An attempt to explain why (and how) boardgaming

has changed in the past twenty years

Lewis Pulsipher

In the early 1980s, about the time I became a computer professional (my schooling was in history), I "left" the game hobby, no longer writing articles, no longer designing games, ignoring it completely. (Britannia was finally published in '86, but I'd finished it in '83.) For nearly 20 years the only game I played was Dungeons & Dragons, which is a very social game (as I play it), and also is a non-competitive game (about this same time I gave up playing games "against" someone, preferring cooperation). I thought that role-playing on the one hand, and video games on the other, would destroy the boardgames hobby. I was wrong, though we all know that the board wargames hobby was "on the ropes" and has only revived (some) because of German/Euro games.

While the hobby did not disappear, it's certainly changed. I'm trying to figure out why.

Note: a young man read an earlier version of this article and (in the midst of ad hominem name-calling at this author in his blog) characterized it as "why won't anyone play these old games with me". Let me make something clear, then: I read lots of rules, and watch many games, but aside from D&D, I hardly ever play any game other than games in prototype that I design myself, so I'm not missing playing "these old games".

Many people, when trying to explain the change in boardgaming, just assume that "this new kind of game is better". If you believe that is the reason for change, then nothing I can say will change your mind. I believe that games reflect the preferences of the players; I want to explain why player preferences have changed, rather than assume that somehow the newer games are simply "better".

Much of the difference in the new gaming: hobby boardgames tend to be less complex than they used to be. (I leave out traditional family games such as Monopoly . . . Americans expect family games to be both simple and easy to be good at.) Why less complex?

First, many people who prefer complex games have moved to computer games. There's no doubt, a computer game can be much more complex than any playable paper game. Anyone who likes "realistic" (which usually means complex) rules can save a lot of time by playing computer games, in which the computer copes with much of the detail. Similarly, very large wargames are much more practical on computer, and younger people who like this kind of game play it on computer. Look at the people playing the "monster" hex wargames at a convention. Most of them are middle-aged and older.

Second, people are much more visually oriented than in the early 80s. There was no World Wide Web then, cable TV was much less "Big" then, there were three broadcast networks instead of four, computers still used monochrome or four-color screens and no sound, and so on. A game with cardboard counters, which limits the visual aspects considerably, was still accounted an attractive piece of work in the 80s. Now, games need tangible pieces--pieces you can easily see from a distance and feel 3 dimensions in the hand--as well as colorful cards, and colorful boards (hexes tend to "ruin the look"). Such pieces do not contain as much information as cardboard counters, which tends to limit the complexity of games in which they're used. Cards can carry much more complexity, so to speak, and sometimes do in the collectible/tradeable card games.

This visual orientation often shows in being more computer-oriented. For many teenagers, if something isn't on a screen, they don't want to know about it. My wife (a college library director) can have a reference book on the shelf that will answer a student's question, and they refuse to look--they want it on a computer screen.

Third, people are much less word-oriented (which is almost the same as more visually oriented, but not quite). I teach at a community college, and my wife the library director is also a Ph.D. student at a large university. We find the same thing: students don't read much. If they *really* get interested in something they'll read for hours, but otherwise, forget it--even graduate students. Those of you who have looked into Web usability know that the typical advice is to write a lot less than you normally would, and use bullets rather than narrative. Give young people a narrative and a lot of them will miss vital parts because they're skimming rather than reading.

The result: rules had better be pretty simple, so that the one person who does read them can comprehend them, because they may not put much effort into it. And the other players won't read the rules at all, so there's no check on the first one's comprehension.

Fourth, young people are much less competent mathematically. Partly this stems from using calculators and computers. I (at age 55) can calculate simple math in my head much more rapidly than most young people, simply from experience and intention (kids often won't even try). Calculating simple odds is a chore for them; I know students who cannot even calculate what 10% of something is in their heads. I see kids (and young adults) who ought to know better actually adding up the pips on two dice rather than automatically recognizing the total from the two results. Probability is quite beyond the average person: Settlers of Catan includes an explanation of the frequency distribution of a roll of two dice, because so few people understand the Bell Curve result.

This is not a matter of "brain power", it's a matter of what people are used to and expect from themselves. Insofar as this is true, some of the mathematical complexity that we could once put into a boardgame is better avoided. In games I design today, if I use a combat table (quite rare), I make it one so comprehensive that no odds calculation is required.

