[game_edu] Looking for articles, books or other stuff based on porting board games to videogames

[Dan Carreker]

Hi Carlos,

 

Even if you're thinking about making an online version of a board game,
Ian's book is worth checking out if for no other reason that it offers some
very good analysis of how the two media differs. Personally, I think any
designer or design educator should have it on their shelf.  

  _____  

From: Ian Schreiber [mailto:ai864 at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2010 8:54 PM
To: IGDA Game Education Listserv
Subject: Re: [game_edu] Looking for articles,books or other stuff based on
porting board games to videogames

 

Hi Carlos (and anyone else who might be interested),

If you were talking about making a board-game version of a video game
(digital to physical), I should shamelessly plug "Challenges for Game
Designers" which has a chapter devoted to that topic.

If you're going the other way, making an online version of a physical board
game, I don't know offhand of any articles but I do know a few basic
concepts:

Basically, the design of the game mechanics is already done, but that
doesn't mean you can fire your game designers :). Rather, it means your game
design tasks must focus on UI.

What makes a good digital UI for a physical board game? In general, it
mostly involves simplifying the game interface with the goal of making
gameplay faster and more streamlined. Examples:
* Automation of non-decision-based tasks (e.g. setup, cleanup, upkeep)
* Simplification of physically complex tasks to single button-presses
* Where applicable, AI opponents to allow single-player play of a
multiplayer game.

In my classes, I like to use case studies. My two favorite examples:

1) "Hey, That's My Fish!" is a very simple tile-based tabletop game for 2 to
4 players. In short, each player places several penguins each on their own
hex tiles. On your turn, you select one penguin to move in any direction,
any number of spaces... but it can't jump over another penguin or an empty
space. After moving, you take the hex you started on off the board and place
it in your score pile. If a penguin is isolated on its own tile, it is
removed from the board and you score that tile. Game ends when all penguins
are removed. The strategy involves trying to isolate other players' penguins
on small islands while trying to trap your own penguins on large areas.

The beginning of the game requires a bit of setup, as you have to shuffle 60
hex tiles and lay them out in a roughly-square configuration, rearranging
them as needed to prevent too many clusters of high-scoring tiles. At the
end of the game players must count their points (each hex is anywhere from 1
to 3 points). The actual play of the game takes maybe 5 minutes, and frankly
the setup and scoring takes as long as the play.

Now, take a look at the game on www.brettspielwelt.de (there is a treasure
trove of other board games there, and all free). Indeed, tile setup is
automated, instantly making the game better. It also counts points for tiles
automatically, so scoring at the end of the game is instant. At first, it
would appear the online version is now superior to the tabletop version.

But then, as they say, the designer grasps defeat from the jaws of victory.
In end game situations where individual penguins are all isolated on their
own multi-tile islands (which happens in most plays), in the tabletop game,
players just manually collect all of those tiles. However, in the online
version, it offers no "pathfinding" for islands and therefore forces players
to manually click and move until all penguins are on single-tile islands. In
other words, after the game is already effectively over, the players still
need to spend 2 or 3 minutes just clicking and moving, over and over, to
manually let the computer figure out that the game is over. Oops!


2) Compare several computer versions of the classic board game RISK. My
favorite version, though you'll probably have to find an emulator these days
to play it, was the version for the old Apple Macintosh. In the settings,
you could tell it to keep rolling on an attack until you succeed or fail,
and you could also place all of your armies in a single location by
Shift+Click. Between those two things and AI opponents (with 3 difficulty
levels) that take their turns instantly, you could finish a complete game in
about two minutes... and while you may not have the satisfaction of
trouncing other people across a table, you make up for it by having a game
that takes minutes instead of hours, making it a great coffee-break time
waster.

Now, compare to a more recent version of RISK, on PC or console. Many of
these have much nicer graphics, but do not offer the shortcuts that allow
for play that the old Mac version did. These games still may take shorter
than the original board game... maybe 10 to 30 minutes per play... but they
still feel slow to me because I know there's extraneous things like cut
scenes of armies attacking or showing the virtual dice rolling, which make
everything take longer. Console versions in particular lack point-and-click
functionality, forcing you to wait for a cursor to move around the map using
analog sticks.


Note that some mechanics translate better to digital versions than others.
In particular, games where players act asynchronously tend to work better
than those where play is simultaneous. Negotiation and trading mechanics
tend to feel slow online compared to tabletop play; compare trading
resources in person with Settlers of Catan, versus the XBLA version (and
mind you, the XBLA version in particular did a stellar job at streamlining
this aspect of play... but even still, nothing is as fast as just asking
"anyone got grain for sheep?", having someone respond "no, but I've got
brick", then saying "sold" and swapping cards). Games like Brawl or Pit that
have everyone acting all at once are so difficult that it would make a
pretty extreme challenge as a port. Magic: the Gathering is also
challenging, not only because of the overly complex mechanics and card
interactions, but because of all of the phases during play where players can
interrupt one another to take an action in response to another players'
action; note that with MTG Online they go to great lengths to streamline
this, allowing players to turn off their response prompts to certain types
of events and having a Chess-like clock to prevent players from stalling the
game too much.


Hope this helps!

- Ian

  _____  

From: Carlos Contreras Peinado <erwaitin at gmail.com>
To: game_edu at igda.org
Sent: Thu, April 15, 2010 6:57:20 PM
Subject: [game_edu] Looking for articles, books or other stuff based on
porting board games to videogames

Hello,

I'm trying to learn about porting board games to videogames from a game
design perspective. Anyone knows about good books, articles or any other
stuff about this? Thank you!

 

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