As I said on Tuesday, I’m aiming to post something on both Thursdays and Mondays. Each day will have a different focus, and I’ll get to Monday on Monday, but today’s Thursday, so it’s time to talk about what goes here.
Essentially, Thursdays will be the sort of discursive article I’ve posted before, with one tweak. Over the years I’ve taken an increasingly broad view of what’s important in game design, and creativity in a wider sense. This is partly based on the idea of gesamtkunstwerk that I discussed way back when, mixed with my more recent thoughts on transmedia as a way of conceptualising projects on a meta level. I can’t remember whether I’ve talked about that, so maybe that combination needs an article of its own.
In simple terms, this broadening of topic means that I’ll be discussing creativity in art and writing as well as game design. All, fundamentally, in the service of creating worlds and telling stories in them. Just different mediums to do it.
In addition to the possible discussion of combining transmedia and gesamtkunstwerk as a creative philosophy, I expect to touch on topics like points systems in army builders, design vs marketing sweet spots in player counts, why it’s so hard to come up with unique games (and why that’s not terrible), plus I’ll be looking at some individual creative mechanics and techniques, and possibly take a look at some Kickstarter campaigns to see what lessons they can impart.
And what of my own projects? At one point I thought that they’d be the focus of this blog, and now I’m thinking otherwise. They’re bound to be mentioned, but I want Quirkworthy.com to be a more discursive mix of theoretical discussions and practical advice. Maybe a project will be a useful example to demonstrate a point, and maybe not. See how we go.
Finally, if you’ve got any thoughts on topics you’d like to see me write about, please drop a comment below. Always happy to hear suggestions.
Quirkworthy 
Something I would love to hear more about is your time working in and around Games Workshop.
What drew me into the hobby at an early age was the package that Warhammer Fantasy, in particular, pushed out. When I was a nipper I the mid to late 90s the game was almost incidental. The artwork, stories and lore in White Dwarf and the army books was catnip to me back then.
As time went on I was always fascinated by Necromunda and Mordheim even though I never actually played either of those games. They seem to me, by design, to be a way of telling stories with miniatures before they are miniatures games. I reasonably sure that it was around the time that these games were abandoned by the top brass that GW started to falter.
This seems to tie into the idea of gesamtkunstwerk and I’d be very interested in if there was such a philosophy at GW back then and how it affected the way you and others worked.
I wasn’t planning on talking about my time in GW specifically. Lessons I learned there may appear in the context of a wider discussion on mechanics or best practice, if they’re relevant, but I think that period has been rehashed plenty, as riccy diccy mentions below.
However, to answer your immediate question, GW’s philosophy on world building and rules development was never expressed in that way. By the time I was involved, it was more that there was a book of holy writ that cannot be changed, except when it was. A handful of people gate kept the sanctity of the lore, and any changes had to get their approval.
Now you mention it, you could think of this auteur-style development as gesamtkunstwerk, and that may be subtly influencing my thinking now. There’s no conscious link though.
Something I really don’t want to hear about is your time at Games Workshop. It’s not just that the games GW produced are/were (for various reasons not having anything to do with you in particular) often only so-so, there’s also way too much GW-related content on the interwebs. Every dog who ever worked on GW games or minis has given plenty of interviews, it’s just not interesting any more except to the most obsessive of fans.
I agree. I’ve been asked by various people to do interviews on just this topic, and I’m just not very interested in going over the dimly-remembered details of something I did 30 years ago. I’d rather take what I learned and see how I can move forward. I’m entirely uninterested in dishing any dirt.
There were a few lessons that I learned then and still apply today, and I may touch on them in a wider article if I think they’re helpful to others.
That said, I get the nostalgia folk of a certain age have for that period, and I’ve heard many times about how GW made a mistake moving away from X or Y. It’s an unresolvable debate as it’s emotion vs business, so both sides are using different measuring sticks for success.
Really looking forward to hearing the broader theories that tie these seemingly disparate elements together- story, game experience, mechanics. I say seemingly because while they should all work together, they often are designed in parallel by different people (or even worse, the same person for indie games…) and end up tripping over each others’ feet instead of working harmoniously.
True.
We’ve all seen examples of the various threads being poorly woven, and I don’t think there’s a magic bullet. I suspect that many of the issues are the same as with any business where different departments don’t communicate properly.
I’ll have a ponder and see what I can say about how they work in games in particular.
That would be great actually, considering your experience it would be very enlightening. I’m particularly interested on how mechanics can spring from lore, once there is a solid foundation of them in the first place; how organically an idea can be expressed mathematically and in play experience, instead of duct-taping a bunch of rules together.
Thanks for answering the comment, by the way!
The old theme-first or mechanics-first discussion is related to this. Definitely worth exploring.
Thanks, I will check the theme-first discussion out!
(Sorry if this doesn’t show up properly- not sure if wordpress allows 5-deep comments)
Glad to see you back in the saddle, my friend. 🙂
Oh Hey, good to see you’re back Jake. I used to be an avid follower of your blog back in the old Dreadball days!