You Have My Sword

The History Behind "Swords & Circuitry: A Designer's Guide To Computer Role-Playing Games"

A First Encounter In the Wild

In the early 2000s, Jana and I are dropping in to an auditorium at Qualcomm. We’re here to attend a meeting of the local chapter of the International Game Developers Association, known more simply to most devs as the IGDA. Raph Koster is scheduled to deliver a talk, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, a power-point presentation which will later become the basis of his bestselling book. I’m hoping to catch up with him because we’d worked together at SOE on a Sims-like MMO called The Good Life that never got beyond the conceptual stages, but some of whose mechanics were later re-engineered for use in Star Wars Galaxies.

At this point in time, San Diego is still a hopping place for game development, thanks in large part to Verant / Sony Online (SOE), creators of the original Everquest. Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) - SOE’s frenemy cousin - is dominating the Playstation with a successful line-up of sports-related titles. Just a few miles north up interstate 5 are High Moon Studios (Call of Duty) and Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto), and Rick Dyer (creator of the original Dragon’s Lair) has a little cult of folks he’s indoctrinating with his own development philosophies out east in Julian. It’s an exciting time to be in the industry, and in San Diego in particular.

On this evening with the IGDA, the auditorium is about half full. It’s no commentary on Raph or his presentation, but the fact that the meetings are frequently held at six o’clock on a work night tends to put a damper on attendance. Few, if any, full-time game industry pros can be there at that hour because most of us are chained to our desks until around seven or eight, and the few of us who aren’t want something other than the IGDA’s offered Papa John’s Pizza for dinner - it’s a little too close to what we’re usually given at work in lieu of non-existent overtime pay.

Being that we’re the cool kids, Jana and I slide into some seats towards the back. We’re close enough to see and hear what’s going on up front, but not so close that we can’t slip out unnoticed if we decide to bail in favor of dinner, and it’s on both of our minds. Not long after we’re seated, however, a young man named Jeremy slips into the row in front of us and strikes up the usual pre-presentation conversation about who we are and why we’re there. He seems glad to meet someone who’s not another student like himself and he’s looking for some choice words of wisdom on the subject of breaking into the business. A few minutes into the conversation we veer into talking about the projects I’d worked on, and Jana casually mentions our book, Swords & Circuitry: A Designer’s Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games.

“You’re kidding,” he says.

Jana and I shake our heads. We assume that he just thinks it sounds interesting and wants to put it on his shopping list, but he turns away from us and starts digging in a satchel around his neck. After a moment, he fishes out our five hundred plus page monstrocity and wags it at us.

“This book?! This is you guys?!” He’s clutching it like it’s some priceless artifact, with the same reverence that I might give to an original copy of Shakespeare’s first folio. “I carry this with me everywhere! All the time!” He had no idea that we’d be there, no suspicion even we sometimes attended IGDA meetings in San Diego. Our meeting him there was pure, random luck.

As Jana and I exchange surprised glances, Jeremy goes on to tell us how much the book means to him, and how much it’s influencing his own thoughts on game development. We’re thrilled that it’s provoked such a strong reaction in him, but also a touch bemused. I was used to meeting passionate fans of Betrayal at Krondor and Dungeon Siege, but I’d never expected to meet someone who was so thrilled about what amounted to a textbook, albeit one that I’d taken a great deal of care to make entertaining.

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Answering The Call

Swords & Circuitry was a reaction to a vacancy. When I got my start at New World Computing in 1990, there were simply no books available on computer game design. There were no college courses, no YouTube videos, no pamphlets, not even any colorful street corner prophets that could tell you what a role-playing game designer actually did, despite the fact that in so many surveys people were saying they wanted to be one. How was one to get from A to Zed? What did you need to study? What did you need to understand? Could you make a living doing it? You could walk into any B. Dalton’s or Waldenbooks or Bretanos and buy a few metric tonnes of books to teach you how to be a programmer, or an equal number of books on mastering pixel art on the Amiga, but there wasn’t one single volume out there where someone had condensed game theory, RPG history, anthropology, screenwriting, consumer psychology and applied game development experience into something someone could sit down, crack open and understand all the basic pieces that a prospective CRPG designer needed to know.

