Sinister Things

I do not watch many reality shows, but I do like Project Runway, Top Chef, and Chopped. And I was an Iron Chef fan from back when it only showed on local channel 26 in Japanese with English subtitles. Though I had caught bits of previous seasons of the Food Network’s The Next Food Network Star show, it didn’t grab me. This year, with season 3 of Top Chef Masters completed, it was time to pick up another food-based competition show and I thought I’d give Food Network Star (“The Next” inexplicably missing) a shot.

Compared to “pure” cooking competitions like Top Chef, FNS is an odd duck. Yes, they want the competitors to be good cooks, but they also want them to be personalities. A contestant is just as likely to fall for failing a camera test than making a bad dish. On Chopped, the judges might give a pass to a chef who makes an interesting, if flawed, dish. On FNS, it is the chef themselves who need to be interesting.

More so than any of these other shows, FNS is a popularity contest. On Top Chef, the winner can be a complete douche as long as the flavor is there. FNS‘s focus on camera work and personality makes complete sense because the winner will be getting a television show, rather than a fat check and a spread in Food & Wine magazine. Being the best cook is simply not going to cut it.

One of the difficulties of food competitions is that we can’t taste the food. On Project Runway, we can at least see the designs and judge for ourselves. With food, you just have to trust the judges’ palates. And this is where FNS works–we can be on equal footing with the judges because there is a criteria beyond the food. In other shows, my wife and I will root for or against competitors based on their on-camera personae and comments anyway.

The irony is that I’m unlikely to watch the show that comes out of this competition, unless the winner is the second coming of Alton Brown or host their own competition show.

Extra: I caught the first(?) episode of Extreme Chef. I liked the premise, which seemed to mix the most horrifying Quickfires from Top Chef with a Chopped-like format. However, it was trying so hard to be eXtreme(!) that it fell flat. Reality shows are known for their melodramatic, artificial tension-building, they took it too far.

In the first challenge of the episode, the main ingredient was rattlesnake. So far, so good. To keep it eXtreme(!), they had the chefs fetch their rattlesnakes from wooden crates filled with snakes. All this was very eXtreme until I quickly realized that the snakes were constrictors with rattle sound effects added in post-production. The actual rattlesnake carcasses where in burlap sacks. Lame.

Competitions shows are made by their judges, in my opinion. I would much rather hear their comments on the food than most anything the competitors have to say. Here again, Extreme Chef fails because the one or two judges were simply dull. The focus on eXtreme(!) physical challenges and X-factors (trademarked Marvel comics) is not enough to keep this show interesting.

The other day, my friend Merwin and I played 51st State, a card game about rebuilding in post-apocalyptic world. He had read the rules, but we spent much of the game figuring things out as we went. By the end of the game (which I won, btw), I think we had figured them out except for a few nagging doubts about how we interpreted some specific rules. But before we got there, we had to muddle through the iconography (learning the difference between “=”, “=>”, and “–>”, for example) and jargon (resources vs. workers vs. contacts, etc.). This made the first few turns pretty painful. My first thoughts when I headed home were how I would have explained and taught the rules.

I like writing rules and instructions, whether for a game, product, or business practice. You want them to be clear and concise, but not overly simplified. You have to know what needs to be explicitly stated and what can be assumed (though usually erring on the side of the former). Examples should be used to clarify edge-cases and not just to reiterate the basic points (that likely don’t need examples). Illustrations and diagrams are almost always a good idea.

Many games benefit from having a cheat sheet or player reference which summarize the key rules and can be used in play without having to hunt through the entire rule book. Very often, I’ll make my own if a game does not come with one. If I cannot fit it on a single page, the game is probably too complex. The same is true in product management. After writing the lengthy, meaty product specification, I will also create a brief product presentation. If I can’t get my key product message across in a few slides, then there is a problem, either with the message or the product itself.

The biggest challenge when teaching a game is that everyone learns differently. Some learn best by reading the rules for themselves; others do better when taught (and our group has one of each: Brian and Merwin, respectively). Some people like to have all the definitions and concepts stated at the beginning while others require a more naturalistic approach where concepts are explained as they are needed. While those with an engineering mindset might prefer the former, it can make for awfully dry reading and when introducing a product to sales and marketing, the latter might be best.

A couple of weeks ago, our group played Troyes. As is typical, Merwin owned the game, but I’m the one who read the rules. But not having the game in front of me sometimes hinders my understanding. In particular, Troyes has a final rule about end-of-game scoring that I just could not wrap my head around. And indeed, neither did the other players when I read it verbatim. But when we played and went through the motions of calculating the score, it made sense. I’m still not sure it is a good rule, but that is a discussion for another post. The point is that sometimes now matter how well written the instructions are, sometimes you just need to do it before you really understand it. This is the value of hands-on training; face-to-face interaction and actually using the product or process can bring insight that reading a document cannot.

I often complain that cooperative games (Pandemic, et al) feel too much like the type of crisis management that I do at work and I don’t want my hobby to feel like work. But writing and teaching, whether games or products or processes, are areas where my hobby and professional career overlap happily.

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Yet further evidence that people suck. Even if we don’t know it.