Fifth, attention spans are much shorter in many young people. Anecdotal illustrations: 1) When I was a kid, I watched "Mr. Wizard", who sat in a darkened room and calmly conducted science experiments, explaining what was happening and why. Great stuff. What's the comparison nowadays? "Bill Nye the Science Guy", supported, if I recall correctly, by educational grants. Bill Nye wears a white coat and looks slightly goofy; as he explains science, the camera jumps from one scene to another every 10 or 15 seconds, bopping back to Bill occasionally, while Bill ends up explaining the same thing three times. (Bill Nye was on TV a few years ago; I don't know if it's still on.) 2) Most of you have heard of "Lord of the Dance". I have a friend who (at age 60) became something of a "groupie" for the show, and she gave me a commercial LotD tape. Both she and I are driven nuts by the editing of this tape, in which the camera will not stay on the same shot for more than 5 or 10 seconds, zooming in and out as well as shifting with abandon. She and I want to watch the dancers; the editor evidently felt that the dancers individually weren't enough to hold interest more than a short time. I think it was edited with teens in mind.

Young people also show this in something they call "multi-tasking", but which often appears to amount to "dilution of attention". They try to do several things at once (for example, watch a screen, talk on the phone, talk to someone next to them), and end up doing a less than stellar job of each one, for lack of focus and concentration. It's hard to play a long or complex game while going to extremes of multi-tasking. I am always a little amazed by a young person who wants to play a game, or just talk, while the TV is on. If the TV is on, I watch it (well, even I can half watch a football game and half use the computer...). If I don't want to watch it, I turn it off or go somewhere else. Yet younger people don't seem to mind dividing their attention. On the other hand, everyone is going in this direction: I can switch back and forth reading among several Internet sites, or play music in the background while I read, which the World War II generation might find quite strange, and I'm "watching" a playoff game as I type. Only in the extremes of "multi-tasking" do we see problems with playing non-family games.

Many young people find it difficult to concentrate on one thing for any length of time (again barring GREAT interest, which is often manifested in video games). If that is so, then boardgames that require long periods of concentration will not be popular, and simple games with alternating short turns (or continuous activity) and short periods of "downtime" (when you're not involved in the game) will more likely be successful with younger people. And that's what we have in many Euro-style games.

Sixth, many younger people nowadays appear to do things to "kill time", rather than from any inherent interest in the activity. It's much easier to kill time on a computer, and even those inclined to play non-video games find the specialty card games (collectible or not) easier to learn and play than most board wargames. Euro-style games often appear to fall into a category of "killing time", to me (but I'm not a Euro-style fan), hence they are short and easy to learn and play (though not always easy to win). Older people, playing games to kill time, played the card game Solitaire. Now we have many more ways to kill time, alone or with friends, and if those ways don't involve a computer, they're more likely to involve specialty card games than boardgames.

Seventh, many young people simply haven't been exposed to board wargames, or boardgames of any sort beyond Monopoly and perhaps Risk. I've introduced a number of twenty-somethings to boardgames during my playtesting, and they are often enthusiastic. I think it's the social aspect that draws them in, and the games are sufficient to hold their attention while they're enjoying the social aspects. The trick is to get people to play in the first place. This is a reason why teachers have free admission to the Origins game convention in Columbus, an effort by GAMA (Game Manufacturers Assdociation) to get (non-video) gaming introduced into schools.

We are also seeing the effects of the "cult of the new". Something is necessarily better because it's new, in this view. Certainly, makers of general-market retail products seem to think "new" means more sales, so they tout "new taste", "new design", etc. on their boxes, even when they've made no practical changes. Occasionally this "new" strategy backfires, as in the "New Coke" fiasco. But even in gaming I understand that the "cult of the new" is reflected in very short shelf lives for games sold in hobby stores. And it appears to me that most Euro-style gamers get restless after playing the same game several times, and want to play something else. There are MANY more game titles available now than 20-25 yeas ago, but virtually none of them sells very well compared to that older time.

People are much less likely to study a game in order to learn more successful ways to play it. Many classic games are classics because people go back to them again and again, finding new depth and interest. Yet many younger people simply aren't inclined to look for that depth.

The point here is that gaming is affected by generational/attitudinal changes. In this case, if people are much more likely to buy a new game than an older one, even if the two are "equally good", then it makes sense for manufacturers to produce many titles. They're also likely to prefer games that require little reading of rules (which ultimately means video games rather than boardgames).

Much of what I've been talking about above can be seen when people describe differences between generations (the Baby Boomers, the Gen Xers, and the current Gen Y/Millennials). These experts describe Gen Y (up to about 26 years old, as I write) as "ambitious but aimless". One example was this: The Gen Y person says "I'm going to be an astronaut". OK, older people say, that's very praiseworthy. You know, you'll have to work to get an advanced degree, and you'll need to know science and math and so on. The Gen Y-er says, "I don't like math. No more math classes for me." Yet they'll still say "I'm going to be an astronaut". There is no connection between where the young person wants to get to, and where they are now, and they cannot make that connection. Somehow, "a miracle will occur" and the aim will be realized. I've seen this (to me, scary) attitude often enough in my younger students to be quite struck by how common it is, and to realize how uncommon it is amongst older students (my students average about 25 years old).

Young people are easily frustrated, and quit easily when something is "too hard". Students often look not for a curriculum major that will enable them to earn a lot of money, but one that is "easy" as well. They don't want to hear (and may not listen to) "if it was easy, why would anyone pay you a lot to do it?"

