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It's always a relief when a book goes off to the publisher, because it's means the one-to-two-month long final scrabble to get it ready for publication is done. And that's now the case with Meeples Together, a book on the design & theory of tabletop cooperative games authored by myself and Christopher Allen. It's been sent to GamePlaywright Press, an excellent publisher of several game design books over the last several years.
The book has had a very long genesis. In some ways, it goes back to late 2002 when Skotos Tech, Chris' online game company, licensed Lovecraft Country from Chaosium as the basis for an online game. But, we were interested in doing more that just that one game with the rich setting. I also wrote a comic (actually, I've written a few, but that's the only Lovecraft Country comic currently in finalized form) ... and we sought out and (in early 2003) acquired the rights to Richard Launius' classic cooperative Lovecraftian board game, Arkham Horror.
At that time, the game has been out of print for over a decade, and former publisher Chaosium was in no position to republish it. So, we decided to get it back on the market as a nice complement to our online game. Richard had already been working on redeveloping the game, and we worked with him on that into 2004. I know that we helped to iconify the locations to help players know why they'd go to various places, and I know I did some work making things more consistent ... but it was a long time ago, so I could no longer count out the specifics. In any case, we finally decided that we'd rather have another publisher do the actual production, and so when we were done with our development work, we in turn signed a license with Fantasy Flight Games. They were willing to go in even bigger on the game's redevelopment, much to its benefit.
But in the meantime, we'd gotten a taste of cooperative design ...
Fast forward some years. Cooperation has frequently been on our minds at Skotos because we're ultimately about producing cooperative games. Christopher and I have also written a series of articles on "collective choice", which is cooperation of a very different sort. At some point we started thinking about writing something more substantive.
We first started talking about writing a "minibook" in early 2013. Yeah, five years ago. My first outline was really high level (other than one chapter, which looks almost exactly what I sent to the publisher a few hours ago; that was apparently a good chapter from its original conception!). It also had a bit of a wider scope: even though the focus was on tabletop games, there was a chapter that included discussion of cell phone games, online games, and gamification.
And, as usual, things went from there. We had a complete draft by the end of 2013, Christopher even gave a well-received talk at GDC on the topic. We got a beautiful set of iconic illustrations from Keith Curtis in 2014. I was unconvinced of the necessity of doing so in advance of having a publisher, but the iconic illustrations that came back clearly added so much to the book that it rapidly became obvious that Chris was 100% right.
We were still working through drafts of the book at the time, but we revved past our fourth draft in late 2014. By then we'd tightened the book up to be tabletop-games-only and had incorporated comments from a wide variety of reviewers, including several co-op game designers who were kind enough to look at the book. I have about 17,000 words of text on cooperation, gaming, other mediums, and the outer bounds of cooperation that went out of the book at that draft. Maybe we'll publish them as apocrypha some day, or maybe they'll just be the basis of other books.
In March 2015 we started talking with an editor at a notable educational publisher. He was interested in the book and thought it'd be a good addition to their catalog. Spoilers: it didn't work out because educational book contracts SUCK.
Clearly, educational publishers think about their books differently than other publishers do. To be precise, they feel like any books they publish are theirs, and that if humans were involved in the writing of them, they were interchangeable tools. The publisher was the lord of all, not the author.
And, I can kind of understand how they get there, as they probably often seek out authors for their books, rather than the other way around. And, some of their books are probably closer to 100% perspiration, with no inspiration needed, because they're on common, well-known subjects. But, that wasn't us at all. We were offering a unique book that was wholly our creation and that (I'd like to think) couldn't have been created by anyone else.
We fought for months over that contract. The editor seemed constantly willing to take issues back to the publisher, but even when they came back in our favor, it was always baby steps. So we told them they couldn't own the copyright to our book, and they came back with a contract that allowed us to retain the copyright, but the license to them was eternal, which is just about the same thing. And then we got into a long drawn-out battle over ways that we could get the rights back if they weren't actively selling the book, but they eventually revealed that they could and would include the book in online sets of e-books. It became obvious to us that they could choose to pay out the minimal royalties required to keep the rights to the book without it ever being seen by anyone. (Would they? Who knows. But the object of a contract is to agree on a set of rules where everyone is happy, and their rules were still full of loopholes, making it obvious that even if we all agreed with the spirit of the rules, they were pointless, because the publisher could get around them.)
