Girl Villagers Break Werewolf

Ted from Bezier Games

Yeah, you fell for the clickbait

I learned an important lesson that day: For werewolf, the card design/artwork should never be a factor in who wins or loses. — Ted Alspach, Bezier Games

This morning while researching another post, I caught up with my Kickstarter updates and was excited to see one from Ted, who runs a company in my home town of San Jose, CA that makes the definitive Werewolf deck.

Over the past couple of months, Ted has gotten enthralled with Kickstarter as a way to push new games and now an amazing Ultimate Werewolf Deluxe Edition. (Why shouldn’t he be excited? That deck raised $130,000!)

I love werewolf and I respect Ted’s energy around gaming, so when I get an update from him, I read it.

About a month ago he sent an update entitled “What? No girl villagers?” (I hope the link works for non-backers). In the midst of all the energy and noise about women in tech, I thought it was going to be a screed on how werewolf was non-gender specific, blah blah blah. But it wasn’t.

Instead, Ted talked about how design affected the game.

After all, I thought, why should everyone have the same picture of a villager on their card? It turns out, because giving each player a different picture of a villager breaks the game! It only took a single play of the game (after the initial “What role do I have” aborted one) with those cards to figure this out: one person said “my villager is a girl with a green apron” and suddenly everyone was describing the unique villager on their card. Except the werewolves, who were pretty much screwed. So in order to play with that set, a new rule had to be added — not only can you not show your card to anyone, you can’t describe it either.

In the tech world, we get so caught up in the importance of design. That we are a “design driven” industry that covets that rare “unicorn” product designer that will swing the pendulum of potential success to the life side, rather than the inevitable death so many startups experience.

But what if design actually broke your product? How many times have we seen a redesign fail? (*cough* Digg 4 *cough*) How many times has the beautification of a rather pedestrian site been its death? In fact, some of the most successful sites on the Internet are also its most ugly.

Maybe it is because design isn’t about design.

Design, at it’s core, is a tool to develop instant familiarity, and the familiar is experienced without interaction. We don’t “see” the familiar, we just know it. And the familiar allows us to belong, and belonging creates affinity. Affinity begets love. Love begets loyalty. Loyalty begets obsession. Obsession begets serial killers … wait, I took it too far.

Here, of course, is where I say “design is useless.” And then the arguments about visual vs product vs interface begin. Oh, and dismiss the above by saying “all design should be driven by data. That’s what Ted did.” That’s always great.

The best designers know that their job is to be invisible. To support rather than lead. To welcome rather than announce.

Every product has a girl villager. What’s yours?