I have skipped a few days here because the Ennies have spurred some interesting business for me to deal with and it’s pretty much all I can talk about and, since I can’t talk about it all, it’s just best for everyone if I don’t even sit near a computer.

Now, however, one deal is in the bag and so I can talk about it. RetroPunk Game Design out of Brazil has acquired the license to translate Diaspora into Portuguese and publish that translation in PDF and hardcopy. These guys are great to deal with and just recently snagged some Evil Hat titles as well, and so we’re very excited about this development. I heard someone else got a deal for a Hebrew translation and now my inner typography geek is … aroused … over that possibility but I’m not actually pursuing it. What could be cooler than a Diaspora for the Diaspora though?

Anyway, I know we have at least a couple of Brazilian fans who are cheering, though I have to warn you that the finished work is a long ways away. Translation is not easy or cheap, friends.

I have a playtest session coming up tomorrow so I’ll have something more amusing then I expect. Until then, as one Brazilian fan shouted at me, sinistro! Which I think means, “you evil fuck.” Not sure.

I did a ton of fiddling with my Terrible Grant® today, mostly working with some ideas for building a VSCA magazine as discussed in my previous post. Some cool stuff is coming together here and certainly having a full version of Adobe CS5 is making a big difference. And so this isn’t a long note, it’s just a loving one. This is for Mr. Terrible. This is the beginning of the evil I will use the grant to wreak upon the world.

Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue have already weighed in. I don’t have anything new to add except possibly my opinion which I think is completely uninteresting. Facts will carry the day and this is clearly a skirmish in the war that will occupy the next several years in the publishing business. The expected (and apropos) analogy with dinosaurs and mammals has been made repeatedly. I believe I alluded to it myself last year sometime.

The only thing I really care about is the fact that I enjoy layout as an art form and the electronic book market, given the direction it’s heading, is poised to change what that is a very great deal. And that’s scary. It means that just as the tools we use for layout are becoming mature, the game is changing under them and again layout is complicated. Complicated is interesting. I’m cool with that. Just scared.

Anyway, is making me re-think Deluge as a product and that’s also a good thing because it lets me address my release fear by not releasing. It’s currently designed as a hybrid product — a PDF that’s built on a US Letter page scaffold with the recognition that some significant body of readers will want to print it. It looks pretty printed — even clever — right now. It also works as a PDF. But as it is an experiment in current electronic publishing, it seems Steve Jobs has insisted that I make it work on a third axis. Okay fine.

So, it has to work in print. It has to work as a functional PDF (that is, printed and on screen). It has to work as a re-flowable form like MOBI or ePub. ePub is a supposedly heavily supported (partially designed) by Adobe. Yet the ePub output from InDesign looks like crap by default, assuming you concentrated on making a cool looking page. Pages are primary to InDesign’s operation and yet the ePub output has no page. You have to think in terms of the “story” and ignore the page for this to work (and yes that means making images inline, which almost always sucks and a half). Okay, I can do this.

Paper and PDF are paginated. ePub (and whatever I convert to from there) is not. I want to have products cross-correlate, so I think Toph’s page insertion scheme is ideal here — at the beginning of each page, the text will contain a reference to the page number, so a reflowed version will identify each page as it would have started in the paged version. I will try to automate this with InDesign and have some ideas. This is fairly inobtrusive (compared with treating the reflowed text as canonical and numbering some fundamental unit of the text, like paragraphs, which is slicker but uglier) but not without controversy. In particular, the implicit declaration that the paged version is canonical strikes me as wrong.

Images have to go inline. That means my lovely margin usage will vanish and images will simply interrupt the text. I can cope.

Sidebars have to go inline. Lots of electronic formats support sidebars but they all suck. The problem is that there’s just not enough real-estate on screen to give sidebars the function that they have on a page — they are either completely intrusive or they are a push-button away and switch between dominant and non-existent. These choices suck. Instead I think I will re-write so that they are not sidebars. This has worked for technical books for ages. Sidebars may be mostly a gimmick anyway–I’m not convinced of their utility beyond breaking up the page and providing visual landmarks.

