 | A Theory of Fun milestone — and postmortemMarch 6th, 2006 |
Today I got my royalty statement for A Theory of Fun, covering July through December of last year. And to my utter shock (but great pleasure), enclosed was a check. Yes, that means that the book earned out its royalty, sometime between November of 2004 and December of 2005.
In one of the comments, Morgan asked if I’d recap the book process, and I figured this milestone is as good a reason as any to do so!
How it got started
Sometime around 2000-2003, I started going on a real kick of reading non-fiction of all sorts. It was stuff from all over the map, not focused on one subject. A bit of network theory, a bunch of business books, some anthropology, history of mathematics and science — really, whatever seemed interesting. I guess I had been out of school long enough that it felt like I needed to stretch my mind a little bit.
Among the stuff I decided to catch up on was some of Chris Crawford’s old writing, which I had read before, but it had been a while. You know, Art of Computer Game Design, and so on. He’d also sent me a draft copy of his book The Art of Interactive Design, which wouldn’t come out for a few years yet, after I was part of the first Phrontisterion.
(That gathering was, btw, my first entree into the wider world of the game development community, and I owe Gordon Walton a great debt for taking a fairly clueless young designer out to Chris’ house to hang out).
I was also attending the odd game design workshop here and there. At one of those, Noah Falstein talked a bit about how he was researching evolutionary reasons why play existed.
All this stuff was going in one ear and out the other, in some ways. I was startled later, when revisiting sources, to see how much of the material discussed in those books and those chats ended up fashioned into sections in the book.
What actually prompted it to take form in my mind, though, was a blog post or forum post by Dave Rickey. I don’t remember which, and I can’t find it, but it triggered a response, and that response was a talk that I gave at the Austin Game Conference in the fall of 2003, entitled “A Theory of Fun.”
Obviously, in doing the talk, I ended up drawing on all of the above materials, plus some: basically, a smorgasbord of everything I had been reading went into the presentation.
The aftermath of the talk
I gave the keynote bright and early in the morning, which meant that a lot of the conference attendees weren’t there to see it. People seemed to like it — especially the cartoon nature of the slides, which I did because I had grown increasingly bored with bullet points. Then I mostly forgot about it.
But then I started to get emails asking about it. Chris Sherman, the conference organizer, was nice enough to make the slides into a PDF, and I was then able to put them up on the web. As you can see, I thought it wholly unremarkable. But the emails kept coming.
Then, at GDC, I was approached by Kurt Squire, whom I knew from his website at MIT, Joystick 101, which I read regularly. He mentioned he wanted to introduce me to someone, and I kinda blew it off. 
But the someone was persistent: it was Ben Sawyer, who in addition to being a major figure in the whole Serious Games movement, is also the game books editor for Paraglyph Press. And he finally cornered me at E3, where he basically pitched me on the idea of doing the talk as a book.
His idea: to mimic the Powerpoint talk: have the slides from the presentation, and maybe a few more, plus add in the text of the talk on the side as an essay. He thought it would make a good inspirational guide for designers.
I said, “Well, the cartoons were done at 72dpi. We’d have to redo them. And the talk glossed a a lot…” I was reluctant, but he talked me into it.
The book-writing process
We signed the contract in June of 2003, I think. When we discussed when the book might be delivered, we figured “hey, we’re mostly adapting, and redoing some cartoons, so how about the end of September?” So that’s the date that we put in the contract.
The dirty little secret: the book-writing process barely existed. During the whole time after the talk, I’d kept on reading, and particularly reading a lot about cognition and about games and game studies. You can see the range of books I was reading over on the book’s Resources page. It was all going into a big ol’ bubbling stew in my head, refining and complexifying what I wanted to talk about.
The first step was to rebuild the presentation from scratch. That is, I ended up making a broad outline of a lot of stuff I wanted to write about (figuring hey, this is my one chance to make a statement about games!) that looked something like this.
