Reflections on Game Design as a Hobby

When I was six years old, or thereabouts, I had a bed spread on my bed with a pattern reminiscent of a game board.  Of course my memory is a bit foggy, but with the help of my Mom who loves to tell stories about my childhood, I have some recollection of turning my bed into an ad hoc boardgame.  My little toys, with the help of the results from a beat up pair of six-sided dice stolen from an old Parcheesi set, would march around the patchwork track racing to their ultimate goal, the large square at the center, where all paths led.

I started making up games at an early age, whether it was bedspread dice races or hallway Nerf basketball with laundry baskets, rubber band army men wars or Uno poker.  I don’t think I ever once during childhood considered a career in game design (I had settled on Astronomy at a young age and was quite happy to change to Environmental Education as a young adult after learning that Astronomers spent most of there time indoors staring at computer screens instead of outdoors looking up at the stars.)  Even when I was in college, competitively obsessing over Chess, with several notebooks full of game ideas and a handful of complete designs under my belt, I never once thought that I might take my ideas and try to make a living from them.

Game design was my hobby and I was very satisfied with that.

I certainly understand what drives the indie game designer, whether it be board games or computer games, casual or strategic, to want to  bring his or her amazing creation to the world at large.  I do imagine one day sitting down with all my ideas and collecting them together to share, perhaps online or in a book.  I even have one or two strategy games that I would produce if I had the funds to do so without consequence.  But I’m not really driven to do so.  Game design is my hobby, its the activity that fills up the cold winter nights, and I don’t really want to spoil it by trying to make it into a meaningful, productive activity.

I guess I wonder, though, what it means to choose, as a hobby, an activity that so many people, independently, take so seriously.  Outside the halls of the big game companies, whether EA or Hasbro, game design takes on a whole new meaning.

Independent game designers are like the alchemists of the modern world, blending new ideas with cherished standards to create wonderment.  There is even a philosophers stone:  a game that will survive their generation and join the likes of chess, go, wari and other ancient games, and become historic.  Oh, even I feel the tug of that, though I imagine my only chance to create something that lives beyond me depends on blind luck more than anything else.

Modern day alchemists, I like that.  I don’t know much about alchemists of old, just what I’ve read of them in novels like Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, but I don’t think I’m that far off in my assessment.  Ancient alchemists were magicians of symbol and thought, mapping out the interactions of the common world in mystical ways, creating ceremony and ritual to explain what they believed existed beyond the everyday.  In our more enlightened world,  games have replaced ritual, but the symbols and ceremony are still there, and game designers do seek to conjure their own kind of magic.  

The commercially produced game designers sandbox, Stonehenge, from Titanic Games comes to mind as a perfect example of this.

I really respect and look up to the indie game designer for they have something I lack.  Its not confidence or drive, though I’m sure I do lack a little of both.  Perhaps its vision, or a desire to please others. Whatever it is, I’m glad there are so many designers out there.  We live in a golden age of games and I’m always sad when I come across someone who sees games as a toy for children rather than the amazing mind-strengthening educational tool that all games are, to some extent (yes, even GTA IV).  But I think I’ll remain happy to sit up in the game design bleachers and watch the real talent on the field.

I kinda feelin’ like picking up a megaphone and doing some cheering; which I guess is the purpose of this website and just another facet of my hobby.