Volume 5, Issue 5 – October, 2002

Jordan Weisman: Gamer’s Luck, Business Savvy

Forget the three old ladies spinning, measuring and cutting yarn. Fate must be a gamemaster with a particularly sardonic sense of humor. All too often when Fate rolls the dice to create your character, you find your greatest strengths tangled up in your biggest challenges. So it happened for Jordan Weisman, creator of top-selling role-playing and interactive games, co-founder and designer of 26 interactive entertainment facilities for Disney, current creative director for the entire Microsoft entertainment department and chief executive officer of WizKids Games.

Weisman transformed a dyslexic’s necessity — thinking outside the box — into a consistently innovative and successful approach to the business of gaming. From Star Trek to BattleTech, from interactive cockpits to artificial intelligence Web mystery games to Xbox®, Weisman changed the way American plays. Crescent Blues caught up with Weisman at Dragoncon 2002 just prior to the launch of the newest component of the WizKids gaming system.

Crescent Blues: How did you go from game player to game designer?

Jordan Weisman: Gaming is actually a very important part of my life. I think the reason for that is that I was very severe dyslexic. I couldn’t read, really. I was very lucky in that I had a very knowledgeable and observant teacher, because in my generation, most dyslexics were just written off as stupid. But she had been reading some of the more recent research and realized there was a chance I was not stupid, so she had me tested.

Another lucky part was that I was in Chicago. The University of Education in a suburb of Chicago was one of the two places in the country doing research on dyslexia. My teacher suggested that I go up there and be tested. The researchers at the university found that, yes, I seemed to have this.

I went through many years of tutoring and, thus, learned the skills to read, but it was very slow and painful. So like any kid, I avoided it, even though I had the skills. I was really apt at cheating, and I could cheat my way out of any class.

Then at summer camp (I was a junior counselor), one of the older counselors had Dungeons and Dragons ®. It had only come out about a year earlier. At the time, the only place to buy it was in Wisconsin from Gary (Gygax) and Dave (Arneson) themselves.

The counselor was a good gamemaster and a good storyteller. This fired my imagination like nothing I’d encountered before. The problem solving, the visualization, the socialization had been completely captured.

I was inspired about fantasy. I was inspired about gaming — all these things I had no access to. The other thing is there is no way to cheat. If I wanted this, I had to read.

So I started reading [J.R.R.] Tolkien. I started reading the rule books. It was slow, and it was painful, but it was something I wanted enough that I would do it. It turned me around completely. It also inspired my imagination enormously.

At the camp, then at my school, I became the gamemaster and the storyteller, which were roles I really enjoyed. I formed game clubs in my high school and so on and so forth, and I started to follow that route. Gaming became the core of my social experience. It also inspired me to organize things. I started this game club that grew into 500 members back in Chicago.

Then there was college. College was not a very successful career for me, but gaming continued to be part of it. I started to publish some special designs and scenarios that I had done at home. They started to sell and became a good reason to drop out of school and pursue this success.

How did you sell them?

I sold them to a local store in the Chicago area. Then I asked them where they bought their products. I traced the distribution chain upwards, then sent samples and price slips to all the distributors. I started selling merchandise to the distributors, who sold it to retailers all around the country.

Did you make the games as well as design them?

These were all paper products at the time. [The process] used mechanical drawing skills that I’d learned in school. We drew starships, then we wrote adventures that people could take on the starships. We printed them at the local “Sir Speedy” little off-set press, printing a hundred copies, two hundred copies. That’s how we started the company. I think our starting capital was $300. My partner became the guy who was at the table who raised his hand and said he had $150.

What was the inspiration that led to BattleTech ®?

FASA [the Freedonia Aeronautics & Space Administration after Groucho Marx’s mythical country in Duck Soup] started by doing supplements for Traveler ®. Traveler was a science fiction game by Games Designer Workshop (at that time). We started doing supplements for their games. Then we started doing our own games.

Then we licensed Star Trek®, which was the first time a big property license had been brought into the adventure gaming world. That was our first really big success, reaching out to new players and everything.

I started to realize that, in essence, we were creating a lot of material which we didn’t own, because anything that we created, Paramount owned. It was kind of fun to see our material — the material we created — show up in Star Trek: The Next Generation and things like that. The whole mythos of the Klingons and the various clans of the Klingons and all that kind of stuff was originally in our product. But I also realized that I was giving away intellectual property to others. So we decided that what we wanted to do was create our own original game lines. BattleTech was the first of those original games, and it was an immediate success, which was quite flattering.

How did BattleTech differ from the other products that were on the market at that time?

At the time, the king of the heap was role-playing games. BattleTech tried to answer one of the issues that I’ve always had with role-playing games, which is a good role-playing game is completely dependent upon a quality gamemaster. And a gamemaster is a really hard thing to be. There are very few good gamemasters in the world, which means that very few good games are being played compared to the overall population.

