, I do enjoy plenty of other games that are poorly designed. Enjoyment of 'low quality' entertainment is widespread in every form of media. Whether enjoyment of a piece of media renders discussions about its 'badness' moot is best left alone for now. The facts of the matter are that there are thousands of games better than Monopoly but people are still allowed to like what they like. 

Abstraction, Representationalism, & Choice

Today, I am not burying the lede: Do not expect your audience to do the work you are unwilling to do. 

I hope a major take away from this blog in general is to pay attention to the details, because a design lives and dies by whether all the details serve the whole experience. This post is a specific admonition regarding the thematic content of a game design. 

Let's define some terms. In this post (but not everywhere in the board game world), abstract will be used to mean themeless. Representational refers to images/ideas that are not abstract. Representation refers to who is depicted by themes and how they are depicted. 

There are two modes of lazy thought in theme/narrative crafting. One is that everyone can imagine themselves as the main character, regardless of what that character looks like. (I won't be delving into this, but there is a lot of interesting literature on diversity in children's toys and childhood development if you've never explored the idea.) The other is that in order for everyone to be represented, no one should be represented. This is the idea I want to explore in this post. 

First off, this argument only comes up in discussions of the representation of marginalized people in board games, never with white male characters. The inconsistency automatically makes this argument suspect. However, there are few lessons we can mine by taking this argument in good faith and seeing if it has anything to offer. 

Let us assume that those arguing for greater abstraction are not actually arguing for fully abstract games. It seems unlikely that the argument is meant to extend to Agricola, Scythe, or Pandemic, stripping them of any and all theme. Rather this argument is presented as way to avoid specific character details in board game design. If you never see what the main character looks like, you can imagine yourself in the lead role. (Reminder, do not expect your audience to do the work you are unwilling to do.)

The first problem we are presented with in this scenario is boring art. You can't have character art if you are avoiding depicting characters. And not every game calls for aliens or anthropomorphic animals. Imagine Agricola with sheep wearing clothes tending smaller sheep in pens- all right for a kid's game, but absurd in a game for adults. (Again, designs with European-looking characters rarely receive this call for abstraction.)  A lack of character art that represents what the characters are doing in the game can do a game real disservice. Some games require representational imagery. Art helps explain and contextualize the rules. Not every game can be abstract, especially when theme/art helps reduce the time it takes to learn the game, in addition to adding a layer of fun on its own. So clearly, we cannot simply do away with character art altogether OR make every character a rubbery alien. What then? (Do not expect your audience to do the work you are unwilling to do.)

Some people will insist that diversity should make sense based on the world-building of the game. To these people, I invite them to research the difference between soft world-building and hard world-building.  There is no rule that says that every detail of your world has to make perfect sense to the viewer. In fact, a certain amount of fun can be lost if you insist on purity of lore over making choices that make the game better. 

The flip side is simply adding in representation in the art alone. Many publishers are doing this and I don't believe there is anything wrong with having more visibly diverse characters. Mostly harmless; somewhat helpful; doesn't go far enough.

Now we are getting to what I really want to address. The benefit of having representation in games is not merely so players feel seen. We can adjust the character art of the same zombie/pirate/space games all day long and never really see something new in the hobby. The real benefit of diverse characters is the opportunity for diverse stories. Yes, there are huge pitfalls if you try to tell a story using someone else's culture—(I have seen people using the 'abstraction' argument to people trying to design games that represent their own culture; not to mention, people praised for cultural appropriation.)—but that doesn't mean the only other option is abstraction. In addition to cultural consultants, co-designers, and research, there is also going out and talking to people. Especially if you are reading this, you have access to a huge diversity of thought and experience via the internet. Do the work to tell better stories. 

If you choose to stick closely to your lived experience, you still have stories to tell that no one else can. Designing games—telling stories—where you have something to say that hasn't been said before is ART. Make art. Make art only you can make. Engage your themes. There is a reason certain themes are so popular. (Zombies address our fears of overpopulation, for instance.) Understand the emotional connection of theme to audience/player. Board games are about relationships: player to player, score to score, area to area, piece to piece. There is design room within the constraints of a board game for more emotion, more theme, more stories, more relationships than what we have seen thus far. (See also: any other post on this blog.)

However, do not expect your audience to do the work you are unwilling to do. You cannot have a deep, resonant theme or a good story or an exciting game if you do not put in the work. Do not hope your audience will fill in the gaps for you. Here's the thing about audiences—they have a choice in how to engage. Some will only engage with your design as if it is abstract. Some will read every word of the lore. Some will engage critically, like a reviewer. Some will compare your game to your body of work. Some will compare it to other offerings in the genre. Some will only engage in the binary of fun/not fun. You cannot control how every player engages with your game, but by choosing to abstract you remove options of engagement (and potential fun) from your players. 

I believe that in order for board games to continue to grow and evolve that games need art, need stories, need emotion and meaning. My advice: do the work.