A Theory of Fun outline – book version
- Games as patterns
- Intro
- My kids are learning tic tac toe…
- And now chess
- People are amazing pattern matching machines
- Face example
- Iconification or “chunking”
- Noise
- Retracing and mastery
- Games are about cognition and pattern mastery
- We play games until we master or fail to master
- We “chunk” mastery
- How children and animals learn through games
- Breaking games down
- Some games teach…
- Spatiality
- Exploration
- Aim
- The premise, and ringing changes
- Variations on a Theme
- Types of variation
- Alternate challenge modes
- Why balance isn’t ideal
- How we design games—ringing changes on previous puzzles
- Tic-Tac-Toe, Chess and Go – looking at boardgames
- Abstracting out fiction
- The power-up example
- What “delight” is (“easy fun”)
- Bettelheim
- Ekman
- Gender and cognition
- What players do
- Maximizing ROI
- R must be quantified for it to count as a game mechanic
- Doing thigns that are not fun
- Twinking and cheating
- Means of fighting this
- The competitive angle
- The flaws with competition
- Story
- Player created content
- Applying known solutions – characters as personality types
- Flow and mastery
- Whittling
- Butterflies and powergamers
- Designeritis
- Games as art
- It’s all just interacting with the medium
Collaborative Competitive Individual
Constructive Open source development Commercial development Modding or skinning
Experiential Mudding Deathmatching Single-player gaming
Destructive A CS degree Hacking Thinking up this post
Collaborative Competitive Individual
Constructive Community Job Hobby
Experiential Performance Sport Consumer
Destructive Teaching Criticism Analysis- Critique
- Communication
- The magic circle, PKs, and fighting evil
- The art of the game is its mechanics? – the dance example
- Games and mind control, and social responsibility
- If I am going to noodle about with this medium simply because I think it’s a nifty keen toy, the least I do is make sure I don’t hurt anyone else in the process. Even better, I can take this nifty keen toy very very very seriously and assume that it is a powerful tool for good or evil. And try to make it a tool for good.
It’s Pascal’s wager. If it’s all just a game, then I was just a crackpot all along. But if it’s not… There are only two responsible ways to behave with such a tool. Either step away from it altogether, and let someone qualified take it up; or take it up and be as qualified as you can.
- Do we get to ignore context—no
- The human condition
- Is it the same thing for our games to portray the human condition, and for the human condition to be portrayed within our games? – Sasha Hart
It is not. I would make the analogy of a trellis. A trellis can shape how a plant grows. Right now, we make very simple trellises. Often the plants escape the trellis, but that’s no credit to the trellis. It’s a credit to the plants.- The concentration camp game example
- Outro
- Subjectivity and openness to interpretation
- Is this what gamers will want?
- Players who want to whittle, who want easy puzzles
- People aren’t broken. They’re flawed. But that is an important distinction, a CRUCIAL distinction. “Broken” implies people don’t change; they do. “Broken” implies people can’t act intelligently; but people are smart, it’s mobs that are stupid. “Flawed” means you accept the many foibles that come with humans and you work with them. Some of them are even glorious, wonderful, fascinating flaws. “Broken” sounds like something you give up on, toss in the trash. “Flawed” sounds like something with a quirk. Something interesting. Something with character. Something collectible, maybe. Something to be cherished. The moment you lose respect for your players, you should get out of this business.
- Child’s play
I then mostly threw that outline away. You’ll notice, however, that I was already mining a lot of writings from the website; if you browse through the stuff on the website, you’ll find material like the Tetris example, the charts of human activity, and much more almost verbatim.
The real outline looked different, because I concluded that I needed to know what I was saying page by page, to capture the “bastard form of a picture book,” as one of the reviews put it. So it looked like this:
- Caption (Image)
- A THEORY OF FUN: Why Games Matter Notebook with doodles and scribbles, in color
- Dedication a little banner
- Foreword A guy pointing at the forword
- A THEORY OF FUN: Why Games Matter Black and white version of the notebook?
- My kids are learning tic-tac-toe these days. Two kids playing tic-tac-toe, one a girl labelled “7″ and the other a boy labelled “5.”
- It’s fun watching kids learn to play games. The kids playing tic-tac-toe, and one says, “I win again! 6073 to nothing!”
- They’ve started to figure out that tic-tac-toe is kind of a dumb game. The kids fighting.
- I know how they feel. I’m not a kid anymore, and some days, when I play a game on my computer, it seems like I’m fighting the tide. I quit because I feel inadequate. Me at computer, playing a game. The game is labelled as “first-person shooter.”
- Other times, if I play something I’m good at, I get really far and do really well, then I get bored.Me at computer, playing a game. The game is labelled as “typing game. (for old folks).”
- Why are some games fun, and other games boring? Why do games start getting boring after a while, and other games stay fun for a long time? Tic-tac-toe game, with legs and arms, tugging on a guy’s pants, plaintively saying “Wanna play with me, mister?”–but the guy is busy playing chess.
In other words, I wrote the book cartoon captions first. I went through all the rearranging and whatnot at this stage. I also decided what every cartoon would be like, and I’d send off this Excel sheet full of stuff like the above to Keith, the publisher, and Ben, the editor. Eventually, we agreed on the shape of the book. This took about a week or two.
Then I started drawing cartoons. I set myself a goal of two every night on weekdays. I would usually start at 10pm, and I would often be drawing until 1am or so. On the weekends, I set myself a goal of eight over the weekend. I did each one in pencil first on Bristol board, then I inked them using a brand-new set of Rapidograph pens that we bought specially to do the book. (I have since fallen in love with these — I used to use nibs for ink work, but haven’t dipped a nib into an inkwell in quite a while).
