Four months ago, right after New Year's 2003, my game Grande Armee "came out." I love that expression: Came Out. It sounds like my game is either a brave gay person, or it's a sixteen-year-old girl from some wealthy old southern family. But no, it "came out" of large cardboard boxes, into the hands of retailers, who promptly began selling it to wargamers.
My wife is much cooler than most wargame wives. She not only indulges the hobby and the time and money it devours, but being an artistic and creative person herself, she deeply appreciates the love of spectacle and creation that comes with miniature wargaming. She was not, however, expecting that Grande Armee would ever be anything more than another indulgence. When she learned that people actually wanted to give me money for it, she was astonished. "That's pretty damn cool," were her exact words.
Indeed. It was all a bit surreal at first, and I felt quite overwhelmed by the whole process. One Tuesday in January I opened up a Yahoo! chat site for the game. By that Friday it had 70 members and something like 110 messages posted. (There are now over 200 members.) Even though I'm a published author with a book and several articles in scholarly journals under my belt, this is quite different. This is like being ten years old again, standing at the edge of the playground with my bat and glove, and the other boys saying, "Hey Sam! Come play with us!" To be perfectly frank: it feels really good.
This article is not about the Hows and How-Tos of publishing a set of miniatures rules. This is about the strange transformations that happen when you take that step: the ways in which you suddenly become a different kind of person to the other people in the hobby when you publish a game.
The Wargame Church
Dave Waxtel, my publisher, has an expression that I've always loved. He says that every game creates "its own little Wargame Church." The game designer is the Prophet: he reveals the new religion and then wanders around preaching, trying to win converts. The converts are frequently quite zealous: often more zealous than the Prophet himself. And thus the Church is built, and endures.
I've seen this phenomenon at work with other games. There are guys who furiously promote somebody else's product for no reason other than that they're True Believers. I've watched them fiercely defend their Church against even the slightest hint of slander. I used to know some guys who thought that Johnny Reb was revealed gospel, and they were so mad at the existence of Fire and Fury that they wouldn't even say "Fire and Fury." They just called it "That other s**t." And of course, like the followers of any religion, these people can get quite mad if somebody changes the rules. They might have loved Command Decision h ad extremis, but when CD3 came out... Heresy! They drifted off, looking for a new church.
But now I'm watching my own little church going up right before my eyes, and it's an amazing phenomenon. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the congregation seems to be very nice fellows. But... do I think so only because it's such a huge boost to my ego that they are part of my church, and not somebody else's? I don't know. I've never suffered from a small ego, but this is really remarkable. The pleasure I get from having made this thing that people like to use is just indescribable. The temptation is overwhelming to think that I've got everything right, because people are so happy with my game. I guess that's why some game designers come across as egomaniacs, or perhaps why a few of them actually are.
Arch-Fiend and Superhero
While I'm on this subject of my ego, there's another strange and edifying experience that has been happening lately. I am becoming aware that, as people learn some things about my game and make up their minds about it one way or the other, I am becoming a Hero and a Villain.
If people like the game, then they like me. It seems to be just that simple. I get these very warm, friendly e-mails from people I've never talked to before (never even emailed before), and they're incredibly flattering and kind. They tell me about all the games they've played in the past, what they like and don't like about other games, how long they've been gaming, about the guys they game with... It's like being at a big party, getting introduced to everybody, and making small talk. They all seem to be a in good mood, and I have something to do with it. One weekend in February I got 62 emails, most of which were like that. After a while I didn't know what to say. I just wrote back and said "thank you." (If you're reading this, and you got one of those 2-word emails from me, believe me: I meant every one of those two words!)
But if people don't like the game - or, more often, if they feel my game is a competitor with a game they like very much - then they don't like me. I am a predator of some sort, encroaching on their turf. Again, this is the sentiment of players- not other game designers. I've been contacted by three other successful game designers, and they've all been quite friendly and encouraging. It's not the Prophets you have to watch out for... it's the Disciples!
These guys can be quite mad about a game that "competes" with their favorite. They often need to find a reason to dislike it; to find fault with it. I must say that I don't understand this. Surely most wargamers have a billion rule sets on their shelves,
whether they play them all or not. I regularly buy new game rules, and I'll keep on buying them, even if they "compete" with mine. I just like games, and like to see what's new. I think the whole notion of games competing with each other is silly. Most people play periods, and then several games within that period, even if they do have a favorite.
