Tuesday, July 15, 2025

TBM: Ep 3 EXTRAS

Yay! Everyone loves talking about Aristotle and some random Renaissance guy, right? Just me? 

Unity is why some things feel well-designed. <- point I should have made in the episode. 

Now is a good time to complain that Wikipedia has something weird going on on the design principles page. Instead of Lauer and Pentak or some other well regarded source for structuring the ideas, it looks like it might be some professor's personal work getting shared? Not sure because I can read all of the cited sources to find out. But the list is super weird. (I'm also not checking to see if it's still this way, because who has that kind of time.)

I really love the classical unities in spite of the fact that they are: 1) not classical, 2) not used much in theatre anymore. I'm not a big fan of plays that get a little too disconnected from a sense of time and location. 

A lot of people who want to apply narrative rules to their projects (games or otherwise) will bring up learning about screen writing. I think that makes sense for video games, but not board games. Let's learn more theatre because the crossover traits make the pairing more natural. 

Hobbies or interests mentioned: theatre history

Monday, July 14, 2025

TBM: Ep 3 script

In an attempt to transition out of hiatus, I will be posting the scripts of my Thinking Beyond Mechanisms segment. I don't plan to edit them, so there may be some differences between the audio and written versions. Take the audio as the correct version. I also plan on offering some additional thoughts in separate posts—commentary on the episodes, if you will.

Ep 3  Classical Design 

Welcome to Thinking Beyond Mechanisms, an in depth look at some of the other aspects of game design, the segment that looks at some of the theory of board game design that goes beyond what typically gets covered when we start learning how to design games. My name is Sarah Shipp and today I want to talk about my favorite principle of design theory, which is unity. 


Unity is a design quality that occurs when all elements work together as one harmonious composition. In other words, all the elements feel like they belong in the same world. A unified composition will feel like one piece rather than a bunch of small elements stuck together. 


Aristotle is credited with inventing the concept of unity. In writing about unity in tragedy plays, he wrote "the components ought to be so firmly compacted that if any one of them is shifted to another place, the whole is loosened up and dislocated; for an element whose addition or subtraction makes no perceptible difference is not really a part of the whole." That’s also good advice for board game design.


David Lauer and Stephen Pentak list unity as one of five basic design principles in their book Design Basics, a popular text book for visual art and design classes. Within the visual art realm, unity still refers to elements forming a cohesive whole, whether that whole is a Renaissance painting or a Jackson Pollack. 


If you study theare, however, in addition to Aristotle’s definition for unity which hails from the classical era, you will be introduced to what are known as the classical unities, although they come from the neoclassical era. In 1570, Lodovico Castelvetro codified what became known as the classical unities of theatre: unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time. This meant that the story of a play needed to occur in one location, during one day, and be about one thing. This was supposed to prevent audience confusion about what was taking place on the stage. 

The purpose of the classical unities was to make sure the audience knew what was going on. This philosophy spawned a tradition of plays set in a single room, frequently a drawing room. One of the most well-known adherents to the classical unities was Moliere, perhaps best known for the comedy Tartuffe. These day, most plays don’t stick to the classical unities as rigid rules. Instead, theatre students are taught the unities to illustrate the importance of not confusing your audience with regards to where, when, and why the action on the stage is taking place. 

This is also useful in board game design. Our players need to know why they are performing the actions of the game. To design a more thematic game, there needs to be unity of action between the mechanics and the theme. As I discussed in the first Thinking Beyond Mechanisms episode, the explicit theme needs to match the mechanical theme. Players need to know who they are and what they want in the game. 

In board game design, unity of place and unity of time are somewhat less important to player confusion but still play an important role in crafting the play experience. Like in modern theatre, board games don’t have to be set in a single geographic place but can include multiple locations. For me, unity of place includes setting but also world physics and character physics. 

Setting is where an event takes place. World physics is the manifestation of the rules of that world such as gravity, propulsion, heat, or visibility. Character physics usually manifests as direction of movement and speed but could also be inventory size, strength, need to eat, etc. Adding mechanics that represent world physics thematically is a way to deepen the play experience. For example, the flow of gameplay in SuperSkill Pinball is highly informed by the physics of actual pinball tables. Creating a sense of place in board games can involve so much more than illustration. 

