Careful note-taking is central to the design process. Overload is inevitable for a busy designer without a systematic approach to keeping thoughts and ideas organized. Even a designer working on a single project will run into trouble without some way to keep track of successful changes and failed experiments

Below are some guidelines I’ve found useful for note-taking. I hope you find them valuable as well.

1. Write everything down.

This might sound obvious, but things are often obvious because they’re important, and this is important. Don’t assume that you’ll remember anything. Any time you make any sort of progress on a design, write your thoughts down.

I didn’t understand how critical this would be until I started really pursuing design seriously. At that point it became clear that game design doesn’t always involve fretting over and polishing one game continuously. Sometimes that was because I had an idea that I wanted to follow up on right away; more often it was because I knew a concept might not pan out, and so I wanted to have another project “on deck.” Whatever the cause, I found that I was usually working on two or three games at once.

Nor do I have the impression that I’m unusual. If anything, I think I have fewer games in progress than many designers!

Working in parallel like this makes it hard to remember where a design is, what you’ve already tried, and what you meant to try next. This is especially true when a game has lain dormant for a while; coming back to it can feel like starting from scratch. If you don’t have good notes, starting from scratch is exactly what you’ll be doing!

Having a written record guarantees that improvements to a game don’t get lost. It’s incredibly frustrating to know that you solved a problem . . . if only you could remember how. Writing everything down guarantees that you never have to repeat your work.

2. Create a rulebook whenever you’re ready to stop.

Given that switching back and forth between projects is part of the job, it’s vital (a) to retain progress made on current game until it’s time to come back to it, and (b) to get up to speed on the next project as quickly as possible. Written notes help enormously with (a), but not so much with (b); figuring a game out from working notes is frustrating and increases the chance that you’ll miss something. It’s therefore extremely valuable to actually write out a rulebook before setting a project down, so that you can easily re-learn the latest and greatest version of the game when you’re ready to start working on it again.

Putting together a rulebook for a project recently saved me a lot of grief. I wanted to try out a change to Lines of Questioning—but LoQ has already undergone many changes, and I couldn’t remember off the top of my head exactly where the rules stood. This was my own game, and I didn’t know how to play! Without a rulebook I would either have had to reassemble the standard version from notes jotted on legal pads—with the concomitant risk of error—or redo the hours of work and many playtests necessary to hammer it out a second time.

Bjarne Stroustroup, creator of C++, says in his introductory programming textbook that properly documenting code isn’t just a kindness to other people who might read it. It’s also a kindness to yourself, since you may well be called on to maintain your code months or years later. The same principle holds true in game design. Document your designs with a rulebook; you’ll be grateful when you resume work on them.

3. Keep your records.

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to see, not just the current state of a design, but how it got there as well. Maybe you’ve decided that some changes aren’t right, and you want to revert a game to a previous version; maybe an idea that didn’t seem useful or important suddenly has new promise. Holding onto notes and old rulebooks ensures that you can turn back the clock.

The easiest way to keep these documents without your workspace (be it a physical desk or a computer desktop) becoming a mess is simply to organize by date. Admittedly, this isn’t much of an organizational method; knowing that a certain set of rules is from 8-11-15, or that some playtest notes are from 12-24-13, doesn’t tell you anything about what they contain. Something is better than nothing, though, and having a system begets putting things in the system. If you intend to store things by date you’re more likely to store them at all, and that’s the most important thing.

A more powerful, albeit more time consuming, method is to organize by topic. Notes on player powers go in one file; notes on mission cards go in a different one; board layout gets a third. If you’re willing to keep this system up, it provides easy, direct access to relevant information. Just make sure to have a comprehensive rulebook so that you don’t end up relearning (or, worse, teaching) from a slew of documents!

Maintaining old notes and rulebooks is the kind of task that seems like unnecessary drudgery until you really need to be able to refer back to them, at which point you’re happy you went to the trouble. Then you forget how relieved you were in that moment, and it goes back to feeling like drudgery. 😉 Try to hold onto the joy of having what you needed a the exact moment when you needed it, and resist the temptation just to recycle your old notes. Sooner or later you’ll be glad to have them.

Carved in stone

I’m always hesitant to say that someone else should work the way I do; there are lots of ways to be productive. Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying that anyone involved in game design who doesn’t have an eidetic memory will benefit from taking lots of notes, maintaining rulebooks for their designs, and holding on to their work documents. The time investment is significant, but the efficiency gains are tremendous.

Managing complexity is usually viewed as an issue exclusively for designers. That’s not unreasonable; players do not, as a rule, have much ability to make a game more or less complicated. It’s possible, however, to envision ways to give them that ability–and there would be concrete benefits to doing so.

As an example of how this might work, consider word count on cards. I think it’s generally agreed that cards with more words on them are harder to parse, tend to involve more elaborate effects, and are more complicated than those with fewer. Designers are aware of this, and try to keep word count down where possible.

Unfortunately, that approach can only go so far. Looking from the designer’s perspective at cards as a group doesn’t address what will be in a certain deck, or which cards will appear in any particular game. Thus, designers have a further challenge: not only do they need to minimize word count overall, they must try to anticipate how the high- and low-word count cards will come up in play. It’s no use saying “90% of cards are very simple” if the remaining 10% are both extremely complex and enormously popular.

What’s more, different players have different tolerances for complexity. Experienced, highly invested players might find it easy to understand even the most difficult cards, while a parent playing with his or her six-year-old could easily wish for the simplest possible version of the game. It’s hard for a designer in the predictive, top-down position to make a game work for all of these players, even if the game is theoretically capable of accommodating them.

