BookLife

Emiliano Sciarra is an Italian game designer best known for BANG!, a spaghetti western themed card game.

“When a man with a pistol meets a man with a Winchester,” reads the BANG! tagline, “you might say that the one with the pistol is a dead man… unless his pistol is a Volcanic!”  That is either a spaghetti koan or PR copy for a very cool card game.  Or both.

Emiliano Sciarra contributed an essay on Knightmare Chess to Family Games: The 100 Best.  Below, Sciarra shares his thoughts on writing, designing, and playing games.

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What has playing games taught you about writing (of any sort)?

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Emiliano Sciarra: Actually, writing and designing games (more than merely playing them) have a lot in common. They are both creative jobs made by incremental steps, requiring more or less the same scheduling and common tasks. The design is carried on mostly by a single person managing his own time, and playtesting is more or less similar to proofreading. In some cases, the work for documentation is the same. So, if you learn how to design games, you learn also the basics of collecting ideas for a good story. Of course, there are specific proficiencies that tell apart these two creative processes (e.g. grammar, syntax and rhetoric vs. probability, balance and re-playability), but there are quite a lot of key elements in common. For example, we all know that a good book will have a sort of “climax” lending towards the end of the story. The same must be true for a game: if we already know the winner with half an hour before the game ends, the last turns are simply useless.

As regards strictly playing games, the most important lesson I found in games about writing is learning how a fictional world works, regardless how small it is.

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Is there a game every writer should try?

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Emiliano Sciarra: Personally, I think that role-playing games are very useful for writers, especially if they take the role of  Game Master. Role-playing games are a form of “open” story promoting improvisation and, thus, imagination and creativity. Also, Game Masters will be forced to think about and foresee the reactions of players to situations they encounter, and this helps to better understand the world and the characters — especially when they take a totally unexpected path!

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In what ways does playing games enhance your creativity?

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Emiliano Sciarra: In a lot of ways — if we talk again about designing games rather than playing them. This varies depending on what kind of game you are designing, but many aspects are common to all. For example, as I said before, improvising a logical consequence in a role-playing game after an unpredicted move by the players calls for an extra boost of creativity. If you are designing a board game, finding the right (and hopefully innovative) mechanic for a given stage of the game is, again, asking for creativity. The same with coming out with a nice background for the game, or a rewarding and balanced score system. And if you design a game starting from the theme, you have to distill the mechanics from the background, which I find extremely creative.