Time behaves differently in games than it does in more linear entertainment. The date and time that certain events occur to characters in the game world is less of a concern in board games, because board games depict abstracted worlds where the same events can recur over and over. However, the perception of time passing is a valuable tool that affects how a player feels while playing a game. Unity of time in board games is about pacing, rhythm, and scale, not about game length or linear narrative. A frantic, real time game should have a theme that matches the rhythm of play. How we theme our games should be informed by the pace of gameplay. 

Castelvetro’s unities are a good starting place when developing a theme. Who are the players and what are they doing in the game? What are the actions and goals? Where does the action take place, and how is that represented in the design? What is the timeframe or scale of the game? Do the actions take place over centuries or seconds? How does that scale inform the pace of gameplay? Does the rhythm of play match the theme? Should it? Which thematic elements might need to be sacrificed to usability? 

Aristotle’s unity, on the other hand, is a good principle for development of a design. Which elements can be taken out without affecting the overall experience? Which elements are distracting from the experience? Do you need to add an element to glue two parts of the design together? 

Both concepts of unity can inform how we design games. A unified design reduces confusion and increases usability. It tells a more cohesive story. If a game has mechanical unity, all the mechanisms fit tightly together, and are probably easy to teach and remember. If a game has thematic unity, the actions of the game will tell an emergent story that lines up with the explicit theme.

So, which type of unity is my favorite principle of design? As much as I like the thematic implications of the neoclassical unities, I’m with Aristotle on this one. A good design is a unified design.

For more ways of thinking beyond mechanisms, you can visit my blog at shipp board games dot blog spot dot com or catch future episodes of thinking beyond mechanisms on ludology. 

Sunday, July 13, 2025

Guest Post: A Story of Mechanical Consequences

In my household, my husband, T. Nikolai Voloshko, is the resident video game expert. We have lots of discussions about crossover principles between video and board games. Yes, this story is about the unintended mechanical and thematic consequences of exploiting mechanics, but it is also just a really funny story. —Sarah

Hello. I'm the living husband of the designer of Deadly Dowagers—a game about killing your husband in order to inherit his stuff so you can marry someone richer—and I'm here to talk with you about unintended consequences of design choices in games.

One video game, specifically; Medieval Dynasty. If you're unfamiliar with this iron age cottagecore gem, no worries. While a complete lack of context would undoubtedly make this entire debacle considerably funnier, it might also make me appear villainous. Therefore, in the spirit of heading off unintended consequences, let's lay a little foundational knowledge to build the very silly looking structure of this story.

In this game, you play as a young gentleman who has escaped tragedy with little more than an oat roll in his pocket and the ability to learn new things. You meet with some people who help you out, and begin establishing your own village in a pretty lush but fairly sparsely populated area in a fictional medieval area, which you may further populate by inviting wanderers at campfires in other villages. Your character gains experience points in various skills by performing actions related to these skills; you get better at chopping down trees by chopping down trees, you get better at planting and harvesting crops by planting and harvesting crops, and you get better at smithing tools by smithing tools. As you level up in these skills, you gain skill points that you can use to purchase specific perks that give you some benefit. This could be a perk that keeps your tools from degrading as quickly when you use them, or a perk that helps you harvest more of a certain resource such as ore from mineral deposits or meat from animals. In the case of the diplomacy skill, there is a perk which can be selected multiple times which adjusts buying and selling prices in your favor.

There is also an achievement for getting to level ten—the maximum level—in diplomacy, having one million coins on your person. I love getting achievements, so of course I decided I needed to figure out how to get a cool million coins. After a little consideration of the game's economy, I realized this was an Achievement with a capital 'A'. You really, really have to grind in order to make it happen, and one of the critical parts of my plan to make it happen was to develop my character's diplomacy skill in order to maximize the amount of money I could get.  The problem with this was that there are few ways to really grind out actions that gain experience points in diplomacy; there are quests you can do which help, and everything you buy or sell gives you a very small amount of experience points, but there are only so many quests you can do per season, and it can be tough to sell a sufficient number of goods to nearby merchants in order to deplete their cash reserves for the season—especially early in the game. I discovered, however, that there was a way to increase my experience points in diplomacy which could be repeated several times daily, (by default, there are three days per season; it sounds silly but it works for the pacing of the game) did not cost a penny, and occasionally provided me with absolutely solid gold pickup lines that I could repeat to my wife—flirting with eligible young ladies.

