Tell us a bit about yourself and Consentacle.

I’m a game designer who’s worked mostly in digital games, starting all the way back in 1999. I’m an arts professor at the NYU Game Center, where we have undergraduate and graduate students learning game design and development. Among other classes I teach introductory game design, where students design original board and card games — not necessarily to create a finished product, but to practice and experiment with some of the fundamental principles and techniques of game design that are applicable no matter what platform or medium you’re working in. It’s actually as a result of teaching this way that I started to get more and more interested in designing analog games, where it’s possible to experiment with odd ideas rapidly on your own.

Although I’ve done non-digital game design work in the past, Consentacle is technically the first non-digital game that I’m releasing as a commercial product! So I’m very green in some ways despite being experienced in other ways. Consentacle is a co-op card game for two players that represents an intimate encounter between a tentacled alien and an intimate human. It’s a riff on and reaction to some old, bad tropes about tentacle sex — and the design tries to turn those inside out, into a game about consent and trust, communication and coordination between the human players to build intimacy and satisfaction for the characters.

What did you do to build up a following before you launched the campaign?

Consentacle is an unusual case in that the prototype was out in public three years before the Kickstarter campaign. I designed the game and created a nice-looking prototype with laser-cut plastic tokens after I was asked to participate in the No Quarter exhibition of games, an annual event in New York where local game designers are asked to create games to be shown in a gallery, played over the course of a weekend, etc. The idea for Consentacle had been kicking around in my head ever since I had a strong “it doesn’t have to be this way!” reaction to Tentacle Bento, the game that was infamously removed from Kickstarter due to its suggestion that players “capture” college girls via trick-taking.

I never imagined there would be a tremendous amount of interest in Consentacle, but it was an unusual enough idea for a game that it got some media coverage, and then people started asking me how they could get a copy. If it looks like a commercial card game and plays like a commercial card game, I guess it’s no surprise that people imagine they could buy it like a commercial card game! So I said “oh yeah, I’ll think about doing a Kickstarter, maybe we can mass-produce it.”

Three years later, after getting married, moving to a new home, starting a new job, and working on several other projects, I actually finished planning the Kickstarter campaign! In the meantime, people kept asking me, at least once a week, when they’d be able to buy a copy. I kept saying “soon, soon” in various ways, usually with a very inaccurate time estimate. I was asked to show the game at several different events, game festivals and cons, and it won the Impact Award at the 2015 Indiecade festival. So people kept hearing about it and kept asking me about it and I kept saying “soon, soon” and feeling very guilty! So that’s what I did to build a following.

Did you expect getting so many backers? Why do you think that happened?

I kept track of how many people asked me if they could buy the game and knew that if I could just get word out to all of those people, we could reach our funding goal. I knew a lot of people would be excited to hear that the game was FINALLY being printed, but I imagined in one corner of my brain that some of them might think “oh, that old game? It’s finally coming out? Not too interesting any more.” That doesn’t seem to have happened at all, perhaps because nobody is stealing and adapting my ideas — not enough designers willing to make sex games, I guess? Or two-player co-op with deliberately fuzzy rules and win conditions might be too unconventional?

In any case, I think the unusual nature of the game and the slow spread of awareness about it is why we got far more backers than we expected. I figured we could reach our original stretch goals, but we’ve hit about double that in the first half of our campaign. What it comes down to is that nobody else is doing games like this, so when something odd appears, the people whose wish has just come true are happy to buy it! I wish more people would design in these less-explored spaces.

How has the response to the theme been? Were you worried that the adult theme of the game would frighten backers from supporting you?

