Reached the Shore Safely

Grace and Mike, thank you again for conceiving of, starting, and refining this amazing program. You guys must do a TED Talk so the program can be an inspiration and model for other communities and industries. The program is an act of generosity, from you and anybody who assists you to strategize, refine the tools, write the announcements, schedule the events, manage the platforms, to the mentors that commit to 3 months of attention to another person, to even the mentees because I think they give back to the mentors, even if just by validating the mentors’ knowledge. 

I would like to write a post about the details of my projects, but this is a post about my overall experience across two back-to-back semesters of mentorship. I am incredibly grateful for my two mentors - two lovely people who I feel will be friends and allies forever. My Fall mentor was Mandela Fernandez-Grandon, a designer in the UK. His game Glasgow (he’s Scottish) is high on Rhado’s list of favorite games of 2020. I bought a copy and even my non-gamer daughter (a junior in college) loves it. It is streamlined, elegant, quick to teach, and provides great feedback as you build out Glasgow. Konstantinos Karagiannis, a game designer in Athens, Greece is my current mentor. He has published and signed games and I look forward to playing as many as I can in the future. He and Mandela are super-intelligent, kind, insightful, and charming. It was an amazing surprise to have two European mentors, both to hear a different perspective, but also see how we are part of a world community. It reminds me of traveling to Amsterdam before the pandemic and using Meetup to join game groups there, immediately making lasting friends and even playtesting my games.

My intended goal for the Fall semester was to finalize the design of a game about climate change that I started in 2016 then worked on nearly full-time in 2019 and 2020 as the magnitude and urgency of the crisis continued to ramp up. I feel I have a unique concept that could teach through engagement with macro examples of real-world catastrophes and solutions along with micro examples of actual actions that individuals can take right now. I literally couldn’t believe that I had been matched with Mandela who’s primary career is as a renowned biologist working on global solutions in the area of sustainability. It was perfect for my climate game. But in my application I also mentioned a few of my other, nearly finished game designs and during my first meeting with my Mandela picked up on a thought I expressed that maybe I should finish my other two games first, because selling the climate game would be easier if I had a published game under my belt. The ungodly urgency of the climate crisis made it hard to just put the climate project aside, but I did and we focused on my other two games. 

Mandela and I had inspiring and productive meetings about my games Agency and Wizards with Bazookas. I thought both games were nearly finished. I had tested them at cons and high-tested them at Metatopia, but it turned out that more, radically more, work was needed, or possible. Agency is a card game where competing secret service agencies use bluffing, imperfect information, and limited resources to create a competitive, unstable, and tactical battle. Wizards is a real-time deck-builder duel game in which two opponents cast spells and fire bazookas at one another. At the end of three incredibly productive months, I hadn’t finished Agency, I hadn’t implemented the ideas we brainstormed for Wizards, and we had barely squeezed in a meeting to the climate game. 

The work on Agency transitioned beautifully with Konstantinos. Our goal was to finalize Agency, ideally Wizards too, and reach a stage where I could pitch them to publishers for real. I hoped we could also look at my climate game. Like Mandela, Konstantinos has a masterful knowledge of mechanics, a clear analytic mind, and is a joy to work with. He provided priceless insight about Agency and the nature of being a game designer. 

But the work was intense. With Konstantinos we did not have a chance to work on Wizards let alone discuss the climate game. In two semesters my goal dilated from ascending Kilimanjaro by nailing a complex game that would help reverse climate change, to polishing up a few nearly finished games, to struggling to just finish one “nearly finished” game. As I pushed Agency I struggled with a failure of confidence in my ability to judge where it should go. Konstantinos felt from the beginning that the core of the game was strong and I just needed to adjust the details. Yet he has the ability to see the core clearly and hold onto it while ripping other things off and throwing other ideas at it. I do that too, but it feels like I am on a Patrick O’Brien deck rounding Cape Horn, the ship about to fall apart, ice on the rigging, and waves washing over - nothing crystal clear. 

Just today in our last meeting Konstantinos taught me yet another lesson about deconstructing games. We were talking about different games. We both love Phil Walker-Harding’s game Imhotep. I didn’t realize Phil also designed Sushi Go. Konstantinos said the two games are exactly the same. This blew my mind. What??? Sushi Go has a drafting mechanic and Imhotep is mostly worker placement. But he explained how he looks at the games as a number of “scoring systems” and “delivery mechanisms”. Aside from my raw intuition about games, I think in terms of mechanism. But this analysis is trans-mechanism. It is really an eye-opener.

I come to game design from an art background. I am analytical by nature, but have trained my brain over the years to call forth ideas and concepts and look for solutions to problems in a way that is almost like divination. In dense, daily design journals I progress ideas for multiple games and other ideas, brainstorming, sketching, and iterating. There is rationality to my process, but I realize that at least with game design, I do not yet have the kind of laser focus my mentors possess to see the underlying mechanics in a game, where the fun is, why players are motivated, and what can be done to amplify the good parts. Konstantinos had a career in music before becoming a full-time game designer so we are able to discuss these two sides of game design - the intuitive, artistic side, and the logical, analytical side. He feels he is still more similar to me when working on his own games, striving to be more critical, but that’s hard for me to imagine. 

But in today’s meeting with Konstantinos we tested version 18g2 of Agency and it suddenly truly feels almost done. It was an ideal final meeting. I feel like I have washed up safe on a Caribbean beach. I have been through storms and am exhausted, but I am relieved and ecstatic. The game isn’t 100% done and maybe the next round of playtests with other designers will not go as well, but I know I have taken the game so far. I told Konstantinos that Mandela was excited to test Agency again when I’m ready and he asked me to let him know what Mandela thinks. Then he had a great idea—I will try to set up a session where Mandela, Konstantinos and I play it together.