Cross-references have to be logical rather than literal because they need to become actual links. This is all good.

The deepest issue is one of legibility — it’s not clear to me that a single set of choices will create a legible document when printed on US Letter as when viewed on the screen in print-preview (PDF) form as when viewed in a reflowable form. I can actually ignore the reflowable version — it’s pretty much guaranteed to be legible because its presentation is reader and user dependent.  But for the two presentations that are most deeply at odds, there are serious issues. I’m pretty sure, for example, that it will pay off to use a larger typeface than I would for print-only target because the sorts of devices used to view PDFs are myriad. But this is likely to make print ghastly and paper-intensive unless the intended print form is two-up or four-up. Can I make that assumption? I suppose I can declare it in the product.

The bottom line, though, is that doing layout just became a very different kind of job for RPGs. Novelists have it easy — one typeface and every page the same shape. No diagrams, no tables (ugh tables — that’s going to suck too), and one typeface. But with all these things there are so many opportunities for the RPG layouterizer to make elegant and beautiful choices. Most of which are undermined by the new technology. I think, though, that honestly Apple and Amazon have together changed the landscape.

It will be years before things shake out, but it’s clear that the shaking has started. And I am in a better position to be a mammal than a dinosaur. But fans of that analogy should keep clear in their heads that we still also have a lot of birds in this modern world. Recall that when mammals started eating their eggs, dinosaurs took to the air.

Predicting the future is a mug’s game. The best you can do is react, especially if you’re well positioned to do so cheaply.

–BMurray

I am going to publish the setting, Deluge, sometime in the next month or two. I did a bunch of new writing for it on the weekend and I feel inspired to do some artwork for it and I had fun experimenting with layout on it. So it’s fun, and you can have it if you want it. I want it — I’m playing it and having a great time.

Here are the four three experiments.

Systemless Experimentation

It’s an experiment in systemless setting design. Not just in whether or not that can be done — it’s been done often enough before that I see no essential controversy there — but whether there is a process for doing it. Is there a way to reliably take an idea and turn it into something others can and will use as a setting? So this process is pretty straightforward:

Describe the idea

Obviously you have to tell the audience what the setting is about. I’m looking at a very rapid development cycle here, so I’m not relying on writing a ton of exposition and fiction. I’m also using an original idea, so I can’t just point to existing canon and say, “like that.” Instead I am relying on the three solutions we used in Diaspora:  micro-fiction that delivers tiny scenes that illustrate how I feel about some aspect of the setting, mechanisms that deliberately create the tone I intend both in play and while reading, and a willingness to back away from stuff that I think is cool for the user to create.

Answer the question, “Who are these guys?”

Who are the agents in this place? Who will the players play? What kinds of characters live here that are worth pretending to be?

Answer the question, “What do they do?”

What do the characters do that’s fun? How do these activities chain together to form adventures? Why do the players care to pretend to do what the characters do? In Deluge we find the answer is (concisely) that they go on missions essential to the survival of communities that protect and love them. That last turns out to be important. Another post though.

The fact that they “go on missions” is not quite enough, though, and so there are mechanisms in Deluge that imply, suggest, bribe, and even bamboozle players into the mission mentality. Mission-driven gaming is one of the most profitable forms for me because you can get going so very fast and everyone knows what’s what right away. It’s why practically every MMO that makes a crapton of cash uses a quest scheme of some kind. And you can always excise it — if you sit down to play and describe the world and the players already know what they want to do, you can just sit back and watch it happen, regardless of whether or not a mission has been offered.

Answer the question, “Who opposes them?”

What is the nature of the conflicts that the characters will face but, more importantly, what are the agents on the other side of them? What are the monsters of this setting? In this setting the opposition takes many forms. The ultimate agents opposing humanity are the angels, but more immediately characters will confront other humans with opposing interests, wild animals, the environment itself, and the decaying ill-understood ruins of the old world.

