Scott Tepper: Preparation is next to…Preponderance in the Dictionary

If my calculations are correct, as you read this, I should be just arriving in Essen, Germany.  Hopefully next week I’ll have a great column for you about my experiences and the games of Essen 2006.

For me, preparing for Essen is different than for most trips I take.  In addition to having to divine in advance what weather-appropriate clothes I should pack for the trip, I have to study up on the rules of the games I’m going to be teaching.  Game companies introduce many of their games to the public for the first time at this enormous trade show. 

As a demoer, sometimes I have played the designer’s prototype, or I’ve gotten the chance to play a pre-production copy of the game long before I have to demo it.  It’s common, though, for the first production run of some games to be delivered directly from the manufacturing factory straight to the convention hall.  In some instances I only get to play a game once, a day or two before having to teach it.

So you can probably appreciate my great respect for game designers and translators who write clear, concise rules.  Muddy, complex, poorly organized rules are my nemesis.  It’s cool to be among the first people to learn a new game’s mechanisms, but occasionally it can be frustrating.  Imagine having to figure out how a game works when you don’t have any of the game components in front of you and the rules say something like this, “When you play a Flibbity-jibbit card, follow the directions and move your pawn from the Warehouse to the nearest Apartment Building (but not another Warehouse!) that has a direct connecting path”.  Of course, the rules don’t include a description of what a Flibbity-jibbit card says, and there is no picture in the rulebook of what the board looks like.  So I have no idea of how to tell the difference between a Warehouse and an Apartment Building.

Usually, I can get a pretty good idea of the gameplay of simpler games from just reading the rules.  But the more complex the game is, as we all know, the more tiny little details it will have that can be forgotten or distorted.  I hate to learn that I’ve explained rules incorrectly to someone.  It gnaws at me when I find out I’ve done this.  I feel awful thinking that people are playing a game incorrectly because of me, or even worse, dismissed a game because of a rule that I messed up.  This is what pushes me to be more accurate going forward.  Hopefully I haven’t “ruined” games for too many people.

Another thing I’ve done to prepare for Essen is to work on my German.  Last year, about four months prior to Essen, I started listening to the Pimsleur German audio CD’s in my car.  I figured a basic understanding of the language would help me get around town.  In school, I studied French, and also picked up basic conversational skills in Spanish and ASL(American Sign Language). 

I was not expecting to have to speak German there, but much to my chagrin, twice during Essen, I had people sit down at a demo table hoping to learn how to play a game, only to have me discover that they spoke no other language than German.  The people had come to learn the games, so I muddled through with my extremely basic German, “You want to go from here to there.  If you are first you cannot put your piece here.  You can move your piece like this.  You cannot do this”, etc… Luckily, neither of the families had wanted me to teach them how to play something like Die Macher.  In the end, both groups understood how to play the games, and ended up playing the games correctly.  Whew!

So I’ve had more time to study up on my German these past 12 months.  I think I’ve now learned enough to be dangerous.  Before, when speaking to a German, I would precede anything I said with, “Entschuldigen Sie, mein Deutsch ist nicht sehr gut"(Excuse me, my German is not very good).  Because my vocabulary then was so limited, there were only so many different ways I could mess up “Where is the bathroom?”

But now that I’ve been exposed to a larger German vocabulary, the possibilities for making outrageous mistakes are endless.  A slip of a letter can totally change the meaning of a sentence.  For example, in a pastry shop, I could say, “Ich möchte dieses Gebäck."(I would like that pastry).  If I slipped and changed the “b” to a “p” in the word Gebäck, then I’d be asking for luggage.

Then there’s the whole issue of double meanings of German words.  If you want an idea of the horrors of learning how to speak German, you must read Mark Twain’s hysterical dissertation, The Awful German Language. (http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html)

It’s my personal hypothesis that so many good games come out of Germany because German brains, having mastered such a complex language, are now primed to do the advanced problem solving required to create intricate and clever game mechanisms.

My good friend, Heidi, comes from Berlin.  As I’ve been learning new German words and phrases, I’ve been trying them out on her to make sure my pronunciation is correct.  One day, wanting to practice my new vocabulary about driving in the city, when Heidi and her husband arrived at our weekly gamenight, I asked her, “Wie war der Verkehr?"(How was the traffic?). 

Heidi blushed and gasped, “What did you say?!?”

I cautiously and slowly repeated the same phrase, and then told her that I had wanted to ask about the traffic.  “Wasn’t that what I asked?”, I inquired.

“Yes.....”, she answered, “but it also has another meaning.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later”, she said, still blushing.

Two hours later, I pulled her aside and pressed her for an explanation.  “Was my pronunciation wrong?”

“No, you said it correctly”, she told me.

“Then I don’t understand”, I said, dumbfounded. “I tried to say it just like they did in the lesson”.

“You did”, she went on, “It’s just that ‘Verkehr’ has more than one meaning.  It does mean ‘traffic’, but...” and she paused, “it also means ‘intercourse’.”

“Uh....uh....um....ack”. 

Yeah, I was really eloquent after that.  Just call me Mr. Quick-comeback.

My mind reeled.  How could they teach unsuspecting students a phrase like that without any sort of warning?!  What kind of twisted sense of humor did the writer of the lesson have?  Was he thinking, “Just wait till these tourists get to Germany and ask about the traffic!  Mwah-ha-haaaaaa!â€?

Well, I should get going now.  I’ve got a lot to do before I leave, and I still have to pack my pastries.

© 2006 Scott Tepper

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Comments:

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Fantastic! Hope to see you in Essen. And of course you know that “Essen” also means “Eating” or “to Eat”. BTW I was taught Caylus last year from a very nice girl, who unforunately did not know if the building track was the better choice or if you had to snatch a cloth cube in the first round, so language skills isn’t everything! /Strömer, from Sweden Posted by Patrik Strömer on Oct 16, 2006 at 11:14 AM | #

Are you sure you are packing pastries? And not pasties? Posted by Frank Branham on Oct 16, 2006 at 12:15 PM | #

One of my favourite things about German is the way the verbs go to the end of the sentence.  There’s a story about a Professor whose lecture consisted of one long sentence, full of clauses and subclauses.  He then left before finishing the lecture, because the students could fill in all the verbs for themselves… Posted by David Brain on Oct 16, 2006 at 05:05 PM | #

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