WHERE DO I SIGN? - Signing the contract for my first book, Swords & Circuitry: A Designer’s Guide To Computer Role-Playing Games.

When Prima Tech sent out a notice in 1999 that they were looking for submissions for a new line of game development books, it took only a few days to bang together the proposal for what would become Swords & Circuitry. It was the culmination of ten years in the trenches working on AAA role-playing titles, and I was determined that it answer the questions I’d had when I’d started my own journey as a developer. At the most primary level it had to be informative - else there was little reason for writing it - so I started off by interviewing dozens of the best-known designers in the industry to share the wealth of their experience alongside my own insights. My secondary goal, however, was a bit loftier. I wanted people to read the book for fun. To encourage that I reached back to sources of inspiration that most people might not expect.

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Re: Connections

I cannot overstate the importance that a certain television program (and its related companion book) had both on my career as a game designer, and also on the writing of Swords & Circuitry. My brother and I encountered it entirely by accident during the late 1970s, and I devoted a page and a half about it in S&C:

“Saturday nights in my childhood meant confinement to the family basement. I wasn’t consigned there by cruel parents trying to hide my burgeoning werewolfism, mind you, nor was I being forced to dispose of dead bodies like a member of the Butchering Bender Family of Kansas fame. What drove my brother Gene and me to regularly hold vigils in the storm cellar was the fact that it was the location of the family’s only “other” television set, and the programs we liked to watch on weekends often conflicted with the 10 o’clock airing of the local news. Originally, we’d begun the habit to catch the British imported programs on PBS like Doctor Who, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Sometime during this period, however, programming got shuffled and we began to catch another series that not only contributed to the betterment of my education but forever impacted the way I would approach the construction of role-playing worlds.

Connections, written and hosted by the British science writer James Burke, was originally a 13-part series that explored the bizarre and sometimes unpredictable ways in which small, seemingly unrelated discoveries or events led to the creation of 13 different pieces of modern technology. Starting with the way that a group of French monks handled sheep rearing, he would then guide viewers through a series of developments that would end with the invention of the modern computer. In another episode he explained why something a doctor did in the court of Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century made it possible for television to exist today.”

— Swords & Circuitry: A Designer’s Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games, pgs. 225-226

MEET JAMES BURKE - Burke was a master of explaining complex ideas and served both as the host of Connections and as the author of the series’ companion book. His work was, and continues to be, a major influence on my own. He appears here in a still from “Trigger Effect,” the first episode of the television series.

Within the text of Swords & Circuitry, I explained how Burke’s Connections shaped my interconnected approach to a game’s narrative, its aesthetics, and its mechanics. For a game experience to work convincingly, at least in my view, all of its component elements have to be working in harmony. If you change just one of those elements, however insignificant you think it might be, you need to consider the cascade of other changes that will necessarily proceed from it. In a unified design, everything is caught in a web of interconnections, and nothing exists in isolation (and if you don’t believe me, try adding a new feature into your game and see how many department heads scream in your ear about your trifling little nothing that you think should be easy to implement).

At a more meta level, however, Connections also influenced how I approached the writing of Swords & Circuitry itself. Burke was very, very good at taking complex scientific ideas and boiling them down into something easily digestible for a lay person to understand. He made things relatable and explained how these abstract theories and developments impacted everyone and were not just things that happened in some mad scientist’s lab hundreds of miles away and in some other century. Every discovery was present. Here. Today. Now. As much as possible, I tried to do the same thing with the major concepts within the book. Rather than filling page after page with tables and gee whiz graphs and formulas which would be applicable only in the most narrowly defined circumstances, I opted instead to teach readers how to see the bigger picture and understand how the moving parts needed to fit together. It was as much about teaching readers a way of seeing and thinking as it was about communicating a set of hard and fast rules that would almost certainly be broken the moment a game concept moved from the back of a napkin into a real-world production environment. And while the book had originally been conceived to be focused exclusively on the role-playing genre, in the end lots of folks have told me that they applied what they learned from S&C to a wide variety of different genres, not just CRPGs.

