02-14-2017, 12:21 PM
Well, since you asked for opinions, I'll toss in some thoughts of my own off the top of my head for you.
I think that it misconceives the nature of the problem, and that it underestimates (or under accounts for) the diversity of taste that inheres in the human form.
Not everyone likes the same thing. Therefore, it stands to reason that not every player is going to like or to prefer the same kind of report, which is the form and the degree of completeness to which information/data is presented to them.
I think that designing a game is like cooking. A good cook can make virtually any of the options listed above turn out to be a scrumptuous part of a delicious meal (gaming experience).
Some games have a lot of depth to them, whereas others can be fairly simple in design. A battle report is but a single component (a piece of a game) of a much larger whole (the game, itself).
There is game design, and separate from that there is the player experience. The individual components of a game's design are not the exact same thing as the individual components of a player's gaming experience.
Whenever I would play Hyborian War, to use that PBM game as an example, I would simply skim over the reports. It's been a few years since I last played that game. My love for the game remains undiminished, however. It isn't because of the battle reports, though.
More recently, I have played a few turns of Alamaze. A recent battle report contained fresh text narratives and are presented with some degree of detail, yet I did the same thing with it that I did with Hyborian War battle reports that I have seen countless different times down through the years - namely, I skimmed over it. Why does a player skim a battle report, anyway? It's to extract certain information from amongst the mass of what all is presented. In an RPG, the details contained in a report would likely be vastly more important to scrutinize than every last textual detail presented in countless other games. In Middle-earth PBM, the text contained on index cards from other players tended to be more important than the details contained in many battle reports. When I became Er-Murazor the Witch-king of Angmar, those little index cards were all that really distinguished me from any other player who donned that role i the game. In that situation, a blank index card presents the challenge to the player of how to become memorable? How do you seize another player's attention? How do you drag them into the experience more?
[NOTE: See Gary Campbell's article about contact cards - http://www.middleearthgames.com/gsiart/diplmcy1.html]
Imaginatively written battle narratives, for example, are not the same thing as whether a game captures a player's imagination, and it is the latter rather than the former that will ultimately determine whether the players stays with the game or not.
Not everyone likes the exact same thing, so I think that there's more than one way to be successful in capturing the imagination of players. Likewise, there's also multiple paths to failure, even using some of the same basic components of game design.
If you were to ask every game designer, or even just every PBM game designer, to cook some fried chicken, do you think that it would all taste the same, even if they all had the exact same ingredients to work with? I don't. The same holds true, I think, where game design is concerned.
Some of the more popular PBM games ever developed down through the years were pretty sparse with the information that they provided. Thus, I think it is more about getting the experience right than it is about which of the options listed above is the best.
I think that it misconceives the nature of the problem, and that it underestimates (or under accounts for) the diversity of taste that inheres in the human form.
Not everyone likes the same thing. Therefore, it stands to reason that not every player is going to like or to prefer the same kind of report, which is the form and the degree of completeness to which information/data is presented to them.
I think that designing a game is like cooking. A good cook can make virtually any of the options listed above turn out to be a scrumptuous part of a delicious meal (gaming experience).
Some games have a lot of depth to them, whereas others can be fairly simple in design. A battle report is but a single component (a piece of a game) of a much larger whole (the game, itself).
There is game design, and separate from that there is the player experience. The individual components of a game's design are not the exact same thing as the individual components of a player's gaming experience.
Whenever I would play Hyborian War, to use that PBM game as an example, I would simply skim over the reports. It's been a few years since I last played that game. My love for the game remains undiminished, however. It isn't because of the battle reports, though.
More recently, I have played a few turns of Alamaze. A recent battle report contained fresh text narratives and are presented with some degree of detail, yet I did the same thing with it that I did with Hyborian War battle reports that I have seen countless different times down through the years - namely, I skimmed over it. Why does a player skim a battle report, anyway? It's to extract certain information from amongst the mass of what all is presented. In an RPG, the details contained in a report would likely be vastly more important to scrutinize than every last textual detail presented in countless other games. In Middle-earth PBM, the text contained on index cards from other players tended to be more important than the details contained in many battle reports. When I became Er-Murazor the Witch-king of Angmar, those little index cards were all that really distinguished me from any other player who donned that role i the game. In that situation, a blank index card presents the challenge to the player of how to become memorable? How do you seize another player's attention? How do you drag them into the experience more?
[NOTE: See Gary Campbell's article about contact cards - http://www.middleearthgames.com/gsiart/diplmcy1.html]
Imaginatively written battle narratives, for example, are not the same thing as whether a game captures a player's imagination, and it is the latter rather than the former that will ultimately determine whether the players stays with the game or not.
Not everyone likes the exact same thing, so I think that there's more than one way to be successful in capturing the imagination of players. Likewise, there's also multiple paths to failure, even using some of the same basic components of game design.
If you were to ask every game designer, or even just every PBM game designer, to cook some fried chicken, do you think that it would all taste the same, even if they all had the exact same ingredients to work with? I don't. The same holds true, I think, where game design is concerned.
Some of the more popular PBM games ever developed down through the years were pretty sparse with the information that they provided. Thus, I think it is more about getting the experience right than it is about which of the options listed above is the best.