“No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.” Attributed to W. H. Auden on several websites, but, typically, none of them identify the source of the original. Any Auden fans knows where and when he wrote it?
If you have it at hand, check the essay “Dingley Dell & The Fleet”. The quote is probably on p. 421 in Auden’s essay collection quoted as “DH”, Dyer’s Hand.
“A game designer is not an author. Like a prop master or a stage director, the game designer proposes and deploys an object into the world, letting it speak for itself and be spoken through.”
Miguel Sicart, Play Matters
“All play is associated with intense thought activity and rapid intellectual growth.
The highest form of research is essentially play. Einstein is quoted as saying, ‘The desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of a vague play with basic ideas. This combinatory or associative play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought’”
Neville V. Scarfe. (In 1962 the journal “Childhood Education” published an article titled “Play is Education” by N. V. Scarfe that contained the following passage:)
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/21/play-research/
“One can make the case that wargame sales are better than ever, if one simply changes the definition of a wargame. […] But that’s like saying that historical fiction should be reflagged as history books because few people will buy and read real history books anymore. No, the problem is that historical wargames were always a small market because they emphasized information and analysis at the expense of entertainment.”
Jim Dunnigan, The Complete Wargames Handbook
Games that focus on [the precariousness of historical events] have a ready answer to the issue of replay-value: players should want to replay the game multiple times to appreciate the subtlety of the contingent factors that lead to some historical event. And they can offer genuine engagement with the history. One can come to a deeper appreciation of the details of historical events by experiencing what happens when those events are slightly altered.
– Chris Bartel
However, it is also enlightening to compare pre-digital definitions to definitions made after digital games became more common. While earlier game definitions emphasized games as an activity, modern definitions highlight games as systems.
– Jonne Arjoranta
http://gamestudies.org/1401/articles/arjoranta
Because tabletop games, unlike videogames, require every player to understand the entire game system to play. You need to understand not only the components, the goal, the rules, and the flow of play, but also how to assemble all these into a comprehensive strategy that will lead you to victory.
– Rob Daviau
” The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design”
A person with experience working with writing and editing can point out issues with a game in the same way that a person with experience working with art and graphic design can. But one of these things is sexy and the other isn’t. A sloppily edited rulebook isn’t likely to be a dealbreaker in the same way that artwork and miniature design are. I would guess it’s far more common for a publisher to think “but of course I can do my own writing” than to think “but of course I can do my own graphic design”. And then we get the poorly written rules defence here on BGG along the lines of “you know it’s really hard to write consistently clear and correct rules so we shouldn’t expect anyone to actually manage it”. No, it’s really hard only if you don’t have the skill and diligence. In the end we’re probably talking diminishing returns for money spent on better rules in most cases, though. A rulebook where you only have to wade through some poor disposition, look up a couple of edge cases online, resolve a contradiction between text and table, puzzle over a case of conflicting terminology, and argue about some unlikely but critical ambiguity is still going to be regarded as “good enough”.
https://boardgamegeek.com/article/22330109
Winning, though the goal of a game, can’t be the purpose for playing. Winning serves the purpose of helping us focus, of allowing us to create the challenge that lets us manifest our powers through the game. Winning ends the game, but not our purpose.
Bernard Koven, The Well-Played Game
My actual thesis here is that “strategy” and “skill” are different , and the main difference between them is that strategy has a luck component , while “skill” doesn’t .
The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design
Un jeu dont les règles sont illisibles est un jeu mort
http://ludovox.fr/%E2%96%BA-e-d-i-t-o-un-jeu-dont-les-regles-sont-illisibles-est-un-jeu-mort/
The rules text is not your game, it is your game’s user interface. It is the button pad on your cell phone; the remote control to your cable or satellite box; the steering wheel, gearshift and pedals in your car. It is the way players (in the absence of a teacher) connect with your game and it needs to be designed as rigorously as the rules and procedures. Players cannot fall back on mashing your game’s buttons, poking through its menus or clicking hyperlinks at random.
https://linnaeus.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/rules-text-as-a-design-artifact/
But games are ever-changing, culturally-shaped practices that have more in common with square dancing and […] butterfly collecting than they do with passively consumed entertainment products. And so the more we try to treat games like media, the less game-like they are.
Tabletop: Analog Game Design
John Sharp
The main reason that a human would work to follow a rule without error when playing a game for fun is if s/he believes that the game will be more fun when the rules are perfectly followed. If this is not the case, players will change or ignore the rules.
– Matthew Berland
Tabletop: Analog Game Design
If we want to make some progress in the recognition of the cultural nature of games, everyone has to get involved, especially publishers, by having their rules written and corrected, if not by professionals, at least by people who have a minimum command of the language. There’s no shortage of such people in the hobby.
— Bruno Faidutti
Theme is more than window dressing, and less than fanatical immersion. To be true to theme, a design should strive to capture the essence of the setting or construct by creating a system in which players naturally adopt behaviors that fit their circumstances. Success is when a player is surprised to act in a way that is not in keeping with their real life personality, as though it were normal.
— Peter Olotka
Tabletop: Analog Game Design
The richness of the board gaming world is also that we open up to people that we would probably never meet in our daily life.
— Émilie Thomas
https://www.trictrac.net/actus/jeux-viens-a-vous-emilie-thomas
If Cards Against Humanity is a symbol of white male culture, it’s not because it’s about mocking blacks or women, it’s because it’s about mocking white male culture. Cards against Humanity is a game about political consciousness - or at least can be played this way.