It definitely frightens away some backers! There are plenty of responses on social media and forums where someone just makes a o.O or google-eyed emoji, and that’s to be expected. I don’t even want to push the game on anyone who’s not comfortable playing an adult-themed game — that’s not consensual, and if you ask me sitting down to play a game is and should be fundamentally about enthusiastic consent. (Otherwise, can you really play at all?) Of course, the reason some potential backers are uncomfortable is the same reason others are excited about it, so it’s not as if we could “change the theme to something less provocative” and get more backers — if anything, the opposite. Some backers would also like the game to be more explicit, pornographic, with more erotic visuals. But the cards are purposefully not designed that way — they’re not titillating, they’re meant to provoke your imagination, induce odd and kinky thoughts, not simply throw some eye-popping sexual anatomy at your eyeballs. There’s plenty of that out there already and there’s nothing wrong with it! But we were going for a slightly less well-explored area in this arena too — a suggestive game that’s low-key enough that you can play it in public without much embarrassment. The game should make you giggle or blush because you’re playing it with a partner who you enjoy coordinating cards with — not because you’re worried someone else is seeing an illustration over your shoulder!

The one kind of comment I always want to respond to goes like this: “I really like the idea of this game, and I’d totally play it but I don’t know who I’d play it with! Nobody would play this with me…” I’ve been showing this game to perfect strangers for years and that’s definitely not true. All sorts of people are willing to try a game about human-alien romance! It only becomes more creepy, quite honestly, if you feel like it’s incredibly creepy. What’s not creepy is just telling people what the game’s about and being sensitive to their reactions — if they’re uncomfortable, play something else! This is definitely an embarrassing kind of invitation to make — I know, I had to learn to choke down my bashfulness at talking about a sex game, and I blush bright red. It’s a growth experience, honestly. And I’m fairly confident that unless you are part of a game club in a nunnery, you can find someone to play with.

As far as I can see you have no third party reviews or previews. Why not?

Honestly? I didn’t get around to it and it wasn’t a high priority before launching. I *should* have prioritized it a little higher, since we found out that many people were potentially interested in backing the game who hadn’t heard of it or tried it. A lot of our backers look at the idea for the game, can get a sense of how to play from our videos and campaign page, and that’s all they need — because there aren’t really any comparable games out there. (I guess if Hanabi released a Sexy Hanabi edition, or a Hanabi-Netrunner two-player co-op adventuer, that might be close?) Other potential players, I realized a little too late, are used to the opinions and format of reviewers and can gauge based on that kind of information whether they’d enjoy the game. I think that kind of judgment may work a little bit better for games that are closer to existing formats, or that don’t make some reviewers uncomfortable. From playtesting and showing the game, I’ve concluded that the closer someone is to the core of the hobbyist game market, the more likely they are to “bounce” off the game, either because they’re nervous about the sex aspect (and maybe don’t want to be seen as a “pervert!”) or because it’s a rather different kind of strategy game that involves far more yomi than valuation of your own strategy. As a result, the people we really wanted to reach first weren’t those who follow boardgame reviews and previews, but the audience for the game has grown enough that we should have taken everyone into consideration! We’ve sent out some additional copies to try and make that happen.

Your funding goal is quite high for a card game and a first timer. How did you come up with that big number?

The funding goal is almost exactly our production budget with no profit margin whatsoever — it’s the amount that we’d have needed to do the smallest possible print run of the game, and get it to backers, shipping included. The game includes tokens and the cards are larger than average, which is why the cost is $30/box with shipping included and not $20 or something similar. Of course with a small print run the cost per box is a little higher, but the main reason the goal might seem high is that about 25% of the art still needs to be completed, and I would not ask an artist to work without pay (nor do I have the funds lying around to pay an artist!) But most of the cost, as with any boardgame Kickstarter, is manufacturing, freight, and shipping.

When did you launch Consentacle and why did you choose that exact moment?

The original debut of Consentacle was in October 2014, and the game had to be playable and presentable by then because it was part of an event, the annual No Quarter exhibition of games. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to find a solid block of time to sit down and plan everything out for the Kickstarter, talk with manufacturers, make sure our illustrator has time to work on it, assemble the campaign page, etc. I have a full-time job teaching game design, I am often running around speaking at events or other schools about games, I’m a freelance consultant on other people’s projects, and so forth. I’d chosen summer 2017 as my “OK, finally going to get it done” time, but even during those months I was also organizing part of the 14th annual Games for Change conference in New York, and executive producing another two-player co-op game (this one’s digital) that will hopefully be showing up on Kickstarter next year.