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Striking the Tone

The second source of narrative inspiration for Swords & Circuitry started with a raft of publications from the ‘80s and ‘90s covering the production of electronic music. By the time of S&C’s writing, I’d been hauling around massive boxes stuffed full of back issues of Keyboard Magazine, Electronic Musician and Mix for over a decade. Going back as early as my time with New World Computing in 1990, I’d often referred to them not only to keep up with developments in music technology, but also because they were excellent examples of how to take technical topics and make them accessible to casual audiences. One of the best examples among these publications was actually an aftermarket user’s manual for the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer (my first “serious” electronic keyboard) and one of the most popular synths of the 1980s.

The Complete DX7 by Howard Massey was an astonishingly thorough book, and it covered not only what all the different parts of the DX7 did, but it dove deep into the theories of FM synthesis, the methodology that the DX7 uses to create its sounds. Clocking in at 278 pages, it dwarfs the mere 32-page official operator’s manual shipped with the original keyboard. It could easily have been a tedious read - as nobody expects technical manuals to be enthralling - but Massey managed to do the unthinkable and filled it with a plethora of hysterical “easter egg” asides that made reading it a kind of comedic treasure hunt. It was fun to read just for its own sake.

As the writing began on Swords & Circuitry, my goal was to capture the same casual, irreverent tone that made Massey’s book and Keyboard Magazine so imminently accessible. By disarming itself at the door, S&C let readers know that it didn’t take itself (or its author) too seriously, and that it was okay to play with the ideas in the book. S&C’s point wasn’t to lay out a rigid formula that should be rigorously adhered to, but rather to encourage a way of thinking about RPGs that could help designers forge their own paths to enlightenment development.

UNCONVENTIONAL INFLUENCES - Connections by James Burke, Keyboard Magazine, and The Complete DX7 by Howard Massey all provided important DNA to the content and tone of Swords & Circuitry: A Designer’s Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games. While Swords & Circuitry, Keyboard Magazine, and The Complete DX7 are all out of print, used copies can still be found on eBay (Massey’s DX7 book commands extra-ordinarily high prices, averaging around $200 for copies in good condition). Connections has been repeatedly refreshed over the years, and it’s possible to buy new editions from nearly every major bookseller. A continuation of Burke’s original television series, Connections with James Burke, recently debuted on the Curiosity Stream streaming service. You can find episodes of the original series on YouTube.

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The Cavalry

What I’d never suspected would happen when I submitted my proposal to Prima Tech was that shortly after getting the book contract (hooray!) I’d also be invited by Chris Taylor to write the dialog and overarching narrative for Dungeon Siege (big hooray!), a game that was already well into production. At first, I was naive enough to believe I could tackle both jobs at the same time without neglecting either project. As time wore on and I began to fall behind on my deadlines for S&C, however, my editors at Prima began to make noises that perhaps they might bring on a second writer to help me finish the portions of the book that I hadn’t yet completed.

The mere suggestion was devastating to me.

Although I knew Prima’s offer was made with the perfectly good intention of relieving the pressure on me, I was terrified at the prospect of another writer touching Swords & Circuitry. It had a very definite authorial voice. My voice. It was written not only from the perspective of a game designer who’d actually worked on AAA CRPGs (which was a rarity for dev books at the time), but it was also filled with personal anecdotes that humanized the topic. I felt certain that the moment a stranger was brought in, everything that made the book unique would be wiped out in order to create a consistent tone across the whole book. It would simply cease to be what I knew it needed to be.

Upon hearing the news, my wife Jana was similarly upset. She was aware of what I was trying to achieve and had been the first person to review what I’d originally sent to Prima.

“This is the most entertaining book proposal I’ve ever read,” she’d said of the proposal. “You’re going to sell this.”

I valued Jana’s opinion not just because she was a loving and supportive spouse, but also because, prior to our meeting, she’d worked for years inside a publishing house and had a good idea of what it took to make and market specialty titles. She also happened to be an author herself, though her first book had suffered a catastrophe mere weeks before printing when the publisher went suddenly tits up and left her with an unpublished book and nowhere else to go with it because no one else held the necessary license for the material it covered.

