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The Quality of an Hour

By Jeff | Published: January 2, 2017

This article is about board games, how they are designed and played, but most importantly how they are talked about. My goal in writing it is to help people who give reviews of board games to give better ones. My thesis will be that games produce certain subjective qualities of experience, and that a good board game review should analyze and expose these subjective qualities in an objective way.

Since this article makes sweeping judgments on the nature of board games, you might wonder whether I’m the kind of person you should listen to about this sort of thing. I’m not so sure I am, but here are my qualifications. I’ve been an avid eurogamer (if that’s still a word) for about twenty years. I’ve designed a few games informally but never published one. Over that same period I’ve worked in video game development and designed or helped design many video games. You’ve probably heard of at least one of the titles I’ve worked on: Ultima Online, Brothers in Arms, Crush the Castle, and Doug dug are some of the more popular ones. I’ve also taught game development at the Guildhall at Southern Methodist University. I think it’s probably fair to say that I understand video game design and development well, but in the realm of board games I am merely a passionate amateur. Take my comments, therefore, for what they’re worth.

The Problem with Board Game Reviews

The problem with board game reviews is that they usually tell us almost nothing about whether we’ll enjoy a game.

Most current reviews boil down to, “I enjoyed it; therefore you probably will too,” or, “I was bored/frustrated by it; therefore you probably will be too.” A review usually includes a summary of how to play the game followed by a reflection on the player’s personal experience in playing it. These reflections are helpful as far as they go, but it’s usually difficult to assess how likely we will be to have the same kind of experience. There can be little doubt that negative reviews tend, generally speaking, to flow from players who lost the game and positive reviews from those who won. Perhaps not. But it’s impossible to tell, because there is usually too little substance in the critique of the review to decide whether the praise or complaints are objective—that is, whether they will often be experienced across different types of players and groups with both winners and losers.

Because reviews lack objective authority, a game’s popularity—it’s geek rating on boardgamegeek.com, for example—is not only our primary, but virtually our only way of deciding whether a game is any good. But this is a poor measure. I may enjoy a type of game most players dislike, or dislike what most players like. A game may earn popularity through marketing, or by being a sequel, or by coming from a well-known designer, or through sheer infectious hype, rather than through the merit of simply being a good game.

The problem with many board game reviews, then, is that they talk objectively only about rules—information we can gain from many sources—and talk about everything else with such subjectivity that it’s difficult to know what it all means for any other player.

This failure of critique is a problem not only for players but for designers. Designers learn to create better games by understanding the reactions of players. But if those reactions amount to “I didn’t like it” and “We had a blast”, how can designs improve?

Poor reviews, however, are not really the fault of the reviewers. Although board games have been around nearly as long as mankind has, we are still developing our understanding of games as a medium, as an artform. Collectively we lack the language to discuss games objectively.

What we need is a better understanding of what makes a game “good” or “bad” and a deeper vocabulary for expressing a game’s strengths and faults. This understanding must speak objectively while dealing with the subjective. That is, it must speak in a way that will help players of all varieties to interpret a review while embracing the fact that games, after all, are works of art that are first and foremost experienced in different ways by different individuals.

A full understanding and a complete vocabulary of game criticism is not only beyond the scope of this article but beyond this scope of this writer. But here are some initial thoughts that may help fuel better reviews.

What is a Board Game?

A board game is a set of objects and instructions intended to produce a certain experience for a group of people, an experience with certain mental, imaginative, social, physical, and emotional qualities.

It’s important to recognize that the function of a board game is to produce an experience. A board game encourages players to move things around, to imagine things, to feel things, to think things, and to relate to other players in certain ways. It shapes an hour or two of your life into something better than it might otherwise have been. “Better” often means “more enjoyable,” but it can also mean “more beneficial” (in the case of an educational game, for example) or even “more relational” (in the case of a romantic game, for example, or merely a game involving teamwork). We choose to spend an evening playing a game rather than watching television because we think that the game will bring us laughter, challenge, learning, or personal connection more than other options would. Games operate on people. The value of a board game is all to do with the experience it tends to produce in groups of people.

Although a board game invariably involves rules, a game is not its rules, and a well-designed game consists of more than “good rules.” A game’s rules serve the mental, social, and other qualities of the experience the game works to produce, but the rules are not alone in producing it. For many players, good artwork can amplify the experience and poor artwork likewise can diminish it. A design with water-tight rules can make so little sense thematically that players have a hard time caring. On the other hand, a game with loose, even flimsy rules can provide beautiful experiences because of the game’s imaginative force. (Once Upon a Time comes to mind as a potent example. Dungeons and Dragons might be another: would anyone play it merely on the strength of the mechanics if the imaginative aspects weren’t rich and immersive?) No one remembers Sheriff of Nottingham for its rules per se: you remember it for its social aspects, the laughter and lying and bluffing and banter those rules produce in your group. Rules are essential, but not the whole story.

The task of a designer, therefore, is not merely to create a coherent set of rules motivating meaningful choice, but to craft a human experience that is mentally, imaginatively, socially, physically, and emotionally satisfying. Coherent and well-crafted rules are the essential core of game design, but not the whole. They are necessary, but not sufficient. The goal of game design, therefore, is broader than players usually imagine. A game review should explain the rules but should also explain the game’s effect on the mind, the imagination, the social dynamics of groups, and so on.

It’s oddly easy to forget that board games merely influence, not control, players. Board gaming, like video gaming, is an “active” medium, by which we mean that it is an art form that requires the active involvement of the “audience”, the players. This is in contrast to passive entertainment like television and film. In these media the art itself does almost everything; the audience merely sits and receives, watching and listening. But in games, and most of all in board games, the player is active and the “piece”—the game itself—waits to be acted upon.

This is easy to forget because players tend to be so compliant to actually read and obey the game’s rules. Yet everything the players do they do by choice. The game does nothing. Without them it would be nothing more than a few bits of paper and wood and plastic slowly turning yellow in a silent coffin.

In a way there is no “board game”. There is a set of objects and written instructions that inspire players—or fail to—to engage by their own choice in an organized activity for an hour or so. It is the most passive of media, requiring the most active of audiences. This is its glory and its humility. The goodness or badness of a game is deeply bound up in its ability to motivate players to open the box, to encourage them to read and understand the rules, to teach them to engage in an enjoyable and edifying activity, and to provide them with pleasing and durable elements—tokens, cards, dice, boards, and so on—with which to pursue that activity.

A board game, then, is a set of objects and instructions that produces, or works to produce, an experience. A review of a board games should analyze and expose what kind of experience the game works to produce and how effective it is in doing so.

In order to critique board games well we need to understand what makes up an “experience” in the way I’ve been using the word, and how games produce these experiences.

The Qualities of an Experience

I find it helpful to analyze a board gaming experience in terms of five distinct but interrelated qualities: mental, imaginative, social, physical, and emotional. Each of these qualities answers the question, “What is the game like to play?” from a different aspect of human awareness. I am not here using the word “quality” to speak of a game’s goodness or badness—it’s quality as a product—but in the more philosophical sense of the word. A quality of a board game experience is simply something that marks that experience, something that makes it what it is. A game’s “quality” tells us what the game is like.

Here are the five qualities I find most useful.

The Mental Quality

The mental quality of an experience is perhaps the one we most readily associate with board games. What does the game do to our minds? What kinds of thoughts, analyses, calculations, or judgments does it elicit?

Abstract strategy games like go and chess tend to cultivate and reward deep analytical thinking. Power Grid or Modern Art, though not as analytical, call for some amount of mathematical calculation. Most European-style games invoke the kind of intuitive decisions that most players find more comfortable. Ticket to Ride invites us to intuitively analyze graphs of destinations and paths between them; Small World to decide the best moment to retire a dwindling army. A game’s design influences how we think for an hour or so, what we do with our brains. A good review should describe not only the rules that produce this influence, but the kind of thinking—analytical, mathematical, spatial, intuitive—that is produced.

