Making Real World Concepts Fun and accessible!
I recently had the opportunity to chat with a BGG User (@RyTo) from Poland about a question tackling how to ensure accessibility (ease of learning/play) with economic (and maybe complex) concepts. Since CRED is based entirely on real world commercial real estate, I was excited to take a stab at a response.
This is such a great question and a very real topic that I had to dive into when designing CRED. The design challenge was creating a game that felt like you were in the shoes of a commercial real estate developer while ensuring it still felt like a game and not work. And if you had never even thought about the concept of commercial real estate development, that is no problem. Heck, I’m a sale’s guy from the NHL – I had no idea about it before a few years ago!
How do you design a game about real world concepts that may be foreign to a lot of people? A few main thoughts come to mind.
For context, the direct question posed to me:
Long time ago, when I was still young I have played a game Merchant of Venus. It was a trade in space game, with supply and demand mechanics. Years ago, I bounced back because, as a young player, I found those supply-and-demand mechanics difficult to apply/ use.
How do You, as a designer, make economical concepts accessible to the players? Thanks in advance!
1) Identify Your Audience: First (and slightly adjacent to your question), it’s important to figure out who you’re designing your game for (i.e. what’s the primary audience). While of course we want a ton of people to experience our game, it’s impossible to design a game for all ages, tastes, experience, etc. This can help you as a designer “hone in” what the game will look like – from mechanics, complexity, time, etc. In the case of CRED, I wanted it to be a medium+ complexity game (think 3-3.5 on BGG) that appealed to hobby gamers who enjoy strategic, thematic games and/or also enjoy the “tycoon” or “simulation” style of gameplay. Are you a fan of commercial real estate? You’ll love this. Have you never once thought about commercial real estate development? You might be surprised how much fun you will have playing CRED.
With that, I’d expect someone new to the hobby or very young to struggle a bit more with CRED – and I’m okay with that. But I did try to design a game based enough on reality that someone familiar with commercial real estate development (but not a “gamer”) can tackle it (a prime example of this is my father-in-law who this game is based on!). On the other side, I’d expect someone who exclusively plays very complex/heavy games to maybe think it’s a tad “light”. If someone is adverse to the “real world”/tycoon feel, but enjoys games with economic underpinnings and strategic gameplay, they can find the fun too.
That’s where I struck the balance with CRED. Designed for my target audience yet making it “accessible” to ancillary audiences. Life is all about balance, and game design is no different. How can you design something that appeals to a wider audience but, at it’s heart, has an identity that your “superhero” fans will gravitate towards.
2) Based in reality, focused on fun: During the early, conceptual stages of CRED, I spent most of my time doing real world research and interviews to understand the concepts that I was about to design the game around. With CRED, the theme came first and all mechanics and game design were created in service to the theme. As such, it allowed me to design, from the ground up, a game based in reality. Why is that important? I have found that people can much more easily grasp concepts that are based in logic and reality, even when the concepts are a tad foreign to them. The game was intentionally designed to mimic already established real world concepts (not inventive ones that can get hard to follow). As such, playing the game feels smooth and unlike games where you can tell the theme was really pasted on.
But, the most important part: focus on what makes those concepts fun when it comes to gameplay and figure out how you carry that fun into the design and mechanisms. I think this is key. If you focus too much (in this example) on the economy or economic concepts (and forget the fun), the learning curve, at least perceptively, is steeper for most people. If everyone must parse through a spreadsheet of data and have robust understanding of how said economic concept is implemented, it becomes more of an exercise in academia than in fun.
This is obviously where the hard part comes in. Balancing real world scenarios/concepts with a game that finds the fun quick is the thing every designer strives to do. And there is no “perfect” formula or equation as every game is different.
3) KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid): My design philosophy has evolved since I started this journey 3 years ago. While popularized outside of The Office, during this development stage, I’ve tried to embody the words of Michael Scott (And Dwight Schrutte): “Michael always says “KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid – great advice, hurts my feelings every time!”.
While humorous, this really has rung true for me during the development of CRED. Anywhere I can introduce simplicity, I try and force myself to do so. Even if it means cutting out something that’s been there since day 1. I attribute this to someone we worked with during the development process, Mondo Davis. I worked with him directly during our development process to take a very critical look at CRED. He never played it, just read our rulebook, watched a home brewed how to play, and spoke with me for about 30 minutes to learn about the journey. He then analyzed it and provided me with a 10 page document of basically why CRED won’t succeed and what’s wrong with it. It was brutal, but this is exactly what I wanted him to do. It took a lot of growing up on my part as a designer, but I can’t thank him enough for what he ultimately instilled in me from his feedback and our time together – Keep It Simple Stupid. It was excellent advice, and it hurt my feelings when reviewing all his thoughts haha!
