Recently, a Game Design Challenge asked you to create a fantasy game for game development. Fantasy sports are one of the biggest games around, and what's interesting is many people don't consider them games or their players to be gamers.

The heart of fantasy sports lies in tying real-world performance of something (such as an athlete) to points. Players of fantasy sports have to gauge the real world in some way to win with their game, and that's what the best entries did in response to this challenge.

There are multiple ways to tie real-world performance to a fantasy game in the game industry. One way is to draft actual developers, and they can be rated by history. For example, Shigeru Miyamoto could be rated 10 in game design, where as Manveer Heir may be ranked 1. To get at these ratings, we can consider factors such as titles shipped, years of experience, and quality of titles (based on Metacritic scores, for example), to name a few.

The difficulty is how to take regular performance measure in an industry that doesn't give frequent updates or metrics for measuring output. If Miyamoto's next game is the worst game in the world, and Heir is working on the next smash-hit, players won't know or get credit for it. As a result, scores may become too dependent on past history instead of the future. Fantasy sports, after all, are all about predicting the future.

Another way to tie real-world performance is to look at the world from the development studio's perspective. Here you can choose studios and their quality and sales numbers can be used for rankings. The potential issue is the lag time between games. The number of studios that would need to be drafted could be major and make the game last a lot longer than many other sports. However, it would also give players a reason to research deeply. Maybe Valve isn't the best draft pick, because its game releases are often far apart. Maybe a company like Telltale Games, with episodic releases on a monthly basis, is a better value for winning. There are a lot of ways to go deep by valuing talent on the development level.

An offshoot of this idea is to draft games instead of development studios. Choose what games you think will perform well in the next few months, and maybe every few months future releases are up for grabs.

Going a step above that, one could look at the game publishers themselves. Stock price, sales numbers, number of releases, quality of product, Game Developer magazine's annual "Top 20 Publishers" ranking, and more could be used to rate the companies on a regular basis for scoring purposes. Much like development studios, it may take a while to get scores given the nature of game releases, but having to choose an actual publisher to draft could make this a very business-conscience game. Much like how Fantasy Baseball is the best fantasy game for pure stat geeks, a Fantasy Game Development revolving around publishers may be the best choice for those interested in the pure business side of the industry.

There are other ways to think about the problem, and you didn't have to limit yourself to the ones presented here, as the following Best Entries illustrate.

Best Entries
Cassandra Yukimoto, Winning Portfolio (see page 2)
Cassandra Yukimoto's idea, Winning Portfolio, got to the heart of fantasy sports -- trading, drafting, and real world performance impacting the game. And in describing her idea, she split the task into two parts: the game itself ("the what" as she calls it) and her explanation and defense of the idea ("the why"), which paid attention to her reasons for bending some implicit rules of the genre and the challenge. In particular, we appreciated this: "Given the constraints enumerated above, I don't think it's possible to produce a ‘fantasy game design league' that allows players to staff their own game studio or development team with industry names and have success be determined by live, real-world stats in a meaningful way."

Patrick Mousel, Student, Flashpoint Academy, Quadruple A (see page 3)
In Quadruple A, players are marketers and publishers, and the ranking and rating of game titles occurs by category. Focusing the game in this way helped Patrick Mousel isolate measurable factors that could be compared in a competitive but fair way.

E. McNeill, Dartmouth College, VG Mogul (see page 4)
Similar to Patrick Mousel's concept, E. McNeill's game idea tightened the realm of possibilities by restricting what will be measured in the game, namely, "all the video games that are scheduled to be released in the next month." Whether a one-month window would hold up in play tests is unknown, but setting strict parameters from the start a good way to tackle the problem at hand.

Honorable Mentions
Rafael Luciano, North Fort Myers High School, Dev Cycle (see page 5)
High school student Rafael Luciano showed a clear general understanding of the genre of fantasy sports-style games. We would have liked to have seen a little more detail in terms of the scoring (are the developers' weekly salaries static or subject to change -- if so, how, and if not does the game have too few factors?), but all in all, this was a strong solution to the challenge.

Joel M. Viernes, Hawaii Community College Hilo, Fantasy Game Development 2008 (see page 6)
Fantasy Game Development 2008 was another strong solution to this challenge, which added an interesting twist in the form of "Legendary IPs," a neat idea that we felt deserved an honorable mention.