Weeknote

I have been thinking about hosting lately. It all started when I tried to compare card game Dominion (Vaccarino 2008) to its online counterpart Dominion Online. The analog version made a splash in 2009 winning the Spiel Des Jahres. The SDJ is a German award which catalyzed the Eurogame movement, promoting design innovations that map onto the social requirements of board gaming, i.e. hosting friends and family. Arguably, Dominion won for its subtle subversion of Magic: The Gathering (Garfield 1993), where instead of deckbuilding prior to play, with cards regularly costing up to 20$ a piece, all deckbuilding occurs as a part of a 30 minute game. This allowed deckbuilding to fit into the German board game distribution model (one box with everything), as opposed to the collectible games model (a base set with multiple customization options). That said, Dominion’s success prompted eight expansions, but these do not fit the collectible model, given that there is no randomness or rarity in their contents, nor any advantage conferrable to the purchaser. Several ports of Dominion to a digital networked play space occurred in the years following its release. Vaccarino gave temporary rights to these coders, so long as they shut down their servers when an official version came out. This gave players what they wanted, free access to all of Dominion’s content readily available for online play. The game changed radically, out of its physical and social context, the half hour family game became a six minute game amongst strangers. Only once the game was officially launched did it stop being free online. Players now pay 4$ to 7$ for expansions with offer new cards (as opposed to their real life 30$ equivalents). Players who own expansions can “host” games on the Dominion Online servers using cards from their expansions, inviting people who do not have them to use them. Here real life is arbitrarily simulated to ease the pill of paying for digital download. Hosting, this essential part of board gaming, is remediated and now I want to know who else is thinking or has thought about this.