Expert and Ignoramus
It can be quite embarrassing to learn that some players now know my game better than I do. I'll get these questions by email asking about very specific game situations, and I'll scratch my head and reach for a copy of the book and look it up! ("Hell, Idunno... What does the book say?")
Despite this, many people seem to have absolute trust in my knowledge not only of the precise contents of this 116-page book, but also of every iota of information that relates to it. I got an email from Italy the other day, in broken English, asking me a list of something like 20 specific questions about how my game would or wouldn't adequately address the following issues relating to the battle of Such-and-Such. Another person emailed me, wanting to know why the Appendices gave the ratings it did to the following dozen or so specific units.... Never underestimate the wargamer's passion for micro-data.
That, in turn, brings me to the flipside of this problem. When you publish an historical wargame, particularly one on a very popular period, you will face the inevitable barrage of historical nit-picking. I'm getting emails from people who are politely "correcting" me, and others who are quite rabidly nuts. One guy WRITING IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS ran down every single unit on my Allied Waterloo O.B. and pointed out how there was some mistake in every one. I'm not joking; he apparently served as Wellington's chief of staff, and could do a roll-call of the entire Anglo-Allied army from memory, one soldier at a time. (He may also be completely full of s**t, but I'm certainly not going to check.)
This has always amused me. What, after all, does a person like that expect the game designer to say in response? Does he expect that I will reply: "Oh my God, I can't believe I've had the audacity to publish this game without consulting you first... The shame, the shame, I'm so embarrassed... I'll immediately buy it back from all the distributors and ask the people who've already bought it to destroy it at once! Let me know if there's anything else I can do to atone."
There seems to be a cadre of wargamers who derive a great deal of pleasure from (and spend a whole lot of time on) critiquing historical micro-data. Not, mind you, for any particular purpose... These letters never seem to be aimed at doing much besides allowing the letter-writer the chance to tell somebody all the things he knows about Napoleonic orders of battle.
Conniving Capitalist Bastard
Go to any wargames chat-site on the internet, and post a question that runs something like this:
"Hi, I'm Winston Wargamer, and I'm thinking about publishing my new game The Glory of Giory. Does anybody have any advice for me?"
I guarantee you will get thirty-five responses that contain this answer:
"Hi Winston. Forget it, man. Be prepared to lose a ton of money and waste ten years of your life. You'll never sell them all, they'll stack up in your garage until - on your 67th birthday - your wife finally makes you burn them in a bonfire in the backyard. You'll never make any money doing this."
It is true that many game designers go into debt producing games that will never turn a profit. In my opinion that has more to do with bad business decisions, poor marketing, not knowing one's audience, and so on. But one of the weird outcomes of this situation is that if you do make some money off your game, suddenly you're Bill Gates: the aggressive tycoon who loves the filthy lucre more than he loves his mortal soul.
I've had a couple of people (all Brits, interestingly enough) rant at me about the price of my game. Never mind that it's smack in the middle of the price ranges of other games of its period. That's not the point: the point is that Grande Armee is quite obviously, grotesquely, trying to be profitable. The shame! Who the hell do I think I am, taking the money of hard-working wargamers like that?
It seems that there is a large and vocal Cheapskate Faction in the hobby, which I find really odd. I mean, think about what we're doing here, guys... We're paying lots and lots of money for little lumps of lead. Does this make sense? (I guess it makes more sense than paying lots and lots more money for little lumps of plastic, which is what most fantasy garners are doing nowadays.) I'm afraid of counting the figures in my collection and trying to ascertain what I've spent on them over the last 2-3 years. I'm scared that it would have been enough to pay off my car loan, or take a summer-long European vacation. I'll bet most garners are in the same situation, even the vocally Cheapskate ones. So what's all this bitchin about a thirty dollar game?
Moreover, we might want to bear in mind that if no game made money, virtually nobody would ever make a decent game. (Or at least none would get published and "come out" so that you'd ever hear about them.) If my game didn't look profitable, Quantum would never have taken up the project and become the publisher. If the product didn't look sellable, no retailer would ever have ordered it. Everybody does his part because it looks like a good business bet. In short, if the game doesn't have Profit written all over it, it is virtually guaranteed a short and obscure little life.