Why not, then, approach the problem from the other side? If word count becomes an explicit, player-facing part of the game, it becomes a lot easier to anticipate how much of it there will be. Word count might thus be limited to, say, 200 words per deck (or market, or tableau, or whatever the game has). Just as with any resource, players can decide how to spend it: a few really wordy cards mixed into a generally very simple environment, or a lot of one-step-above basic cards, or any other combination. The average level of complexity will be consistent no matter how players approach the game.

Of course, word count is a blunt instrument for measuring complexity–but there are other tools available. Each card could have the grade level of its text evaluated. (This isn’t as intensive a process as it sounds; Word has this kind of evaluation as a built-in feature.) The limit could then be based on the number of grade levels overall, or on the highest grade level permitted for any one card. Cards could alternatively be categorized based on the number of steps required by their text, or the number of action windows they implicate. An appropriate standard could be chosen for each game.

Handling complexity in this fashion also enables an opt-in approach that helps players customize their experience. Long-time players can push the limit up to allow for new strategies; parents can directly set the bar at the appropriate level for their kids.

Complexity doesn’t, then, need to be the province of designers alone, nor does it need to be unpredictable. There are techniques out there for measuring it objectively, and once measured it can be treated as a resource under player control, with maximums for individual components and/or for a game as a whole. Approaching complexity in this way could benefit designers, who might be able to say more confidently that they know what the play experience will be like, and has particular advantages for the players themselves, who would be able to tune an aspect of the game that is critically important to enjoyment.

(I’m on vacation this week; this post is going up automatically. I’ll respond to any comments when I get back!)

There’s a predicate issue we often skip right over when balancing a game: who will the balance affect? Who are the “players” that the game needs to treat fairly? The answer can dictate a great deal about a game’s design.

Certainly, most of the time the answer is obvious. The players are the ones sitting at the table, or in front of their computers. Game balance affects them, and they’re the ones we’re concerned about.

However, the people immediately making the decisions and pushing the components around aren’t the only possibilities. For example, consider the courtroom. Many people see game-like elements in a trial: there’s strategy, tactics, resources, winners and losers. However, the players aren’t just the lawyers. The clients are playing too–sometimes for life-changing (or even life-ending) stakes. The “game” of law needs to be balanced for these players who often have little opportunity to influence what’s going on.

That might seem an unsolvable problem–how can a game be made fair for players who can’t leverage their skill?–but the writers of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure found partial answers thanks to some out-of-the-box thinking. In essence, they introduced co-op elements into the law, requiring attorneys to, for example, provide certain important information to the opposing party. When those co-op aspects of the law work well, they eliminate a number of “gotchas” and ensure that the clients have a chance to put on their case.

We might alternatively look toward spectators as potential players. Many games are explicitly designed for spectator appeal; basketball, for example, has on occasion changed its rules in part because the game was trending in a direction that was functional but boring. Thinking about balance in terms of the viewers might be more useful than thinking about it in terms of the people actually engaged in the sport, when those viewers generate multiple billions of dollars every year.

Game design is, to some extent, about creating an experience. It’s therefore sensible to ask “whose experiences?” Always ask that question; the answer might be surprising, and might push a design in fascinating directions.

As a Philly native, I’m usually rooting for bad sports teams. The Eagles are often more worth following for the soap opera than for the on-field play. The Sixers are, charitably, rebuilding. The Flyers haven’t been the Broad Street Bullies for a long time, and the Phillies are in such dire straits that their manager recently couldn’t call for a relief pitcher because someone had left the bullpen phone off the hook!

Here’s the thing, though: rooting for those teams is a lot of fun. It’s not disappointing when they lose, and it’s a thrill when they win. What’s more, talking about a lousy team is way more fun than talking about a great one; there’s more room for disagreement, more topics to hash out, and more debate to be had.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, either. It’s long established that people like to root for the underdog. We can see that in every sports movie for kids; they feature plucky come-from-behind wins, not the crushing dominance of the best squad.

Given all of that, I’m surprised that more attention hasn’t been given to designing multiplayer games that are intentionally unbalanced. We have imbalance in professional sports, and it makes them more fun, not less. Why not tap into that same dynamic in other genres?

For example, imagine a two-player game in which the players choose their sides. One side is visibly stronger at the outset: it has more pieces, a better position, whatever. However, both players have the same victory condition: to get X points, or to remove all the opponent’s pieces.

This game would absolutely be unfair–but I’m not at all convinced it would be unfun. Whoever picks the stronger side is likely to win, and everybody likes winning. Furthermore, winning could still be a challenge and something to take pride in.

The player on the weak side will probably lose. What he or she gets in return is the chance to be the underdog. Losing isn’t a big deal, and winning means he or she shot the moon!

In this design, then, fun would be decoupled from fairness. The players would know in advance who was likely to win, but that wouldn’t matter because each one would have entertaining things to do. Rather than the fun coming from the players competing for victory, the fun would come from each player helping the other play out a great experience: the player who begins the game with the advantage gets to be the skilled master, while the player who starts out weak gets to be the never-say-die hero.

It would be important, of course, that the players in this game pick their sides. Not everyone enjoys struggling uphill; those players shouldn’t be forced to be the underdog. For those who like the challenge, though, I think this could be an exciting way to make losing fun. If a player isn’t expected to win, but will be hugely rewarded for doing so, then there’s entertainment just in giving it a try.

Obviously, this doesn’t work for every game or every circumstance. Strict tests of skill, for example, should start on a level playing field. Not every design needs to be for tournament play, however, and we don’t need to let the requirements of tournaments limit the avenues we explore. Sports have taught us that it can be fun to start from a bad position; other types of games might benefit from exploring how to apply that lesson in other contexts.