We sat down with Richard Garfield and Mind Control VP of Business Strategy (and fellow Wizards of the Coast alum) Randy Buehler to discuss what they believe is the still-untapped potential of computers to run the next generation of paper-baed games, and why there’s room for games for the thinking player on the populist planes of social networking platforms.
Richard, you’ve said that you left Wizards Of The Coast so you could focus on creating new online properties. What led you to that?
Richard Garfield I still do paper games, for fun, and a wide variety of computer products, but my passion for a long time has been to try to fill this niche between transliterations of paper games, and the much more simulative computer game standards, like shooters and RTSs, and MMORPGs. I feel like that space is fertile ground for game design. And on the other hand, I felt like the paper-game industry was being very well developed. There are lots of interesting games coming out every year, interesting collectibles, interesting non-collectibles, Eurogames. I didn’t feel like there was a huge hole in the market. Whereas with this area, the hybrid paper/electronic game, I feel like we have the potential of really providing something which is missing there.
Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield
How would you describe that kind of hybrid? What’s the difference between that and say, just porting a tabletop game to Xbox 360?
RG I think there’s a huge difference. The potential a computer gives you for game design is vast. And if you just had a device which you could put in your board games, which handled hidden movement and adjudicated rules, you could come up with a vast number of different games to what you have right now. And the computer can do a heck of a lot more than that. By rules adjudication I also mean doing calculations for the players. The main reason why something like Spectromancer wouldn’t be fun to play with paper is because there’d be a lot of bookkeeping. But the computer can do it for you.
Mind Twist is described as a game for players who “like to think,” but a lot of the games that have thrived on Facebook are not thinking games.
RG That’s right. Oftentimes when I approach a new platform, what I’m trying to do is address something which I think is missing. So the non-thinking game player, they’re being very well catered to right now. But there’s a whole other market [for] somebody who wants to play a game a little more analogous to a Magic: the Gathering or something like that.
Randy Buehler There are a million grinding games out there, so part of this is an anti-grinding moment. But there are also a million twitch/dexterity-type games, and – I just want a good turn-based strategy game, where I can take my time to think about what I want to do. It comes down to how quickly and how accurately I can think, not how quickly and how accurately I can push a button.
The game is free-to-play, and players can pay for more content. How much free content will a player start with?
RB Our thought is to give you four characters, [which] actually gives you a reasonable diversity of different armies.
RG We’re trying to make it so that the players are motivated to buy more, not for acquisition of power, but for diversity of play experience. So if you like the game, you’re going to want to play different characters because they’re fun to play, as opposed to you want to play different characters because they’re more powerful. This is something which in Magic served very well. A lot of people found it really counterintuitive to make a trading card game where the rare cards weren’t as a rule more powerful than the common cards. But the idea there was, purchasing cards got you power in Magic, but it was less about power than about variety.
Unlike a collectible card game, it sounds like you’re not trying to use scarce content to hook the players.
RG There may be elements of the game which are random like that, and rare. But for those that haven’t got the very rare characters, we don’t want them to feel like they can’t compete in the online arena. Even if the character is balanced in some ways, if it’s hard to get, this can be perceived as restricting players. We want to do everything we can to make the game feel fair to play head-to-head.
[We] may drop different graphical treatments or sound treatments for your character, and different awards that you might be able to show off. Those you might get through winning tournaments or just as random drops in particular single-player games or even multi-player games. But we don’t want it to be seen as contributing to your power.