A woodland sniper from Mage Knight (image courtesy WizKids Games)

Jordan Weisman: The reason was my kids. I have two boys, and a couple of years ago, when the oldest boy was 11 and the other one, nine, they became very motivated about miniature games, because like all males of all ages, they think all these figures out on the table are an incredibly cool thing, and they want to play God and manipulate them. They started to get really turned on by this, and they saved up all their money and went out and bought a big miniatures game. It cost $150.

They came home, and they couldn't do anything. They couldn't build the figures, because that required Superglue®, and that was too hard. They couldn't paint the figures, because they really didn't have the eye-hand dexterity at the time -- or the patience.

They couldn't figure out the rules, because the rules were 250 pages long, and the game would take hours to play. So their investment went to naught, and that was very telling to me. Basically, my kids, in not so many words, said to me: "Everything that you and the rest of the industry have designed is way too hard. You're counting us out. We don't want to be counted out. We'd rather be players, and you're not letting us."

That was like, wow. That was like a shock in the face. I'd been designing games for twenty years, and I never realized how exclusionary we were -- and how stupid that was.

So I sat down and literally made a list of all the things that keep people out of this game that they want to play -- cost, all the things. I said there's got to be a way to solve those things. There's got to be a way to eliminate these barriers so that these people who want to play games can.

The results of that were I knew the figures had to come pre-assembled; I knew they had to come painted, and I knew that the technology to do that existed, because of the state of action figures at the time. I had to do a whole bunch of research in China on how to build a mechanism to do that. But I knew you could do it.

It came down to the solution of the game system. One of the things that also bothered me about the miniature game systems that I developed before was there was all this record keeping.

There were all these cool figures on the table, but there were all these pieces of paper and pencils all over the place. You had to keep making marks. It was irritating. It got in the way of the suspension of disbelief and in the way of the socialization and the rapidity of the game. I wanted to find a way to avoid that.

I kept beating my head against this problem for about three months. One day, I remembered in the days before calculators, that we had a device in our graphics arts studio -- which every studio had -- called a proportion wheel. A proportion wheel is a rotary dial. You put the size you wanted the art to be on one side. The current size of the art was on the other, and the wheel would tell you what percentage to set the camera for.

I thought about that device and said, that's the solution. The proportion wheel was a two-dimensional table on a circular base, and it was indexed so you could review it. From that, I sat down and made the Combat Wheel (r). I realized that not only did it solve the problem of how to encode all the information on the base of a figure, but also meant there was absolutely no need to reference the information in a rule book. This was the critical component in getting rid of those rule books.

Combat Dial for a MechWarrior game piece (image courtesy WizKids Games)

Effectively, all those tables, which used to be all through the rule books are now on the bottom of every figure. It meant the figures could be sold in a collectible format, which was critical from a business standpoint, because the molds for these were very, very expensive. We needed to create a situation where we could offset the cost by the highest volume of figures.

Jordan Weisman: I would start by saying that perspective we have in the United States is very different from the rest of the world. In Germany, for instance, gaming is a lifelong thing. Very sophisticated games are considered mass market properties and sold in huge numbers to Germans. In England, a man is considered odd if he doesn't have a hobby, whereas in the United States, we consider adults who have hobbies a little odd. It's as if they never grew up. We've always had a slightly different perspective on these things. I think the role-playing games have helped pierce the stereotype and brought gaming to a larger audience, because of the fictional involvement, because of the character association and the emotional attachment to the stories we are, ourselves, creating.

I also think role-playing games forced a larger socialization. This is an important component.

Before role-playing games, there was always a small, very loyal market for very elaborate board games -- Avalon Hill, SBI, historical simulations using little cardboard tokens for creating World War II, etc. It was a hard thing to spread, because it was only two players.

While role-playing, all of a sudden, said, "You know what? You're going to need one game master and six to eight players. You can have 40 players." If you think of that in terms of how a network spreads, role-playing has a much greater growth potential, because instead of just dividing a cell, you are now multiplying. Each one of those people has the ability to bring in a great deal more people. So I think role-playing found a larger audience via that.

I think the socialization component is also very important, because one of the hardest things kids have is what to talk to other kids about. Adults have the same issues, frankly, which is where I think sports comes from. We're afraid to talk about anything else, so sports becomes a common language.

Well, gamers have another language, and that is incredibly valuable when you're a teenager. To have a common thread to talk about and a common activity to do together can really gel a community. The friends you make in that kind of activity are very long-lasting.

In 1987, I founded a company called Virtual Entertainment and built virtual reality centers around the world. They were big electronic centers where you would walk in and get into a cockpit, which would be networked to other cockpits. It was the first place the public could ever play a network game. This was long before the Internet and those kinds of things. These centers were the first exposure that people ever had to that. We built 26 of these things around the world.

A MechWarrior armored vehicle (image courtesy WizKids Games)

I built the centers very much on the analogy of what people were doing on tabletops -- trying to recreate that experience, only providing the audio-visual experience. What limits a lot of people from being involved in role-playing games is: one, the game master (as we discussed earlier), but two, there are a lot of people whose imagination muscles have become very weak. They all had imagination muscles when they were kids, but they let them atrophy. So visualizing a scene on their own and immersing themselves in the scene enough that they can problem solve within that context is very difficult to them.

So the goal of the cockpits was to provide the audio-visual stimulus. All you have to do is release yourself into that -- suspend disbelief a little bit instead of a lot -- and begin socializing, because it was still a very, very social kind of experience.

One of the things I would witness (and relate back to the tabletop) is what I call the "bus crash phenomenon." Which is: you ride the bus to work every day, and the people sitting next to you are strangers. You never talk to them. The bus gets into an accident, and every one of those people on your bus is your best friend. You stand around for hours waiting to get the next bus or whatever, and you have to talk about this experience. Now you have a bond with these people who were complete strangers. You call them later and talk about it more.

The experiences in these virtual reality centers would be the same thing. Complete strangers would walk in. They'd have this common experience together, then we would bring them into a debriefing area, where they would witness the experience again. They would talk to each other, and they would all bond. That was one of the real values of the whole experience.

I think the same thing happens in gaming. You have these elaborate experiences, and they're very emotional. They're very high adrenalin, and they build friendships that last for years.

Crescent Blues: Anything you'd like to add?

Jordan Weisman: I can express a frustration, which is gaming and gaming fiction is still considered a bad stepchild by a lot of individuals. I think that is a perception that is changing, but it needs to change faster.

I think that there is a feeling in Hollywood and in literary magazines that if it's a story that came from a game, they can't really consider it a very good story. We can't consider it as literature. We can't consider it for a movie. We can't consider it as viable as a story that came from a book or from a comic. I think that's a very linear mindset.

People have not really understood the differences between linear and interactive media -- because all gaming, whether it's electric or tabletop is an interactive form. Its storytelling is a different form of storytelling because of that. I think that some of these people haven't yet started to appreciate the quality of storytelling that is taking place in these venues. I would ask people in those positions [in the moviemaking and literary establishment] would be more open to exploring these stories, because I think there is some great work being done in this industry.

Click here to learn more about Jordan Weisman and WizKids Games.

Jean Marie Ward