Rather than watch my concept for Swords & Circuitry go up in flames, Jana offered to step into the role of co-author and handle two chapters that really didn’t need much much input from me. The first covered the history of the CRPG genre, and the second dealt with the marketing and “life cycle” of a project’s development. Armed with a checklist of topics I’d provided for her, she then dove into the necessary research, roughed out the chapters to get as close as she could to my “voice” and then I did a final polish pass to smooth out anything that I felt wasn’t consistent with the rest of the book. (Her other major contribution was in convincing me to preserve some of my personal anecdotes which I’d self-consciously nearly cut from the final draft. She felt strongly that they enhanced rather than detracted from the rest of the book’s content, and in the end I’m glad I listened to her advice.)

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Circuit Breaker

Once the manuscript was complete and in the hands of Prima Tech, I was happy that the text was left relatively untouched. Kelly Talbot, our developmental editor, clearly saw what we were trying to accomplish, and became our champion to ensure that what we’d put on the page was pretty much what readers ultimately saw. At the time he’d told us that it was one of his favorite books to have sheparded through the process, and I hope all these years later that he still feels that way. We were very fortunate to have him in our corner.

The only concept for Swords & Circuitry that didn’t end up how I’d intended involved the formatting of the book and how it would be marketed. What I really hadn’t wanted was to have S&C shelved with programming titles in bookstores, or at the very least not exclusively so. I’d already spent ten agonizing years explaining to friends and relatives that my job as a game designer involved exactly zero programming, and that my job much more closely resembled that of an old-school dungeon master. Pursuant to that, the concept that I had pitched to Prima - and what I had believed they had signed off on - was that S&C would be laid out in a way that would feel attractive and familiar to people looking to transition from tabletop design into the world of computer guided RPGs. I strongly felt that they, rather than programmers, were the people who would most benefit from the book and the people most likely to buy it.

The first sign of a hitch in this plan came when Prima informed me that they didn’t have the budget to hire any separate illustrators for the project, so if I wanted anything done, I’d have to either hire people to do it myself (out of my advance) or dig up volunteers. This left me with a dilemma. I didn’t feel comfortable with asking my artist friends and contacts to create new work that would be unpaid, but I thought it was possible someone might have unpublished material just lying around in sketchbooks that they’d be willing to let us use. In response to my call for art, my friends Shawn Sharp, Jeff Perryman, Jon Gwyn, and Jim Wible all contributed pieces which could be integrated wherever the layout artists at Prima felt would serve the design. Jim Wible also contributed a number of new icons that could be used in our sidebars and callouts and created the iconic Swords & Circuitry logo which was integrated into the cover’s design.

Whenever we got back the first galleys for S&C’s layout, I was distressed to find that other than Jim’s icons, none of the other artists’ work had been integrated in any way, and the layout looked pretty much identical to every generic computer instruction manual of its day. This was not what I had agreed upon with Prima. After expressing my displeasure with the situation to my editors, they explained that the layout for Prima’s Game Development Series wasn’t something under their control, but they’d see if they could arrange some kind of compromise. Prima’s “solution” became to take all those lovely illustrations and dump them into a gallery in the center of the book without any explanation about why they were there. The effect was “we interrupt this book on game design with a random collection of science fiction and fantasy art. Please enjoy.” Another problem was that the approval galleys they’d sent for our review hadn’t included the title page. We wouldn’t know until we got our printed hard copies that they’d misspelled our last names right where we’d be signing the book (though thankfully, they at least got it right on the book’s spine). Although it was a relatively small error, it was a particularly vexing flaw to mar our first book.

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On the Road

Once Swords & Circuitry debuted, we were gratified to see how well it was received by readers. It was among the highest rated game development books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble after it launched, and several people, including influential colleagues, left lovely reviews for it online.

Jana and I had both planned on supporting S&C with author appearances and book signings and assumed that Prima would naturally help make the arrangements. Unfortunately, as the kind of publisher that they were, they weren’t at all oriented towards anything other than magazine ads, fliers, and t-shirts. Any supplemental marketing or promotion would be solely up to us.

