The Hidden Costs of Computers and Pen-and-Paper Games

The best way I can describe this is buying a new computer. When you buy a computer, you aren't done paying for it. No, I am not talking financing it, but there are costs that continue to get charged to you in one way or the other. Even if you have a computer, you are still getting charged these costs. Now, I am defining 'cost' here broadly, it is not only money, but it is time. Now intrinsically, both are the same, as all money is is a way 'labor' can be stored and monetized but that is beside the point.

Your new computer has the following costs in real money:

• The cost of the computer itself
• The cost of keeping it 'fed' in software, paid-updates, and games (Steam)
• Ongoing access fees for Internet and digital media (Netflix, iTunes)
• The cost of keeping it upgraded in hardware with monitors, mice, and accessories
• The cost of storage media, cloud storage, or backups
• The cost (in space) of system setup
• Repair costs to replace or fix hardware

Okay, a pretty agreeable list for everyone. These are pretty basic tasks that you agree to pay out of your pocket, so they are up-front and most are optional. Let's look at the hidden costs of computers, and I will measure these in time:

• The time needed to learn the system (for new OS's and programs)
• The time needed to update the OS
• The time needed to keep on top of system security and antivirus updates
• The time needed to research and work around program incompatibilities and limitations
• The time needed to keep up and maintain the file formats you use
• The time needed to update ALL programs on the machine
• The time needed to update ALL hardware drivers on the machine
• The time spent in researching and finding software packages for your operating system
• The time spent in inefficient basic tasks (file and disk management, backups, writing media)
• The time spent in configuration (hardware, icons, desktops, tiles, wallpapers, screensavers)

Let me start off by saying your time is usually more valuable than your money. Let me say then that nobody is paying you for the time spent in the above list. You can have the best computer in the world, but if you are spending more time fiddling with it, learning it, and updating it - it is eating more of your time than it is worth. The only time spent on a computer that is earning you value is when you are either being productive or playing a game - the things you bought the machine for in the first place. Everything else is a cost to you.

Now where are we going with this, and why is it important for a gaming blog? Let's shift gears, and figure out the costs a pen-and-paper game have in real money:

• The cost of the game books needed to play
• The cost of expansion books and the time needed to learn them
• The costs of keeping it 'fed' in modules and gaming materials
• The ongoing access fees of costs of character creation software (Hero Lab, D&D Insider)
• The costs of dice, pens, paper, and other table materials
• The costs of figures, battle maps, and tabletop terrain
• The costs to replace damaged or lost books

Again, a pretty standard list, some are needed and most are optional. Now the real point of this article comes up, and this is a pretty sorry metric for most every pen-and-paper game, becuase most of them do horribly in this regard. What are the costs in time for pen-and-paper games. Note that I am purposefully excluding play time - that is the 'value earn' time that you bought the game for. This list is strictly the 'junk time' wasted in supporting a roleplaying game system:

• The time to learn the game and read the books
• The time to teach it to every new player
• The time needed to explain and introduce game worlds and back story
• The time to adjudicate and decide unclear rules and situations during play
• The time needed to keep up with official rules errata for the game
• The time needed to teach errata to every player in the game
• The time spent in non-play tasks like character creation
• The time spent maintaining characters in level ups, power choice, gear choice, and character improvement
• The time spent getting play groups together and finding new players

I know some people enjoy some of these parts, but we are using the measure of 'play time is gold.' Now many games purposefully increase these time costs as a part of a system lock-in strategy. With computers, you normally want to reduce the time costs - increasing them is a hassle and makes the computer not worth owning. For pen-and-paper games, if a rules system is ultra-complex and all-encompassing, you literally don't have the time or the energy to learn or play anything else. You always can, of course, but some systems enshrine complexity to the degree where you have to make a mental commitment to play only that, and nothing else - especially if your friends have invested as much time as you have, or even more. Pathfinder and D&D 3E and 4E follow this model, and do quite well at it.

Part of the problem is that it is easy to walk away from a simple game - you have little invested in it. This time and money investment is a huge part of marketing games such as Warhammer and 40K, the buy-in costs to buy, assemble, paint, and create armies is very high - and thus the lock in for players is as well. Same thing with pen-and-paper games. If you own a shelf full of gaming books of a system, you are locked in, both with a money cost and a time cost.

Is the time-wasting tactic used for system lock-in bad? Well, for computers, it is. Part of what makes Windows such a giant is that you have to spend so much time with it to keep it running. Owning that computer takes so much mental effort worrying about it, it almost creates a parental dependency between user and machine. The computer is helpless without your attention, and this creates a sort of system lock-in as well between you and your computer. You want to play the latest games and get work done, so you accept the time costs involved with that. If there were computers out there where you could do the same things, but for less time and hassle - would you walk away?

People are walking away from this model today, and thus Windows as well. Tablets and iPads are replacing the web browsing and email needs for many desktop owners that don't need all that power. Android is a more open ecosystem with greater freedom and less hardware support time requirements. Chromebooks are 'zero time cost' computers that just open up and work, without worrying about driver updates, system security, file formats, or software functionality. Of course, in a Chromebook, your files are locked-in to Google's ecosystem, but they allow you to use other storage providers (Dropbox, etc) as well, so there is still freedom to store files where you wish, provided you want to spend the time doing so.

Are people walking away from complicated pen-and-paper games? Well, World of Warcraft decimated D&D like Magic the Gathering decimated, well, D&D (a long time ago when Magic first came out, and it was easy and fast to get into and play). MMOs give players a higher 'value add' time than a pen-and-paper game, you can log in and immediately start having fun. You don't have to spend hours maintaining your characters in separate computer programs, learning volumes of rulebooks, or finding other players to play with you. All of that is just there. In fact, MMOs that purposefully reduce costs in the time needed to learn, and also the costs needed to play (free to play) often do better than ones requiring a huge time or money investment up front.

What does that say for complicated pen-and-paper games that are getting more expensive in both the cost of books needed to play, and the time needed to support them? Is the pen-and-paper gaming industry going in the wrong direction with more expensive games, especially in this free-to-play world? Just because dinosaurs leave large tracks doesn't mean you should follow them.

The next big thing in pen-and-paper games will follow the free-to-play model. Simple rules, optional upgrades, minimal upkeep time, and zero-entry cost. None of what I see in D&D Next, Pathfinder, Star Wars, or any other upcoming release fits that model. In fact, the system lock-in of the older games, Pathfinder, D&D4, D&D3, actually keep people from wanting to learn the next big complicated thing that comes out. The giant dinosaurs fell to the smaller and faster ones that could adapt and move quicker, they weren't replaced by even larger dinosaurs that ate more resources.

It is one of those game-design issues I ponder about on a lazy day, looking at shelves of games beckoning to be played, but taking so much time the activity seems like a waste...of time. Are we going in the wrong direction? Where is the next big thing? Will it even look like those games on the shelf next to me?