This is tricky in a system-free setting because obviously you can’t provide stat blocks and stat blocks are part of what people expect to pay for. But you can talk about the kinds of mechanisms that need to come in to play for each form of opposition and you can talk vaguely about representation (these guys are strong and smart, but slow and ugly). So that’s a challenge.

Interface to systems

Finally, to be systemless, I choose to be explicit about where the user needs to attach her system. So throughout the document there are passages that are solely about ways to make the intended effect happen in any system, sometimes with examples from specific systems. Mostly, however, the concepts are general and the solutions will require a little work (but not a lot) from the user. The assumption underpinning this is that one person at every table (at least) loves this kind of thing. As evidence I offer the fact that most of the posts about Diaspora are about how to make it do something else. I expected that. I love that it came true. It might be an essential fact of populist role-playing games that they succeed when they facilitate mis-playing them.

Publication

Publication itself is going to be an experiment as well. I intend to publish Deluge solely as a PDF (I know you’ve read my opinions and blitherings about PDFs but a hallmark of experimentation is that it could come out either way — you don’t experiment when you believe you know the outcome with any certainty). I intend to make it cheap because it’s getting written whether I publish it or not because it’s in my head and trying to get out.

Perhaps oddly (but it’s my experiment so I can do what I want) I am laying it out as though it were destined for print. There are a few reasons for this, but foremost is that laying out for electronic use turns out to be a dull and aggravating job. It holds no artistic interest for me and the only academic interests in it have already been resolved and I see no need to re-explore them. Most of them stem from correlation between re-flowable and paged texts anyway, and this is not an issue here.

I am, however, laying it out as though it were destined for your printer. It will be on standard US Letter sized pages, though oriented in landscape, and it will use fonts and graphics that I have chosen partially for their functionality on the low resolution devices we have in our homes (and, secretly, our offices). It will assume double sided printing and binding, but only because that doesn’t hinder it much if you choose to print it single sided and staple the corner.

I will test its viability as a document viewed on a screen, but I don’t care if it works on my Kindle.

Licensing

Deluge will be licensed under a Creative Commons license allowing free use, modification, distribution and all that good stuff provided it’s not for commercial purposes. I’ll be selling it but you can give it away once you have it. I think there is plenty to be learned from this, though it will be hard to disassociate other factors in sales and availability. Ultimately the normalising number I will need is evidence of actual play, and you can’t command that and you can’t even know what percentage of actual play is reported. So it will be hard to draw conclusions from this unless the results are dramatic.

–BMurray

I wish I had a layout project with more width in the pages. 6×9 is a lovely format for actual use, but for layout it has few opportunities compared to, say, a big square page. Inevitably some things suffer — you can’t really afford luxurious (sometimes even adequate) margins without inflating the page count or becoming a little precious. There’s only a narrow range of sensible font sizes available. Notes, callouts, whatever — the marginalia that seem to be necessary for a game text — have a limited method before they dominate the primarey text box so much that they might as well be a part of it.

If I had, say, nine inches of page width to work with, I could give myself an inch of margin and still have a couple inches to set aside as an outer column for side notes. Luxury!

Well I don’t. But I have said in the past, in different contexts, that constraint is essential to real creativity, and so I take a dose of my own medicine and try to make it work. When setting Diaspora, I think we made a poor call on line length — I’d love to have just a little more white space on all four margins, actually. So in future I’ll take my margin and then see what I get rather than choose the margin to achieve a follow-on effect (like page count, say). The thin margins forced our sidebars to be inset, though, which I like — they start further out than the main text block and they head well inside the text block, forcing text to flow around them. That breaks things up nicely and has a more dynamic feel to it, which I think you want in a text that is not read-in-one-go fiction, like a paperback novel.