The mental quality of the experience consists not only in the types of thinking involved but in the rhythm of thought, the overall activity of the mind. Take, for example, the contrast between Power Grid and Ticket to Ride. One of Power Grid’s most striking features is that the game consists of a repeated cycle between four fairly distinct sub-activities: auctioning, buying resources, claiming cities, and cashing in (“bureaucracy”). These sub-activities are sufficiently different that players experience a mental shift when moving from one to another. It’s common for new players to struggle to remember what activity comes next, or even, once reminded, how to do it. The mental juggling associated with moving between activities is a major aspect of the Power Grid experience, either a detraction or a benefit depending on whether a player enjoys that kind of juggling.

Ticket to Ride, on the other hand, is a game of unbroken focus. Turns are designed to move quickly, normally just a few seconds per turn. The complexity of the map and the interplay between the colors of cards and the routes available provide a perpetual tableau for analysis and decision-making. Consequentially, Ticket to Ride players may often be found huddled around the board, staring intently, utterly consumed in the choices before them, in an unbroken meditation, and this mental immersion gives the game its appeal for those kinds of players. Yet players who dislike that degree of focus, or this homogeneity of play, or players who are simply distracted easily, can disengage from the game and cause distraction to the other players. The game’s mental quality depends on turns moving rapidly; when a player takes a minute or more to play, the effect is destroyed and the game’s appeal is diminished. The mental quality of the Ticket to Ride experience, therefore, is one of mental focus and immersion. Any review of Ticket to Ride should describe that effect and evaluate how successful the game is in producing and sustaining it.

The mental quality of the experience produced by a game, then, is how the game feels to play—”feels” not emotionally, but mentally. It is what the game does to our minds.

The Imaginative Quality

Game designers and reviewers often talk about a game’s “thematic” elements, by which we mean its setting, story, mood, and artwork. The game’s theme is what gives the game a grip on your imagination. Any game can be boiled down to abstract tokens and counters; its theme connects these symbols to elements in your memory—whether realistic or fantastical—that help give meaning to the mechanics and amplify the game’s appeal. Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings, for example, is generally well loved; but who would play it if the players weren’t invited to imagine themselves as hobbits adventuring under the ominous shadow of Sauron? Lewis and Clark’s or Francis Drake’s historical attachments are surely part of their appeal.

The imaginative experience provided by a game is usually captured sufficiently by its marketing text. Reviews need not dwell on this aspect other than to point out unusual successes or failures in achieving the desired imaginative effect. Players tend to be highly tolerant of thematic failures. What, for example, are players really doing in Ticket to Ride when they lay out train cars, and in what sense are they using “tickets” to reach “destinations” (both words invoking the language of tourism rather than of industry)? The imaginative effects of a game are often best left unanalyzed. Yet sometimes a game’s thematic peculiarities are significant to the overall quality of the experience. Hardly anyone can emerge from Spyfall, for instance, without asking why a spy of all people is so blind, deaf, and ignorant as to not be able to recognize his current location. Therefore designers, reviewers, and critics should be mindful of a game’s imaginative quality; but this is one quality of experience that is already recognized as an important aspect of game design.

The Social Quality

The effect a game has on any particular group of people tends to be varied and unpredictable. Individuals are complex; when they mix, their complexity multiplies. A game—say, Pit—that is uproarious good fun among cheerful, extraverted, perhaps tipsy old friends may produce nervous caution and hurt feelings amongst unfamiliar introverts. Yet game designers are, if nothing else, responsible for crafting games in such a way that the game lures diverse groups into a more or less common experience. When we talk about games, we must think carefully about what the game does to shape the social experience of the players and consider what types of individuals and groups are likely to accept, enjoy, reject, or dislike that experience.

Part of Sheriff of Nottingham’s charm is its remarkable success in inspiring a particular kind of social quality in diverse groups of people. The success begins, frankly, with the artwork. The image on the box, echoed in the standee, of a fat, smug, contemptuous, appraising Sheriff invites the player assuming that role to take on that demeanor. The thematic elements merge with the core game mechanics to thrust players into their appropriate roles: obsequious, or defiant, or poker-faced merchants slipping past a powerful (yet manipulable) authority. Many groups enjoy the social experience, the play-acting, banter, bluffing, and bargaining that results from this imaginative and mental foundation.

One interesting aspect of Ticket to Ride is that it produces fairly diverse play. Some groups prefer a milder form of play in which direct blocking—playing a route for no other purpose than to interrupt another player’s progress—is discouraged as annoying or ungentlemanly. Others consider blocking essential and the frustration it causes as a necessary price to pay. The fact that the game mechanics neither discourage nor encourage direct blocking gives Ticket to Ride a diverse social quality. Whether this is a good trait or a bad one is unclear to me.

Small World’s social quality is also remarkable. Everything about the game, from its title to its tagline (“It’s a World of Slaughter after All”) to its player-versus-player mechanics would suggest that it will be a highly vindictive dog-eat-dog slugging match. And there’s no question that direct competition between players is a major aspect of play. Yet on the whole Small World avoids the direct, I-win-you-lose warfare of comparable games— say, Risk. The competition between players tends to feel more liquid and “pushy” rather than vicious and “stabby”, giving the game something of a Judo feel rather than Jiu Jitsu. This is achieved by moving the game’s key currency off the board into “points” which can be lost and acquired in a variety of ways; by keeping them a secret until the end of the game; by allowing a player to retain most of his soldiers after a defeat; by detaching players emotionally from their units by sending the units into decline, such that many defeated units are “already on their way out”; and by making expansion (which is under a player’s control), rather than defeat (which is not), the main cause of diminishing power. The result is a game that cultivates the entertaining pretext of vicious competition while dulling its fine edge into something most players find more comfortable. (As a rule, the most opinionated players in board gaming tend to be highly competitive; the average player is less vocal and less competitive.)

Here’s a more subtle example of social quality. Card games are generally competitive but the game of “Idiot“, simply by virtue of its name, implies (with tongue in cheek, hopefully) a social vindictiveness, a sneering abusiveness, a one-up-manship that the mechanics themselves lack. If the game were called something more socially neutral— say, “Palace”—the social quality would be milder and the game would feel different. It would not be a better game necessarily (it might be a worse one), but it would be different, because its social quality would change.

I believe there is still much to be discovered in this area, but when talking about a game’s social quality I think we can answer at least four questions.

  • What kind of social dynamics has the game actually produced in the groups you’ve played it with? Does it inspire your friends to be more gentle or more vindictive? Does the game inspire laughter and cheerfulness or is it a cooler, more calculated experience? How do people interact when they play it?
  • Now think outside of your own groups to the world at large. What is it that the game does to encourage certain social qualities of experience?
  • How effective is the game at producing the kind of social quality or qualities it seems to want to produce? If the game seems to encourage gentle, non-vindictive play, for example, will many groups nonetheless turn it into a bloodbath?
  • What kinds of groups are likely to enjoy or dislike this kind of social play? Should extraverts avoid this game? Introverts? Highly competitive people? Highly sensitive people? Groups that enjoy laughter and hilarity? Groups that enjoy intense contemplation? How can I judge whether my gaming group will enjoy this game or not, given their social character and the social qualities encouraged by the game?

These kinds of questions help uncover in an objective way the subjective social experience a game tends to engender.

The Physical Quality

Gamers and reviewers describe some games as “fiddly”. Sometimes this is praise: the game is full of objects that are pleasing to hold and manipulate, a lot of manipulation is required, and there is perhaps a Zen-like or OCD pleasure in moving pieces around. Sometimes it’s a complaint: the game has too many objects that are constantly falling over, are difficult to manipulate, and we spend a lot of time moving things around.

Whatever “fiddly” means, it’s clear from these comments that the physical sensations of interacting with the components of a game form part of the play experience.

In a few games the physical experience virtually defines the nature of the game. Terror in Meeply City (Rampage) is a recent game in which players fling, flick, and shake the game components to simulate a Godzilla-like attack on a hapless city. Crokinole, a sort of household shuffleboard, has remained on Boardgamegeek’s top 100 list since time immemorial.

