If you’ve been around me for more than thirty minutes, you know I love tabletop games: board games, roleplaying games, miniatures games – the works. I’ve even blended all three types into hybrids, using strategic board games to set the grand politics of a roleplaying campaign where players lead miniature armies into battle on the tabletop. Professionally, I’ve made games – both digital and tabletop – for over twenty years, and I like to push the bounds of what games can do.

That’s why I’m really excited about how mixed reality (MR) can be used to enhance tabletop gaming in ways that virtual reality (or standard video games) can’t. I say enhance because I believe it’s important to preserve the unique qualities of board games that have made them popular for over 5,000 years.

What’s so special about tabletop games?

Tabletop games are social.

Games bring people together around a common space to share a common experience. Humans are social beings, and games are a time-tested vehicle for building understanding, trust, and respect for one another.

These experiences are not exclusively competitive. Many tabletop games are cooperative, with all players united in a struggle against the game itself. Most roleplaying games, for example, are largely cooperative, with a neutral game master facilitating the game for one or more united players.

In all cases, the face-to-face social interaction with other players has intrinsic value.

Indeed, there’s an entire category of social deduction games such as Werewolf/Mafia and the excellent The Resistance: Avalon (a personal favorite) that rely heavily on the immediacy of face-to-face interaction and non-verbal communication.

Virtual reality board games have been unable so far to capture that aspect of tabletop games. Mimicking the subtle facial expressions and body language that is so vital to interpersonal communications is still incredibly difficult.

Rec Room for Oculus VR, a platform for social gaming, implicitly acknowledges this by using extremely crude avatars in order to avoid the uncanny valley effect.

It’s like looking in a mirror!

Tabletop Simulator is another VR platform for board games. Unlike Rec Room, it doesn’t even attempt to represent players visually. As a result, it’s not significantly different than traditional video game versions of board games.

This is where augmented reality can step in, as it offers the possibility of actual face-to-face interaction in a shared game space.

Live Game Board is one attempt to do just that. Players use their mobile devices to view virtual objects on their screens overlayed on a mat unique to each game. The current offerings are essentially very simplistic mobile games, but perhaps talented developers may take the concept and expand on it.

This brings us to the other unique aspect of board games.

Tabletop games are tactile.

There is an indefinable quality to tabletop games that involves more than just the visual. Board games involve a degree of physicality – pieces, dice, tiles, boards, or other objects – that can be manipulated. That tangible presence is both grounding and serves as a focus for the social interaction.

There is also immediate and gratifying sensory feedback when rattling dice, pushing a rook to check your opponent’s king, or even flicking a marble across the floor. The mind knows this is real, and which has a powerful effect on how we perceive the events. There’s even research that suggests gestures and interaction with physical affordances (e.g. game pieces) combine with speech in the formation of our memories. Even the smell of a new board game contributes to this unique experience.

Many tabletop gamers elevate the physical components of games to an art form. Miniatures gaming enthusiasts devote countless hours (and dollars!) to collecting and painting these playing pieces.

Scale models and tabletops as detailed as any model railroad collector’s are the game board for recreations of battles from history, science fiction, or fantasy. I’ll admit, I have everything from Elves and orcs to Tiger tanks and X-Wings.

You can see some great examples of painted miniatures on Cool Mini or Not.

Can current technology replace that tactile experience?

Haptic technology is making strides in replicating some of these sensations. Ultrahaptics uses dynamically modified air flow to simulate surface textures. It might one day be possible to integrate into a comprehensive VR approach to simulate a tactile board game experience, but at present that isn’t a cost-effective or practicable solution.

And wearing a full Tesla Suit or bHaptics’ TactSuit is not only costly, it might just be overkill at the dining room table.

Seriously, I just wanted to play Stratego.

Games are universal

People of all sorts enjoy games. These games vary by culture and individual preference, but most every human on this planet has games they play. From Senet (the favorite of the pharaohs) to the games of the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia, games transcend time and geography.

Language can be a barrier for playing games with groups from different regions. While many board games are localized for language, that doesn’t help when your friends gift you a French edition of 7 Wonders and you don’t read French. (Yes, this happened to me recently.)

This is one area where some off-the-shelf AR technology can help. Google Translate (formerly Word Lens) provides real-time text translation.

While not perfect, it’s a taste of what’s coming in the very near future. Just the thing to translate text on cards or game boards!

This universality of games brings people together from around the world to meet and play at game conventions. Gen Con in the United States attracts over 60,000 attendees annually, and Spiel in Germany draws nearly 200,000 people.

I go to Gen Con most every year, as well as Strategicon in Los Angeles three times a year. It’s fantastic playing new games and connecting with people over a shared passion. You should definitely check for game conventions near you!

So where does that leave us?

Where existing virtual reality and augmented reality approaches fall short, I see amazing potential in how mixed reality will enhance and transform tabletop gaming. MR can bring the digital and tabletop worlds together in a way that maximizes the best quality of each.

I’ll share thoughts on specific areas we can leverage this technology in my next post: What does Mixed Reality bring to the table?

In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about tabletop games, I’d recommend starting here:

BoardGameGeek – This is the repository for board games. A bit overwhelming, but this is a great resource for finding detailed information about individual games, discussion forums, a marketplace for buying or trading games, and much more. You can even find me there.