Still, for my next couple of projects I’m pretty sure I want to get a little space to breathe, and so I’ll be setting aside some margin at the expense of pages. I think I can get away with this because Soft Horizon will have a relatively low page count compared to Diaspora. This also gives me more freedom for font size and choice, leading, justification, and a dozen other things. But it also means that the book will have around 30% more pages than it would have if I worked in the tighter environment I did before. I think that’s okay — I really want to build I will want to own above all.

The other constraint I have at the moment is print quality. While Lulu has been pretty good (and, honestly, getting better all the time — the latest books I have are much nicer than the first ones I saw), it’s still a 300dpi service built for volume and efficiency over quality and beauty. That’s fine — I know what I’m getting into — but now I know better what that constraint really means and can adapt to it. So, for example, Soft Horizon will probably avoid grays because they just suck at 300dpi black and white because they are just arrays of black dots. And they look like it. Frankly, that’s pretty ugly. If I could get gray ink (which would be a colour) I’d do it, but then the cost is exactly the same as a full colour run. That would be fun but not cost effective through Lulu. Maybe a future project.

So no gray because of the print quality. That means I probably won’t do the impinging-sidebar thing, because the gray background I used there seems essential for it to work– the sidebars need to come forward away from the text.  It also means I’m paying more attention to the text itself, assuming a lower resolution print run. So I’d love to get above the 9 point I chose for Diaspora because that’s risky at lower resolution. Either that or (or maybe both) use a medium instead of book weight — I happened to be reading over the shoulder of a fellow commuter, and he was reading a book on design that was set in a medium weight serifed font and it looked wonderful. So that might fly.

Anyway, that’s all detail and I could go on and on about the choices I’m making for this new project, but the point is that the constraint has actually driven a great deal more creativity than it has halted. Certainly there are options that are not open to me, but in desiring the impossible and faced with the constraint I have, I’ve also had to think about things I would not have addressed otherwise — a medium weight type face is one, but also working entirely in black gives me the opportunity to really revel in that — to use a lot of black and build a really stark positive/negative page. The darker text feeds into that as well. Now I’m starting to see an overall feel for the work, which was lacking before. It’s becoming distinct.

I still want a big page project. I think, however, that when I get one I will create some artificial constraints (providing I don’t discover enough new ones) when that happens. I suspect that perfect freedom might not help the creative process at all, except insofar as I get to choose constraints (a blank page is perfect freedom in which to write, but I can still choose to use it to write a sestina). I’m reminded now of a book I have that is set such that every page has a block of text on it that is exactly the same height and width and appears to be fully justified, but on inspection we discover that it is actually ragged, but each line is crafted such that it is almost exactly the same length as every other line. It’s a beautiful book full of beautiful pages.

The text is kind of crap though. There’s a lesson there too.

–BMurray

Here’s my disclaimer: I am an amateur. I didn’t go to art school and I haven’t done a lot of work but I’ve read a lot and I think I have a competent eye for these things. I might not.

Okay, so that out of the way, someone asked me a short time ago to talk a little about how I choose a typeface. That’s a tall order because I don’t have a process, but I am prepared to talk (possibly at annoying length) about the things I care about and how I find what suits my cares. My primary sources are The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst and every book Edward Tufte ever wrote. Tufte doesn’t speak specifically about typography, but thinking about type in terms of his general advice about graphic design yields fruit.

First off, I’m not all that interested in titling fonts. That is not to say that they are unimportant, but only that I think they require less detailed attention to get right — they only see use in limited parts of the text, and their usage is primarily in terms of a single image (the cover, the chapter head, etc.) and not in terms of text that will be read. So while it’s interesting, it’s more of a general graphic design problem than a typography problem.

So let’s think instead about setting a large body of text spanning several pages and containing some structure. The minimum faces I’ll want for this are a good body face for the text and a good italic for emphasis. My first cut will be to use these for everything, modulating mostly size for structure. After a lot of playing around I may decide to add a new face for headings and maybe another face for callouts or notes. But getting started all I want is the body text and its italic.