I’d actually hoped to launch it earlier in the summer, but got some advice that September was a good month based on metrics; timing the campaign the way we did also let us overlap the final days of the campaign with the Indiecade festival of games, where the game will be part of this year’s “alumni games” showcase for past winners. That’ll be the first time I can show the game and actually tell people they can pre-order a copy online, which is an exciting relief!

If there was one thing you wish you knew before you launched, what would it be?

That I should have had many prototype copies ready to go over a month before launch — I got additional cards printed and babysat the laser-cutter over a weekend to cut more prototype tokens, but it wasn’t enough, especially since it’s more courteous and helpful to press to get them advance copies many weeks ahead of time. I suppose I knew this stuff from experience with digital games, and just hadn’t prioritized it highly enough compared to direct communications with players — but the difficulty of sending physical games around had a lot of complications that I wasn’t giving enough focus.

Why do you think there are so few female game designers on Kickstarter?

The digital game industry has a bad reputation as a place for female players and game developers because of terrible behavior by a segment of players, especially online (and sadly, this includes a handful of developers as well). On the other hand, there are a lot of “pockets” in video games where a female game designer can find a welcoming and supportive community away from all of that — sometimes this is a local dev community, or a company that has good policies and a lot of women working there, etc. Because digital games has roughly a 80/20 male-female split still, there are definitely still some outdated assumptions that come up (that the “core player” is a certain kind of guy who wouldn’t be bothered by sexist jokes, etc) and sometimes a boy’s-club attitude, but the situation is slowly changing from my point of view as someone who’s been working in that industry for decades. I’m happy to say that over half of our incoming game design students at New York University are women, however!

As for tabletop games, I’m afraid the situation is better in some ways and worse in others. The harassment is not as overt or intense, from what I can tell; maybe this is because tabletop games are played and discussed more in person rather than on the de-inhibition, anonymized spaces of the Internet. On the other hand, there are even fewer women designers in tabletop. Some great RPG designers who’ve Kickstarted (Avery Alder, Marissa Kelly, Jenna Moran) and some designers of the classics (Leslie Scott, Karen Seyfarth, Susan McKinley Ross) but it’s even more rare.

If I had to guess I’d point at a few factors including that the early seeds of hobbyist community developed at a time even before roleplaying games or video games, when gatherings of tabletop enthusiasts were, according to some old-school grognards I know, 99.9% male. More importantly than that, games that seem too “womanly” encounter resistance from publishers; the stories told by Mary Flanagan (Monarch and Visitor in Blackwood Grove on Kickstarter, plus over a dozen previous games) are fairly shocking even to me, and I’m more familiar with the video game industry! In Flanagan’s public talks on this subject she describes how publishers don’t want to look at a game where female characters are too central, they’re afraid that having a woman on the box will suggest to families or male hobbyist players that it’s a game only for girls, and so forth. This is a more ridiculous situation than in the video game industry, where every year some game boxes feature a starring female protagonist and sell millions of copies. (Of course, the teams making these games are mostly men.) All I can suppose is that it’s a traditionalist attitude, but ironically there were more overt “games for girls” in the 1980s when the market was bigger! I’m not saying that “games in pink boxes with unicorns and princess dresses” are the answer, but neither is retreating to the sexist subtitle of the first family war-miniatures game, H.G. Wells Little Wars from 1913: he called it “a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books,” which is an attitude I still see a lot. Well-meaning in some ways, very sexist and exclusionary in others, and I think we can do better.

What is your main tip to handle the mid-campaign drop of new backers?

Don’t “handle” it at all, this is an organic part of word-of-mouth campaign that takes a disproportionate amount of effort to try and counteract. Be like water and flow with the shape of things; use this time to catch up and re-organize, adjust your plans for the level of success you’ve reached, and if you want to keep growing, don’t rush right at the area that’s dropping (word of mouth, organic marketing, virality), grow a separate area instead. One obvious suggestion would be that this is the time for non-organic marketing (ad buys, working with press, interviews, going on podcasts, etc)

What is the best kickstarter advice you ever received?