The only negative that I could find was that there were a maximum of three eligible ladies per village. There are ten villages on the map on which I was playing, and you could not be assured that there would even be a single eligible lady there. Sometimes there was a mix of men and women around the campfire where eligible folk linger, or sometimes it was only men. Because of the constraints of the game, my character was unable to flirt with perfectly eligible men during dialogue, and every attempt I made to do so by doing things such as picking flowers or making very manly-looking items like stone knives and then dropping these gifts upon them was met by vacant stares and a complete lack of experience points.  I did, however, find it rewarding to watch the charming way the game's model for a bunch of dandelions tumbles over a character's face, down their legs, and into the campfire. None of that brought me closer to my goal, unfortunately, and the process of running around to each village was time consuming. I could not very well both exploit this passively renewable well of experience points while also reliably acquiring goods to sell.

So I formed a cult.

You may recall I mentioned earlier that you can invite wanderers at campfires to join you. As long as you provide a house in which they may sleep, along with food, water, and firewood, they will more or less happily work any task to which you assign them; harvesting lumber, hunting animals, working farms, you name it. If you assign an eligible woman and an eligible man to the same house, after a time they will marry and produce offspring, who will eventually grow into contributing members of your society. You can flirt with a woman—and therefore gain diplomacy experience points—as long as you and she are both within ten years of age of each other and not married to someone else... so I decided to simply not invite eligible men into my village. Before long, I had no fewer than thirteen eligible ladies in my village, all tilling, hunting, smithing, mining, and doing everything a man could do.  As great as I like to think I am in terms of village planning, it became a bit of a chore to locate these women throughout the day in order to flirt with them until they were tired of me, but I noticed that they would all sit down on benches or chairs in the mornings before work, and in the evenings after work.  To make things easier in my pursuit of grinding out my diplomacy experience points, I placed several benches for them to sit upon.  These benches were all situated around a bell that I made and hung from a little wooden tower about thirty feet tall. This entire setup was right next to the kitchen, so that they could smell what I was cooking. I do not think that the game actually has scent-based mechanics, but every morning around seven in the morning when I was cooking potage, I would turn around to see a gaggle of eligible young ladies all sitting around the bell with wholly neutral expressions on their faces, saying things like, "I don't want to be lonely anymore," and "I know not every marriage is built on love, but at this point I'd love to have a loveless one, at least." I took this as my cue to immediately flirt with each of them in turn. While it did take some time, and occasionally the bell inexplicably rang on its own, signalling the beginning of the workday and therefore the departure of anyone not engaged in conversation, all of my village's inhabitants would return to the seating area in the evening. Anyone I missed in the morning, I could flirt with at night.

This went on for eight years in the game. I continued to invite more eligible ladies to my village in order to maximize the number of diplomacy experience points I could easily gain per day, and eventually I reached my goal of achieving level ten in diplomacy. I remember that moment well; it was the last day of winter, and I was making potage—as is my custom. To celebrate, I hopped onto my horse and rode to every village on the map, and acquired husbands for every single lady in my village.  This was more of a task than it might first have seemed; most of the ladies in my village were eight years older than they had been when I first invited them, and as previously mentioned you cannot pair someone with a potential spouse with an age difference of more than ten years. I accomplished my goal for all of the women but one—so my character married her.

This created a boom in my workforce. Literally overnight, the population of my village doubled. The women in my village had been working their respective craft for eight years straight in most cases, and had become quite skilled. While their husbands were not apprentices per se, their level of skill may as well have earned them this title, but they contributed to the wealth and welfare of my village all the same. Everything was going very well, and I was steadily getting closer to earning one million coins.

Then, about a year later, each of these women gave birth.