The goal of BattleTech was to try to design a hybrid that would have the fictional association and intensity of a role-playing game, but the mechanics of a board game, so that it didn’t require a gamemaster. It was an interesting kind of twist on that, and people responded very strongly.

But the storytelling component remained very strong — at least there seem to be quite a few BattleTech novels out there.

Oh yeah. They’re on novel 58 or 59.

Did you plan that tie-in when you created the game?

Yes. We always believed in and were one of the innovators in game-related fiction. I always believed in depth of story, depth of universe. One of the things that BattleTech did first — and probably still does the best — is make sure that all the different media components of the BattleTech universe are part of a larger uber-story.

We plot out the fiction for BattleTech three years in advance on the “uber-side.” Then the novels, the games, the computer games, the comic books (when we were doing comic books) and so all are all in the same fictional point at the same fictional time — the same real time. So everybody knows where the story is going to be for whatever comes out for Christmas this year, and they’re telling stories within that larger story.

That kept our continuity together over what is now twenty years. It’s a big, sprawling space opera over that period of time. Storytelling was always a critically important component of each of the fictional universes we’ve done.

How does that relate to what you’re doing now with WizKids®?

Interesting question, because in some respects, when I started WizKids, it was almost the anti-print-based company. Our goal was to make everything tactile, to make everything immediate, to have fast play and not require the investment of reading big rule books, of reading big fiction and so on.

I was really hard-core about it, because it was such a break from the tradition of the industry and from that tradition which I, myself, helped to build. Now I was saying we have to break from it; we have to go 180 degrees.

I think I was so strong on the subject, because I didn’t think I would admit there was a middle ground. I needed designers and all the members of the team to make this big shift. It was really hard. Very few designers were willing to change that radically.

Now we’re a couple of years into it, and I’m softening. We’re doing the fiction to support these lines, especially the lines like BattleTech and the new line of MechWarrior novels. We are even supporting comic books and novels for Mage Knight and Heroclix.

Is Heroclix the Marvel universe game?

Heroclix is an interesting situation. Heroclix is WizKids’ brand for its superhero gaming system. We have now brought in the entire Marvel comic universe and the entire DC comics universe into the system. DC came out in September. It is the first time ever that both of those big fictionalized universes have a common system underneath them.

We also worked out relationships with Crossgen, Top Cow, Dark Horse and many other individual comics creators to bring all their characters into this common game system. It’s kind of like the entire comics world on one platform, and that’s one of the reasons I think people are so excited about Heroclix. But it’s not our world to tell stories in, because none of those characters are ours.

Could you describe the WizKids platform and why you chose to go with this system?

The reason was my kids. I have two boys, and a couple of years ago, when the oldest boy was 11 and the other one, nine, they became very motivated about miniature games, because like all males of all ages, they think all these figures out on the table are an incredibly cool thing, and they want to play God and manipulate them. They started to get really turned on by this, and they saved up all their money and went out and bought a big miniatures game. It cost $150.

They came home, and they couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t build the figures, because that required Superglue®, and that was too hard. They couldn’t paint the figures, because they really didn’t have the eye-hand dexterity at the time — or the patience.

They couldn’t figure out the rules, because the rules were 250 pages long, and the game would take hours to play. So their investment went to naught, and that was very telling to me. Basically, my kids, in not so many words, said to me: “Everything that you and the rest of the industry have designed is way too hard. You’re counting us out. We don’t want to be counted out. We’d rather be players, and you’re not letting us.”

That was like, wow. That was like a shock in the face. I’d been designing games for twenty years, and I never realized how exclusionary we were — and how stupid that was.

So I sat down and literally made a list of all the things that keep people out of this game that they want to play — cost, all the things. I said there’s got to be a way to solve those things. There’s got to be a way to eliminate these barriers so that these people who want to play games can.

The results of that were I knew the figures had to come pre-assembled; I knew they had to come painted, and I knew that the technology to do that existed, because of the state of action figures at the time. I had to do a whole bunch of research in China on how to build a mechanism to do that. But I knew you could do it.

It came down to the solution of the game system. One of the things that also bothered me about the miniature game systems that I developed before was there was all this record keeping.

There were all these cool figures on the table, but there were all these pieces of paper and pencils all over the place. You had to keep making marks. It was irritating. It got in the way of the suspension of disbelief and in the way of the socialization and the rapidity of the game. I wanted to find a way to avoid that.

I kept beating my head against this problem for about three months. One day, I remembered in the days before calculators, that we had a device in our graphics arts studio — which every studio had — called a proportion wheel. A proportion wheel is a rotary dial. You put the size you wanted the art to be on one side. The current size of the art was on the other, and the wheel would tell you what percentage to set the camera for.