It’s not one piece of advice, but I sat down with Gil Hova (The Networks, Bad Medicine) and he was kind enough to just talk at me for an hour about what he knows, mostly manufacturing and logistics advice. This was the area that I knew the least about (since most of the games I’ve made have been composed of bits more than atoms) so it was incredibly useful.

What´s your thoughts regarding stretch goals?

I think they’re a great way to improve the quality of components in a game up to the point where the designers’ vision has extended. If a designer had really envisioned a game with custom wooden pieces, that might be hard to include in the base level of a Kickstarter if you know that chipboard tokens could suffice. I tend to think the base funding goal should only be the essentials — in our case, that included art for 20 more cards because I already knew from testing and feedback with a robust prototype that players were unhappy without more extensive art. There’s a point at which a designer may think “wow, we got everything to make the game look the way I always envisioned it looking… hmm, maybe we can add even more stuff? Extra cards? Fancy containers? Let me come up with something else that can be custom-made!” This is the point at which stretch goals stop making sense and become a purely promotional tool, and I am not convinced they’re the greatest idea for that unless they’re adding significant value to the game in the way that an expansion pack would (and in that case, does it make sense to bundle it into the same Kickstarter?)

What is your comment in the debate about paid vs unpayed reviews?

In general, I think it’s hard for content creators to make a living these days and I can understand why paid reviews might seem like a good idea, but it’s hard for me to imagine that they don’t erode your ability to grow an audience that trusts your opinions, at least if they’re in the form of a “review” rather than something like a sponsorship spot where a podcaster briefly discusses a new game with the creator or a mention in a round-up of new games. Over the last couple decades I’ve grown increasingly suspicious of the cognition involved in “reading reviews” in general — reviews for any aesthetic product beyond something predominantly functional like a toaster. Some reviewers have thoughtful, moving, and insightful commentary, criticism or insight, which to me is an entirely different form of output than the evaluatory review, and less likely to be found in a paid review (at least in video games? Maybe it’s different in tabletop) because it’s more driven by the writer’s interest and tastes. I suspect this is what actually draws smart, creative people to writing reviews in the first place, not slapping a numerical score on something. When it comes to simply having another human play and evaluate something for you, then tell you whether you should buy it — just think about it for a moment? This whole process is a little bit ridiculous for an aesthetic experience. They’re not you, and their ability to predict what you like is based only on how well they and you conform to some market subset (which as a matter of personal evolution you might want to break out of anyway?) This is part of why detailed video play of games has become more prominent — because reviewing matters of taste is a somewhat doomed exercise that mostly helps people cultivate a tiny pebble of confirmation bias to back up their decision to part with a sum of money. On top of that, as one music critic once noted, “writing about music is like dancing about sculpture.”

From a game designer’s point of view, it’s a little bit simpler: does a paid review offer good value for the money, compared to a Facebook ad or something similar? In some cases, for larger blogs and podcasts and video creators, it’s definitely good value even when you factor in cost and labor of getting a physical product to a reviewer. If I had been more desperate to get the word out about Consentacle, or more organized during the summer, I probably would have spent some of our limited budget on paid reviews for larger reviewers. At the smaller end, however, it rarely makes sense and it’s often hard to get a decent idea of what audience size really means — at least below a certain threshold, I don’t find numbers about subscribers or Twitter followers very reliable, there’s too much variability in actual impressions. This is unfortunate, because it’s the smaller content creators who actually need paid reviews; the bigger names with huge audiences shouldn’t be doing paid reviews, they should find other less dubious revenue streams.

You have to take my thoughts on this with a grain of salt, because I’m an outsider and don’t know the concerns and questions of people more intimately engaged in this debate — but hopefully my take is of some interest as that of someone who’s just “passing by.”

Where can people reach you?

Consentacle backers can leave comments for me on the Kickstarter page! Twitter is also a good place to contact me.