Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Graphing Thirty Years of Gaming Collaborations

Posted by Zonk on from the i-can-see-my-house-from-here dept.

ShannonA writes "The world of designer board games, including such classics as The Settlers of Catan and Modern Art, is full of creative collaborations between designers. In a new article, Six Degrees of Collaboration, Shannon Appelcline traces these collaborative connections across a half-dozen countries and over thirty years of time." Interesting to see how relatively small a part of the table-top gaming industry really is.

8 of 12 comments (clear)

  1. Always six degrees? by jibjibjib · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I find it interesting that everything is always referred to as six degrees of separation. It has been said that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else in only six degrees. From this, one would expect that a small group of people with related interests would be connected in less than six degrees.

    1. Re:Always six degrees? by The+Clockwork+Troll · · Score: 2, Insightful
      They mean six degrees of arc. The article is presented in XGAML as a game with a circular playing board with a diameter of 10,000 miles. There are 60 people on the board, each of whom is six degrees apart, literally. Each game's purveyor subtends a right angle.

      I hope that clears things up.

      --

      There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
  2. Ride the short bus? by Mr.Oreo · · Score: 2, Funny

    Wow.
    The entire industry could ride a school bus to work every day.

    --
    - Mr.Oreo
  3. In a similar vein by strider44 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One of my maths lecturers talked about how they graphed a degrees of seperation of maths papers, where connections in the graph would be where the people collaborated on a paper. He was split from Albert Einstein by 3 degrees as I remember.

    1. Re:In a similar vein by HoneyBunchesOfGoats · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That would be the Erdos number.

  4. Am I missing something here? by The-Bus · · Score: 2, Informative

    The chart is interesting but it seems to focus on a pretty specific subset or group of subsets of the table-top gaming genre. This would be akin to talking about fantasy writing and then just mentioning people who worked on Forgotten Realms books.

    Much to my chagrin, Settlers of Catan is mentioned in the summary, but not actually charted. TFA doesn't even mention that game or Klaus Teuber. Ravensburger publishes some of the best games I've ever played. The problem is only a very small fraction of them ever makes it to the US. For those who like easy-to-pick up games that are never the same twice, may I recommend The Amazeing Labyrinth which is sort of a treasure hunt game where the board changes every round.

    --

    Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.

    1. Re:Am I missing something here? by KDR_11k · · Score: 2, Informative

      Interesting that you mention Teuber and Ravensburger but not Teuber's publisher, Kosmos.

      Also, I'd suggest Puerto Rico as a great title from Ravensburger, it takes a bit to learn it but after that it's a great game with very little luck involved.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    2. Re:Am I missing something here? by ShannonA · · Score: 2, Informative

      Germans seem to have a much lower incidence of game design collaboration than either Americans or French, and so they're much more poorly represented on the chart. Klaus Teuber, the designer of Settlers of Catan, has only one pseudo-collaboration. He did work with others on a mixed set of Settlers supplements called _Atlantis_, but that branch ends immediately because all of the people he worked with are new designers who have done zero or one games of their own, with no additional collaborations. If any of them become successful, we may be able to link Teuber in in a year or two.