There was one particularly disgusting clause that was in very late versions of the contract, which I found so disturbing that it's become a part of my regular spiel about why educational publishers suck: it said that if one of the authors died, then the publisher would pay out royalties to that person's heirs only for one more edition, and then they didn't have to anymore. It was the epitome of the idea that the book belonged to the publisher, not the authors, no matter what we managed to change in clauses about copyright and licensing.
TL;DR: Educational publishers suck. Don't ever send them anything unique and innovative. And, if you are going to do a lot of work to create a book for them, understand that it'll be their book, and make sure they pay you a wheelbarrow of money, because that's all you're ever going to get.
The introductory email that I have from the publisher was dated March 18, 2015. The last email I have from them, titled "Re: Updated Contract", was dated May 28, 2015, a bit more than two frustrating months later.
We were talking to other publishers by June, making the rounds of gaming industry publishers and not-quite-educational publishers. We worked on that in 2015, then part of 2016, and by then we were getting distracted with other things.
See, this is a weakness of mine. I'm great at knocking out text. I can sit down, outline, and then move straight through a large book. I can also edit and revise; in fact, I've gotten pretty good at that in the wake of Designers & Dragons.
But selling a book, that's a lot harder for me. It's hard to maintain the focus to contact publishers until I find the right one. (Chris is better than me at making those connections, but by this point he was running RWOTs and working for Blockstream, so as I said, we were distracted.)
And that was really the issue here: finding the RIGHT publisher. I think the book is very strong. Christopher and I worked well together to collect together a variety of topics that we wouldn't have thought of alone, that together create a great model and theory for cooperative game design. It's extensive, it's well supported, and it approaches the topic from a few different directions. It's better than the years and years of game design articles that I've written at Mechanics & Meeples because it manages to dive so deep into a single topic. As I've been approaching it's end, I've been wondering how to use a similar model for other game design areas ... and I'm not entirely sure I can.
The problem was that the book has a very specific audience. Our educational publisher was actually a really good fit, because it's a very learning-focused book that I could see being used in game design courses. But cf. Educational publishers suck. When we moved beyond that publishing category, we found that it wasn't quite stuffy enough to be academic. (Mind you, I just reformatted 200 footnotes today, and though some portion of them refer to other articles I've written, many others are references to game designers, psychologists, and who knows what else.) Yet, the focus on design made it a little harder of a sell to the common reader ... and in any case very few people were publishing game design books of this type, particularly if they weren't either educational or academic.
Thank goodness for Gameplaywright. They were pretty much the perfect publisher, because thoughtful design books for tabletop gaming (and even thoughtful design KITS for tabletop gaming) is exactly what they've been producing.
So what do you do with a game design book that's sitting on your computer, unsold, for two years?
You update it.
For the last two years, I have been regularly going back to Meeples Together to update it for the newest game that we played, as I realized that its cooperation system or its "challenge" system or something else offered an interesting new perspective on cooperative game design.
And thankfully, the result is a much better book.
When Chris & I worked on the early drafts in 2013-2014 we had a more limited supply of cooperative games to write from. In the years since, the field has really exploded, and we also had more opportunity to play through a much larger number of them. So the book really benefitted from having a few years to percolate and expand.
We worked out a contract with Gameplaywright early this year. No problems. Everyone was great and our heirs don't have to worry about being abruptly cut off. Meanwhile, a lot of effort this year went into making sure the book was ready to go.
The first quarter, from January to March, was our time for a few last new games. We picked up a half-dozen or so of the newer co-ops in December and we played through them. Then, my TODO list became filled with new things to add to the book, and I ended up working through May to get those all in.
Then, June was scheduled as my sixth-draft revision where I went through the whole book cover to cover. Besides doing low-level line editing, I also had three other goals. First, I wanted to look through all that new stuff we'd added in the last two-to-three years and make sure it was well-integrated into the book. Often it was, but sometimes I found that a section had been hung full of ornaments for all these new ideas we'd discovered, but it needed to be reorganized and rewritten to make it once more flow into a coherent whole. Second, I wanted to update a few of the games that were extensively used as examples in the book. There were some old games that had dropped out of print (or out of favor) and some newer games that really deserved more attention. Third, I wanted to work with Christopher to get his final feedback, thoughts, and revisions, which as usual included a few interesting sources that I would never have found myself.
I was supposed to be finished on July 1, but somewhat to my embarrassment the book slipped to July 9, today. And it wasn't through laziness: I've worked increasingly stressful hours on it week by week as June smashed down into July. It's been almost all I've been thinking of for at least two weeks now, putting any other writing projects on hold. (Even when I had free time in my evening hours, all of my writing and editing energies had been spent.) But, it's now off, and for the first time in years revising it as we play some new game is no longer required.
