We are in a golden age of transparency and interaction with game design. Transparency is where the players have insight into how the game was designed. Interaction is where the players can give feedback to the designers during the design process.

RPGnet's original motto, 'the inside scoop on gaming', was a stance that brought about transparency. As a statement, it's not different from a celebrity tabloid that claims to give you the behind-the-scenes view. Or, not much different from a director's commentary on a movie.

You need both transparency and interaction to have a genuine dialog. By allowing forum discussion between users and creators, and further, by treating the bulk of the 'players' as peers rather than subjects, we began to create dialog.

Email lists already allowed 'backroom chatter' and had designers talking to each other or, in cases like the Chaosium Digest, genuine dialog between designers and players. However, those were narrowcast, invitation-only channels. The web allowed discussion to go public and removed the gatekeeper controls over who had access to the information and to the designers.

Earlier experiments in game design via collaboration had also taken place both live and via email. However, a full mix of transparency (anyone can see in) process combined with interaction (anyone can comment) that included evolution (the designer acts on some of the input) took a little while to gel.

I would mark Gareth-Michael Skarka's 2002 column, "Game Design: Step by Step" as the first complete example of a game design dialog. Although the intended game was clearly stated as a GMS-authored work, there was player interaction to the pieces that led to alterations in the game design.

Over the next ten years, there has been strong exploration of game design as a dialog rather than as a broadcast ('this is my game and how I made it!'). The concept of letting potential players look at and comment on a game in progress is now a standard form.

Into this, we can throw Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a way for fans and potential customers to connect with a game designer by providing early sponsorship (money!) to ensure the design exists. Kickstarter adds the essential 'how to profit' part that was missing in early web experiments. However, Kickstarter is still rooted in a very strong, very traditional "me creator, you customer" model.

A primary difference that Kickstarter provides is that it elevates even the simplest supporter from the category of mere 'customer' into the loftier ranks of 'patron'. When you participate in a Kickstarter, you're not just buying something, you're supporting a venture.

You also can get bennies. Kickstarters offer sponsors the ability to give narrowly parameterized content (characters, words in Orcish), similar to how endowing a college with money gives you naming rights to the building but no say in the content taught within. Kickstarter gives (or sells) inside access to the game design process, but that again is no different than a narrowcast model.

At this stage, I have yet to see a Kickstarter that escapes the 'broadcast' mode and moves into a genuine dialog with players. One argument is that people will pay for something, or help create something, but are loath to both pay for and work for the same thing.

A second and stronger argument is that, once you connect 'paid for' and 'gave input', that someone contributing heavily to a Kickstarter might feel entitled to being listened to. Conversely, someone might decide not to contribute if their suggestions are not adopted for the actual game. Would you pay for something where it's not yet set into stone exactly what the item you've buying is?

Theatre (partially) solved this long ago. A patron of a play-- the person who puts up the money to fund the show-- may or may not be promised a share of the profits (but even so, the profits are likely meager). The patron is respected, and may make comments, but there is always a very strong wall between 'patron' and 'director', with the director holding final sway.

If you watch movies like "Shakespeare in Love" or "Moulin Rouge" or even "The Producers", you can see that the dynamics between patron and artist can get very muddled. This raises the question of whether game design can use the patron model (that is the heart of Kickstarter) while also bringing dialog to the process.

The challenge then is to marry these concepts. Create a Kickstarter (so you can get paid) that provides transparency to the game design process, allows interaction, and has that interact lead to dialog which itself influences the final game design, while still allowing the original creator to maintain their own tone and voice for the final product.

I'm not going to ask 'is it possible', because any decent metagamer should be able to design a game design kickstarter that is, itself, a game. I'm just going to ask who is doing it, and what are you waiting for?

Until next month,
Sandy (sandy @ rpg.net)