I thought about that device and said, that’s the solution. The proportion wheel was a two-dimensional table on a circular base, and it was indexed so you could review it. From that, I sat down and made the Combat Wheel (r). I realized that not only did it solve the problem of how to encode all the information on the base of a figure, but also meant there was absolutely no need to reference the information in a rule book. This was the critical component in getting rid of those rule books.

Effectively, all those tables, which used to be all through the rule books are now on the bottom of every figure. It meant the figures could be sold in a collectible format, which was critical from a business standpoint, because the molds for these were very, very expensive. We needed to create a situation where we could offset the cost by the highest volume of figures.

It used to be that games were board games, and they were things you put away when you were 13 and only pulled out when you were really, really bored. Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons changed all that. People play role-playing games forever. What do you think is the key to their longevity?

I would start by saying that perspective we have in the United States is very different from the rest of the world. In Germany, for instance, gaming is a lifelong thing. Very sophisticated games are considered mass market properties and sold in huge numbers to Germans. In England, a man is considered odd if he doesn’t have a hobby, whereas in the United States, we consider adults who have hobbies a little odd. It’s as if they never grew up. We’ve always had a slightly different perspective on these things. I think the role-playing games have helped pierce the stereotype and brought gaming to a larger audience, because of the fictional involvement, because of the character association and the emotional attachment to the stories we are, ourselves, creating.

I also think role-playing games forced a larger socialization. This is an important component.

Before role-playing games, there was always a small, very loyal market for very elaborate board games — Avalon Hill, SBI, historical simulations using little cardboard tokens for creating World War II, etc. It was a hard thing to spread, because it was only two players.

While role-playing, all of a sudden, said, “You know what? You’re going to need one game master and six to eight players. You can have 40 players.” If you think of that in terms of how a network spreads, role-playing has a much greater growth potential, because instead of just dividing a cell, you are now multiplying. Each one of those people has the ability to bring in a great deal more people. So I think role-playing found a larger audience via that.

I think the socialization component is also very important, because one of the hardest things kids have is what to talk to other kids about. Adults have the same issues, frankly, which is where I think sports comes from. We’re afraid to talk about anything else, so sports becomes a common language.

Well, gamers have another language, and that is incredibly valuable when you’re a teenager. To have a common thread to talk about and a common activity to do together can really gel a community. The friends you make in that kind of activity are very long-lasting.

In 1987, I founded a company called Virtual Entertainment and built virtual reality centers around the world. They were big electronic centers where you would walk in and get into a cockpit, which would be networked to other cockpits. It was the first place the public could ever play a network game. This was long before the Internet and those kinds of things. These centers were the first exposure that people ever had to that. We built 26 of these things around the world.

I built the centers very much on the analogy of what people were doing on tabletops — trying to recreate that experience, only providing the audio-visual experience. What limits a lot of people from being involved in role-playing games is: one, the game master (as we discussed earlier), but two, there are a lot of people whose imagination muscles have become very weak. They all had imagination muscles when they were kids, but they let them atrophy. So visualizing a scene on their own and immersing themselves in the scene enough that they can problem solve within that context is very difficult to them.

So the goal of the cockpits was to provide the audio-visual stimulus. All you have to do is release yourself into that — suspend disbelief a little bit instead of a lot — and begin socializing, because it was still a very, very social kind of experience.

One of the things I would witness (and relate back to the tabletop) is what I call the “bus crash phenomenon.” Which is: you ride the bus to work every day, and the people sitting next to you are strangers. You never talk to them. The bus gets into an accident, and every one of those people on your bus is your best friend. You stand around for hours waiting to get the next bus or whatever, and you have to talk about this experience. Now you have a bond with these people who were complete strangers. You call them later and talk about it more.

The experiences in these virtual reality centers would be the same thing. Complete strangers would walk in. They’d have this common experience together, then we would bring them into a debriefing area, where they would witness the experience again. They would talk to each other, and they would all bond. That was one of the real values of the whole experience.

I think the same thing happens in gaming. You have these elaborate experiences, and they’re very emotional. They’re very high adrenalin, and they build friendships that last for years.

Anything you’d like to add?

I can express a frustration, which is gaming and gaming fiction is still considered a bad stepchild by a lot of individuals. I think that is a perception that is changing, but it needs to change faster.

I think that there is a feeling in Hollywood and in literary magazines that if it’s a story that came from a game, they can’t really consider it a very good story. We can’t consider it as literature. We can’t consider it for a movie. We can’t consider it as viable as a story that came from a book or from a comic. I think that’s a very linear mindset.

People have not really understood the differences between linear and interactive media — because all gaming, whether it’s electric or tabletop is an interactive form. Its storytelling is a different form of storytelling because of that. I think that some of these people haven’t yet started to appreciate the quality of storytelling that is taking place in these venues. I would ask people in those positions [in the moviemaking and literary establishment] would be more open to exploring these stories, because I think there is some great work being done in this industry.

Jean Marie Ward

In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, was published by Samhain Publishing in 2007.