In most games the physical experience of play is less obvious. Arguably it is an assumed value of game design that the physical experience should be as transparent, as unnoticeable, as possible. Whether or not it is right for us to uphold this value, in practice it is never achieved: a game in fact feels like something to play it; our fingers and arms and minds (at least) notice it. The physical nature of a board game is inalienable.

Anyone who has ever restocked the resources of Power Grid knows the truth of this. There is both tedium and pleasure in restocking. Whether you enjoy it or not you’ll agree it’s a significant aspect of the game. Often two or three players will join in the effort, making this physical quality part of the game’s social experience as well.

Caverna, likewise, is to great extent an exercise in the scattering and gathering of little objects. Again this is often a social effort: one player distributes wood, another rubies, another animals. It is tedious, yet after a while becomes almost ceremonial. Meditative players quote Ecclesiastes (or the Byrds) while preparing for the round:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.

Some games—large ones, often military ones—invite standing and wandering around the board. Thoughtful games bring players’ elbows onto tables and hands to beards and earlobes. Laughter makes people spread out, lean back, and turn toward each other. A board game is a physical experience, and an observant critic will take the game’s physical effects into account when preparing a review.

The Emotional Quality

It may be a fault in my own constitution that leads me to relegate emotion to the last place in this list. But I can see no way around it: of all the effects a board game produces in players, emotion seems to me the most subjective, varied, unpredictable and, frankly, meager. Board games often elicit the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, but apart from these direct reactions to the gameplay itself they are strangely unemotional beasts. When has a board game ever made you cry? Movies have; books may have; video games, even, may have. I’ve never heard of anyone crying because of a board game, unless it was because they lost.

Games produce laughter. Often this is tightly connected to the social experience. It is not normally the laughter of comedy as such, at least not the comedy of the board game itself. Usually it’s the comedy of the players.

Some games can give a certain sense of pathos, mild contact with loss or bereavement. My family enjoys Zooloretto, but we never feel well-settled when we have to execute an animal. Likewise Agricola. There is always an apology forming somewhere in the back of my mind when I have to feed a newborn lamb to my starving family. The whole tone of that game is “pathetic” in the old, Latin sense: pitiful, tragic, what we would now call dystopian.

Many games have a strong undercurrent of emotional tone that goes beyond mere “theme.” There is a quality of desperation—of hope against hope—that makes up the better part of the shadowiness of Shadows over Camelot. I think you like this game or dislike it almost in proportion to how well you can weather its mood of dreary near-futility, near-inevitable collapse. Games like Arkham Horror and Betrayal at House on the Hill cultivate creepy imagery. I doubt many players feel actually frightened by these games, but they do convey an emotional tone.

But these are whispers, mere hints of emotion as compared with the deluge we receive from films and novels. Emotion is an element, but not the domain, of boardgames.

Therefore when you recall and report to others the emotions that a game produced in you, be careful to separate the extrinsic and purely subjective experiences of triumph and failure from the emotions intrinsic to the design of the game. Someone has to feel these emotions each time we play, but the fact that they feel them tells us nothing about the game. These strong emotions are vivid to us but useless to others. Instead, the underlying emotions that are connected either to the theme or to the mechanics in association with the theme will be far more subtle and more difficult to pinpoint, but far more useful to other players.

How to Write a Good Review

How, then, do we critique board games well?

First, recognize that board games influence, rather than control, players. If a board game is delightful, it may be that you, rather than the game, produced that effect. Likewise if you find the game dreary or even “broken”, could this have been you or your group rather than something that most players will discover? When you talk about what a board game is like, recognize that your personal assessment is always uncertain and preliminary. What you’ve experienced with the game from your own perspective within your own gaming group may or may not be expressive of what others will experience. You must do more than report what you experienced; you must analyze what about the board game is objectively true across many players and groups.

This will never be a perfect assessment. It is usually very difficult to separate our experience from the game’s objective qualities. I believe that as designers and players continue to develop a shared understanding and vocabulary not only of game mechanics but of qualities of experience, we will get better at figuring out why a game made us feel the way it did, predicting how it will make others feel, and explaining those predictions in the form of good reviews.

Think through the five qualities of experience I described above: the mental, imaginative, social, physical, and emotional qualities. Briefly:

  • What kind of thinking does the game encourage?
  • What kind of setting does the game portray? How vividly does it portray it?
  • What kind of relationships does the game encourage? Is it highly competitive or gentler? Hilarious and cheerful or contemplative and quiet? Is backstabbing and deception a major element or is competition more straightforward?
  • How does the game feel (physically) to play? How do your hands and arms like it?
  • What emotional mood or tone, if any, does the game invoke?

Once you’ve analyzed the game in this way, turn your attention to the many different kinds of players out there. What kind of player is most likely to like or dislike these particular mental traits, or imaginative, or social, or physical, or emotional? Help your readers or watchers (or just your friends!) see themselves in your review, so that they can make an assessment as to whether it’s a game worth pursuing.

It’s true that some games are simply bad: mechanically broken, with a dull or incoherent theme, tending to promote social strife, having too many fiddly (in the bad sense) components, emotionally depressing. And it’s true that some games are simply good: well-loved by a wide range of people over a long term of play. But you should assume that most of the games you play are somewhere in the middle. Most games are decent, they deserve to be played by someone, they will be adored by some and hated by others and met with indifference by most. Your task in reviewing games is to help your friends and fellow games identify whether this is a game that they, personally, within their unique game groups, are likely to love or hate or view with indifference. Show them the kind of experience the game works to offer and show it to them in such a way that they can find themselves in the mix and decide whether it will be a good game for them.

An Example Review

As an example of the principles I’ve outlined above, let me offer this brief review of Spyfall. The review consists of three sections: the essentials, which outlines the facts of the game, its publication information, description, and a brief synopsis of the rules; what it’s like to play, which uses the five qualities of experience to analyze the game’s objective strengths and weaknesses; and who will love and hate it, which uses this analysis to identify different types of players who will respond well or poorly to Spyfall.

The Essentials

Spyfall is a 2014 game for 3 to 8 players by Alexandr Ushan, published by Hobby World (among others). It is a card game with strongly social elements, almost a party game. A round takes up to 15 minutes.

To begin each round you randomly choose a packet of cards from a set of 30 distinct packets. Each packet lists a distinct location, from a casino to a military base to—oddly—a Crusader army.

Deal the cards from the chosen packet to each player, one per player. Most of the players receive a card that show the same location as other players. Exactly one player will receive the “Spy” card, which tells him nothing about the location. All the cards are kept secret, so no one but the Spy knows who he is.

Players then take turns choosing another player and asking him or her a question. The questions can be very open-ended, anything you like. A player may respond however he likes and then becomes the new questioner. Play continues until either the Spy wins or everyone else does.

The Spy wins if he is able to identify the location before the other players identify him. If he attempts to guess it but is wrong, he loses. He can make this attempt at any time, but once he does so the game is over. The other players may, at any time, unanimously agree to accuse a player of being the Spy. If they’re right, they win; if not, the Spy wins.

Out of these simple mechanics a game with rich social dynamics emerges.

What It’s Like to Play

The non-Spy players’ experience is very different from the Spy’s.

For the non-Spy players the goal is to detect the Spy. The key to doing so is to identify who among the group seems not to know what the location is. If the location is a restaurant you might ask, “What does it sound like here?” and expect an answer like, “I hear sounds of metal and glass.” A player who answers, “I hear the wind blowing loudly,” may not know he’s in a restaurant, and one who answers, “Oh, you know, the usual sorts of sounds,” maybe trying to disguise his ignorance.

You might think that the best strategy would be to be as explicit as possible. “Do people eat food here?” “Oh, sure, that’s its whole purpose.” But of course the Spy wins as soon as he correctly guesses the location. Talking explicitly about the location makes it clear you’re not the Spy but also gives away the location to the Spy. The genius of the game design is that it makes the one thing you most want to do (expose your knowledge of the location) the one thing you must not do (give away the location).

Therefore when non-Spy players pause and scratch their heads, they’re working to formulate questions and answers that are meaningful to those “in the know” but cryptic to the Spy. The mental quality of the experience is one of picturing the location, remembering what’s already been said, considering a question or answer, and judging how it will be taken by the Spy and by other players.

The social experience among non-Spies also involves voting on when to make an accusation. Players must convince each other to accuse; a single hold-out who refuses to accuse may give the Spy time to discover the location and invoke the wrath of the other players. This banter around accusation is part of the game’s social quality.

The Spy’s experience is very different. Any game that asks one player to stay hidden among the group tends to put that player in a nerve-wracking pinch (an emotional quality). In Spyfall this tension is amplified because the Spy lacks the crucial information that the other players possess—lacks, in fact, any information. The nervous, furtive quality of being the odd man out, therefore, is amplified by a sense of blindness, of grasping at straws.

The social challenge for the Spy is to keep a poker face and avoid being discovered. The mental challenge is to identify the location by interpreting the questions and answers of other players. This is very difficult.

There are thirty locations possible. Although the game rules encourage players to study the list of locations before the game starts, thirty is far too many to hold in your mind. In our group we pass the list of locations around and require each player, when he asks a question, to spend some time looking at it. This gives the Spy a cover by which to safely recall the possibilities. But these glances at the list come rarely. The Spy spends most of his time listening to questions and answers without a clear strategy for recalling what location they might suggest.

Experience seems to be the key. More experienced Spies have the best chance to recall the possible locations and guess them from the clues.

This leads to the first of the game’s real flaws. Socially, the game can have a victimizing quality. The Spy tends to become not only the odd-man out but the laughing stock of the other players. Even gentle groups in which no one intends to hurt anyone’s feelings can do so without wishing to. Spies are recognizable by their ignorance—an ignorance disguised by bluffing and lies. When this ignorance becomes obvious players naturally laugh. For the Spy, losing the game at the same moment that a group of your friends laughs at you for not being “in the know”, when you are caught in a failed lie, can be a deeply unpleasant experience. In our group, no one has been really disturbed by this—it’s all in good fun, after all, all part of the rules, all make-believe—but no one wants to be the Spy more than once or twice in a row, either.

A helpful contrast here is with Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. In Deception the odd-man out is a Murderer working to stay hidden among Investigators. It’s a very similar set up. The difference is that in Deception the odd-man out is working from a position of advantage—the Murderer knows more than the other players—while in Spyfall the Spy knows nothing. The emotional and social reaction at the end of a game of Deception tends to be, “Amazing! You sly dog! You were bluffing the whole time!” while in Spyfall it tends to be, “Ha! Boy do you look like an idiot. You’re asking questions about the ocean inside a casino?”

This problem of not being able tell that you’re in a casino (or on a beach, or in a medieval army) points to the second flaw in the game. Imaginatively, the idea of being a hidden spy is attractive to many people. But the mechanics of the game simply don’t fit this theme. This spy, rather than being cleverer or slicker or more nimble than other players, is so blind and deaf and brain-addled that he cannot determine his present location. That, put simply, makes no thematic sense.

Players can put up with a lot of nonsense in a theme, but Spyfall’s inconsistency has raised comments from many players. Arguably it makes the game harder to learn: the game art shows a debonaire James Bond-type, but as you learn to understand the rules you realize that you won’t be spying, won’t use gadgets, won’t be weaving in and out of crowds with a privileged non-chalance. In fact you’ll be more like the new kid in school, feeling foolish and out-of-the-know and being hunted down by the others. The imaginative quality of the game is one of confusion.

Presumably the designers chose the theme of “Spies” because it meshes with the idea of staying hidden and gleaning information, and attempts to bestow some attractiveness upon the odd-man-out role. Another theme might do these jobs better. If the spy were an Alien trying to remain hidden among humans in a given locale, this might explain better why he can’t figure out what sort of place he’s in (and whether it’s the 12th or the 21st century). A Doctor Who license for this theme might work, I suppose.

Wedding Crasher would be another option: you are chatting with wedding attenders with whom you have no connection, recalling family vacations you supposedly remember but in fact have no knowledge of.

In any case, I tend to doubt whether a game’s theme ever truly makes or breaks it; I don’t think anyone is substantially less likely to play Spyfall because its theme doesn’t match its mechanics. But the disconnect is bigger than in most games, and should be food for thought for designers even if not for potential players.

Who Will Love and Hate It

Personally I enjoy Spyfall. I’ve played perhaps a dozen rounds and would happily play many more. But there are individuals and groups who will love it and some who should probably avoid it.

If you are especially sensitive in social situations, avoid Spyfall. If you don’t like feeling stupid, lying to cover your stupidity, or having people laugh at you when your lies fail, you should avoid this game. To enjoy the role of the Spy you must put on thicker skin, detach yourself from the pressure of the role, and remember that it’s all in good fun.

Some game groups won’t let it be all in good fun. They would turn it into jabs and ridicule, amping up laughter against the Spy when he loses. A sensitive Spy with a highly competitive group would be a bad combination.

Overall I would recommend this game for groups looking for lightweight fun, who enjoy social banter and close observation of other players, and who have the social grace to treat losing Spies gently.

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Reflections on Completing a Chronological Reading of C S Lewis’s Works

By Jeff | Published: December 15, 2016

I recently completed the quest of reading everything C. S. Lewis ever wrote in chronological order. Now when the moment is fresh, I’d like to clarify, celebrate, and reflect upon that quest. My chief goal in reflection is to make as much good out of the reading as I can as well as to pave the way for the second expedition through his works that I hope to make someday.

This is a personal reflection written originally for my own benefit but made available to other friends of Lewis.

For both edification and enjoyment you can hardly do better than read Lewis, whatever he was writing. But my relationship with him (and I am not alone in this) goes far beyond that of reader and writer. He has been a mentor to me in a spiritually difficult phase; a mentor and guide; a guide and companion. And if not quite a friend, he has been a fond (on my side—the relationship is very one-sided) acquaintance in sharing some roads, some distresses and fears and insights and joys, that no one in my direct experience has walked or, at least, divulged walking. I’m thankful that the Lord led me, at a time of spiritual darkness, to this companion, to these writings, to this quest. It has been my daily nourishment without which I may very well have starved, shriveled, and died, but with which (along with other food) my faith has been nursed and fattened to reasonable good health.

Reflect

I must have begun the quest on or near 4 November 2012. I’ve been reading Lewis on and off all my life, so in that sense the quest began with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when I was seven, but this concerted mission of reading everything, roughly in order, began after seminary.

Spiritually, seminary had been the best of times and the worst of times. It was undeniably valuable, certainly fruitful, but also cultivated in my soul a frail dryness borne of analytical biblical studies, linguistics, the fine incisions and distinctions of systematic theology, the reading and writing of endless papers. I graduated in 2011 full of knowledge but devoid of passion.

Lewis had been all but verboten at seminary. His books were never assigned, seldom referenced, and when mentioned, almost never praised. Although Lewis is the darling of evangelicals, he himself was no evangelical. He did not accept Scripture as inerrant. He was prone to theological speculation—such as an attraction to the doctrine of Purgatory, or to the immortality of pet animals—that make us uneasy. My professors didn’t like him and didn’t promote his presence in the curriculum.

As I emerged from six years of intensive study, my faith was in danger, a brittle exoskeleton emptied of flesh. As I prayed and analyzed my condition I sensed that my problem was one of sheer negativity not in the emotional but in the most direct sense. Seminary had prepared me to carefully eliminate error: bad theology, bad interpretation. But a person who only eliminates error is engaged in a negative activity. He lacks a positive purpose. A living theology, I now see, needs a positive stroke: not only the annihilation of error but the creation of insight, joy, and new action.

