Lewis Pulsipher

Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish by Lewis Pulsipher has a subtitle that promises more than it can deliver.

The book gives you the impression that it would be a good way to build up a good game, even repeatedly quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's famous quote about being done when there's nothing left to remove. Repeatedly.

It's clear from reading this book that Pulsipher is very opinionated about games. In fact, by his definition, most games aren't true show more games, but are rather puzzles or toys. While I am not a professional game designer (my most notable game was an escape room/hidden picture style game based on the Hardy Boys, which I made for a game jam), I strongly disagree with his definition that a game requires seemingly intelligent opposition, as it makes very few things real games. His casual denigration of games like Katamari Damacy, calling it a "toy", indicate to me that he doesn't understand certain games well enough to critique them.

Sure, he's a veteran board game designer. In fact, he designed a game called Britannia, which I had previously only heard of when scrolling through the list of games on the Fantasy Flight website. Based on the index of the book, this game is one of the most mentioned games in this book, alongside Civilization (every single iteration), Dungeons & Dragons, and Monopoly (which he hates, justifiably). He's certainly not shy in blowing his own horn and telling stories about his students in which he emerges as the benevolent hero saving their otherwise bland game.

In the book, he presents three pitches for video games. Granted, this book was published in 2012, but the three pitches were pitiful games even by those standards. The mental images they evoked were more the sort of games I would have played in 1992.

The rest of the book is a mish-mash of opinionated paragraphs, contradictions, outlines that should have been developed into their own chapters or sections, trashing on Millennials, and criticizing other games/developers/game development books (He seems particularly bothered that Salen & Zimmerman took about 80 pages to define what a game is). The book has plenty of diagrams to show certain concepts, but many of them are not actually in the book, but instead are available on his website. Likewise, a lot of the ones in the book are poorly formatted, with text spilling out of their corresponding bubbles. Further, there's a laughable glossary that feels like it devolves into an opinion about something instead of actually defining it (for example, his definition of AI doesn't actually say what it is, beyond "artificial intelligence", but rather that bad AI can make a game a worse experience).

In the end, the book is stodgy and dated (even by 2012 standards) and probably won't help you make games. It falls greatly short of the promise on the subtitle. The only thing I gained from reading it were that I should create a paper prototype of video games (something I had previously learned in a software requirements management course in college). Fortunately, he also recommended other books on game design (though he omits mentioning The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell). I'll give these books a look to see if they're any better.

I would not recommend this book, as it's a bit like plucking pearls from muck just to try to find something worthwhile. show less

I give this one a half-star on credit because I think it might just be beyond me. I can just about handle four-unit tactical plans, but when you get into all this craziness of anticipating what the other guy (or guys!) might or might not do, and preparing multi-unit plans in either case, and then deciding what to do based on the greater room for movement it gives you next turn when you get it wrong--that's mathematician shit, man. I guess I'm just a Diplomacy romantic--or a guy who knows how show more to play to his nebulous strengths. But this might do you some good if you wanna up your game. Originally published in The General 18/3. show less

The best of these three canonical articles on Diplomacy covers the hardest-to-intuit and yet most important aspect--laying your plans and laying them well. "Negotiations" is impossible to teach, let's face it, and "tactics" is useful, but without a plan, you'll get nowhere, nowhere. Dominate your sphere, keep the guys in the other sphere going at each other, hit that stalemate line, but make sure you know what to do after that, or you languish. And you want to win! Originally published in show more The General 18/2. show less

Decent article, and the first article on my LibraryThing! I foresee this being a fulfilling relationship. Anyway, this is one of a triad dealing with Diplomacy strategy on the three canonical levels (negotiation, strategy, and tactics). This one has some good reminders, but it's a bit obvious some of this stuff--like, the diplomacy of Diplomacy probably cannot be systematized in any useful way. So I take this on the "pointers" level--recognize who are "drawers" and who are diehards, never show more lie unless necessary, identifying "classical" and "romantic" play styles, talk with everybody, be flexible, never give up, explain plans thoroughly, be unassuming, be positive! Originally appeared in The General 18/1. show less