So this is my new blog. In fact, it’s my first blog, and thus, currently my only blog. My primary purpose for starting it is simple. Like many other gamers (table-top games, including board games, strategy games, Euro games, war games, and roleplaying games), I’ve had some ideas for new games swimming around inside my head for a while. But other than a few pages of handwritten notes on paper, I’ve not done anything concrete about them. I’m hoping that a design journal in the form of a blog will give me both structure and incentive for further developing these ideas. It’s not that I expect to publish any of the games, or certainly to make any money off of them. It’s just that I’d like to move some of these ideas from daydreams to reality.

In fact, the most difficult part for me is taking the next step to turn into something tangible the things I imagine while riding the train to work, or reading or playing other people’s games. Again, like others, I’m sure, the demands of family and career make it difficult for me to find time when I feel like sitting down to write. Thinking up new stories and new game mechanics is fun; writing full sentences when you’ve already developed the basic idea is not fun.

This is made worse by my natural approach to writing, which is to work the material over and over in my head until I have it just the way I want it, and then put it down on paper. I know this is a particularly bad habit for game design but it’s worked okay for me professionally. As previously a consultant and now a government regulator, I do a lot of business and policy writing. With this approach, I tend to be quite slow. However, I’ve seen many others who lose interest after their first draft and never bother bringing the level of quality for a document up to where it needs to be.

By taking my work public—that is, where at least there is the possibility that it may be seen by others—I’m hoping to embarrass myself into making regular and material progress. I’m also hoping that through regular writing I can practice at producing more material faster with the expectation that I will go back to revise and improve it later. And I’m hoping that by finally producing something more formal than notes, I can eventually turn my game design outlines into finished works.

As for your role is this… I’ve no idea if anyone will actually follow what I do here. But if you’re out there reading this, feel free to stick around, comment, and propose your own ideas. I’d welcome the company.