TBM: Ep 4 EXTRAS

You know what? Maybe skip this episode. Not sure why I felt the need to walk people through how my thinking diverges from Made to Stick. 

I got really into the idea of resonance after I explored immersion. This is what I came up with. I've pretty much decided that resonance only caught my attention because it was a buzz word in the hobby for a while and that we've all somewhat moved on from it. 

I mean, I stand by my formula. I just don't worry much about resonance compared to immersion or thematic integration. Basically, I'm tackling this problem from other more fruitful angles these days. 

TBM: Ep 4 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.

Resonance

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 learn how to design games. My name is Sarah Shipp and today I want to talk about what makes ideas resonant. 

A few years ago, I had been working on my own ideas of what it means to be resonant, when I ran across the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. The concepts in Made to Stick both validated and helped clarify my ideas around resonance. The book outlines a number of traits that make ideas sticky—more likely to be remembered or acted upon. These traits can be applied to marketing, but also awareness campaigns or even urban legends. Together, these traits spell out Success: S-U-C-C-E-S. 

The first trait is Simplicity. Sticky ideas get to the core of the matter quickly. The next is Unexpectedness. Surprise helps keeps an audience’s attention. The next trait is Concreteness. Ideas that use less abstract imagery, but are instead stated in terms of human senses are more relatable. The next concept is Credibility. Ideas may come from someone with authority or may express their own internal credibility. The next trait is Emotions. Tapping into people’s emotions gets them invested in an idea. The final trait is Stories. Stories allow an audience to experience a situation without having to actually live through it. 

There is a certain amount of overlap within these traits. Stories generally contain emotion and are a good way to harness emotion. Stories also generally contain concrete imagery. Stories may also have internal credibility. Additionally, the order of the traits in Made to Stick is merely for the sake of the acronym. 

I wanted to borrow some of these ideas but adapt them to be useful to board game designers. The first thing I did was throw out credibility. External credibility is more about marketing than design. Some designers have credibility because of their past designs. Some because they have expertise in the theme they are using. However, most first time designers don’t have the experience needed to establish credibility. And those designers are the future of the hobby. So, I don’t wish to place too much emphasis on external credibility when it comes to design. 

Additionally, I find that internal credibility naturally arises when the other traits are well-executed. A simple, surprising, concrete, emotional story does not need additional credibility in order to be resonant. When thinking about considerations beyond resonance within design, credibility becomes more important. But I wanted to distill resonance down to something easier to remember than the Succes model. 

In my formula, I combine Concreteness and Emotions with Stories, under the heading of Familiarity. People respond to the familiar. Have you ever heard a familiar song on the radio and your first thought was “I love this song” only to realize after the first few seconds that you hate the song but your brain was temporarily excited because the opening notes were familiar? Our brains seek the familiar. We place stories into genres because we want to know what sorts of things will be familiar about them before we read, watch, or listen. 

Concreteness is also about familiarity at a human scale. By including elements that are viscerally familiar, we can better transport our audiences into our stories. In board games, this means that when laws of nature are represented simply but viscerally, players will become more invested. For example, SuperSkill Pinball represents gravity by having players continually moving the pieces down the board, where “down” is toward the player. Another example is in The Coldest Night, players feed fuel cards into a central fire to keep it from going out but must play cards that won’t smother the flames.

Emotions are not something we add into a design, but a by-product of the elements that we add. Visceral imagery and compelling stories can create a whole range of emotions. So, in a sense, I leave emotions out of my formula, but I acknowledge that they are a part of fine-tuning resonance and must be considered during playtesting. 

I won’t speak too much to stories here; that may be a later episode. While stories and emotion fall primarily into my category of Familiarity, they also impact my next category for resonance, which is Unexpectedness. Yes, I am borrowing the term directly from the Succes model; it’s the most straightforward word. A twist in familiarity keeps ideas fresh and hooks in audiences. My main caution here is that the ideal ratio of familiarity to unexpectedness is 90/10. Too much unexpectedness will make ideas feel random, hard to follow, and lacking in credibility. 

Lastly, I reframe Simplicity from a design perspective and call it Removing Chaff. If you aren’t aware, chaff is the name for the outer husk of wheat berries that must be removed before the grain is ground into flour. An idea will not be truly resonant if it is bogged down by lots of extraneous, unrelated elements. For a deeper dive into this concept, refer to my previous segment on unity. 

Finally, I put my concepts together in a formula for resonance, which is: Familiarity plus Unexpectedness minus Chaff. This concept can be applied to themes but also mechanisms. Most games build on other games but with a few twists. We’ve all heard complaints about kitchen sink games that don’t feel cohesive. By my definition, those games are not resonant. It turns out that resonance is a surprisingly simple concept, but often difficult to execute. 

So, remember when designing that games should to feel familiar with a twist and uncluttered by elements that distract from the main experience. 

If you’re interested in a more detailed discussion of my formula for resonance, I gave a talk at GDC in 2021 that is now available on YouTube. 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. 

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

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. 

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.]

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.

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.