| Reiner Knizia estuvo en Córdoba |
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| domingo, 06 de enero de 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Reiner Knizia in Córdoba Our cultural association Jugamos Tod@s is very proud and happy because Dr. Reiner Knizia visited our city Córdoba. Reiner Knizia had many activities here, in the Festival de Juegos de Mesa - which was celebrated on early Autumn in Córdoba. Exploradores, the Spanish edition of Reiner Knizia's Lost Cities edited by Devir, was the JdA 2006 Game of the Year in Spain. Our Festival 2007 poster pay homage to it, with a view of Córdoba. With Reiner Knizia in Córdoba, we had an exposition about his games, a gaming day at the University of Córdoba with people playing Knizia's games and a conference about game design by Reiner.    
He had interviews for television channels.
We tried typical foods of Córdoba and had time to talk about games and some other life things.   We organized our II Kniziathón tournament - this time with the author here.  
   
We had an award ceremony: Jugamos Tod@s Award to the best Spanish Game Author, Kniziathon winners, and the announcement of the six Finalist for the Game of the Year JdA 2007 award.     We played a Knizia’s prototype – we can not say much about it (We want to see it published!). But it was a proof about his perfectionism: the game is a solid abstract game for two player, apparently well finished. But Reiner wants to play and to play it again, to be sure that one way to play the game is not strategically better than others…  Reiner Knizia was signing games for his Spanish fans for almost two hours, with different words and a smile for everybody.   And we showed him our Giant Kingdoms game :-)      Jugamos Tod@s with Reiner Knizia Only left to say: Thanks, Reiner!
More about the Festival 2007 and its gaming activities, here.
- Can you tell us how your life as a designer began? Well it began through the love of games, I played a lot of boardgames as a child. I didn’t have enough pocket money to buy all the games I wanted so I decided to design my own one when I was about ten years old, and that is how it all began.  Digging (1990) - What, in your opinion, makes a good game? Difficult question... There is no specific answer to this question, it depends on same many things, we have a very diverse market and there are different people with different requests so I think it is almost impossible to confirm what exactly makes a good game
- What do you like doing in your free time? What free time? (laughs) - We thought you may say that… Free time depends on the person and I am the kind of person who can only do one thing at once and games are my life.
- How did boardgames become so popular in Germany? There are many different opinions and ideas about this. My own personal opinion, and I don’t know if it is right or not, people who play games in Germany are mainly families and this means that it is a tradition that is past on from generation to generation. They have the perception that playing games is a very valuable activity, it is something that brings the family/people together. 
- What is an average day at work for you? I usually get up very early, normally at about 4 or 5 in the morning. I try to keep the mornings for design work, without phone calls or emails, I think it is the right start to the day. Eventually, of course, the operational side catches up with me, and that I try to do in the afternoon. Then in the evening, there is the play design, the play testing. That is the how would like the day to be structured anyway, however it does not always work like that. There are often a lot of disruptions.That is why I keep travelling to a minimum as there is a always a pile of paperwork to catch up on, on the return. Also it cuts into the design process and if you do it too often then you find that you are not working anymore. 
- What is the design process for a new game? The design process starts with an idea in your head. It starts with a novel approach. It is then finding the right theme the right components, the right mechanics, everything that belongs to a good game. It is essentially constructed in quite an artificial way to try to make a harmonic design. It starts in the mind, often with discussions with other people which leads to an idea or a concept which is then transformed into the first prototype. When to do the prototype is a very important decision to make. If you do it too early then, you won’t get relevant feedback about the design, if you do it too late you might get the feedback that it doesn’t work and you have already invested too much time into it. It is a long process of playing the prototype, changing it, playing it and changing it again and this goes on for months until I am happy with it. Within this it is very important for me to have a lot of different opinions by many different people, everybody has a different angle, a different view which contributes to the game and so there is not only my creativity in a game, there is the creativity of many people. So I would say I don’t have a very fixed methodology of how a make a game. My important starting point is to find a new entry point, something which has never been done before.  - Where do you find your inspiration? Everywhere, it is about going into the world with open eyes. I have many ideas, too many possible ideas. Here in my studio I have 90 draws and each draw contains one game and I don’t allow myself to have more games than draws. Getting the idea for making a new game is not difficult, the difficult part is taking this new game and really bringing it to perfection. This is where, I think, a lot designers and companies give up to early, they get a game up to about 60 or 70% perfect and then they think it is OK and they publish it. But this 30% takes a long time but it what makes a game successful as it is what makes it significantly better and will have the final touch. You can’t often put you finger on the thing that makes it, but people feel that it makes it.  - Do you think game designing is a skill that can be learnt? Absolutely, I think people can learn anything. Obviously, there a people who are gifted, but in the same way as if someone wants to be a computer designer or an athlete. Anyone can do it. The main thing is it takes a lot of experience and a lot of work. But if you are interested and enthusiastic about it then you will succeed, like any other profession.