— Bruno Faidutti
https://twitter.com/Bruno\_Faidutti/status/1211673387719942144?s=03
These are not just complex decisions; these are interesting ones. Interesting decisions make for interesting games.
— Greg Costikyan
Modern Perspectives on Game Design (George Phillies and Tom Vasel)
I had come to conceive of a game as being like a machine to translate the player’s decisions into physical reality.
— Rachel Simmons
Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming
Your game lives or dies on the strength of the written rules.
— Jacob Davenport
http://www.playagaingames.com/games/writing\_rules/
How can you design a car without driving it? Or how can you make a movie without watching it? This is the same thing. How can you design a game without playing it?
— Reiner Knizia
For the Love of Board Games (Erin Dean)
By and large, people don’t play with game systems because of the stories. The stories that wrap the systems are usually side dishes for the brain. For one thing, it has been rare to see a game story written by an actual writer. As a result, they are usually around the high-school level of literary sophistication at best.
— Raph Koster
A Theory of Fun for Game Design
É verdade… Mas, ao contrário do que acontece com literatura consumida, esta literatura é criada pelos jogadores.
Puzzles are solution finding; games are problem solving.
— Lewis Pulsipher
Leonard Bernstein
Perhaps the principal thing that I absorved from professor [David Wight] Prall, and from Harvard in general, was the interdisciplinary spirit… that the best way to know a thing is in the context of another discipline. So these lectures I give in the spirit of cross-disciplines, which is why I’ll be speaking of Music along with quick side forays into such fields as Poetry, Linguistics, Aesthetics, and even — Heaven help us! — a bit of elementary Physics.
The Phonology of Music (1976).
John Harington
Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
— Epigrams, Book iv, Epistle 5.
L. Annaeus Seneca
Prosperum ac felix scelus/ Virtus vocatur (“Successful and fortunate crime/ is called virtue”)
Carl Gustav Jung
One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.
Jung and the Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post (1977)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Jung
W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand
Dingley Dell & The Fleet
Nenhum ser humano é inocente, mas existe uma classe de ações humanas inocentes chamada Jogos.
Um jogo é um mundo fechado de ação que não tem relação com outras ações daqueles que o jogam; os jogadores não têm motivo para jogar o jogo além do prazer que ele lhes proporciona, e o resultado do jogo não tem consequências além de si mesmo. Estritamente falando, um jogo no qual os jogadores são pagos para jogar, ou no qual jogam com apostas em dinheiro, deixa de ser um jogo, pois o dinheiro existe fora do mundo fechado do jogo. Na prática, pode-se dizer que um jogo jogado com apostas permanece um jogo desde que as quantias de dinheiro ganhas ou perdidas sejam sentidas pelos jogadores como pagamentos simbólicos, ou seja, o que eles ganham ou perdem não tem efeito sensível em suas vidas após o término do jogo.
O mundo fechado do jogo é um de paixões simuladas, não reais. Muitos jogos são, formalmente, batalhas simuladas, mas se algum dos jogadores sentir ou demonstrar hostilidade real, ele imediatamente deixa de ser um jogador. Mesmo em lutas de boxe e de luta, nas quais a alegação de serem chamadas de jogos é duvidosa, o ritual de apertar as mãos no início e no final afirma que não são lutas entre inimigos reais.
Dentro do mundo fechado do jogo, os únicos seres humanos são os jogadores; os outros habitantes são coisas, bolas, bastões, peças de xadrez, cartas, etc.
Assim como o mundo real, o mundo do jogo é um mundo de leis que os jogadores devem obedecer porque a obediência a elas é uma condição necessária para entrar nele. No mundo do jogo, há apenas um crime, a trapaça, e a pena por isso é a exclusão; uma vez que um homem é conhecido por ser trapaceiro, nenhum outro jogador jogará com ele.
Em um jogo, o prazer de jogar, de exercitar habilidade, tem precedência sobre o prazer de vencer. Se isso não fosse assim, se a vitória fosse o verdadeiro objetivo, um jogador habilidoso preferiria ter um jogador sem habilidade como oponente, mas apenas aqueles para quem, como trapaceiros de cartas, um jogo não é um jogo, mas um meio de subsistência, preferem isso. No mundo do jogo, o prazer da vitória é o prazer de simplesmente vencer. O mundo do jogo, portanto, é um mundo inocente porque o julgamento ético de bom ou ruim não se aplica a ele; um bom jogo significa um jogo no qual, ao final, todos os jogadores, sejam vencedores ou perdedores, podem dizer com sinceridade que se divertiram, ponto que é destacado no discurso do Pequeno Homem após a partida de críquete entre Dingley Dell e Muggleton.
Sean Connery’s big break
My start, my childhood, was less than auspicious. But when I was young, we didn’t know we lacked anything, because we had nothing to compare it to — and there’s a freedom in that. I had a very hard working mother and father, I think of them both a great deal. I got my break — big break — when I was five years old. And it’s taken me more than seventy years to realize it. You see, at five, I learned to read. It’s that simple, and it’s that profound.
— Sean Connery
Jerry Pournelle
The enemy of every free man is a real greedy successful one. Biggest enemies of capitalism are successful capitalists.
— Jerry Pournelle