The Binding of Isaac is a hugely successful videogame, and thanks to two extremely lucrative crowdfunding efforts that netted around $8 million, you could argue that its a highly successful card game as well. The videogame fits almost too perfectly into begin turned into cardboard, with its roguelike genetics being suited to the randomness of dungeon crawler, variable bonuses and and player powers sitting well within the tabletop realm. There's around eighty thousand people who have some kind of variation of the tabletop game. So surely its extremely good because well funded games are always amazing, aren't they. I'm approaching this as someone who is away from the hype canoe sailing down the river rapids of marketing and excitement and so this is probably going to be dull in comparison. I'm also someone who is a fan of the game, and has spent many an hour running around randomly generated dungeons of blood and filth. For those unfamiliar with the videogame, you play
Disclaimer: No gamers were harmed
during the writing of this blog post.
So, you’ve designed a game, you spent many hours, days,
weeks even designing and/or finalising the artwork and writing the rule book,
you successfully fund on Kickstarter and your game goes out into the wilds.
You start to see photos of people not only playing, but
enjoying your game on social media and you feel great. Those hours, days, weeks
were worth it. Your creation is bringing joy to other people’s lives. And then
you see a photo where someone isn’t playing your game quite right.
I mean, it’s not like I’ve played this game hundreds and
hundreds of times and the gameplay is now muscle memory and ingrained into me
on how it should, MUST be played. But you look at the photo and all you can see
is THEY ARE PLAYING IT WRONG!
You want to reach into the photo and correct it. But they
are having fun. What they are doing wrong doesn’t actually affect gameplay. In
fact, it has exactly zero impact on their enjoyment of the game but it’s wrong.
Wrong, wrong, WRONG!
@Nerdling_mum and @gamerbeng playing
Assembly slightly wrong.
You try to resist saying anything. But fail miserably; you
spent hours/days/weeks getting that art work and rule book just right and they
are ignoring it!
Your inner voice gets the better of you but at least you are
able to politely point out that they are playing it wrong and reply: “You
forgot to flip the cards/tokens”. Maybe with an emoticon or two to soften it up
compared to what your inner voice would have had you say: “Didn’t you READ the
rules?! Flip BOTH the card AND the token!!” I mean, I wrote that rule in the
rule book for a very specific reason.
At least at cons you can politely reach out and flip the
cards or tokens that they have obviously forgotten to flip. Eventually they get
the message: play MY game at MY stand, you play it correctly!
But in reality, it really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t affect
the gameplay or their enjoyment – in fact them playing to my rules might indeed
affect their enjoyment as it’s a little extra admin which they may have deemed unnecessary.
So, what’s the lesson in all of this? When you release
something to the public you have to learn to let go. You have done your best to
teach people how to play, but if they are enjoying playing it in a certain way
because it suits them, who are you to say it’s wrong? Games are meant to be
fun, and anything that makes our game more fun for someone is alright with me.
Well, the logical side of me. I’m still getting my emotional side under control
but I’m getting there. Feel free to play Assembly wrong and post pics of it
being played wrong. I’ll try not to bite and just be polite* J
*This is wholly dependent on how much sleep I’ve had
the night(s) before, mostly as a result of interruptions from little people, so
no guarantees!
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