November 25, 2024

Black Box Games talk about their UK Games Expo Award part I

by Niyati Keni

 

New UK games company, Black Box Games, recently won the coveted UK Games Expo’s Best New Strategy Card Game Award of 2013 for their first ever collectable card game, Lords of War: Orcs versus Dwarves. I caught up with Nick Street and Martin Vaux, co-directors of BBG, to talk about game design, buxom ladies with hammers and pink triceratops.  

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I’ve been wondering what might be a suitable collective noun for game designers.

NS: What’s a word that implies people throwing ideas about? 

MV: (laughing). An intelligentsia?!

NS: I meant more like lunacy. An asylum of game designers! 

MV: All the game designers we’ve met have been so massively different to one another. It’s hard to come up with a collective noun that would suit.

NS: And now we’re meeting game designers that are also businessmen, not just people who create games.

MV: Yeah, exactly. If you’re a game designer at home, creating games for the pure enjoyment of it, you’ve got the freedom to do whatever you want. And we’ve done that – created games that are the most impractical things that you could never make into a profitable product because they’d only ever appeal to you as an individual or to a very small cohort of your friends. As soon as you start thinking about it in terms of a business you have to refine the idea so much to get it down to as simple a message as possible. And then on top of that, does one create a version of a game that already exists or try to create something unique because so many games are simply versions of others. For example, there are so many versions of Monopoly or Settlers of Catan. It’s the same with movies. How many versions of Bladerunner have you seen? 

 

Talk about the elements of game design.

MV: As with any art form, normally what you first see is the genre. But you’ve actually got two underlying things to think about: the gameplay mechanic and the theme. In a lot of games, the mechanic is dictated by the theme and in some you can superimpose a theme on top of the mechanic because the mechanic is quite flexible. There are certain games that if you didn’t have a specific theme on top of those gameplay mechanics, it just wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t make sense. Why would you do the things you do unless it’s related, say, to the characters in a particular TV show? A perfect example being Arkham Horror as a game. It doesn’t always make sense from the perspective of gameplay mechanics. When you play it you want to try out all the weird things you can do, not because they’re going to help you win, but more because you’re a fan of H.P. Lovecraft or because you think it would be interesting to go to a creepy library and have a chat with the librarian! It doesn’t have to confer any advantage.

As you talk about game design I can’t help but see a lot of parallels with writing, with fiction. Is it essential for a game to have a narrative?

MV: For me, yes. And also, for me, a sense of completion of the story. One of the big things for me that I really appreciate in all art is catharsis. That feeling of relief and resolution when the story is done, whether that’s a game of Risk or even a game that I don’t particularly like, like say Monopoly. I really hate it when in a game of Monopoly, when I’m forced to play Monopoly, the last two players go ‘Well alright, let’s just call it a day then!’ What was the point of the whole afternoon?!

NS: The point was everybody playing together!

MV: Yeah, that’s true. I suppose what board and card games achieve that books, films, TV and even most video games don’t is to encourage immediate engagement between human beings in a room. Nothing else can really do that. It’s sort of a combination of conversation and team exercise isn’t it? Co-op games have become increasingly popular in the last few years because I think people like that collaborative aspect of it. But almost all games, even the most competitive games, have a collaborative aspect, because the basics of game theory are that the weak must combine their efforts against the strong in order to have a chance of winning. Somewhere along the line there has to be that engagement between players, that kind of very human interaction which very few other art forms enable. 

Do you concern yourself at all with the vagaries of the market before you start work on a game?

NS: Initially, you have to make a game for yourself. You can’t really make a game for someone else because you can’t know how they think. You have to make games for yourself and then hopefully one or two will fit a certain market.

MV: Definitely. Ultimately we’re designing games we want. Like someone writing a novel, a play, a poem or making a film. You do it because you’ve never seen the very thing that would capture how you feel or capture that desire you have to see something exist. It’s a kind of primal thing. Everyone expresses themselves in a different way. Cavemen used to make marks on walls. Now we have increasingly sophisticated ways of doing that involving laser printing and cutting and dice moulding and plastics and Far Eastern labour creating parts for us. Though I suppose when you’re designing a game, at the back of your mind, you are thinking about how your core gamer is going to respond to what you’re doing, because the core gamer is the one who’s going to buy your game, the one who’s going to take a risk because they’re looking for a new experience. Certainly that’s how I feel when I look at other people’s games. I look for something that I’ve never seen and it’s that appreciation of someone putting together a system that makes sense to me, that makes me think, ‘I’d never have thought of doing that’ or ‘that’s neat’. We buy games because we want to try them. And then when Nick and I sit down together and play them we say ‘that’s a cool idea. I wonder if we can take a seed of that and integrate it into one of our ideas’.

NS: We have also tried to think beyond our core gamer being from a certain demographic. When we were developing Lords of War, when we were thinking about the characters, you talked a lot about what Dnyan (Martin’s wife) would like to see, as a woman.

