When to give up

I think only about 33% of my plans are successful. I have always been a hit or miss kind of guy and that is okay with me. I learn best by failing so I am coming to accept it without letting it discourage me from continuing forward. I think it is good to live by the old adage that a good baseball player fails two-thirds of the time at the plate.

But the question at hand is, when is it appropriate to call it quits on a particular experiment. The relative difference of last month to the month previous has really interrupted my plans for the highest-low game, but I am not convinced it will ever work the way I want it. On the other hand, I know my workers a lot better now, and think that I totally misjudged the incentives. What my workers want more than anything else is TIME OFF, not a parking spot or a gift certificate.

Secondly, I misjudged the complexity of the game (as I have already mentioned in an earlier post) and perhaps the SUBTLETY as well.

Are these brief observations enough to rationalize scrapping the game altogether? (By scrapping I mean, never mention it again because by this point nobody cares and everyone tunes me out anyway). Or is it worth trying to refine it and adapt it for the last month of the summer? Designing management games is not like designing regular board games that can be playtested quickly, refined, and pulled out again after some tweaking, so how can I playtest new hypotheses?

Some game designers are really game engineers. They can visualize beforehand how all the rules will fit together, which saves them a lot of time from playtesting ideas that would never work. I value this method of design, but I have not yet developed the ability to do it that way. As I said before, I learn by failure, and I will test 30 ideas as long as each one is new and exciting and I am convinced that among the 30 there is at least one winning combination.