So, you want to be a game designer

I was tweeting around my virtual nest the other day and found this link to perhaps the first online service for people who want to design and publish their own games. It's called The Game Crafter. OK, so I was more impressed by the fact of its existence of such a service than I was by the service itself. They had to make a lot of compromises in order to get as far as they did, and though I can't recommend them to you yet, I can share my genuine excitement about the very first vanity game publisher that has crossed my virtual portal. The company is quick to let you know what kind of quality you can expect and how your profits get shared. And though you're not going to get custom-designed pieces, and your board and cards are not going to be, shall we say, commercial grade, and you can't, by law create a game to be sold to children 12 or under, the fact is that, despite all these limitations, this Cafe Press for printing games on-demand should prove of real value to many different audiences.

But, before you get too carried away by the promise of it all, if you're going to spend the time on producing your own games, you should also spend a lot of time learning about what designing games is really all about. Luckily, some remarkably clear, well-constructed, and insightful guides haave been published in the last few years. Go to the library and see if you can find a copy of Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: a book of lenses, for example, or Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop, Second Edition: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, for another, or Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Thumb through any of these books. If you learn nothing else, you will at least begin to develop an appreciation for what, thanks to companies like The Game Crafter, you are suddenly being given to play with.

As my friend Garry Shirts says - the person who stands to learn the most from any game is the designer.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith