Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

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The internet has had a huge impact on game development. Nowadays, playtesters and designers from all over the world can collaborate via the magic of online forums. Fans can keep their fingers on the pulse of every product they care about– and can even get questions answered within hours from the masterminds behind it all. However these message boards do have a down side as Michael Brown has noted on the Steve Jackson site:

“It seems that Traveller has gotten to the point where you have to have several advanced degrees to even be able to play or join the discussions, and if you lack these, you’re looked down upon somehow. I miss the heady days in the early 80s — when I discovered Traveller — when it was a raucously fun pastime, not an exercise in smarter-than-thou.”

Yes… on many gaming message boards a new wargame has supplanted the games we all supposedly love. It’s a wargame called “I’m the Smartest Gamer on the Internet.” Sure, some really nice results can come from all of these battles over canon and ship designs. But the downside is that new players and casual players are often alienated.

I guess these people existed even in the eighties, but most of us didn’t know they existed. We just buckled down and played our games. Somehow we managed to have fun even if we didn’t know what we were doing. And there is a lot of fun to be had as you gradually learn the killer rules and tactics over several games. But I have to wonder how many of us would have continued buying games if we had come into contact with a bunch of know-it-alls that really went out of their way to make us feel like “newbies.” (Ak! I hate that word. I hate it even more when people apply it to themselves as if they have to bow and scrape before the grand expert brainiacs….)

A seperate but related issue is the case where a new player dislikes a certain aspect of a product or maybe even be completely unable to get the hang of it. When he goes onto a message board for help… he’s liable to get advice back from the guy who made the thing to begin with! This is pretty daunting in and of itself– especially if the player was expecting to get advice from other “mere mortals”– but it can get sticky if the designer gets frustrated by the new players inability to “get it.”

In the final analysis, games should be about having fun, but new technologies have subtly influenced the focus of our hobby. The internet has done a great deal for all the gaming gear heads out there– we have a constant opportunity to geek it up with our obscure tidbits of gaming knowledge– but I don’t know if it’s been a good thing overall for creating a new generation of wargamers. New players have opportunities to embarrass themselves in front of the entire online community. They even have a greater opportunity to offend the creators of their games. Please folks… if you’re a big wheel in the gaming world– or even if you’ve just got a lot of gaming experience– please be nice to the new guys. At the very least, they might introduce the hobby to their friends and help make new products financially viable– and they may even be the only players for “Game X” in somebody’s neighborhod.