Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Overview of Writing Games
Every format of game should be played to its strength. Table wargames, boardgames, card games, computer games, table roleplaying games and live roleplaying games can each do some things very well and others less well. It's foolish to try to make one into the other.

STORY GAMES vs GAMEPIECE GAMES

A story game allows a story to unfold about what is happening to characters in the game, with the players making the decisions that those characters would make, and the game system resolving the outcomes of those decisions. The roleplaying game is the ultimate development of the story game: characters can make any decision they want - there is infinite choice. The game has an illusion of reality: I imagine that I am in my character's position and say, for example, 'I'm going to open the door and look cautiously inside.'

Chess is a gamepiece game. There is no story. The pieces in play are simply abstract gamepieces which represent nothing else. There is a completely limiting set of rules: pieces only move according to fixed rules, and can never do anything else. The aim of play is to use the rules to your own advantage to out-think your opponent. There is no concept of a reality in which these pieces are individuals: I would always say 'I'm moving my bishop' rather than imagining that my bishop is a person making a choice for himself based on what he can see and his own motivations.

THE STRENGTHS OF GAME FORMATS

Table roleplaying games have great flexibility. Players can attempt any action, not simply those for which there are rules. This needs a GM to make it possible. They also allow action to take place which is hidden from the players.

Computer games have two great strengths. They can handle very complex rules very quickly. In most games where people handle the rules manually, it's necessary to keep things simple to avoid slowing the game down, which often requires annoying simplification. Computers handling the rules avoid this. Their other advantage is that they can do hidden action very easily. Their disadvantage is that you need a computer to run them. And if there is more than one player, it's hard to separate the display in real time unless you have computers linked together.

Live roleplaying games give you a realistic feeling of the chaotic, panic-stricken action of combat.

THE HORROR OF CONVERSION

Sometimes people try to take a game of one format and and make a game of it in a different format. This can lead to disaster.

Here's a story once told at a games convention by John Tynes of Tynes Cowan Corp (Pagan Publishing). There's an old boardgame caled Chainsaw Warrior where you play a heavily armed super-soldier going in to slay zombies and beasties to save New York from a Horror. Basically the way it worked was that you would move on a space each turn, turn up a card and deal with what's on that card (eg. it might be a monster to fight). Now, Tynes Cowan had written a computer game of this, and it was a simulation of how the boardgame played. The result was that each turn the player pressed the space bar, and the computer told what happened that turn. The only thing that the player had to do throughout the game was press the space bar. This was extremely boring.

The root of this problem is that Tynes Cowan had written a computer program to simulate how the boardgame works, rather than to play out the action of the story in the best possible way that the computer could do. If they were making a computer game of Chainsaw Warrior they should have made an action game like Doom or Duke Nukem where you play out the action of fighting. Trying to simulate the original boardgame is just silly.