Links: David Megarry on Dungeon, Pierô on Why You Shouldn't Illustrate Games & Faidutti on Common Beliefs about Games

I assume that the earliest playtests of the game were done with the Blackmoor group. What changes (if any) came about as a result of these playtests?

DM: Well, I think we played it three or four times but then the prototype went to Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva. I invented Dungeon! in October, 1972 and visited Gary (with David Arneson) in December, 1972. Gary liked the game a lot and was willing to try to peddle it to [Don] Lowry [of Guidon Games, the original publisher of Chainmail]. I left the prototype with him at that point. I had not made a copy of anything, so this was a very trusting activity. Ultimately I got the board back and the cards but the hand drawn rule booklet was lost. Anyway, the Lake Geneva crowd did more playtesting than the Blackmoor crowd.

Gary made some changes to the board, insisting that there was an imbalance in the movement on the fourth level, but by and large the game has remained essentially as I designed it. Gary did request player-to-player attack rules which I supplied but I insisted they be optional rules. He added a few more optional rules like wandering monsters, but I viewed these as complications to the basic play: Ma and Pa America was going to have enough work to understand the basic rules let alone learn how to fight each other. Arneson and Gygax were both into complicated, lengthy rules in all their games; it took a lot of effort on my part to keep it simple.

When I'm playing a prototype that I have to illustrate, I'm always trying to think how I will dress up the mechanism of the game to give them a visual aspect. Doing a beautiful game is a challenge because it's not necessary to do a good game and because, sometimes, because the game is beautiful, it's less "playable", "readable"... A boardgame illustrator has to always keep in mind "mechanisms come first, beauty after".

Commonplace #5: Games are not intended to be taken seriously.

Unlike work, which needs some detachment and ought not to be taken too seriously, games need to be played with the utmost seriousness and dedication. Always trying to be a winner in real life is a very bad idea, since it brings disappointment and often makes you look ridiculous. In a game, if all players are not trying to win, the game simply falls flat and becomes pointless and boring. The reason is that victory is its only point, when no one has the slightest idea what the point of real life is.

This doesn't mean games can't be fun. I like fun games, and I think I design fun games, but fun is no more a necessary feature of games than it is of novels or movies. They can be fun, they don't have to. There's not the slightest fun in Chess, Ticket to Ride or Settlers of Catan, but this doesn't mean one can't have fun playing them. That's what Blaise Pascal has explained in his theory of diversion, and that's what Freud later said: the opposite of play is not seriousness, it's reality.