- Have you ever tried to teach anyone? Every now and again I give a talk about game design in universities. There is the saying that those that can do, and those that can’t teach, and at the moment I think I am still designing very good games and I don’t have time to do everything, so I want to concentrate on that. Maybe once I’ve lost interest in doing that then I might teach, then of course how relevant is my teaching afterwards?  - The internet in the boardgame world today obviously plays an important role and contains many opinions from people all over the world, is this something you take into consideration in your work? No I don’t, actually on the contrary. I am trying to hide away from the internet and hide away from the general public. I don’t have time to engage in these conversations that go on forever. It does contain lots of opinions but it is also very unedited and the contributions are of very different qualities. Gaming design takes a lot of time. I am making lots of games and this is where I am focusing my time. To extend the question a bit, the same thing applies to other people´s games. It is fun to play other people’s games but I hardly do it. Firstly, I don’t have the time, but secondly and more importantly, it doesn’t distract me from my own ideas. Game designing involves so many different components which can create problems for which you need to find solutions. When playing other games you find solutions and it is very hard to think of new ones and if I don’t play other people’s games then I have to come up with my own.  - Obviously today German boardgames are sold all over the world do you take this into consideration when designing a game from a language point of view. I usually take a very global approach. Firstly, I try to look at a game and make a good game out of it. Some games obviously need language, for example when they are based on a book, like the Lord of the Rings game, which needs to reflect the story line. But many games do not need language and it obviously helps to have a very small language element.
 - Merchants of Amsterdam, or The Lord of the Rings, was a commissioned game. Is this something that you do often and does this have a very different design process. That’s a very good question. What makes designing fun is to really sit down and develop ones own ideas and let them grow and also having the freedom to put them aside and say, well this one didn’t work. So commissions are not a typical way to work. They can obviously bring about exciting projects, like movie projects, and for this type of commission you obviously have a deadline as when the movie comes out the publisher wants the game. For this the publisher knows the materials, the costing and there is the license itself that you have remain true to. For this the design becomes more of a challenge with respect to the content and the structure of the design because it needs to be delivered at a certain time. Plus you may design something, but the publisher may have had something very specific in mind, so what happens if they don’t like it. With this respect I am actually very wary of commissions and I am more and more hesitant to take them on as they are much harder to do. 
- Many of your games are designed around Ancient Egypt, is this a theme that you particularly like to use and therefore repeat? Yes, history is something that is wonderfully visual in games and this is my favourite epoch. I could do 100 more games on Egypt but I know I can’t do too many. I am currently working on one at the moment, but I have to discipline myself as I know that my taste isn’t everyone’s taste.  - We know that through the desert wasn’t originally made using camels. Can you tell us how it was originally and why you changed it? My original theme was Rockerfella, rich people on an island with millions, with big swimming pools, golf courses and palaces. I didn’t change the theme I took the game to the publisher, who said that they liked the game but we are not convinced by the theme and we want to change it, so the suggestion was Through the Desert.
- And were you happy with that? Well yes, I would not agree to go with a theme that I was not happy with. So, I am happy with it, it is a very successful game. Some people make fun of the camels which are the colours of sweets, but that’s fine.  - So have you ever been disappointed with the final product of one of your games? Yes, this happened especially in the early stages, when I didn’t have the experience and I worked with publishers and let them do things without having proper control and the end product I hardly recognised. This is often with respect to the graphics or the written rules. But I have learned from this and now it doesn’t happen so often. I also respect the publisher for the contribution that they make.
- So have you ever thought about setting up your own production company? Absolutely not, I hardly have enough time to design my games. Producing a game is a very different quality to designing one. Then there is the marketing etc. I do not have the time to do any of this.  - At what stage of making a game do you know how successful it is going to be? I never really know. There is a stage in the design process when I know that this is going to be game. There are times when I have started a game and then problems have occurred and we have decided to leave it, this is normal and all part of the design process. There have been other times when I have spent three to four hundred hours designing a game that has never come to market. This is the most annoying. It is also sometimes the case when you start a design and it takes enormous resources to complete the project and it is still going to be game, but I have games which have taken far beyond 1000 hours to complete and with Hindsight I should never have started these projects. I try to avoid projects that are going to take masses amount of time, in the end they are not fun there are just a strain. Going back through, the question has a lot to do with the publisher. If I go with a big publisher then in terms of sales figures the game will be successful. But then there is the question of what makes a game successful, is it good sales figures, good reviews?  - In terms of game designing what is the difference between the Knizia of the past and the Knizia today? I think every designer evolves and develops. I think when I started out in the 80’s, my first objective was to get a game published at all. Then I became more ambitious, then I wanted to have a game published with all the many publishers of Germany. Then once I had achieved this then I tried to go international. Then I tried to collect as many different language and countries as possible. Then I personally reached a stage when thought can I do things that go beyond a single game? That is where the creation of Blue Moon World came from which was a whole product range.
