Any game (or any other text, but games here) that someone (let’s call her the publisher now, though things get muddy if we talk about specific cases) produces, has some objective. I’m going to discuss a small set of possible objectives, so let’s be clear right at the start here: I am talking about game texts (not games in the abstract — the set of rules shared by the tables’ hive mind that are executed in play) whose objective is to be played.

There are other objectives and the difference can be subtle. It’s possible to have an over-arching objective of making money and still wind up with an objective of play en route: getting played is part of the marketing strategy, for example. Some game texts do not have this marketing strategy and so may not have play as part of their list of objectives. These publishers should ignore the rest of this essay. Play as an objective can also be arrived at as a simple matter of artistic integrity (and I’ll have nothing to do with cynics who scoff at artistic integrity) — it’s not unreasonable for someone who loves designing games to hold the goal of seeing that game played higher aloft than the goal of turning a buck.

So, some publishers have as a critical goal maximising the amount that their game gets played. That’s what I’m talking about here now. If you aren’t interested in how you get games played, move on.

Getting a game played is a sieving process. There are several obstacles that have to be navigated by a prospective player (actually there are two quite separate sieve stacks but I only care about one right now), and each is equally important (mathematically — each reduces your audience by a percentage and multiplication just works that way). All are not equally easy to achieve. Here are your layers, roughly:

Awareness: this is not actually part of this sieve because awareness of the game is the objective of a marketing strategy. It’s super important, but we will take it as read here that we are talking about people who are already aware of and have some desire for the game. We’re talking about obstacles to play now.

Distribution. The percentage of people who might play who can actually get the game. If you can’t get it you can’t play it (not strictly true, but that’s in the other stack — people who play someone elses game, taught by that someone else — and that one is much easier to get large numbers through, but the source may be dependent on the output of this stack).

Readership. Of all the people who got the book, only some of them will read it through. Some will never open it. Some will try to read it and shelve it before getting far. In order to get the owner to play, they have to read it. You care about people reading it.

Comprehension. A subset of the people that read the whole book will understand it. Now this one is tricky — some play can happen with partial understanding. Sometimes a game is even improved by partial understanding¹. But if it’s incomprehensible, it doesn’t get played.

Enthusiasm. The readers who understood the game now need to sell it to their table. The reader can’t² play by herself. So the text needs to deliver enthusiasm that can be delivered to others.

Teachability. That’s a crap word. But even if the table is enthusiastic, the reader still needs to deliver the rules in such a way that the enthusiasm is sustained, otherwise the evening’s play will fall flat. So some percentage of games that get this far will halt before play gets a grip. Now a big factor in teachability is in the capabilities of the teacher, so the control the text has over this is limited. But not zero. The text can provide ways to teach.

Fun. Finally, that session has to have been fun in order to get more play. This is different than insisting that the game itself must be fun. The session in which everyone was learning the game, the very first session, has to be fun enough to create enthusiasm for more play. After that it’s largely out of the hands of the game text.

Okay, so given this sieve and given my personal interests, I want to talk about one layer that gets short shrift by publishers who ostensibly have the goal that this sieve stack implies: play. That sieve is readership.

There are several factors that limit the likelihood that someone will read a text through. Some are more important than others and some can be mitigated by others, so I’ll talk about the roles that are at the end of the process. So I’m not talking about whether the writing is fun to read, though that’s a factor, because there’s a gateway after the author that’s supposed to force the text back for revision if it’s not happening: the editor. The other major role is the guy that delivers the editor’s output to the page: the layout artist. These two roles are you last chance to retain readers.

Obviously I have a specific axe that’s making all these sparks. I just read a book I won’t name (because I don’t think personalising this criticism is valuable) that I did not read because both of these roles failed. I suspect this is a hugely fun game, but I will not get to play it unless I can get down the other sieve stack, where someone I know and love does read it and decide to teach it. It’s full of cool ideas, but they are not delivered to me.

First, the word count is about twice what it needs to be. The text itself is turgid and full of itself and goes on forever. I have some sympathy for this, because I write like that too. But the editor should have demanded that the text be cut and cut and cut again. A lower word count reduces the overall size of the book, reduces the cost of layout, and increases the options available to the layout artist.

Now you can’t just cut anything — I mean, if it takes two hundred thousand words to deliver the concept, then that’s what it takes. But a good editor can cut a lot from the best writer. This is why director’s cuts suck so hard — even great (possibly especially great) directors desperately need an editor who can smack them down. For a game to get read through, the editor needs to cut and preserve voice. Bored readers stop reading.

Second, the layout is just plain aggravating to read. Now there are a couple of common problems with layout, especially in independent titles. The first is layout that just plain sucks — the layout artists doesn’t know anything about design and has as a priority getting words on paper. This problem is not really an interesting one because there’s no sense of disappointment for me — bad layout is just bad layout. It’s obvious.

The more insidious kind of layout problem is where the artist has crafted a beautiful page that is aggravating to read. This is seriously disappointing and makes me drop a book just about instantly. A book with beautiful fonts that are too small ore stuffed into lines that are too long or that impinge on the edge of the page too closely is just about the saddest thing I can try and fail to read. Viewed from enough distance, each page is a work of art, but in the process of reading it (and again, reading it is what it’s for — a priority goal) it fails. It’s a special kind of ugliness, like a pretty diagram that fails to deliver its information.

Okay so there you go. For a book to get played it needs to get read. For it to get read it needs and editor with authority and nerve, and it needs a layout artist who cares foremost about delivering text³.

I look forward to revised editions of several games I have not played.

–BMurray