Do we see something of this in games? In games, they don't want something that they have to think about a lot (and video games generally oblige with linear, easy-to-understand strategies). If a game is a long one, the young person may want to win (the ambition) but isn't willing to go through the steps to get there (hence aimless)--so he or she doesn't play (or plays badly, and then isn't happy with the result). Frequently, then, in a (solo) video game there are lots of intermediate steps (finish this level, do away with that boss, gain more capabilities for your character) to draw the player onward. Perhaps the popularity of point accumulation boardgames right now relates to the immediate rewards of scoring some points in many turns.

When video game players do decide to play boardgames, they are often poor players. I suspect this is because they've learned to play using trial-and-error rather than logical analysis. Video games encourage the former, both because you can always go back to the previous save point, and because the games are too hard to get through without dying a lot. After a video gamer has played a particular boardgame several times, they gain the effect of trial and error from having watched all the moves in the game, and then they tend to be better players of that game. (See also "Are Video Games Turning Us Into A Nation of Losers", http://pulsiphergames.com/other-industry/industry.htm.) Moreover, video gamers tend to be a little passive when playing boardgames. Partly this is because they're doing something they're not used to, but it also comes from being used to linear video games (console games) where the next step is fairly obvious, where tactics tends to be more important than strategy. ("Strategy games" as a category, are almost exclusive to PC rather than console games.)

Lack of time is sometimes proposed as a reason why younger people don't play wargames. Lack of time may be a factor, but I'm not convinced that it's a major factor. Look at the time people put into RPGs and video games. Do people play video games for just an hour, or do they play for long sessions? I'm not much of a video game player (and only PC versions), but my sessions tended to be hours-long when I did play. On the other hand, even pre-teens seem much more busy, going more places, doing more things, than I did at any time during my childhood. But that busyness, while it might take them away from games altogether, wouldn't explain why one type of game would be preferred to another, except for the length of the game.

The basketball coach Rick Pitino, who worked at colleges for many years and then switched to the pros for several years before returning to college, was asked what differences he saw in college. He said that players now expect to get lots of playing time immediately, and said it's the "age of instant gratification". Video games are instant gratification, specialty card games can be nearly instant gratification, some Euro-style games can be nearly instant gratification, board wargames are not. You can play a video game as soon as you install it (I read the rules, but I'm unusual--most people read no more than the "get started" and then play). Boardgames take much more effort to learn how to play (and you need other players, too). Video games are fundamentally complicated, but are easy to play because the computer takes care of the details; boardgames can be much simpler, yet there are more details for the players to keep track of. The difference that may be important to boardgamers, though, is that you can understand all the complexity that's in a boardgame; in video games that's often not true. (Aside: I'm surprised that more boardgame publishers don't include a short (CD) video teaching players how to play the game, so that it will be easier for them to get started.)

Even in video games we see a movement away from complexity of play. Many console game players will not touch PC games (which, by and large, tend to be less linear, offer more choices, and involve more strategy and less "trial-by-error). A friend of mine has a son who has a kick-butt computer (256MB video card, for example), but who only plays the console video games even though his computer is immensely better for games. Even when he has a choice of buying the console version of a game or the computer version of a game, he'll take the console version. In general, console versions of games that are also available for PCs outsell the PC version by a factor of three to ten, though the price is generally similar.

Linear design, auto-aiming, and other factors make video games less complex than they used to be.

Boardgames (and RPGs, and CCGs) all have one distinct advantage over video games: they are (or can be) social events. This social aspect is what has made "German" games; as I understand it, families like to play games together in Germany, and want something less dumbed-down than Monopoly. Most of my friends play non-video games, and most of the people I know who play non-video games are my friends. Of course, with the advent of Internet play, computer games are becoming social, up to a point. One of my friends plays Everquest, and can get in gangs of 70 people to go on big adventures. Yet this is still a lot different than playing face-to-face. On the other hand, young people do not in the least mind making friends of people they have never met--I have several students who have long-distance girlfriends or boyfriends they met via the Internet, in at least one case referring to "my boyfriend" before ever meeting him. E-mail, instant messaging, and especially free long distance via cell phone have made it much easier (in considerable part because it's cheaper) to make long-distance friends. As time passes the difference in socializing between face-to-face games and video games will become smaller and smaller.

So as a summary:

* many people who prefer complex games have moved to computer games

* people are much more visually oriented than in the early 80s

* people are much less word-oriented

* young people are much less competent mathematically

* attention spans are much shorter in many young people

* many younger people nowadays appear to do things to "kill time", rather than from any inherent interest in the activity

* many young people simply haven't been exposed to board wargames

the effects of the "cult of the new"

* differences between generations

* lack of time may be a factor

* "age of instant gratification"

* boardgames take much more effort to learn how to play (and you need other players, too)

* in video games we see a movement away from complexity of play