Immediately after graduation I could hardly look at a Bible, and I staggered back to Lewis like a man emerging from a desert. I devoured two or three of his works in the space of a few days, almost literally slavering for his particular blend of wild imagination, steely intelligence, and joyous spiritual depth. I don’t know whether I could then have articulated that I was turning back to him because he married the careful, reductionist theological method that I had received in seminary with a bold, expansive, creative heart.

The marriage unnerved me, actually. I had prayed that God would bolster my faith; in answer, it seemed, he had led me to Lewis. Yet Lewis’s superior attitude to Scripture in Reflections on the Psalms repulsed me, and the milquetoast and uneven theology he sometimes displays in Letters to Malcolm left me shaking my head. So I prayed again for clarity of direction and, if I was to read Lewis, for his works to be of benefit rather than harm to me. And somehow—I can’t explain exactly why—even the more troubling and unevangelical works (Malcolm and Psalms top the list) acted as food to me. My faith began to steady. The skeleton began to strap on flesh. Even without exactly accepting Lewis’s own beliefs, his companionship in facing the questions was steadying and energizing.

The idea of reading everything—all he wrote—rooting the schedule in his letters, must have formed in the autumn of 2012 and in any case was enacted about then.

It took me about four years to complete his works. There were intervals when I would set him aside and read other things, but I’d say that about three of those years saw me reading every day. The letters (in three volumes) make up the bulk of the content, the spine of the reading program, and no small part of its value.

I have mixed feelings about reaching the end, but not mixed in the way I would have expected. The bitter is less bitter and the sweet less sweet, yet strong flavors abound. As for bitter, I’m less sad than I thought I would be. There is some poignancy to reading about any person’s death; you’d think this effect would be amplified by the person being Lewis; you’d think it would be amplified by it being someone whose thoughts you’ve spent so many hours absorbing. When I reached the last page of his letters, I bowed and prayed for a few moments but I was nothing like tearful. I can’t say exactly why. My best guess—I feel it’s a poor one—is that he himself does undergo a sort of journey of detachment after Joy’s death in 1960, so that one is perhaps prepared for his death along with him. A less lofty reason might be that it’s simply a very great deal to read, and I was ready for it to be over. And, I had already read of Lewis’s death in Warnie’s diaries; perhaps this prepared me. In any case the end was poignant but not melancholy.

I almost regret not having reflected more throughout the process. I might have blogged my journey as I went, or irritated and edified friends with daily quotations to Facebook, or written book reports of one kind or another to help capture what I was uncovering. In fact I’ve barely written about Lewis even privately, much less more formally, publically, or fully. There is a lost opportunity here to better understand, synthesize, and recall the flurry of information that has passed through my mind and to disseminate more of Lewis’s valuable insights (for example in his letters, which are not often publically quoted) to others.

I almost regret it, but I don’t. Writing would have added a great deal of pressure to the process, not to mention time and labor. It might easily have taken twenty years rather than four, and would have made the act of reading much more artificial, more extrinsically motivated, than it was. I think there’s a general principle here—one I learned in seminary—that the best way to learn a corpus is to read it quickly to begin with, then read it again for deeper reflection.

So I don’t regret reading Lewis without writing about him, but all the more do I look forward to reading him again with more writing and reflection. Unless other demands prevent it I’d like to find an academic advisor, or program, somewhere that will give me credit of one kind or another for my second reading and the writing that should accompany it.

Some Major Themes and Elements of Lewis’s Life and Writings

A lot has been written about Lewis by those with more expertise and insight than I have. The most obvious and important themes of his writing and life—such as his involvement with the Inklings—are thoroughly explored elsewhere. But here are some major themes that are less often discussed and happened to catch my attention.

Warnie

Jack’s relationship with his brother Warnie is peculiar, unexpected, in many ways wonderful, and not a little sad. It’s a major, though often unspoken, aspect of his life, and worthy of reflection.

That they were lifelong friends is undeniable and, I feel, enviable. Their shared Christianity, love of literature, and pursuit of the craft of writing made their friendship both possible and fruitful. Yet there were two besmirchments: on Jack’s side, Mrs. Moore and other distractions; on Warnie’s, alcoholism.

Jack’s failings in the relationship are most clearly seen from the complaints (always sad, plaintive rather than enraged) in Warnie’s diary. It was Warnie’s tragic fate that the man he most loved was forever beside him, yet out of reach. Until 1950 Jack’s attention was occupied by tutorials, books and letters, and Mrs. Moore, and although they all lived together Warnie felt he had too little of Jack. After she died there was a brief respite. Warnie was ebullient. Then in 1954 Lewis’s (partial) move to Cambridge again separated them. It seems that throughout their adulthoods, and then most vividly upon Jack’s death, Warnie regretted, and at least somewhat resented, these incursions on their brotherly companionship.

On Warnie’s side, his alcoholism was at least an annual trouble and a great worry to Jack. The binges were often extreme and led—at best—to hospitalization. They are a persistent theme through the decades the brothers lived together. We see Warnie at his worst during Jack’s last summer, in 1963. Jack is very sick, has been increasingly ill for over a year, then suffers a heart attack that leaves him an invalid. Yet Warnie, rather than rushing home, stays far away in Ireland, drunk. Incredibly—in a manner that dispels almost any other sympathy—he remains both absent and incommunicado for months, haphazardly missing much of Jack’s endangered period and returning just a few weeks before his death.

In the end we’re left with a mixed impression of their relationship, pity mixed with joy. They remained close brothers throughout their lives, bonded by memory and suffering, two old, bookish gentlemen pottering around house and garden. Yet it was no perfect companionship, and in fact there was great loss, even neglect, on both sides.

Arthur Greeves

Something similar may be said of Lewis’s relationship with Arthur Greeves. Arthur was Lewis’s closest lifelong friend. They were very close in their teen years, suffered a tapering off when Lewis moved to Oxford, yet always shared a deep fondness. They met occasionally throughout their lives, perhaps once every two or three years, normally with Lewis going to Ireland where they could travel together in the countryside of their shared boyhood.

Arthur, however, seems to have been a somewhat emotionally troubled person, and the mismatch in their intelligence (few could match Jack’s intelligence) limited the depth of their relationship. Arthur never had a career, never married, and seems to have suffered ill health throughout his life. Despite this lack of occupation (Lord knows how he spent his days), he refused Lewis’s frequent urging to visit Oxford. If I recall rightly he visited just once in all those decades. I suppose it’s likely that if Greeves hadn’t grown up in Lewis’s own hometown they might have fallen out of touch in their 20s. Instead, they preserved the friendship. But one gets the sense that there was yet more available in the relationship than they were able to secure.

An Author’s Insecurities

A remarkable theme through Lewis’s writings are his worries and frustrations as an author.

Working backward, as late as 1963 he feared that his writings would fall out of print within three years of his death. There’s no indication that he feared a loss of prestige: rather, that the income would no longer support Warnie. In (about) 1948 he wrote in a letter (I wish I could find it) that he thought his days of publishing books was over. Not long after, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came to him.

I suspect that prior to this—at least until the 1950s—Lewis reckoned himself a failed poet rather than a successful novelist or author. This perspective gave him a certain freedom. Lacking ambition and pretence, he wrote what amused him rather than what he thought most estimable. He thought Till We Have Faces his best book, yet it sold poorly, and he disliked the title (which was the publisher’s choice; he had preferred Bareface). Perhaps I’m projecting, but I believe he felt he had succeeded in creating merely “good” books, not great ones: books that met a particular need (like Screwtape Letters or The Problem of Pain) or that dabbled in a curiosity or amusement of his own (Perelandra or The Lion…) but were hardly great literature. By no means did he reckon himself one of the great authors or foresee his ongoing success.

Connected with this, Lewis’s financial worries are interesting to regard with hindsight. In this respect I think his experiences are typical of people in general or Christians in particular. One year (about 1960) he discovered to his horror that he had vastly underpaid taxes on book earnings for several years. The resulting bill threatened to undo them. Yet after a few weeks or months of worry the problem turned out to have been an error and all came to nothing. I find that an easy fear to identify with and a welcome reminder that these fears tend to evaporate, at least with prayer. I should also say, for it is another great theme and I shall neglect it badly, that to his very great credit, Lewis never shrank from lavish generosity.

