Connections Day 1 - Joe Miranda's Wargame Design 101, part 2

The Connections Interdisciplinary Wargaming Conference

So someone just asked Joe Miranda "how long does it take to design a wargame?"
Joe started with the stock answer of "it depends" but then follows up with "I've got it down to about a week."
That collective groan you heard was every game designer in a 10-mile radius ready to kill Joe, as all of the folks in the room who don't understand wargame design now think that this is just some rote, automated process that just involves a few days of looking up ORBATs and then you crank out a game, and how could this possibly take you 3-4 months to fully flesh out the design and why the heck are we paying you to do this project for the government when we could just go get Joe to do it in a week even though we totally don't understand at all that he's building those one-week projects off of a tried-and-true rules engine that bears no resemblance whatsoever to what we need in our non-hobby-game way.

ugh.


Someone just asked about the "golden BB" and/or "black swan" effect. See our discussion here or here about that in the GameTalk feature.

By: Brant