  - Where did the Blue Moon world idea come from? We had done a number of licenses and this was I suppose a step between conquering the world and doing my own brand and it was a very successful brand. I was very naive at first, I thought we could sit down a few evening and create this world and see what games we could make out of it. This turned out to be years of work. I think Blue Moon is the game that out of all of my games, it has taken the most resources. And so even though it is a very successful game I look at it that it probably cost me 20 or 30 games that I couldn’t do because of it. So this was a learning process. A lesson that I had to learn, that you always underestimate contributions and that tasks of others. But I had to learn it and I had to pay for it in my time and now I know it.  Blue Moon noveel by Frank Rehfeld Going back to your previous question from before about the me of the past. I think that now I am much more interested in the different media in which you can present games. I have been looking at the X-box or the Wii but using them for games in which you still have to interact with other people and all the electronic games that I have done are all new attempts to bring fun and new things to games using technology. It is an evolution and it is exciting.  - What game would you say has been your most successful and which are you most proud of? You expect an answer to this question? It is too difficult, there are too many different criteria of what is success. In terms of business success I certainly think that my children’s games are my greatest success as they have sold in very big numbers and have hopefully created a lot of happy children. In terms of games I am proud of then my abstract games which created a whole trend of new abstract games. But I don’t have a particular game. It is almost like asking someone with a family and which is their favourite child, it is question that you can not answer. You love them all and there are aspects that you like about one and other aspects that you like about another. I feel like this about my games.  - So do you know the rules to all of your games? Absolutely not. This is something that people are always amazed by. I have difficulty remembering the rules. This is the problem for us. When designing that game we have so many rule options, someone who buys the published game only has the one option. For me I have all the history in my head, I have all the different attempts and game versions in my head and this makes it all a blur and it is very hard to remember the published rules. I always get someone to explain them to me, or I read them before an event to remind myself of the final published rules.
 - So how did it come about that you are on the front cover of Poison? That was just a little gimmick suggested by the publisher, I try not to take myself too seriously so I said OK. It was also this publisher who put my character as the bad actor in Traumfabrik who has negative points. Most people in the general public don’t know my face anyway so it is just a bit of fun for those who do.  
- Do you present different games to be published in America as opposed to Europe? That is not how the design process goes. First I am trying to make a perfect game and then after I will have a look at where it will work best and sometimes that is the American market and sometimes that is the European market. A lot of the time the games are suitable for a wide market. Sometimes I will take the game and adapt it so that it is more suitable for a certain market. A good example of this is, Schotten Totten which was a very simple game of cards of co numbers. For the American market this became Battleline. A pile of cards were added which allow you to do very specific tasks which is what the American market like, more complexity. Whereas the German market want short rules to get into the game very quickly and get on with playing it.  
- If you had to recommend 5 of your games to someone who had never played any of your games before what would they be? Again it depends on their experience, for a family I would recommend something very different to people who had experience in playing games. To name a few I would always recommend Genius and Through the Desert. Lost Cities is a good game that many people call the Spouse Game as they say that their wife doesn’t like playing games but that they play that together. And then for children, Safari. I suppose I should think about that question a little more for the future, but there you have a few and I think they are games which will be around for a very long time.    
- What do you think the future of the boardgame is? There is a lot of competition within the boardgame market, but I think the real competition comes from outside this market. We are competing for available pocket money and available time. People go on holiday, go to cinemas, read books, watch television, people do sports, and people play games and so I think the more diverse we can be on the games development side and the more different types of games; electronic games, boardgames, role playing games, collectable card games that we can offer, then the more entry points for people coming into the gaming world. And the more people we introduce to the gaming world the bigger we will make our class of games, which are very close to our heart. So I don’t mind which areas come to the foreground just as long as we have a wide and rich gaming world. The future of gaming itself will be probably more and more influenced by an electronic component. But I don’t mean putting it into the foreground, if we deal and operate our washing machine or microwave we don’t think of electronics even though they are packed with electronics. And I think that this is the influence that electronics will have on games. I don’t think that people will need to be a computer genius to operate them. It will be a normal game but the electronics will have a supporting role and make the game more exciting but not take over.  - Can you tell us anything about your next game? I can’t tell you. I leave all that part to the publishers. Plus I always work about 2 years ahead of the publishing date. So right now I’m working on games which will be released in 2009 and I am not going to tell you about those.  Municipium, a upcoming Knizia's game in 2008
- Can you tell us anything about your book? I have written roughly about 10 books on the subject of games. It is something that I wanted to do I had a lot of materials and they have been published into a number of different languages. It was a very enjoyable process for me and something that I wanted to do, but also something that doesn’t come easily to me, it takes a lot of my time and a lot of dedication and it means about half a year not doing other things and so I have decided that there have been enough books written and I shall not do this anymore, I want to concentrate on what I really want to do.
- Moving on to Spain then, what do you know about the gaming world here? I think that Spain is a very exciting emerging market and I am very interested in that. There are a lot of exciting fans there as well which of course is the basis for every good market.  - So what made you decide to come to Cordoba for the games festival this year? I am always very interested in travelling and going to these things I simply just don’t have the time. HoweverI met some Spanish people at Essen the previous year and was impressed by how they organised themselves and the way they promoted the game, and I was interested to see the gaming world there.
Thank you very much Reiner, ¡nos jugamos!
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| Modificado el ( miércoles, 09 de enero de 2008 ) | ||||||||||||||||||||
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