Right now my head is filled with game-design ideas, and whenever I talk about them, people say, "Ooh, yeah, why don't you do that one next? I'd buy a game like that." But when I think about the two-and-a-half years I just spent on Grande Armee, the last year of which was heavily dominated by financial issues, dealing with a publisher, with prospective retailers, with advertisers, even trying to calculate the costs of shipping, storage, and using online billing services... I realize that "doing" a game is utterly and completely dominated by two things nobody has enough of: Time and above all else, Money.
Great Game, Except for...
Within a week of its debut, I was seeing Grande Armee variant rules, house rules, and people writing me to say: "We had a great time! We played the Aspern-Essling scenario, except we decided not to use this and that rule, and created that and this..." Most game designers have no problem with this. I certainly don't. But it does raise a fundamental philosophical question in my mind:
If most people don't play the games the way they're written, then why does anybody buy a set of rules at all?
Surely this phenomenon explains things like that Courier poll last year, in which nearly one-third of all respondents, when asked "Which Napoleonics rules do you use?" responded: "Home Brew." I think perhaps that people look at wargame rules as "open architecture" systems: the engine's sound, but they want different features.
The more I thought about this, the more it began to make sense. Another whole cohort of gamers will rip a designer to shreds for not having taken the following eight billion historical factors into adequate consideration in his design... In other words, they are disappointed that the game in their hands is not the same as the one in their heads. So they begin taking elements from the latter and inserting them into the former.
The problem is that no one factor by itself is an adequate model of anything. Everything is supposed to work as a coherent system: all the parts that were put in, and especially all the parts that were left out. (Not many people consider that the stuff that doesnt get included is a very important part of game design, too.) So if you add or subtract tools, you're essentially making your own game, but without the benefit of having seen it through the same pair of eyes that put the toolbox together this way in the first place.
Join the SPD
Borrowing an acronym from contemporary German politics, I would like to inaugurate a new organization within the wargaming world. I call it "The Society for the Perpetually Disturbed."
One of strange things about wargaming is the fact that people get so excited and/or upset over how somebody else's game works. In recent comments on this site, people have talked about how "disturbing" certain aspects of the game design were, or how they were "disappointed" by this or that.
Now, as a person who regularly critiques wargame designs, I'm certainly not so naive to think that my game would be immune to the same kind of criticism I've dished out to others in the past. No problems, mate. Usually, I think any press is good press, in the promotional sense of the word, particularly for an entirely new design. What I don't understand, though, are the guys who devote a lot of time and energy hanging out on the chat-site simply to keep pointing out the ways in which some other game is superior to this one (which they've never played.)
Are they hired advocates? Unemployed lawyers and PR men? Or just eccentric zealots? I have trouble envisioning them in any other sort of business. Can you imagine, for instance, a guy who hangs out on a Volkswagen fan site and posts message after message about how he likes Toyotas better?
Hmmm... well, actually come to think of it, I can imagine that guy.
I surely don't make the claim to please everybody. But if the mere existence of this game upsets you this much, then the better solution would be just to stop thinking about it. (I'm assuming, of course, that you don't like being upset... You don't, right?)
The Training Wheels Come Off
I talked to Arty Conliffe a couple of weeks ago, about something completely unrelated to wargaming, and at the end of the conversation I told him about some of my recent adventures. It was over the phone, but I could hear him smiling. He said, "Well, that's only the tip of the iceberg..." He should know. He's got fifteen game designs in the marketplace, and is infamous for eschewing the public eye: "I like the guys," he said, "But I don't want to live my life on the internet."
When Arty releases a new game, he aims for it to reach the point where the training wheels come off, and the game is really out there on its own, without any need for the designer to help it along. And he's right, of course: that's ideal. Once the game has entered the public domain it doesn't really belong to the designer anymore, anyway. I had a very gratifying experience at this last Cold Wars, when I watched Grande Armee games being run (very well, I might add) by guys from hundreds of miles away, in one case by a person I'd never met before.
I feel like a parent whose kid has gone off to school. Have a nice day, Junior!
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© Copyright 2003 Hal Thinglum
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