I wanted to make the cartoons much better than what was in the slides. But I also realized very quickly that doing them up totally awesome would take freakin’ forever. So I settled on a sort of “Gary-Larsonesque style” as another review called it: something that I could actually do two of in an evening. Some of them turned out to demand better artwork, such as the brain, the bust of Shakespeare, the portrait of Pascal, and so on, and others wanted to be more elaborate cartoons, such as the Pac-Man eating people on the street.
During this time, I was still traveling a fair amount, and I even had a vacation at Kristen’s uncle’s in Colorado. The Rapidographs and Bristol board came with me wherever I went, and I stuck to my goal every day. The drawing of the girl dancing was done on her uncle’s kitchen table.
By and large, the drawings were done in order; I skipped around very rarely, figuring that I would get discouraged if I did all the fun ones first. Some of them, I knew that I would be repeating elements, so I left space blank, expecting to assemble the image digitally. All the images were then scanned using a new printer/scanner that we had wanted to get anyway, but used the book as an excuse for. Kristen did all the scanning, turning the ink drawings (which were done at 11′x14′ by the way) into 300dpi TIFFs. Each one ranged from 3 to 10 megs, and the final files weighed in at around 640MB.
Just uploading these to the publisher’s servers took a while. In the meantime, all the captions were added to the images by me, and we actually debated things like whether or not some of the blank lines I had in the captions made sense or not, or would be confusing. I actually got somewhat worked up about stuff like that, but Keith was very understanding.
Finally, the cartoons were done, exactly on schedule: it was September 1st, and the book was due on the 30th. I took the rest of the week off, and came back ready to work on a Friday night.
Then I wrote the book in a long weekend.
No, really. First draft started on a Friday night, and I finished it on Monday evening, as I recall. It just poured out; at this point, I’d gone over it so much, I knew what to say on every page.
The real work was editing it. A set of reviewers (several of whom were friends I knew already!) were picked as editorial reviewers, and they read through the text and offered arguments, corrections, and suggestions. This took a week or so. I also showed it to a couple of folks whose eye I trusted: Dave Taylor and Patricia Pizer. They took just the first few chapters and demolished my flabby first-draft text. It was amazing, and prefigured the word-by-word editing job that Keith and Judy Flynn would do. I was able to take the guidance from those first few chapters and go back through the entire text and really tighten it up.
And then the word came back from the review board: they wanted footnotes or endnotes. Ben wanted each game referenced to be discussed in terms of the theory, or from my viewpoint.
I cringed. I had poured out the text in a long weekend from memory. I have a pretty good memory: that meant that I had to go back through the entire book, line by line, and every time I found something that was referencing a book, a game, I had to dig out the game or the book, and find the pages, the citations, the quotes. It led me back through 2+ years of reading and research, and often back into new primary sources.
In order to preserve the light feel of the book, we ended up deciding to keep the notes at the back. It took about a week to do the notes, and the word count on the notes is almost exactly the same as the entire rest of the book put together. Then we had to copy-edit the notes. I kid you not when I say that Judy and Keith flagged an average of three corrections per paragraph that vastly improved the text. I will never underestimate copy-editing again.
We had arguments — pages that were a tad too long, clarifications, whether or not chess should be capitalized, that sort of thing. But all in all, it went really smoothly for mostly being done in one month.
In the end, the ms was delivered in final form two days early.
Aftermath
It’s been over a year. The book is now in four languages including English. It’s used on the syllabus at MIT and Wharton, plus lots of other places I can’t track down. I still have no idea how many copies it has sold. I was told when the whole process began that a game book might sell 3000 copies, typically, and that if it sells 10,000 copies lifetime, it’s an amazing success. When the book debuted, it quickly settled to what Keith called “a steady rate.” I suppose I expected it to fall off slowly, like most things.
But it hasn’t. Instead, month in and month out, it has sold at basically the same steady rate. Its lifetime average sales rank on Amazon is around 10,000, and so it has been for pretty much the entire year and a quarter it has been available. Based on the reports I get, it looks to me like we have a good shot at reaching those 10,000 copies sold someday. Who knows. Since the book was half cartoons, and therefore sold for far less than the exorbitant amount most game books are sold for, it’s not exactly a goldmine. But the money wasn’t really the point.
It wasn’t too long before the publisher started asking about a sequel. But I didn’t quite know what to write about, so I have been putting them off for around nine months now. Now I do know what to write about, but that’s another post for another day.
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Your writing process is similar to the process I use for writing music. There’s a lot of inspiration (a.k.a. research) involved, and so, the approach doesn’t feel “structured”. I suppose that “structure” would arise from a more detailed schedule. For instance, did you ever think, “Okay, I want to have the outline done by this date, the first draft done by this date, the editorial review will last 2-3 weeks, and the book should be ready for publishing on this date before the deadline”?
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