Board Games are Balloons
Figure 1: A balloon.
Board games are balloons.
In fact, most human-made things are balloons. I’m not crazy. Hear me out.
On our game Inventures, I’m the project manager and the designer and the marketer and the everything else (except the artist, who works under contract). There’s no ‘we’ in Birtle Games, really.
It’s just me.
The royal ‘we’. So It’s very easy to take a step back and ask myself, ‘why am I doing this?’ It’s a dangerous thing to ask yourself.
“Why am I working on this? I could be eating sushi.”
I almost stopped working on Inventures many times, despite the fact that I always believed in it. I was tired of being the one holding it up.
Recently I turned to my game shelf and looked at all the games, and all I saw were balloons.
(Metaphorically, of course).
A game itself is just the latex skin of the balloon.
It’s just the thing you see. The thing that holds the air in. The structure. If you buy a balloon, you’re buying the latex. If you buy a board game, you’re buying the physical thing.
But it’s not the latex of the balloon that gives it form. It’s the helium inside.
If the board game itself is the latex of the balloon, the helium inside is the dreams and vision of the team behind it.
This image is supposed to represent dreams, mkay?
Nobody sees the dreams. The dreams and grit and persistence weigh nothing. But the dreams are what makes things happen.
Everything made by people happened because someone dreamed it up: garbage cans with wheels, the stock market, bluetooth headphones, the newest car. All of those things came into being because people pushed hard to make them happen. They inflated that car with their dreams… metaphorically.
When you buy a balloon, is the helium just there to make the balloon float? Or is the balloon just there to hold in the helium?
A years-old half-filled balloon (aka, the first time I tried launching Inventures)
Seeing board games as balloons changed my life.
I know longer see Inventures as the physical copy of the game I’ll get from the manufacturer (the latex balloon). I now see Inventures as the work I put into it and the dream itself (the helium inside).
If I stopped dreaming and stopped working on it, the game would fizzle out. It would be nothing. Nobody cares about a balloon with no air inside. Nobody cares about half-filled balloons either.
The first time I launched Inventures on Kickstarter, the graphics kind of sucked. I was asking people to see a finished product that wasn’t yet there. I was asking them to inflate the balloon for me.
So what’s the lesson here?
You can never rely on other people, unless they’re partners in a project, to provide the dreams and the energy and the oomph to get things done. You can’t sell half-inflated balloons. Sure, you can get other people excited about something you’re working on, but you can’t rely on their excitement to push you through.
Nobody ever accomplished something on their own. For Inventures, I had tons of supportive friends and family, useful playtesters, and feedback from experts. But none of them could fill up the balloon.
“I’m not saying ‘don’t rely on people’. Just don’t rely on them to inflate the balloon.”
Person inflating their own balloon (not a euphamism)
Likewise, the only difference between a half-filled balloon and a fully ballooned balloon is how much effort you put into it.
Earlier on, I was afraid I’d never be able to make something that looked professional.
But if I just keep filling up the balloon, Inventures could get there. Just putting in the effort is no guarantee that Inventures will succeed. However, there’s no way in heck it could succeed if I didn’t keep putting in the effort.
In conclusion:
I hope you start seeing the world, and your creative projects, as balloons. Thanks for the read, and I always love questions, comments, and feedback. Keep inflating that balloon :D
You can follow Inventures’ pre-launch page on Kickstarter HERE.