Friendship

I think it’s clear that Lewis was a good friend. His decades’ worth of letters to Owen Barfield, Greeves, Joy Davidman, Mary Shelburne, Cecil Harwood, the Farrers, June Freud, including visits with them in Oxford, Ireland, or on walking tour, give ample evidence. It’s not clear to me how he cultivated these friendships or what they were like up close, but they were clearly a major aspect of his life.

Incidentally, Lewis at the Breakfast Table is a book about Lewis by his friends that I’d like to read by way of coda.

Anglicanism

I envy Lewis his Anglicanism, another major theme. It seems to me that a good part of the spiritual health and insight that he demonstrates so soon after his conversion and maintains thereafter may be attributed to the theological tradition he inherits as well as the spiritual disciplines this tradition makes available to him: the daily rigor of Common Prayer, regular Eucharist, and the guidance of a spiritual director. In his Christian writing Lewis shrinks from denominationalism, and in his own thought and practice he departed from classic Anglicanism in many ways (disliked the hymnody, believed [at times] in Purgatory, was no inerrantist, veered toward Arminianism rather than Calvinism), but his tradition served him well in enviable ways.

Orthodoxy and Speculation

His theological orthodoxy and speculativeness are interesting themes. It’s incredible, given his background and his path to faith, that he was as orthodox as he was: perfectly orthodox in all the key particulars. This miraculous conformance to the necessities of Christian faith is worth a study in its own right.

But Lewis was more imaginative than most, and his imaginativeness did invade some important Christian doctrines: Purgatory (as I mentioned), the souls of animals, the nature of hell and those who are cast there, the relationship between human choice and divine sovereignty. He certainly toed the edge of orthodoxy in some places but never, I think, earned an accusation of heresy.

For my part, I think I most disagree with him in areas that touch on Arminianism (though he was not, quite, an Arminian). In particular, I think that Lewis too easily accepts the Kantian doctrine that the Euthyphro question should be resolved by placing Moral Law as a separate and, in some sense, superior thing to God. I understand and in essence accept Lewis’s protest that the direct alternative—that God arbitrarily defines morality—is despicable, not to mention untenable. But I don’t believe this is the only alternative; and even if it were, it’s not clear to me that it is more despicable, or more untenable, than Kant’s approach.

Lewis’s view is closely connected (as he states in The Problem of Pain) to the belief that human moral sense, though flawed, is basically adequate. That is, when all’s said and done, people have enough good “in them,” in some sense, to recognize good and evil. These views start Lewis down the Arminian path. (Actually for him it’s the George McDonald path, and I think the cause and effect are reversed from how I’ve just said it, in that McDonald first indoctrinated Lewis in the conclusion, and authors he read later helped him understand the premises.) The conclusion is that people do possess some basic and essential, if flawed and corruptible, good, and that God is so loving that his operation in creation is to call and reach out to people in an effort to woo them. This is very Arminian. It leaves Lewis open to the idea that people can come to Christ after death, or serve him through another god in life (as in The Last Battle); that the pagan gods and myths were not (wholly?) demonic but in fact, at least in part, an outreach of God to ancient peoples; to minimize hell as a sort of inevitable self-immolation not of people per se but of the detritus of what might have been people; and to believe in Purgatory as a necessary phase of the afterlife (though I think he held this doctrine very tentatively, at least until his last few years). I’m not necessarily far from Lewis on every last one of these ideas but I distrust them more than he seems to have done.

There is a soft, human-oriented tone to his theology that, at its best, is sympathetic, open, gracious, and oriented toward love but, at its worst, minimizes God’s sovereignty and justified wrath, denigrates Scripture, and understates the centrality of explicit faith-acceptance of Christ’s saving work on the cross. I’m not so sure that Lewis would flinch, in fact, at the charge that he minimized God’s sovereignty, or wrath, or even Scripture, at least relative to those who in his view overemphasize them. But he would strongly object that he minimized Christ’s saving work on the cross. Yet as a “tone”, as I’ve named it, I think the charge stands. Christ’s saving work, or explicit faith in it, is sometimes—not always, nor even usually—an indirect element of Lewis’s soteriology rather than a direct and necessary one, and I think this is a mistake.

In a word, I accept some Calvinist ideas more than Lewis does. It must be said, though, that Lewis became more Calvinist in his later years, more explicitly concerned with God’s sovereignty. But certain objectionable elements in his theology—objectionable to evangelical Protestants, anyway—remained throughout his life.

The Innate Goodness of Pleasure

John Piper has just about made a career out of one of Lewis’s major themes: that pleasure is by its nature good. Lewis mentions this idea many times in writings of every kind, both as a detail and as a fundamental and explicit theme. As the title indicates, pleasure (in one of its forms) is arguably the central character of Surprised by Joy. Again, books could be (and have been) written about this.

I appreciate and enjoy, and largely accept, this element in Lewis’s thought. It was part of what made his words an antidote to the spiritual dryness and thinness I experienced after my seminary years.

And it affected his praxis. Lewis was no ascetic. Beer and cigarettes at the Bird and Baby, or merely the joy of literature, of a laugh, of “bawdy”, were not very guilty pleasures for him. Mostly this is a characteristic of the English in general rather than of Lewis in particular; my reaction is that of a Bible-belt evangelical rather than of a Christian per se. The point is that Lewis accepted pleasure intellectually as well as hedonistically and was much less stuck-up and legalistic, as a result, than many Christians of my ilk or even, perhaps, of his.

Literature

And of course one of the greatest, if not the greatest, themes of Lewis’s life is that of literature, of reading. He was an incorrigible bookworm. He read well, taking notes and making indexes. He was shameless (this goes back to the pleasure theme) in reading what he liked, imbibing the same succulent book repeatedly, and ignoring what he didn’t like. (An Experiment in Criticism captures his attitude to reading and readers.)

I’ve emerged from his works with a strong desire to read more as he did, but also vividly aware that I will never match him. His early training in Latin, Italian, and German gave him access to works that are far out of my realm, and of course his vocation as a professor of literature justified reading as a daily occupation.

Here’s a theme that simply can’t be summed up except by saying that it is the dominant theme of his life and separates him inevitably from most Christians who love his work and would like to resemble him more generally.

With that:

Reading as Lewis Read

What works should a person read if he wishes to read what Lewis himself most read, enjoyed, and discussed?

Lewis himself will thrash me to within an inch of my life when I get to heaven (or Purgatory) unless I mention that he himself disliked reading lists of this sort (see for example his letter to Robert Metcalf Jr dated 25 August 1959), believing instead in the importance of reading in context and from a natural outflow of discovery rather than under an obligation to conquer “The 100 Best Books of the Century.” Still, there’s no harm noting what works he seemed most to enjoy.

Please don’t take this list as authoritative; it’s what springs to my mind after four diffuse years in his letters.

Older Works

  • The Bible
  • Augustine
  • Dante
  • Virgil
  • Wordsworth
  • Milton (though I get the sense Lewis dealt with Milton professionally rather than approving him as such)
  • Spenser
  • Wagner
  • Chaucer
  • Malory
  • Ovid
  • Walter Scott
  • George McDonald

Writings for Christians

People sometimes wrote to Lewis to ask him what books he would recommend to new Christians or which had influenced his own thinking. His answers varied, but these recommendation are consistent. I should say, by the way, that these are not all sound evangelical choices (in case that sort of thing concerns you). The Theological Germanica, for example, has been roundly condemned by both Protestants and Catholics for many centuries; but Lewis evidently found some good in it. He recommended it regularly.

  • Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
  • Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations
  • Anonymous, Theologica Germanica
  • William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
  • Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

20th Century Novels

  • Tolkien, of course
  • Charles Williams, of course
  • David Lindsay, Voyage to Arcturus
  • Eric Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros

Others I’m forgetting?

