On Facebook recently, my friend Miranda Horner — an accomplished game editor who works primarily on Dungeons & Dragons for Wizards of the Coast — posted this:

I want my chosen industry, the tabletop gaming industry, to be so successful overall that it can afford to take people away from the computer gaming industry instead of keep feeding them in to the computer gaming industry.

How do we, all the gaming professionals out there, make that happen? Is it even possible?

The assumption behind her observation and question goes to the question of making the tabletop business more “grown-up” — a place where real, gainful, fulfulling careers can be had. Setting aside that there are some tabletop jobs like that even now, I think that making those opportunities even more widespread is absolutely possible. Three key ideas come most forcefully to mind.

First, most of the publishers I’ve worked for in the past do very little to establish and follow good creative and publishing practices. Editorial change-tracking, disciplined end-to-end text styling (character and paragraph styles, please!), sensible data organization and archiving, solid file-naming conventions… All of these practices are well-known among professional creative organizations across the world. Disciplined processes eliminate friction from the publishing process. They make the products better and they make publishers more nimble as new opportunities that arise from technological advances and market changes. Small publishers, especially, in the tabletop industry, should be better than this.

Second, the tabletop gaming industry doesn’t do a very good job of sales and marketing, especially compared to other businesses run by grown-ups. The number of publishers with detailed — and useful — databases of their fans, customers, and retail outlets is very small. The number of those companies that use them effectively is even smaller. The tabletop game industry should get a lot better at this. “Salesman” does not mean “order taker,” and “marketer” does not mean “blogger.”

Finally, the tabletop business should be aware of and promote the advantages that it has over other creative businesses. Unlike the computer game business, the tabletop business can bring real, playable products to market quickly, and each contributor can make a much more substantial contribution, than anything that all but the smallest mobile app publishers and Facebook-style Flash publishers can match on the digital side. Designing tabletop games can be promoted as much a creative and lifestyle choice as a financial one, even while diligent and disciplined publishers strive to make the financial rewards more competitive.

Long, deep treatises and business plans could be written to answer Miranda’s question much more fully (and a deeper debate could be had about whether some of the assumptions that are part of it are completely warranted), but these three ideas would be an excellent beginning to the question of how to make the tabletop game business a more grown-up industry.

In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft’s journey from survivor to action star to heroine (or antiheroine, but we’ll get to that) takes her through horrors visceral and terrestrial, mundane and extraordinary. But her grim and grueling adventure isn’t quite or only survival horror. At the end of her ordeal—the end of her transformation—she is a survivor, yes, and she is more than that. But what? A badass? An icon? A hero?

Tomb Raider is about fear and bravery, growth and change, in its gameplay, its story, its characters. The game’s marketing campaign (and, indeed, the game itself) tells us “a survivor is born,” but is that true? What does it mean?

That theme of survival is woven into virtually every aspect of Tomb Raider’s narrative, from its abrupt beginning to its stirring end. Every character is a riff on the theme. The whole experience is a dramatization of the challenges and costs of survival. It’s bloody wonderful.

Massive spoilers from here on out.

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Geek & Sundry’s fun and fantastic series about games and gamers, TableTop, is returning for a new season of episodes as soon as April 4th. This is wonderful and welcome news. Host and producer Wil Wheaton hints at some of the games and guests to feature on the show over at Wil Wheaton dot Net today, so go and get ready for future eps now. Onward.

In a post sketching out an Indiana Jones game I’d like to play, I mentioned that I’d like to see it incorporate “conversations that count.” This isn’t an innovative idea, I know, except maybe for the implication that it fits into the kind of game we’d want from Indiana Jones or Lara Croft or Nathan Drake. To me, conversations with meaningful — even if modest — ramifications in gameplay go a long way to adding contextual nuance and player ownership over the game’s narrative.

Some games call for rich conversation webs with major, persistent ramifications. The Mass Effects and Walking Deads of the world seem to make great use of dialogue choices and effects. I don’t think what I’m seeking in my action/adventure games is revolutionary but its underutilized so let’s talk about it some more.

Weirdly, to my mind, conversations are considered the stuff of RPGs. If Mass Effect 3 didn’t have robust dialogue, it’d be a shooter with character-customization mechanics. When you add NPC interaction and consequences to dialogue choices, that’s often considered an inherited feature from, or defining feature of, RPGs.

Why aren’t inter-character interactions a feature of more narrative games? Why aren’t they just a feature of play?

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Indy and the Idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark

I’ve enjoyed a slew of Indiana Jones video games, like The Fate of Atlantis and The Emperor’s Tomb, but I haven’t played the Indiana Jones video game I really want right now. It doesn’t exist. Yet with Uncharted and Tomb Raider paying homage in some ways and setting precedents in others, I think the time is right for a new Indiana Jones video-game adventure.

Here’s what I want an Indiana Jones game to be: an adventure game played in the third-person style of Lara Croft and Nathan Drake with rich exploration of engrossing environments, puzzle-based combat, dialogue scenes that count, and rollicking set pieces. The idea is not to recreate the forward momentum of an Indiana Jones movie, because the movies do that already, but to create a uniquely interactive experience that draws on cinematic techniques and ludic mechanisms in equal measure.

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