And I'm looking forward to it being published so everyone can see it. Hopefully I'll be able to talk more on that later in the year!
The book has had a very long genesis. In some ways, it goes back to late 2002 when Skotos Tech, Chris' online game company, licensed Lovecraft Country from Chaosium as the basis for an online game. But, we were interested in doing more that just that one game with the rich setting. I also wrote a comic (actually, I've written a few, but that's the only Lovecraft Country comic currently in finalized form) ... and we sought out and (in early 2003) acquired the rights to Richard Launius' classic cooperative Lovecraftian board game, Arkham Horror.
At that time, the game has been out of print for over a decade, and former publisher Chaosium was in no position to republish it. So, we decided to get it back on the market as a nice complement to our online game. Richard had already been working on redeveloping the game, and we worked with him on that into 2004. I know that we helped to iconify the locations to help players know why they'd go to various places, and I know I did some work making things more consistent ... but it was a long time ago, so I could no longer count out the specifics. In any case, we finally decided that we'd rather have another publisher do the actual production, and so when we were done with our development work, we in turn signed a license with Fantasy Flight Games. They were willing to go in even bigger on the game's redevelopment, much to its benefit.
But in the meantime, we'd gotten a taste of cooperative design ...
Fast forward some years. Cooperation has frequently been on our minds at Skotos because we're ultimately about producing cooperative games. Christopher and I have also written a series of articles on "collective choice", which is cooperation of a very different sort. At some point we started thinking about writing something more substantive.
We first started talking about writing a "minibook" in early 2013. Yeah, five years ago. My first outline was really high level (other than one chapter, which looks almost exactly what I sent to the publisher a few hours ago; that was apparently a good chapter from its original conception!). It also had a bit of a wider scope: even though the focus was on tabletop games, there was a chapter that included discussion of cell phone games, online games, and gamification.
And, as usual, things went from there. We had a complete draft by the end of 2013, Christopher even gave a well-received talk at GDC on the topic. We got a beautiful set of iconic illustrations from Keith Curtis in 2014. I was unconvinced of the necessity of doing so in advance of having a publisher, but the iconic illustrations that came back clearly added so much to the book that it rapidly became obvious that Chris was 100% right.
We were still working through drafts of the book at the time, but we revved past our fourth draft in late 2014. By then we'd tightened the book up to be tabletop-games-only and had incorporated comments from a wide variety of reviewers, including several co-op game designers who were kind enough to look at the book. I have about 17,000 words of text on cooperation, gaming, other mediums, and the outer bounds of cooperation that went out of the book at that draft. Maybe we'll publish them as apocrypha some day, or maybe they'll just be the basis of other books.
In March 2015 we started talking with an editor at a notable educational publisher. He was interested in the book and thought it'd be a good addition to their catalog. Spoilers: it didn't work out because educational book contracts SUCK.
Clearly, educational publishers think about their books differently than other publishers do. To be precise, they feel like any books they publish are theirs, and that if humans were involved in the writing of them, they were interchangeable tools. The publisher was the lord of all, not the author.
And, I can kind of understand how they get there, as they probably often seek out authors for their books, rather than the other way around. And, some of their books are probably closer to 100% perspiration, with no inspiration needed, because they're on common, well-known subjects. But, that wasn't us at all. We were offering a unique book that was wholly our creation and that (I'd like to think) couldn't have been created by anyone else.
We fought for months over that contract. The editor seemed constantly willing to take issues back to the publisher, but even when they came back in our favor, it was always baby steps. So we told them they couldn't own the copyright to our book, and they came back with a contract that allowed us to retain the copyright, but the license to them was eternal, which is just about the same thing. And then we got into a long drawn-out battle over ways that we could get the rights back if they weren't actively selling the book, but they eventually revealed that they could and would include the book in online sets of e-books. It became obvious to us that they could choose to pay out the minimal royalties required to keep the rights to the book without it ever being seen by anyone. (Would they? Who knows. But the object of a contract is to agree on a set of rules where everyone is happy, and their rules were still full of loopholes, making it obvious that even if we all agreed with the spirit of the rules, they were pointless, because the publisher could get around them.)
There was one particularly disgusting clause that was in very late versions of the contract, which I found so disturbing that it's become a part of my regular spiel about why educational publishers suck: it said that if one of the authors died, then the publisher would pay out royalties to that person's heirs only for one more edition, and then they didn't have to anymore. It was the epitome of the idea that the book belonged to the publisher, not the authors, no matter what we managed to change in clauses about copyright and licensing.