Advice for Future Reading

If I ever read through Lewis again I want to remember these questions of method.

A General Plan

It’s best to take his life one year at a time and for each of his years read his published writings first, then the letters. For most of this round I read his letters first, but it’s better to reverse that. If you read the writings first you get a clear sense of what he was thinking and saying; the letters then become an enriching commentary on how and why the published work emerged. If you read the letters first, a great deal of their commentary and insight fall on deaf ears: though you get the thoughts that lead to the works in the proper chronological sequence, you don’t know what it is they’re leading to.

Reading Warnie’s Diary

Warnie’s diary (Brothers and Friends) is valuable, but perhaps gives away too much. I read it quite early on, in Lewis’s 1930s I’d say. Warnie goes quickly all the way to Lewis’s death, and any year prior to 1963 is too early to be reading that. Better to read Warnie as an afterward or in segments, annually, like everything else.

Boxen

Boxen is, alas, not that much fun to read (I find), and covers a fairly long span. It was written when Lewis was about 9 to 14. It’s absolutely remarkable, and wonderful to skim through, but not something most adults are likely to find greatly interesting or edifying. It’s like reading the private picture-stories of your extremely—extremely—precocious nephew. You might skim it first, before anything else, or maybe associate it with the year 1907.

Lewis’s Diary

All My Roads Before Me should be read for 1922–1927, the years Lewis journaled. His choice of subject matter is usually inconsequential so it can certainly be read all at once anytime during those years without harming the flow of thought, emotion, or events, but dividing it per year would be the most diligent approach.

The Literary Works

An interesting experiment would be to read his literary works in reverse chronological order. He becomes less specialized, more lucid—by which I mean less academic and more Lewis—in his later literary works. Perhaps reading this whole stream of work backwards from everything else is too much; but reading Discarded Image as a sort of preamble to his literary corpus toward the beginning of his career isn’t a bad idea.

Conclusion

It’s difficult to find a single page of Lewis, whether in his letters, his fiction, his non-fiction, his books or articles, that isn’t brimming with challenging and helpful insights beautifully expressed, often with sharp wit and memorable humor. I don’t know of anyone else like him. I’ve no question that God led me to him as a child nor back to him as an adult, and these years of reading—perhaps a million words, and untold hours—have already paid back hefty dividends in comfort, enjoyment, challenge, and spiritual growth.

It seems comical to others, no doubt, that I’d already be thinking of taking a second journey through Lewis’s works sometime in the future. Dogs return to their vomit, you say. There probably is a little madness in it. Lewis himself would weep if he knew (and maybe, by his own lights, he does) and would certainly dissuade me with abashed modesty. But I think God has wrought something significant in this man. Not only in him I hasten to add. Augustine is another like him. Tolkien’s authorial imagination is greater, as I think Lewis recognized. And Scripture itself is perpetually underrated for its unsurpassed (even by Lewis) beauty of expression, skill in storytelling, intelligence, potency, and good humor—all the same qualities for which Lewis is praised. But of course I’m not alone—none of us are alone—in finding in Lewis a mentor, guide, sometime surgeon, and muse who, improbable and silly though it may be, seems almost as near to hand as anyone alive and serves our sanctification at least as well.

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Why Unreal, Unity, and Source are Going Free

By Jeff | Published: March 4, 2015

In the last three days, three major game engine developers have announced they are giving their technology away. Why would they do that? What do they hope to achieve?

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The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

By Jeff | Published: December 17, 2014

In the early 80s, all it took to make a game was a computer, some graph paper, and a lot of determination.

Games were created by brilliant individuals.

Early Richard Garriott

Richard Garriott circa 1979

Their designs were often groundbreaking and sometimes deeply artistic.

Donkey Kong
Joust
Archon

Their choices defined much of what we see in games today.

Ultima IV Character Stats
WoW Stats

Some of these auteur game developers even made a decent living.

Lord British

Playing their games inspired me to make games of my own.

Atari Basic Programming
Atari Basic

By the mid-90s I had a degree in computer science, and landed my dream job at Origin Systems.

Origin Systems

But the industry had changed. The days of the solitary, brilliant, auteur developer had passed like rain on the mountain.

Now games were made by massive teams with massive schedules and massive budgets.

Assassin's Creed: Revelation tevelopment team

Big budgets required big revenue, and big revenue required small risks.

Video Game Sales per Year -1995

My dream job turned out to be a nightmare. I was working harder for less money than my non-game-programming peers in exchange for the privilege of making games.

Average salary comparison

But I didn’t make games. I made little pieces of games.

Particle system

So I moved into management. I thought that more leadership would mean more creative control. It didn’t. I still didn’t make games. Now I didn’t even make little pieces of games. I made schedules and budgets and meetings.

So I got out.

 

 

Then, just for fun, I started making Flash games.

With Flash you could create art and code in the same space. The games were small and focused. You could make a pretty good game by yourself. And Flash was everywhere, so you could publish your work to the world.

It was a dream come true. I could make whole games—not just pieces. They could be as strange or as fun or as experimental as I wanted. There were no schedules or budgets or meetings to fuss over.

Then the dream got even better. It turned out my little games could make a little money.

Then came the iPhone, and suddenly you could make a lot of money.

It was a renaissance, a second chance. For the first time since the early 80s, an individual programmer or a small group of developers could make a living creating fantastic wonders that made people smile while stretching their view of what games could be.

It was another golden age. For others.

Fez by Phil Fish

Fez by Phil Fish

Limbo by Playdead

Limbo by Playdead

Minecraft by Notch

Minecraft by Notch

And for me.

House of Shadows

House of Shadows

Doug dug.

Doug dug.

pixa

pixa

And then, suddenly, it was over.

So many people rushed to make games for the iPhone that supply exploded and prices collapsed. You literally couldn’t give games away.

Number of App Store Apps 2009-2014

Soon the only people making money on small games were those who made their games into billboards and markets.

Dragon Vale

It was the opposite of creativity. The opposite of art. And the type of fun these games delivered was bargain-basement: addictive but empty, like sucking sugar through a straw.

Candy Crush

Even small, indie games were no longer innovative, beautiful, or human. They were machines designed to latch onto a human brain and feed it all the right chemicals to keep it entranced.

So I got out.

 

 

Now making games is a hobby for me, as for millions of others. Just a hobby.

Small game development isn’t totally dead. Occasionally a game will make a splash and the creators will reap rewards for a few months.

Monument

But almost no one makes a steady living. Zynga, Rovio: today’s superstars are tomorrow’s street sweepers.

Will Code for Food

And if your game does do well, there are always a thousand hungry developers willing to steal and repackage your idea.

Threes vs 2048

Creating small, beautiful games is no longer a living. But it is a grand hobby. A 48-hour game programming competition like Ludum Dare is the highlight of my year.

Connected Worlds
Proletarian Ninja X
Claustrophobia

I get so pumped in those 48 hours, I have a hard time coming down.

 

 

When I was in college they told us there would always be a demand for software developers. In general that’s still true.

I always wondered what it would look like when it stopped being true, when the need for developers dwindled, and programming stopped paying the bills.

Now I know.

For the lone game programmer that day has already arrived.

Twice.

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C. S. Lewis’s Letter to Tolkien upon First Reading The Lord of the Rings

By Jeff | Published: June 29, 2014

J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings over a long interval that began well before World War II and ended a few years after. Both Tolkien and his adult son Christopher regularly attended meetings of the Inklings, a literary group of which C. S. Lewis was the guiding star, and the two Tolkiens took turns reading The Lord of the Rings as it came together. Lewis had therefore heard most of The Lord of the Rings before receiving the typescript of the finished novel in October 1949. After reading it he wrote this letter to Tolkien.

