I’m working on a reference sheet for a game. Usually, I use BoardGameGeek as a resource for this sort of item, but for whatever reason, Monastery has not inspired a lot of extra geekery. I’ve spent about an hour, cumulatively, massaging a small document from another player into shape.
There’s a temptation when doing work that seems intuitive—writing, working with pipes and wires, etc—to imagine that there’s not really that much to whatever task is at hand.
“Look,” you might say, standing over a sink whose U-bend has developed what appears to be torrential flop-sweat, “it can’t be that hard. The water comes up from there, goes here, comes out there, and drains here.” The fact that this description requires you essentially to genuflect doesn’t trouble you at first. But six hours and eight trips to the hardware store later, your cursing has finally surpassed your blood pressure which, in turn, is only surpassed by the power of the stream of water power-washing the inside of your cabinet.
I mean to say this: hire a goddam pro. Do it early and count yourself lucky.
The parallel I’m angling toward has to do with language. Which is a lot trickier than the crowded history of building codes and practices (“How in god’s name is this pipe metric?!” you will be screaming at the hardware store guy who’s already thinking about his date that evening, “Are you telling me they shipped all this copper from Quebec?” You will get a shrug that, transposed several thousand miles, would easily be described as Gallic).
Sentences will escape you. You will lose the sense of your point. What should come next? Should you write exactly what the developer sent you or rewrite it? Maybe start from the top and imagine yourself a middle-aged guy in Nebraska with a manic toddler (I’ll just let you know: mania=exhaustion), an impending visit from friends, and a wife and gaming partner who’s starting to get a bit stressed out about the state of her work.
My advice to the game publisher in this predicament: Hire an editor.
Let’s take a step into my past: During my academic career, I took a class on Theories of Language. It was a kind of intro to and meta-conversation about linguistics. Fabulous class. I still have a good friend who came from among the other students. But I learned that there’s a whole genus of academic who’s devoted to understanding how language works. It just so happens—in a point of delicious irony—that the institution was looking to hire a poet that same semester. One of the poets, during their job talk (academics get to do a reading/dog-and-pony show as well as three days of interviews), responded to a question about how she was using language in a particular poem by saying, “Well, I have a theory about language, I think it…” She went on, but I was appalled that she hadn’t done any research into how language might actually work.
OK, thank you for the indulgence. But, really: hire an editor.
I’m really going to try for brevity, here.
Our friends didn’t show, which is fine. Long day, lots of chaos. But I was on edge with the rulebook work on Monastery and Dana seemed pretty stressed out and very much not into the game thing. So we opened San Juan, a game we have some passing familiarity with (full game photo by mothertruckin, cards by Aldaron). And it’s well worth engaging. You’re trying to build the city of San Juan, playing cards to build buildings, produce goods, and sell goods for more cards. The triple use of the cards (played down as buildings, buildings paid for with cards that are doled out face down, and resources that come straight off the draw pile) might take a couple of rounds to get used to, but it streamlines the materials and play. And during the game we started to feel a little better, though I still have a guilty feeling about pulling Dana over to do this. I don’t like feeling guilty; it makes me grumpy. And then it’s hard to have a good, open conversation about what we might do tomorrow night after the girl is put to bed and we roll out the sky-blue felt onto the table.
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