TL;DR: Educational publishers suck. Don't ever send them anything unique and innovative. And, if you are going to do a lot of work to create a book for them, understand that it'll be their book, and make sure they pay you a wheelbarrow of money, because that's all you're ever going to get.
The introductory email that I have from the publisher was dated March 18, 2015. The last email I have from them, titled "Re: Updated Contract", was dated May 28, 2015, a bit more than two frustrating months later.
We were talking to other publishers by June, making the rounds of gaming industry publishers and not-quite-educational publishers. We worked on that in 2015, then part of 2016, and by then we were getting distracted with other things.
See, this is a weakness of mine. I'm great at knocking out text. I can sit down, outline, and then move straight through a large book. I can also edit and revise; in fact, I've gotten pretty good at that in the wake of Designers & Dragons.
But selling a book, that's a lot harder for me. It's hard to maintain the focus to contact publishers until I find the right one. (Chris is better than me at making those connections, but by this point he was running RWOTs and working for Blockstream, so as I said, we were distracted.)
And that was really the issue here: finding the RIGHT publisher. I think the book is very strong. Christopher and I worked well together to collect together a variety of topics that we wouldn't have thought of alone, that together create a great model and theory for cooperative game design. It's extensive, it's well supported, and it approaches the topic from a few different directions. It's better than the years and years of game design articles that I've written at Mechanics & Meeples because it manages to dive so deep into a single topic. As I've been approaching it's end, I've been wondering how to use a similar model for other game design areas ... and I'm not entirely sure I can.
The problem was that the book has a very specific audience. Our educational publisher was actually a really good fit, because it's a very learning-focused book that I could see being used in game design courses. But cf. Educational publishers suck. When we moved beyond that publishing category, we found that it wasn't quite stuffy enough to be academic. (Mind you, I just reformatted 200 footnotes today, and though some portion of them refer to other articles I've written, many others are references to game designers, psychologists, and who knows what else.) Yet, the focus on design made it a little harder of a sell to the common reader ... and in any case very few people were publishing game design books of this type, particularly if they weren't either educational or academic.
Thank goodness for Gameplaywright. They were pretty much the perfect publisher, because thoughtful design books for tabletop gaming (and even thoughtful design KITS for tabletop gaming) is exactly what they've been producing.
So what do you do with a game design book that's sitting on your computer, unsold, for two years?
You update it.
For the last two years, I have been regularly going back to Meeples Together to update it for the newest game that we played, as I realized that its cooperation system or its "challenge" system or something else offered an interesting new perspective on cooperative game design.
And thankfully, the result is a much better book.
When Chris & I worked on the early drafts in 2013-2014 we had a more limited supply of cooperative games to write from. In the years since, the field has really exploded, and we also had more opportunity to play through a much larger number of them. So the book really benefitted from having a few years to percolate and expand.
We worked out a contract with Gameplaywright early this year. No problems. Everyone was great and our heirs don't have to worry about being abruptly cut off. Meanwhile, a lot of effort this year went into making sure the book was ready to go.
The first quarter, from January to March, was our time for a few last new games. We picked up a half-dozen or so of the newer co-ops in December and we played through them. Then, my TODO list became filled with new things to add to the book, and I ended up working through May to get those all in.
Then, June was scheduled as my sixth-draft revision where I went through the whole book cover to cover. Besides doing low-level line editing, I also had three other goals. First, I wanted to look through all that new stuff we'd added in the last two-to-three years and make sure it was well-integrated into the book. Often it was, but sometimes I found that a section had been hung full of ornaments for all these new ideas we'd discovered, but it needed to be reorganized and rewritten to make it once more flow into a coherent whole. Second, I wanted to update a few of the games that were extensively used as examples in the book. There were some old games that had dropped out of print (or out of favor) and some newer games that really deserved more attention. Third, I wanted to work with Christopher to get his final feedback, thoughts, and revisions, which as usual included a few interesting sources that I would never have found myself.
I was supposed to be finished on July 1, but somewhat to my embarrassment the book slipped to July 9, today. And it wasn't through laziness: I've worked increasingly stressful hours on it week by week as June smashed down into July. It's been almost all I've been thinking of for at least two weeks now, putting any other writing projects on hold. (Even when I had free time in my evening hours, all of my writing and editing energies had been spent.) But, it's now off, and for the first time in years revising it as we play some new game is no longer required.
And I'm looking forward to it being published so everyone can see it. Hopefully I'll be able to talk more on that later in the year!