My dear Tollers—

Uton herian holbytlas indeed. I have drained the rich cup and satisfied a long thirst. Once it really gets under weigh the steady upward slope of grandeur and terror (not unrelieved by green dells, without which it would indeed be intolerable) is almost unequalled in the whole range of narrative art known to me. In two virtues I think it excels: sheer sub-creation—Bombadil, Barrow Wights, Elves, Ents—as if from inexhaustible resources, and construction—the construction Tasso aimed at (but did not equally achieve) which was to combine the variety of Ariosto with the unity of Virgil. Also, in gravitas. No romance can repell [sic] the charge of ‘escapism’ with such confidence. If it errs, it errs precisely in the opposite direction: the sickness of hope deferred and the merciless piling up of odds against the heroes are near to being too painful. And the long coda after the eucatastrophe, whether you intended  it or no, has the effect of reminding us that victory is as transitory as conflict, that (as Byron says) ‘There’s no sterner moralist than pleasure’ and so leaving a final impression of profound melancholy.

No doubt this is increased for me by the circumstances in which I heard most of it for the first time: when there was great danger around us but, in me at any rate, a happier heart than now. But that only accounts for a small part of my total impression. I am sure it is in itself a great and hard and bitter book which, though I love it, I shall never open without a certain shrinking. It will rank, along with the Aeneid as one of what I call my ‘immediately sub-religious’ books.

Indeed (unexpectedly) the general aroma seems to me more like the Aeneid than anything else, in spite of your Northernness. This is partly because both (a.) Are so often sylvan (b.) Have strategy, as distinct from mere combat, (c.) Suggest an enormous past behind the action.

All the alliterative verse I liked.

Of course this is not the whole story. There are many passages I could wish you had written otherwise or omitted altogether. If I include more of my adverse criticism in this letter that is because you heard and rejected most of them already (rejected is perhaps too mild a word for your reaction on  to least one occasion!) and even if I now convinced you on any point, the conviction would, I take it, be too late to bear fruit. And even if all my objections were just (which is of course unlikely) the faults I think I find could only delay and impair appreciation: the substantial splendour of the tale can carry them all. Ubi plura nitent in carmine non ego paucis offendo maculis.

I congratulate you. All the long years you have spent on it are justified. Morris and Eddison, in so far as they are comparable, are now mere ‘precursors’.

The mappemound [sic: mappemundo=”map of the world”] is, as you warn me, now inaccurate. But on a rather different point—do you mean the Shire to be so large?

I miss you very much

Yours

Jack Lewis

The friendship between Lewis and Tolkien laid the foundation for the fantasy genre as we know it today in film, games, television, and books, so it’s interesting to see Lewis’s immediate reaction to Tolkien’s magnum opus. As usual Lewis clearly expresses what the rest of us sense dimly. But what I really sense upon reading this letter is how impoverished we’ve become as a culture, how uneducated even the most educated modern person is. Can you imagine today finding a community of artists and thinkers—even a small cadre like the Inklings—who could not only read the ancient languages but compose in them, had the skill both to dazzle the imagination with flights of fantasy and to chasten the mind with analysis and logic, and had not only read, but enjoyed and profited by, literature from Greece to modern times? How many of us now could comprehend a letter like this, much less write one? The Inklings were, I suppose, rare enough in their day. Are there any left now?

Posted in books, C. S. Lewis, fiction | Comments closed

How the Enlightenment Endarkened

By Jeff | Published: March 16, 2014

Reading Lewis’s Miracles, chapter 6, I’m delighted to discover him capturing in a delicious nutshell the essence of much of my own recent thinking about the Enlightenment, modernism, atheism, and the forgotten philosophical case for Christianity. He says:

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A Chronological Reading Guide
to the Works of C. S. Lewis

By Jeff | Published: November 8, 2013

Lewis - Essay Collection coverWith a major C. S. Lewis conference getting underway in Houston this weekend, I thought that now would be a good time to publish my chronological bibliography of C. S. Lewis. It is now available as a Google Docs sheet.

I have prepared this bibliography in order to serve my own quest of reading all of Lewis’s writings in chronological order. If you are on this or another, similar quest, you may also find it useful.

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Posted in C. S. Lewis, faith | Comments closed

What Programming a Game in 48 Hours Taught Me About Programming Games

By Jeff | Published: August 28, 2013

Spacetime AdventureI participated in Ludum Dare 27 this weekend, programming a complete game, Spacetime Adventure, in 48 hours. I make games for a living but I’d never done that before. It was fun.

It was also enlightening. For the past several years I’ve spent most of my development time with C++11 in Xcode. I like it. Nah, I love it. But this weekend, working in Adobe Flash Professional with ActionScript 3.0, I could not believe how high my productivity was. I was knocking off tasks like they were popcorns in a fire. It helps that I used to work in Flash a lot, so I knew the drill. But I had forgotten how easy and quick it is to make games in that system.

The contest limit is 48 hours, but I actually spent 30 hours. In that time I made an entire game, and not a terribly simple one: it involves Box2D physics and time travel. It’s not a highly polished game, of course. I’m going to work on it some more before really “releasing” it (though you can play it now if you want). But it has all the main bells and whistles: front end, HUD, user interface, the game proper, victory screens—even music. Not that that’s anything special—the contest is to make a complete game, and over a thousand contestants did so.

Yet most of the games I make in my professional job take much longer than this. As I reached the end of the weekend I couldn’t help but ask myself, “How is it that you were able to complete this game in less than 48 hours, when most of the games you work on take upwards of several months?”

HoS ScreenshotThe last game I shipped, House of Shadows, took 11 months. Even if you assume that it was 10 times more complicated than Spacetime Adventure, this still leaves a productivity ratio of about 6:1. This means that if I could transfer the pace of production from Ludum Dare into my normal work, I would complete a game like House of Shadows in less than 2 months.

Now no doubt some of the differences between a Ludum Dare project and a “real” project are esoteric and non-transferable. House of Shadows, for example, is really probably more than ten times more complicated than Spacetime Adventure, thinking in terms of the internal game mechanics, rules, variation, and user interface. Spacetime Adventure gets away with being pretty simple really. But along with this kind of non-transferable difference, perhaps there are other differences that are transferable. Maybe there are things about creating a 48 hour project that can make a “real” project faster and maybe even more fun.
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Posted in games, Ludum Dare, productivity, programming | Comments closed

The Ludum Dare Experience:
The Exhilarating End

By Jeff | Published: August 28, 2013

Spacetime AdventureThis weekend I participated in Ludum Dare 27, a programming competition in which competitors create a game in a weekend. I made a game, had fun, and learned a lot. In this series of three articles I reflect on my experiences before, during, and after the competition, looking for lessons to apply to other kinds of projects.

As the third and final day of Ludum Dare 27 began, it was far from clear whether I could finish the project. I had completed the core game on Saturday night, but a great many tasks still remained, including bug fixing, randomized levels, background art, and the entire front end (intro screen, instructions, etc.). Front end work, in particular, often takes days on its own, so I was afraid I would have to cut it or leave it very minimal. Read More »

Posted in games, Ludum Dare, programming | Comments closed

The Ludum Dare Experience:
The Melancholy Middle

By Jeff | Published: August 27, 2013

Spacetime AdventureThis weekend I participated in Ludum Dare 27, a programming competition in which competitors create a game in a weekend. I made a game, had fun, and learned a lot. In this series of three articles I reflect on my experiences before, during, and after the competition, looking for lessons to apply to other kinds of projects.

I learned this weekend that a 48-hour project is a faithful microcosm—a diorama—of a 3-year game project. I was struck by how many classic features of game development are preserved in this dilation. The high-energy, optimistic initial phase. The grueling, pessimistic middle phase. And the steady, realistic ending phase. You inevitably live them all whether you’re making a game in a weekend or through the better part of an Olympiad.

Although the Ludum Dare competition is limited to 48 hours, in my time zone it takes place over the course of three days. Beginning on Friday night, I conceived and designed my game with great enthusiasm and began the implementation. Sunday’s work, too, would prove enjoyable. It was the middle day—Saturday—that became a long, worrying crunch, the Empire Strikes Back of the experience. Read More »

Posted in games, Ludum Dare, programming | Comments closed
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