MV: It’s very difficult to create something that men and women can do together in terms of entertainment that appeals to both. Because from a very young age boys and girls are encouraged to think of themselves as very distinct. Girls are expected to like stuff that’s fluffy and sparkly and pink and boys are expected to like mud and trashing stuff. I’m not sure why, but games seem to have become a male preoccupation. Certainly that’s been our experience at expos and with gaming groups we’ve been involved with. And from a male perspective, as a game designer, I can’t assume I know what all women want or that they’ll have the same taste. So I had to think specifically about what Dnyan, my wife, would like. When we were still designing Lords of War, when each deck was just a bunch of pieces of paper with different coloured crosses on it, when I was thinking about characters and armies, I’d think, ‘would Dnyan want to play as this?’, ‘would it appeal to a woman, would it appeal to her?’ In fact Dnyan skews in favour of the Elf deck which is weighted towards women, more feminine.

 

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Well, two out of six Elf command cards are women. The other four are male. Yes, there are many women in the Elf ranks. Not so with the other decks, though.

MV: No, but we had to be realistic. If we’re going to make a business we have to look at who’s going to buy the game. Firstly we had to decide which genre we were going to launch the game in. We had the choice, really, if we were going to appeal to core wargamers, of historical battles or fantasy. Sci-fi was there as a weak third but those were the likely two. Now try and find a historical army that has women. So it had to be fantasy.

NS: We did discuss an Amazon deck. But Amazons are so niche within the gaming world, our chances of success as a start-up would have been slim.

MV: We talked about it a lot, trying to work out how to do it, but it’s just not straightforward. It’s regrettable actually. But then our theme is war! You can’t get away from the fact that males traditionally fight and it goes back to that primal thing, that women are taught to care and nurture and be the glue that sticks society together and men are taught to be fractious, domineering and…and grab stuff! Not that these things are right. It’s just that this has traditionally been the case and our consumer primarily is going to be male. Come on, how many people think only rationally about a purchase when they make it? It’s why advertising for a sophisticated product like an automobile is not normally based around the engineering quality of that automobile, it’s based around ingrained concepts about masculinity, or femininity, about sexuality. And those are messages that we are encouraged to take on when we are children. Hopefully society will change to allow a more balanced and open view of these things but at the moment, as a business, we’d be mad. 

NS: What Martin is trying to say is we sold out for the money!

MV: Within the universe we’re creating, women do fight and they are deadly. They are some of the most able pieces, like the queen in Chess. Of all the decks, the Elves and Dwarves are probably the most approachable for an entry level player because they are recognisably human, so to make a certain proportion of their units female made sense. But the Orcs and the Lizardmen are not human. You’ve got to make a decision then, do you make female Orcs? Which is something that isn’t really part of fantasy literature. You do get the occasional fantasy universe in which they have created a character that is a female Orc but it’s very hard to create a non-sexualised image of a female Orc. What would it be, a kind of extreme muscle-woman with big boobs? And trying to create Lizardwomen is even more difficult. The Lizardmen were always going to be a big leap. They’re not one of the main fantasy races. We wanted to do them because dinosaurs are cool. But it’s hard to put dinosaurs into games and for them to remain balanced so it was a way that we could use dinosaurs. We went as far as having pink triceratops but how do you identify a lizard as female?

NS: Well, Martin, it’s whether they have a bow. And bigger eyelashes.

MV: A bit of lipstick? You know, there’s no way we’d have done that. It’s just too patronising. 

NS: If you look at Warhammer and Mantic Games, or at video games, it’s very hard to find an army with females in it so we’re proud that we’ve at least managed to get some out there. 

MV: At one point we thought about doing Trolls versus Fairies. We put that out to market testing but nobody cared for it. So, sure, we could create some Fairy war or maybe Kittens versus Puppies or whatever and try and market it to young girls. It would be interesting to try. But are there enough young girls who are making those purchases to make a difference? Realistically, I’d say no. The biggest family card game in the world is Uno which is numbers and colours. There’s nothing to be offended by in Uno. You’re not dealing with combat and as soon as you start to bring in a theme like combat to any game or film or story, it becomes tricky.

NS: On the subject of gender, Brenda (Nick’s wife) was concerned early on that the women warriors were overly voluptuous. 

MV: They are exaggerated to a degree but I don’t think they’re exploitative. If you look at comic book art, if you look at science fiction art, like Conan the Barbarian, it’s all fur bikinis, massive boobs, over-masculinised guys. There’s been an enormous amount of literary criticism written about this area in the last few decades. Our cards are fun. There’s a lot of humour running through them. When we were creating a Dwarf female command card, we could have tried to create one who wasn’t buxom. But it’s just more funny to have a woman with big bosoms wielding a frickin’ massive hammer! You know, for fantasy literature in our time, the cornerstone is Tolkien. And there’s no way you can consider Tolkien’s work without considering the inherently sexist nature of it. Dwarf women don’t even appear. They are discussed as having beards and being ugly but you don’t actually see any of them. Not only that but it’s inherently racist as well. You’ve got these blond, blue eyed Elven guys and all of their white friends who hate the black Orcs and go to war against them and the Easterlings for goodness sake. It is inherently screwed up as is C.S.Lewis. What we’ve done is tried to include a black Elf to at least try to enter into that conversation with the objective to one day release a Drow deck which will be all black Elves. We’d love to do that.

 

Part II posting soon.

 

 

 

 

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