As we’d discovered the first copy of our book on a store shelf at our local Borders bookseller, we made arrangements that we’d hold our first signing there. Since most of the people in our audience hadn’t yet read the book, most of the attendees’ questions were simply about classic games and how does an aspiring developer get into the industry. In particular, I remember one young man in the audience who was fascinated about the history of video games, and even asked us to inscribe his book with “Pong rules” above our signatures. Not long after, we’d hold signings in several Borders bookstores scattered across southern California.

SHELF-ISH PRIDE - We discovered our first copy of the book on the shelves at the Mission Valley Borders Bookstore following a day at Comic-Con International 2001.

FIRST SIGNING - Jana and I had our first author appearance and signing for Swords & Circuitry at the Mission Valley Borders Bookstore in San Diego on June 11, 2002. (Incidentally, the large document in a white binder is the design document for the never released sequel to Betrayal at Krondor, The Thief of Dreams).

DESIGNER ROUNDTABLE - Following our S&C signing at the Santa Monica Borders, I sat down for lunch with signing attendees Andy Caldwell (left) - a fellow New World Computing alum - and Peter Oliphant (middle) who was the designer and programmer on the classic RPG, Stonekeep. (Prior to his work in the game industry, Peter was a child actor best known for his recurring role as Freddy Helper, the next-door neighbor kid in the Dick Van Dyke show.)

In 2003, Jana and I were invited by Prima Tech to hold a signing in their booth at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. It was a wonderful opportunity to see Emi Smith, the acquisitions editor who had purchased our book for Prima, and to meet the writers behind some of our publisher’s other terrific titles. It was also during this visit that we were greeted by a young man who informed us that he was the translator for the Korean edition of S&C - an edition which until that very moment I hadn’t known existed, and to this day, we still don’t have a copy of it despite years of frantically trying to get our hands on one.

IN THE BOOTH - Jana and I take a moment before our 2003 GDC signing to snap a picture with one of our editors, Emi Smith. She and our developmental editor Kelly Talbot (not pictured) were both instrumental in helping us get S&C to market.

In 2002, the buyout of Prima Tech by Thompson Learning - the largest educational publisher in the world at the time - dramatically expanded the opportunities for Swords & Circuitry to reach new audiences. With more and more career colleges offering degree programs in game development, Thompson found a gold mine in Prima Tech’s existing line of books. Before any work could be formally offered as a textbook, however, authors were required to provide an associated Instructor’s Resource Kit, aka an IRK, for use in the classroom. These kits included a course syllabus, power point presentations, test questions, and set of exercises for each chapter that could be assigned to students. Swords & Circuitry was among the first chosen for adoption as an official textbook once we submitted our IRK.

IRKed - Our PowerPoint presentations for Swords & Circuitry were a little more elaborate than most as we pushed the multimedia capabilities of the platform as far as we could. They took nearly as much work to create as writing the book in the first place, and actually even contained some material that hadn’t been presented in S&C itself. These kits were only ever made available to colleges that formally adopted S&C as a textbook.

Swords & Circuitry ended up being quite successful in classrooms and popular with teachers who appreciated its accessibility and cross-disciplinary approach. On several occasions we were invited to serve as guest lecturers and enjoyed the opportunity to talk directly to students about the challenges and joys of role-playing game design.

WESTWOOD HO! - One of our favorite places to guest lecture was at the Westwood College of Technology in Anaheim, California. While students were eager to explore ideas expressed in the book, they also seemed to enjoy hearing some of my personal anecdotes about working in the industry.

In the years since its publication, Swords & Circuitry has become something of a collector’s item. While Jana and I have occasionally discussed an updated edition, the state of the industry has changed so much that a Swords & Circuitry II would be a very different publication requiring a herculean amount of work to bring up to date. Nonetheless, we are both gratified by the number of developers working on big titles today who have told us that they keep S&C close at hand, and refer to it frequently for inspiration. We’re also amazed that Swords & Circuitry is cited in no less than thirty-seven different academic papers which suggests that perhaps - just perhaps - we had something to say that wasn’t entirely nonsense. It’s gratifying and it’s humbling, and we’re glad that we’ve contributed a tool that designers find useful.