Heroic Attempts at Efficient Game Writing
The GM team of Berkeley (2001), a one-night 1960s spy game written by Jake Beal, Peter Litwack, Nick Martin and Richard Tibbetts, took particular pride at being able to move from concept to game-start within two weeks, a situation that arose from the need to fill a weekend slot in the schedule to replace another scheduled game that failed to complete development. The result was a formulaic one-night spy game that fulfilled most expectations of the genre by borrowing extensively from tried-and-true ideas from previous games. Despite the scenario of the game (a Californian college campus in the 1960s) being an odd fit for the major interactions within the game (conspiracies conducting espionage over an assortment of generic technological artifacts), most of the players were quick to overlook its shortcomings and lack of innovation due to its miraculously short period of design and production.
SIK games are also infamous for their short production times, although a closer look at the actual processes involved in SIK game design reveals that most SIK games are imagined, discussed and bounced about as a concept long before they begin any writing. Most SIK games feature exceedingly brief rules that take little time to write and are easily translated from concept to prose. Players often receive sheets duplicated among all their teammates, further reducing production time. The brevity of SIK games is a trait favored by fans and designers of the SIK genre of gaming. Players expect to spend little time reading their sheets, game designers respond by writing small amounts of text and restricting the sheet content to the bare essentials.
Most of the time-consuming work happens at the concept stage. Because of the lack of any hardcopy or actual data produced in the concept stage, combined with the ability of most SIK game writers to maintain several simultaneous game concepts in their heads at a time, many designers assume good SIK games can be written in two or three weeks, forgetting about the invisible preproduction processes involved in streamlining high-combat games.
GM teams of most other kinds of Guild games, however, include this concept-processing time in their estimated schedules and realistically schedule game-start many months away from the date they succeed in assembling their GM team. Some forward-looking GMs roll the time required to form a GM team with the necessary skills into their time estimates, knowing that recruiting a GM team can be easier with an expected run-date in mind. The multi-month writing periods also compensate for the fact that most GMs are either students or have full-time jobs and can only spend a fraction of their time on the writing of a game. Some GM teams with a majority of student members deliberately include the summer session into their writing schedules to take advantage of the increased student-hours available for writing, although many GM teams have found that a student’s productivity does not necessarily increase during vacation time.