In the game, when a female villager produces offspring, she ceases to work, and takes care of the child full time for two years. This is an excellent long term investment, because the child inherits what appears to be the average level of skill between their father and mother.  Hilariously, I could look at the character sheet for the infant and see that they were more skilled than their dad in many areas, although they would not be capable of actually utilizing those skills in workplaces until eighteen game years passed. In the short term, however, all of the skilled workers were no longer eligible to work—all of them. Literally overnight, the workforce of my village was cut in half, and because the remaining half of the workforce was half as skilled by comparison, the production output of my village came screeching to a near halt. Suddenly, instead of liesurely roaming around and admiring the fantastic foliage effects in the game, I had to buckle down and pick up the slack. I had to till the fields, make the fertilizer, smith the tools, cut the trees, dig out the ore—everything.  This created a cascading effect of systems failures; the mine workers could not produce enough ore because there were not enough of them and none of them were skilled, which bottlenecked production at the smithy, which choked the lumber industry and the agricultural sector depending on the tools the smithy produced, which created a firewood crisis wherein people were burning all of the sticks that the smithy needed to use for tool handles. The kitchen could not produce prepared meals quickly enough, so people were eating raw foods like whole heads of cabbages without anything to go with it. Prepared food goes a longer way than raw food does, and I could see that my village was beginning to head down the path to famine.  None of the men in my village were good enough to do their wives' jobs, and I had the diplomacy to show for it.

Game years later, I am still feeling the effects of this occurrence, which is largely a little sheepishness on account of the fact that I hold an ARM (Associate in Risk Management) designation, yet failed to anticipate the personnel risk which accompanied the decisions I made in this game. While it is clear that everything that occurred was baked into the mechanics of the game, I cannot imagine that the game designers anticipated it might have happened on the scale in which it did.  If I am mistaken in this, however, then I am quite proud of the developers for punishing people for forming cults.

[NB, the game mode described above is the original version of Medieval Dynasty. There is a newer version where you can play as a woman as well as a man.]

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

TBM: Ep 2 EXTRAS

Immersion was the vocabulary term that got me interested in exploring board game terminology at a deeper level. Fortunately, Gordon Calleja has already written the book on this topic. Unfortunately, the book is video game specific, once you get past the intro.

Because I didn't invent the terms or definitions that I talk about in this episode, they are the ones I feel the most pedantic toward. Maybe designers could speak in terms of thematic immersion and system immersion? But hearing anyone talk about how immersive a game is tends to just make me cringe. 

There was somebody online who objects to my use of the word agential and preferred if I would say mechanical. Geez, that will definitely make the nuance of meaning clearer and not be confused with any other uses of the word mechanical. I actually worked to not overuse the word mechanical in my book, otherwise it would have been tacked onto a dozen different terms: theme, actions, structures, goals, strategies, etc. 

Anyway, I stand behind my points in this episode, more than probably some of the upcoming ones.

Monday, July 7, 2025

TBM: Ep 2 script

In an attempt to transition out of hiatus, I will be posting the scripts of my Thinking Beyond Mechanisms segment. I don't plan to edit them, so there may be some differences between the audio and written versions. Take the audio as the correct version. I also plan on offering some additional thoughts in separate posts—commentary on the episodes, if you will.

Ep 2  What is Immersion?

Welcome to Thinking Beyond Mechanisms, an in depth look at some of the other aspects of game design, the segment that looks at some of the theory of board game design that goes beyond what typically gets covered when we start learning how to design games. My name is Sarah Shipp and today I want to talk about that ubiquitous term, immersion.


Gamers praise games for being immersive. Designers pitch their games as immersive. But do we all mean the same thing when we use the term? Turns out, we don’t. In his book, In Game: From Immersion to Incorporation, Gordon Calleja differentiates between two types of immersion: absorption and transportation. 


Absorption has to do with a narrowed focus of attention. Any game can be absorbing, so this definition expands the number of games that could be considered immersive. Absorption is the framework for immersion that people use when they bring up flow theory. Flow theory is the psychological description of a phenomenon wherein people may enter higher performing states of consciousness due to focused attention. This state is more likely to occur in games where the challenge of play is only slightly higher than the player’s ability level. 


Other terms that could stand in for absorption are engagement and resonance. Gordon Calleja refers to his model of immersion as the player engagement model. In his model, he examines different qualities of video games that can create player engagement. My definition of resonance is a combination of familiar elements and an unexpected twist minus any chaff or filler. I’ll delve more deeply into resonance in a future episode.


Immersion as absorption should be a familiar concept to you, but you probably recognize that this isn’t how many people use the word immersion. Let’s now turn to the topic of immersion as transportation. 