Co-Op Board Games – This site reports exclusively on games where all players are working together. I think cooperative games are great for get-togethers where people don’t know each other well and for introducing people to tabletop gaming in general. Check out the game Pandemic for a fun and challenging time!

The Dice Tower – Started by Tom Vasel, this is a good source for board game news and reviews as well as a podcast. Worth checking out.

Game Brain – If you prefer to listen to people discuss games in-depth, Matthew Robinson and guests dive into a variety of tabletop games in this weekly podcast. Lots of good discussion and insights.

Happy gaming and I’ll see you around the table!

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As a creator of interactive media, I don’t fit easily into a single silo, having worked on projects from mixed reality military simulators to action figure-based board games. So it should come as no surprise that my most frequently asked question is “so just what is it that you do?”

As is often the case, the short answer is not necessarily the best answer.

My catch-all answer of “I’m a producer” usually draws crinkled brows and polite nods, as that role is defined in vastly different ways across industries and even varies from studio to studio. Indeed, my own roles vary from project to project (and over the life of a project), encompassing that of executive producer, product manager, and designer, all rolled into one.

When expanding on what the means, I’ve been told my elevator pitch would work only on the Burj Khalifa.

So perhaps a more meaningful answer is I assess and meet people’s needs. This is applied differently in the various roles I take, but the core skills are the same: a willingness to listen, a desire to learn, and an ability to put it all together.

Willingness to Listen

Many people think they’re good listeners, just like many people think they’re good drivers – it’s everyone else who is the problem.

The temptation for anyone in a creative role – particularly when consulting – is to quickly demonstrate just how smart and clever you are to your client. High expectations and short timelines put tremendous pressure on you to launch into a solution before you understand the problem.

As executive producer, an inability or unwillingness to genuinely listen to your client’s story and needs can critically damage the trust they have in you. Your willingness to actively listen demonstrates respect for both them and their circumstances, and is critical for laying the foundations of a successful project: understanding, trust, and cooperation.

As product manager, acting without first really listening to can result in wasted time and effort as you focus on the wrong priorities and demonstrate a lack of empathy for your audience. This in turn affects the work of a designer, as every action or interaction should serve the needs of the audience and the goals of the product as a whole.

Even on a personal level, we appreciate feeling heard. Who likes having someone else tell you how you feel or how you should solve your problem without first having really listened to you?

I was in a roundtable discussion with clients who were very bright, non-technical academics. They wanted a simulation that would reinforce some of the lessons taught to the professionals attending the program. My well-intentioned colleagues, eager to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the client and project, launched into a very interesting and detailed description about just what the simulation should be and how it would work. It was a cool idea and pretty impressive-sounding, really. And it was all terribly wrong for the client.

I could see the clients’ expressions around the table – people who knew they were listening to an expert provide an expert solution, but it was a solution that didn’t feel right in ways they couldn’t articulate. Putting on the brakes, asking open-ended questions, and providing space for the clients to put things in their own terms got us back on track to really understanding their circumstances and problems, and built trust that we could ultimately deliver the experience their alumni needed.

Investing the time to listen doesn’t preclude “moving fast and breaking things,” but it pays to know what you’re breaking and why.

As an expert in my field, yes, my gut instinct might be completely correct, but a little humility and willingness to listen to others pays off no matter what I’m working on.

Desire to Learn

Coupled with a willingness to listen is a desire to learn. Creating impactful products and experiences requires an understanding of markets, people, and domain knowledge. This can take many shapes: performing product comparisons, consuming source material, working with subject matter experts, developing user persona and/or empathy maps, and so on.

It’s more than compiling data, however. It’s immersing myself in the knowledge and striving to become an “expert” in a new field, or at least have a functional understanding that enables you to speak to the needs of your client and audience. For that, you really need to enjoy learning and experiencing new things, embracing both the growth (and occasional discomfort) that brings.

Sometimes it’s about really getting into the shoes – or boots – of your audience. I was asked to create a game-based learning simulation for the US Army to teach the planning and decision making around logistics. To better understand the experience of the Soldiers I’d be serving, I travelled to Fort Hood, Texas, and took the same week-long crash course the troops take. A similar opportunity took me to the deserts of the National Training Center and a ride with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. In both instances, I was able to learn things that aren’t captured effectively in typical user research. Like how sand gets everywhere, including your teeth.

Ability to Apply

All of the above is well-intentioned but ultimately meaningless without the ability to apply it to solve problems effectively. This requires not only the capacity to synthesize what you’ve heard and learned, but the unwavering focus on the client’s and audience’s needs, as well as the discipline to continually revisit your efforts to make sure they remain on target.

As executive producer, that means establishing a common vocabulary with your client and maintaining clear, honest communication with them throughout the life of a project.

As product manager or designer, that involves continually reevaluating your work, making sure that even as you adapt to newfound learning and changes in the market or simply come up with cool ideas, your plans and design remain focused on fulfilling the real needs you’ve assessed.

Without discipline, this can be a haphazard or reactionary exercise, chasing after an ever-changing goal. Staying focused on what I’ve listened to and learned makes this iterative process one of continual refinement and improvement, better serving the needs of my client and audience.

That’s how I strive to serve people both personally and professionally, assessing, understanding, and meeting their needs, because ultimately helping them achieve success is my success as well.

Ah. We’ve reached the top floor. I hope you enjoy the view.

Month: August 2019

The Digital Tabletop