Of course since he never played it, we had to take his feedback and thoughts with a grain of salt. But what came out of this, in my opinion, is a vastly more streamlined version of the game and a game that gets to the fun faster. Now, am I saying I’ve perfected this? No – absolutely not. But it’s a great exercise as a designer and sometimes the bitter pill we have to swallow. I’m not saying to make your game simple, but don’t make it complicated just for the sake of doing so or because “that’s how it’s done in the real world”. Everything, to some extent, is abstracted in a game. Find the balance of where realism and fun meet. Ask “at what point does x mechanic or x concept get in the way of finding the fun”. To circle this back to your question, this is really the key to making concepts (economical, dry, complex, etc) more accessible to players. This can be done by removing a unique mechanic that creates a new ruleset, shave down the breadth of information a player has to analyze, remove entirely a piece of the equation that is causing more headache than fun, etc.
So, to sum up. How do You, as a designer, make economical concepts accessible to the players?
1) Figure out who your audience is for the game you’re designing. Next, find the level at which your audience wants to engage with those concepts in the game. Once you figure that out, design the game and mechanics to that level. If you feel like this takes out too much of the “realism”, evaluate if your targeting the wrong audience or making the wrong game.
In your example, were you the target audience of that game? If not, maybe that’s okay. But regardless of if you were or not, what could have been done to make you not feel overwhelmed by those concepts that were difficult to use/apply? (Which brings me to my other points)
2) Whenever you can, base your design in reality so that it is more digestible and relatable to players learning your game (if you’re utilizing real life concepts – not talking about fantasy). Whenever a rule or mechanic gets in the way of having fun or brings the level of difficulty outside the scope of point #1 – cut it or adjust it. At the end of the day, people play games to have fun and the reason tycoon games are so fun are because they gamify everyday concepts. Do I know how to run a theme park after playing Sim Theme Park? Absolutely not. But I sure felt like I did when playing it and had a blast doing it.
In your example, it seems like the mechanics/concepts were done in such a daunting/high level way that you couldn’t find the fun or learn by the knowledge you already had. If you have play testers giving this feedback, ask what’s the root of their confusion or difficulty. Is it a mechanic? Or is it a concept? Is it that one of them is being abstracted too much so it no longer makes sense, or the mechanic that’s being used to implement a concept is the source of the confusion/difficulty. There’s always another way to skin a cat.
3) Keep It Simple Stupid: Similar but slightly different than the above point. Whenever you can introduce simplicity into the game or take the legwork away from the players, do it. In looking at Merchant of Venus (again knowing nothing but seeing pictures), I even got freaked out by just how many options there where – I felt like I was looking at a spreadsheet. Did it need all of those? Does the game really change when having 14 trade goods as opposed to 5? Does the experience warrant the complexity? If I’m being honest, this is probably where I’ve grown the most as a designer. After countless play tests, your play testers will tell you when you’ve hit the sweet spot (like where I think we have landed).
In your example I think it sounds like the way the supply and demand concept was implemented just didn’t quite make sense to younger you. Had they simplified the concept (at it’s core supply and demand is quite simple, but can be made super confusing quickly when expounded upon), would the game have felt the same? This could have been an issue with the rulebook, with the complexity of a mechanic (trying to simulate too many things and overcomplicate it), or going deeper conceptually than needed for what the game provided.
4) Graphic design and play testing can be an obvious but huge way that you can make your game more accessible (with economical concepts or not). Ensure you have a harmonious language that your game speaks. So much of the complexity can be removed by great graphical design (which is why you hire someone good at it haha). Again, I’m not saying CRED will be a “masterpiece” in this area, but I think we will launch a product that speaks a language and, once you understand that language, the “chunkier” economical concepts don’t feel so chunky. I go back to Merchant of Venus. I literally think the game has screenshots of excel sheets as player reference cards (no judgement at all, this game did come out in 1988 after all). It’s really hard to find the fun in those (though my wife might beg to differ haha). What I’m saying is if you don’t make your game look like fun, it’s not going to feel as fun when playing it. And if it doesn’t feel as fun, it might feel harder, more like work, and more daunting. If the game, graphically, takes some of the load off of the players and streamlines it so visually things make sense, it will be so helpful.
Play test your game and listen to what your play testers are saying. You should be able to know when you’ve struck the right balance. I encourage all designers to get their game in front of people they know won’t like it either. In this case, see if you can get someone who really hates economic concepts in games and get their thoughts. They will help you so much in how to simplify and find out where you’ve gone overboard.
At the end of the day, I don’t even know if I fully answered the question. This is an area that I am working to get better in every single day. At the end of the day, my goal with CRED: While it stays true to its real world theme and inspiration, it approaches potentially complex concepts with relative simplicity and is packaged into a game that people can have FUN with!
- Cooper