What is transportation? The term transportation comes from the literary concept of narrative transportation. When you read a book and are mentally transported into the world of the story, that is narrative transportation. Similarly, board games can transport players thematically. I call this version of transportation thematic transportation, because games do not have to have a written narrative in order to be transportive. 


For example, the hybrid party and video game, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, is highly transportive, without containing any story chapters like a narrative adventure game would. Games can make use of both traditional narrative transportation and non-narrative thematic transportation. 


Games will be more transportive when their themes are well-integrated into the mechanics, which is a topic for another day. Games can also benefit from thematic resonance, which is to say familiar themes with unexpected twists. I should mention that in this case, familiarity doesn’t mean ‘common board game themes’ but rather subjects that are easily recognizable by your intended audience. 


Last time, I mentioned inherently abstract mechanics, which have to be overcome for a game to feel thematic. Oftentimes, the most abstract mechanics are the ones required for upkeep of the game state but have no real interaction with the game world. When designing for transportation, only those mechanisms that interact with the game world will aid immersion. 


When abstract mechanisms are interspersed with thematic mechanisms, the result can be prevent an immersive experience. My preferred method is to silo the abstract mechanisms away from the thematic ones. To explain why I do that, I must first mention Gil Hova’s model for thematic integration. 


In his model, he defines three roles: the player, the avatar, and the agent. The avatar is the narrative representation of the player in the game. The player interfacing with the avatar is what creates transportation. The agent is the mechanical representation of the player in the game. When the avatar and the agent overlap, the mechanics are thematic. 


However, abstract mechanics are almost always necessary in a game. I describe these mechanisms as purely agential in reference to Hova’s model. When possible, assigning agential mechanisms to their own separate phase or phases can help with immersion. Why does this work?


We have the innate ability tolerate brief pauses in a given state of emotion without leaving that state entirely. A common example is actors pausing for audience laughter, because for the audience no time seems to have passed while they are laughing. We can incorporate agential pauses into gameplay that allow the game to function but don’t materially damage immersion. 


However, mixing agential mechanisms with thematic mechanisms can prevent players entirely from achieving a sense of transportation. Players must have a certain level of consistent contact with the game world in order to feel transported, which agential mechanisms can interrupt. 


Transportation, when you look at it, is simply a very specific type of absorption. Fittingly, designing for transportation requires very specific considerations compared to designing for absorption more generally. Both are worthy goals of design. But they aren’t exactly the same thing. 


One of my hobbies is to listen to board game folks talk about immersion and try to determine which type of immersion they mean. For instance, Gil Hova’s model is transportation-focused. More importantly, there is a tangible benefit to knowing which type of immersion you are trying to achieve in your own designs. 


If you are trying to achieve absorption you will likely need to focus on creating interesting puzzles that will challenge your intended audience. If your goal is transportation, you will need to focus on integrating an interesting theme with your mechanics while paying attention to any agential mechanisms. 


For more ways of thinking beyond mechanisms, you can visit my blog at shipp board games dot blog spot dot com or catch future episodes of thinking beyond mechanisms on ludology. 

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

TBM: Ep 1 EXTRAS

Ok, episode one. I had to record this one twice, once before I got green lit to join Ludology and once after I bought a podcasting mic. I tried to fake a pop filter for the first recording with panty hose. It did not work. I will not apologize for the audio quality of the published segments, but know that I know that it's not the best. 

So, the point I make in this episode conflicts me, because the structure of implicit and explicit theme doesn't quite map to the structure of core gameplay, baked-in theme, and opt-in theme that I describe in my book. Sigh. At some point I should reconcile the two systems. 

I think we can start accepting that certain terms exist without giving their origin story. I'm against giving the history of ludonarrative dissonance every time the term comes up. 

I have an unhealthy obsession with the theme of Love Letter and how it could be fixed. I would prefer a simple rule change, although a lore change would also work. 

King of Tokyo should theme the 1,2,3 on the dice to how many civilians you eat. Then the game is perfectly thematic. 

Hobbies and interests shout outs in this ep: drawing class

Monday, June 30, 2025

TBM: Ep 1 script

In an attempt to transition out of hiatus, I will be posting the scripts of my Thinking Beyond Mechanisms segment. I don't plan to edit them, so there may be some differences between the audio and written versions. Take the audio as the correct version. I also plan on offering some additional thoughts in separate posts—commentary on the episodes, if you will.