That may sound weird because most people are used to every typeface having italic as a setting. Well, most faces come with an italic, but there’s no interesting way in which the italic form is part of the roman form. Sometimes they are related (sometimes the italic is just the roman skewed to the right) but they don’t need to be. At the barest beginning of my process I will try my preferred roman’s built-in italic. But I might change it.

So this is really, hacking down to the root, about choosing a roman typeface for the body text.

My first question to myself is, “What is the time period that the text implies?” That is, does the content of the text seem to dwell in a particular century? Some texts have obvious answers — a book about Victorian adventurers will suggest 19th century typography. Some texts have less obvious answers — say I was setting Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone. When is that? Failing a clear referent I will either try to imagine a suitable era or possibly use the author’s era (I think Elric can be set non-ironally using faces iconic to the 1970s).

Basically I am looking for some criterion that can be common between the text and the type. Because type has evolved over time, time is a good place to start. It’s not the only place, mind you. For example, a science-fiction project might be written today and might be about the year 2900, but if it’s a certain kind of science-fiction it might be best served by a nice legible sans-serif from the fifties or sixties — Univers, say, or Helvetica. Pushing the analogy (to the point that it’s an in-joke) further, I might choose a very modern version — like Alright Sans. Hrm, I’m still thinking in terms of time. Maybe that is crucial after all.

So once I have an era I research it — find texts from that period and find typefaces that originate from or are related to the era. Bringhurst’s books is brilliant for this because there is a chapter devoted to typefaces and includes plenty of historical information. This lets me find a specific face, but it also shows me examples of, say, a Carolingian typeface, that I can then use to look for similar or related faces.

Having found some exemplar fonts, I usually make a test sheet with the widest variations, setting a column of text about three inches by three inches set in 10 point, and eyeball them. I print at 300dpi, which is about the worst case my published product will go out at. I am looking for:

Legibility. How easy is it to read this block of text. Is it annoying? Okay? Fun?

Tone. Does the face delivery the tone the text wants to deliver? If it’s playful and dynamic, is the text? If it’s solid and dour, is the text?

Colour. Does the block of text, seen as a patterned rectangle rather than as words, create a pleasing decoration? Does it look good in a rectangle on my page?

Robustness at resolution. Do these elegant letterforms look as good at 300dpi as they did on my screen blown up to 15cm? Some humanist faces can get quite ugly if the variation between thick and thin is too extreme — the poor resolution will amplify the difference and suck.

I might fiddle with leading and and point size in order to get a feel for variations.

Then I pick one. I’m not using that one, necessarily. My next step is to discover what I will use and this can be a longer journey. I start by examining the technical details of the typeface I have (assuming I have it — sometimes that prior research is done with a photocopier). My ideal font is in OTF format and has a complete set of features. Barring that, I personally care about:

Ligatures. If ffi looks stupid and there’s no ligature, I need a new font. If the text seems to demand decorative ligatures and I don’t have them (like ct, st, sometimes ck or even gt), I’ll need to make a choice now.

Text figures. I happen to really like my numbers in text — that is, the ones where the digits are treated as a first-class character, allowed to descend or ascend above a lower-case height. I almost always want that.

Cost. Can I afford this typeface? How much of it? I might want a bold, and italic, and a regular. Can I have it?

Now I start researching related fonts. Personally, I am a big fan of MyFonts because it has really good preview graphics and lots of them. They also seem to keep up well with new artists producing book faces (rather than titling or decorative faces), and their newsletter is great. So this is the fun part — I nose around the interweb and I talk to other designers and I bounce ideas off anyone who will listen.

And eventually I will find a typeface and use it. At some point in the project I will consider changing it. Sometimes I do, usually going through the whole process again and making some different decisions.

–BMurray

Prototyping is a powerful tool in any development process, and making a book is no different. I’ve seen quite a few books lately, however, that don’t look like they’ve been prototyped, so here’s a primer.

