The reason I titled this Chasing 1% is because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where and how I choose to improve as a Games Person, or Person What Makes Games And Sells Them. Even how you choose to phrase this is an ambiguity, and parsing out my personal challenges with expressing things in terms of I Am and the manifold layers of sin and pride around it doesn’t make it any easier. Let’s pretend I’m saying this decisively and clearly, here: I’m A Game Designer.
And I want to talk to you about ways we make ourselves worse at making games.
Specifically, what I’m thinking about the most lately is the stuff I don’t want to do. When designing games, I make a point of telling people to find what you least like doing, then design to do that the least. I maintain that this is a good idea for design. Design is, in simplest terms, the way you create an object so it interfaces with a human being. Game design is how you make your game interface with humans. In good design, people intuitively use pieces, the experience of an object can sometimes explain itself, there’s all sorts of good stuff about design in books like The Design of Everyday Things, or if you’re really lazy, this Vox/99 Percent Invisible video. But this isn’t about design any more.
The next step after you’ve made a game is connecting that game to a person. A good design will help, sure – if you’ve made a game with good, nice tactile pieces or a visual element that people love or a play experience that leaps out or whatever that will help once you have put someone in front of your piece. I’m not going into the long structure of how to market but rather want to point to and address the point I find myself most tripping up:
When are you working to make your game only 1% better? Is that the best use of your time?
Look, I hate Scribus. I really do. Scribus has an interface designed by moon robots, or something, it’s just totally alien to the way I feel things should work. Buttons are sticky or unreliable or it forgets what text you’ve got selected if you move in the wrong way and it doesn’t do responsive representation when you’re changing a style and look. None of that matters. Because right now, Scribus is the best tool I have for making game manuals to the standard Fox expects. I put off learning Scribus to instead focus on refining other parts of my games, and in some cases, for the better. But now, at the point of it… I kinda have to learn Scribus. I have to learn Scribus because I need to be able to do the DTP part of manual design myself. That’s a place to better focus my efforts. Maybe the result will be realising that I can’t internalise these lessons well enough, maybe I’ll decide that no, Microsoft Word and PDF stitching and Gimp is good enough: I don’t rightly know. The point is, I’m avoiding working on Scribus entirely and instead, lately, sluicing effort into… refining the finest points of pixels on Wobbegong designs.
I’m skipping out on writing ad copy until the last minute.
I’m neglecting to make Youtube Videos until after the product is ready to go.
There’s a process and a cycle and I keep finding myself dragging my feet on these useful, secondary activities while I instead tinker with the primary activity to make it 1% better.
There’s this silly meritocratic lie we have going on that is all success is a function of quality, which is nonsense. We live in a society that genuinely doesn’t know what quality is – look at Arctic Scavengers, a game widely and largely regarded as a brilliant classic that also couldn’t shift units at all until Shut Up & Sit Down randomly did an episode about it. Arctic Scavengers was a great product, and it eventually got attention, but it wasn’t Its Quality that burst out of it, it was luck. It was lucky that the one guy who randomly bought a copy to give it a try on a lark was Quinton Smith.
You making your game 1% better will not yield 1% more people playing it. You will gain a load more people playing it by putting that last diminishing-return 1%’s effort into things like contacting people and posting on forums to get attention and engaging with media folks and making advertising copy that doesn’t suck.
But it’s so comforting to just chase that 1%.
And then we don’t have to scare ourselves by trying to, y’know
Put ourselves out there.
Alternatively, and hypothetically, you can hire marketers and advertisers to do that for you and if you can afford it, godspeed and good luck to you. I wouldn’t know my arse from my elbows on that front. I personally favour the methodology that works for me so far, which is being able to share the game with a human makes them more likely to buy it.
One final point before I trundle off, valuing your product.
In Australia, the minimum wage is about seventeen dollars. Round it up to twenty to be nice. Okay, so at the barest minimum you can consider a person’s time as worth roughly twenty dollars an hour. Probably much more, but that’s a good minimum. With that in mind, if I charge you ten bucks for a game you play with a friend for half an hour, you’ve paid ten bucks for an hour of entertainment – between you. If you play it twice, that’s even better.
You don’t need to make games people will play forever (though obviously, fun if you could!). What you want to make is games people will play to get their money’s worth. And if they play it once or twice, if they enjoy it for half an hour: You have broken even. If you have a game for four or more players, and it takes an hour, and they all have fun – like, that’s eighty dollars’ worth of fun your product created. You can probably afford to charge twenty bucks for that.
It’s hard to get past this roadblock that considers our own art worthless. But don’t. It’s okay to give people a bit of fun for a little while, and anything above that is bonus. The people who play your games two or three or five or ten times – they’re the people you’ll hang on to.