Postcards From Berlin #3: The Game Architect

By Jeff Allers

German Word of the Month: baustelle = construction site

In that pre-game time of sorting wooden bits and shuffling cards, I often ask new players around the table standard icebreaker questions, in order to get to know them a little before play begins. When I first joined my Berlin gaming group, I was particularly interested in learning more about the people there, and I remember asking a woman what she did for a living.

She returned a very short, typically German reply, “Author.”
“What kind of author?” I asked, intrigued.  “Novels, children’s books?”
“Game author” she answered with a wink.
From then on, I often asked new acquaintances in the group if they, too, were authors.  “Aren’t we all?” one of them replied.

It has been said that every gamer is a closet game designer.  It all begins when you start developing house rules or variants for your favorite games.  Then, before you know it, you’re pushing homemade prototypes on friends and even considering publishers.

In Germany, the people who develop their ideas into games and then have their names so prominently displayed on the box are not called designers, but rather game authors.

Because four published authors are regulars in my gaming group—not to mention lots of “wannabees” like me—we are often playing as many prototypes as published games.  Sometimes, that’s all we will play in an evening.  It’s not really a gamers’ group, it’s a game authors’ group.

I like the title of “game author,” as it emphasizes a story being told, even when the theme is relatively abstract.  German games tend to be heavy on the mechanics, but playing them does create a story, even if the players are not inspired to write elaborate session reports about the experience afterwards.

I’ve always enjoyed writing stories, but I prefer yet another title: the game architect. 
Architecture is all about seamlessly fusing the different disciplines into something that is more than the sum of its parts.  In a game, it’s usually blending story and mechanics, an exciting social experience with rules and mathematics.  Just as the architect fuses art with engineering, form with function, sociology with technology, how we live with how we build.

Of course, you must allow me some personal bias.  After all, it was architecture that originally brought me to Berlin…

In the mid 90’s when I first arrived here, fresh out of college, Berlin was covered with the largest construction sites in the world.  The flat cityscape was growing vertically, first populated by cranes too numerous to count, then by steel, glass and concrete monoliths in every shape and form that modern technology could allow.  Potsdamer Platz, once an intersection so busy it contained Europe’s first traffic light, had become a wasteland when the Berlin Wall was built right through it after World War II, but now it was slowly being redeveloped.  I once counted over 60 giant construction cranes there, as I toured the silent scene one night.  Most people like to go to dinner or to the movies when they go out.  I like to go to construction sites.

It was the lure of these huge projects coupled with a fascination for the city’s history which drew me here two weeks after graduating with my bachelor’s degree in architecture.

Designing and building things has always been a passion of mine, and I suppose it runs in the family.  Both my father and uncle are architects and my sister is an interior designer.  As a child, my coloring books were black and white copies of my father’s perspective drawings, and my toys were wood blocks brought back from construction sites and sanded so that I could build houses using my father’s floor plans.  I suppose that architecture always meant “playtime” for me, and even the seriousness of the profession later on could not dampen this feeling. 

Several years ago, however, I traded in my architecture career for youth ministry with inner-city teenagers.  Then I discovered German board games, and the desire to “play” with architecture was reawakened.  Especially since my gaming group really is a “Baustelle,” a construction site where new designs are always being developed.

Architecture has been described as the one inescapable art.  It seems that we can never quite escape from playing games either, whether they be games of skill, athleticism, or the intellect. Many board game components are so tactile, they connect us to the past by reminding us of our childhood toys. And when we were children, we always made up new games to play.

As adults, board games provide a way to socially interact in a creative way again, a “recess” from our more complex lives.  A good game designer, like a good architect, encourages that interaction in the environment he or she creates.

Because most board games are not solitaire affairs, the designer must always be thinking of his or her audience. The architect also rarely designs purely for himself.  Of course, there are always those like Frank Lloyd Wright who cared more about his own personal vision than the enjoyment of his clients, but I have not yet met such egotism in gaming circles. That is probably because the mark of a successful game is the enjoyment that groups of people have in coming together to play it.

And, just as architects have, over the centuries, played with the tension between form and function, so too is the ever-present tension between theme and mechanics in game design.  Some designer games are the equivalent of Le Corbusier’s modernist houses, stripped of all ornament down to the pure architectural forms:  “Less is More.” Some are like Michael Graves’ post-modern structures, with decoration added on seemingly after-the-fact.  And some are beautifully thematic, like a Gothic cathedral or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilboa, where the sculptural forms and spaces tell a story.

Then again, maybe I’m risking bringing too much seriousness to our hobby.  It is, after all, the unpretentiousness of the people that makes designing and playing games so much fun.  And it’s a lot more casual too—I’ll take green hair and t-shirts over a sea of bohemians wearing black turtlenecks any day.  For me, though, it gives me the opportunity to relive my studio days, as I make drawings and cut chip board with Exacto blades in the wee hours of the night.  Of course, I’m no longer making models of buildings for the Berlin skyline.  I’m constructing board game prototypes.

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