A prototype is a category of simulation. Now everyone simulates all the time — it’s part of how being sapient works. When you wonder about how to solve a problem, you simulate the problem and the solution in your head and, presuming your simulation is adequate, you find out whether your idea is stupid before actually implementing it. In hardware design we do a lot of simulating too — we can’t afford to actually run trains around the office in the early stages of testing and development, so we have train simulations that supply identical inputs to the controlling software.

Simulations have limitations that need to be thought about very carefully (and there is a relationship to game design here that I won’t explore further in this article but you might want to file away for your own use later, because all games are also simulations). The first is, obviously, whether the simulation is correct — whether you are getting your math and logic right. This is also not something I want to explore because that’s part of testing the simulator. The two critical elements of the simulation that you need to think deeply about are the granularity and the scope.

The granularity of a simulation is the minimum unit on each metric that you will care about. You cannot simulate continuous time or continuous distance, so instead you chop your simulation up into, say, 1 second intervals and centimeter segments. This is your granularity. Because you decided it carefully, you  know that it is a strict limitation on the functionality of your simulation by design — you know that if you measure an event that takes 1.7 seconds, that you only know it’s around 2 seconds. And you know that if you need to know what happens in a half-second interval, then your 1 second granularity is broken.

The scope of the simulation is the range of values over which it will operate. This has direct bearing on game systems because we don’t often thibnk about it very hard and assume, consequently, that the scope is infinite. It isn’t. All simulations have limited scope and it’s better to design it than discover it. So a simulation that is designed to consider weather events over a six hour period has nothing whatsoever to say about month-long weather cycles. A simulation that considers only wind speed and humidity has nothing to say about suspended particles. Not “little” or “weak” information, but none.

Okay so prototypes. A prototype is a physical model of your end product. Its objective is to broaden both scope and granularity past the point that intellectual or software simulation can achieve by using the real (continuous — baring quantum limits) world for some parameters. So when you want to see if your new electric shaver design is comfortable to hold, you could simulate holding it in a computer, or you could build a little plastic one and weight it so that it’s the same as the real thing would be and then, well, hold it. Your scope is still limited (it doesn’t shave anything) but within the scope you intend, you have nearly perfect granularity.

Okay so books. When you are laying out a book in software, you are working with a book simulator. It has intrinsic scope and granularity choices and you did not make them. Consequently you may not be entirely clear on what they are. For example, you cannot see the whitespace effect of your margins, because your artboard is usually laid down on a white background (change request for Adobe — please make the unused portion of my artboard black or something). You cannot see how your fonts will work because your screen is only a hundred dpi or less and your paper is between three- and fifteen-hundred. You cannot see how your artwork’s colour will look on the shelf because your screen has a different colour gamut than print (there are colours you cannot display that you can print and vice versa) and because your screen has different refelctivity and diffusion characteristics than your paper (and you will choose between a wide range of papers).

When you understand the limitations of your simulation, you begin to understand first that you must have a prototype relatively early in the production and that you now know roughly what its scope is.

So, when you are making a book, while you are still playing with layout ideas, make prototypes. Here’s what I do. I print a half-dozen or so spreads (left and right pages) at full size so that the output art and type are exactly the size they will be in print. I then trim the paper to my actual paper size (printing with registration and crop markings will help you get this as right as you can) — there is zero value in printing 6×9 pages zoomed up to your letter size paper, or real size in the middle of the whitespace of a too large page.

Then I assemble a mini-book by stapling or otherwise fixing these pages together. My printer doesn’t print on both sides, so I glue odd pages to their even back face. Now you can detect things that will have escaped you before. You are not done, though — you need to use the prototype properly. So sit down and read your book. Don’t skim it. Read it. Come on, it’s only twelve pages and it’s your job.