Beyond Theme Versus Mechanics


Welcome to Thinking Beyond Mechanisms, an in depth look at some of the other aspects of game design. My name is Sarah Shipp and I want to use this segment to look at some of the theory of board game design that goes beyond what typically gets covered when we start learning how to design games. Why is it important to learn more theory if you already have a good grasp of mechanical design? A lot of how we design is affected by how we think. When we learn new ways of thinking about design, our design process is affected. 


If you have ever taken a drawing class, you might have started with drawing exercises that focus on how you see an object and lessons on how to perceive that object for the purposes of drawing it. A lot of learning to draw is learning new ways of thinking about what we see. You’re unlikely to advance very far in life drawing without these lessons. 


There are similar lessons to learn in board game design. Unfortunately, very little published board game design theory exists outside of mechanics and math. I’ve spent the past several years reading and writing about board game design theory, and I’d like to share some of the things I’ve discovered. While I sometimes drift into the philosophical, my goal is to outline ways of thinking about game design that are useful to designers. 


My particular area of focus recently has been around theme and the integration of theme into mechanics. Today I want to talk about the most common question in game design: theme first or mechanics first. I’ll explain why I think this is a false dichotomy and what I think is a more helpful way to think about theme when designing games. 


I see a lot of designers who create a whole fantasy world, then search for ways to gameify it. Even more often, there are designers who design whole games before looking for a theme to add to it. And of course there are designers who develop theme and mechanics concurrently. I am an advocate of doing whichever method works for you. 


But I think that regardless of your approach, there are ways to think about theme and mechanics that can improve your skill as a designer. The question becomes then not theme first or mechanics first but how does theme interact with mechanics to produce the gameplay experience? 


As the saying goes, the medium is the message. And in board games, I am increasingly convinced that the mechanisms are the theme. Or rather, that through play the mechanisms create the theme. Or perhaps I should say A theme, call it the mechanical theme. There is also a second, often unrelated, theme added into the game in the form of art and text, which I’ll call the explicit theme, since it’s the answer to the question “what is the theme in this game?” 


When these two themes- the mechanical theme and the explicit theme- create clashing experiences, the game is said to have ludonarrative dissonance- dissonance between the game and the story or theme. Even if a game doesn’t feel dissonant, when the explicit and mechanical themes do not line up, players will usually describe the game as abstract and the theme as pasted on. 


Take Love Letter, for example. The explicit theme of Love Letter involves courtiers attempting to deliver letters to the Princess. The mechanical theme is best described as a covert struggle to identify and eliminate your competition. There is very little overlap between the two themes. As a result, Love Letter is not considered a particularly thematic game. However, when these two themes perfectly overlap, a game is said to be highly thematic. 


Let’s back up a bit. How can mechanisms create theme? Well, clearly certain mechanisms are inherently thematic. Look at various combat mechanics, such as taking damage after a hit, or pick-up-and-deliver. How many games use pick-up-and-deliver in an unthematic way? It’s almost impossible. Likewise, worker placement carries a certain inherent thematic quality. 


What about mechanisms with inherently abstract qualities? Specifically, drawing cards, shuffling, dice rolling, etc. In thematic games there are two experiential states: one of the thematic game world and one of the mechanical game state. Most games require at least some mechanisms to be purely mechanical in order for the game to flow smoothly and operate like a game. These mechanisms are not usually the central mechanisms however. 


When I say that the mechanisms are the theme, I am talking about the mechanisms central to the game experience. If the central mechanisms are inherently abstract the designer will have a harder job creating a thematic game. For example, the abstraction of dice rolling as a central mechanism is very difficult to overcome unless there are sufficient supporting mechanisms that can draw players into the world of the game. King of Tokyo manages to overcome the abstraction of the dice but many roll & writes do not. 


Many designers use theme as window dressing. I believe this limits the types of gameplay experiences they can create. Instead, if designers understand the nuanced relationship between mechanics and theme, they can craft game narratives that are greater than the sum of the components, rules, and art. 


What sort of nuance is involved in the relationship between theme, mechanism, and the experience of gameplay? That’s more than I can cover in this episode. For more ways of thinking beyond mechanisms, you can visit my blog at shipp board games dot blog spot dot com or catch future episodes of thinking beyond mechanisms on ludology.