Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany

When I was growing up, history was a list of wars. This was partly the fault of games. From an early age I played any game I could find and hunted for more. At yard sales I would rifle through stacks of Milton Bradley to dig up a tattered copy of Third Reich or Wooden Ships & Iron Men. These games shaped my understanding of history. At the school library I tended to ignore the books that didn’t concern armed conflict. History was a list of battles and all the rest was window dressing. Of course, this was also partly...

All models are wrong, but some are useful. I think that first part goes double for games, because games carry the additional burden of needing to be interesting and engaging. I think that second part goes double for games too, because they speak the language of entertainment and art, things which connect to the human parts of us in ways that a more strictly mathematical simulation often does not. It's poetry, not math. Much is made in some quarters about whether or not a game is an "accurate" simulation, which in some ways misses the point, because they can't be...

No matter how much feedback you get from playtesters, it's always going to be a small fraction of the feedback you'll get from players once a game has been released. And that is as it should be; if games had more testers than purchasers, there's no way it'd be paying our bills! It's common post-release to hear things you didn't hear in testing, and for players to raise questions that you never thought of asking. And sometimes, yes, something gets missed; this is the stuff errata is made of. There are some folks, particularly within the wargames niche, that regard...

Over the last few years, a few folks have asked me how I knew when I was done with a game. For me, it actually isn't super-complicated, because I generally don't start actively working on a game until I have a very clear idea of what the end product is going to be, and then I just get to it and I just keep at it until the game resembles that idea. I go into it with my parameters already defined: what the game is going to feel like, what tensions are going to be present, what ideas are going...

My father had started working for Blue Cross around the time I was born, in an entry-level position. It didn't take long for him to advance up the ranks into management. I don't remember a whole lot of conversations with my father before he died, but I remember him telling me that he was always the first one in and the last one out, and that if you put in the time and the energy, if you work hard and seize opportunities, you can make something of yourself.  I got my first job when I still a teenager - I...