Does your printed line slide into the gutter in an aggravating way? This will now be brutally obvious. Are your margins too thin? Are the lines too long? Is the font too large or too small? Is the page colour good? Do those callouts or sidebars invite or obstruct? Is that too many fonts maybe (chaotic page colour)? Is that really the green you want there? Does this ampersand really work with full-height caps in the context of the page it’s on? Are the headings distinguishing their associated text from the rest of the page? Can you even see black print on that grey? Is that even a number there with all that fooferah — it looks awfully foggy now.

Does the spread look good? Is a blank page or a full page illustration maybe better on the left to balance the chapter heading whitsepace? Does the eye move across the spread the way you want? Is turning the page to continue reading annoying in this particular context, inviting re-flowing to keep stuff in one spread?

The earlier you do this the better you’ll unerstand what you’re making. Waiting until you get your test copy back from the printer is hundreds of man-hours too bloody late — you will now be under pressure to live with your errors because you’re so far along. So do not wait. Prototype now and prototype often.

–BMurray

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

I think I have a new love. I dig sans serif fonts, but my preference is towards ones like Optima which have what they call “humanist” features — that is, they look like they have been drawn with a pen or brush. They have thick and thin strokes in them. The difference between a humanist sans and a humanist roman can actually be a pretty grey area.

Non-humanist sans serif fonts usually leave me cold, at least as a book face. I mean, I love Helvetica for titling but I couldn’t read a thousand words set in a block of it.

Now look really close at Alright Sans. It’s actually got some variation in line thickness and, if you look really close, you’ll see it’s actually quite playful. Straight strokes bend a little at the end or into a curve. It’s pretty, legible, fun, and smart. Now look closer.

See, it’s a freak. Most sans fonts are modern — they practically by definition use line figures — numbers that span a full capital letter height. That’s an accountant thing and maybe a utilitarian thing. It’s type in the strict service of function. It suits most sans serif fonts. But check out Alright — it has text figures, for starters. Yes, it sports a full set of numerals that properly ascend or descend, given the full status of a letter. It also has a rich set of decorative ligatures, like ct and st, which have no practical purpose and usually are only found in “old style” fonts.

This font is not a hybrid or a parody, strictly speaking, but it’s playing at something. And I think I love it. I wish I had a project that suited it.

–BMurray

The holidays are bad for me creatively. Well, intellectually-creatively, anyway. Not being at work I’m not challenged much, and as the duties are mostly social and relaxed I’m not getting a ton of reading done either. Oh yeah, no commute — that’s probably got more to do with the lack of reading. Anyway, what reading I have been doing has been light and the film I’ve managed to watch is also light. The end result is that I’m not thinking very hard or very deeply about much of anything and consequently don’t have much to say.

On the upside, this does seem to fuel a different part of the brain, because I’ve been getting lots of work done on layout and cover imagery for Soft Horizon. Below is the current state of my cover idea.

That’s a pretty low resolution image, obvoiusly, but gives a feel for where I’m going. It’s got a lot more refinement and complexity than earlier, similar versions and I’m pretty happy with where this is heading.

Similarly I’ve had a chance to do a lot of layout tests for the game, experimenting with some of the new features of Adobe InDesign CS4 (we used CS3 for Diaspora). I’m still trying to figure out how I want to call out rules and so on, but the bulk of the pre-text work is done. The styles are all defined and the page sizes set up, grids laid down, and all fonts selected. I’d show you the font, ITC Mendoza Roman Book, but ITC won’t let me download images of font samples so I can’t actually show it off, even with their own official show-off graphic. That’s pretty sad. I may rant about intellectual property at some point. At right is an image someone else made as a sample, though. They called it “One of the great under appreciated book faces” and I pretty much agree. It’s elegant and complete and has everything I want (I want text figures and excellent small caps and I want it in OpenType). Big chunks of text set in Mendoza have a little dance in them, which is not clear from that little sample image, and that makes producing pages very satisfying.

I’m waxing pretentious again. Maybe that’s what sugar and new art pens and slacking does to me.

–BMurray