Brecht, Board Games, and Immersion

Immersion is a hot topic in board game design right now. Games that are immersive are seen as the ultimate way to provide the player an 'experience.' The trick is that games with strategy, or even copious rules, have a difficult time becoming more immersive. 

I've been thinking about immersion a lot from the perspective of theatre. In theatre, immersion is desirable because it creates strong emotions in the audience, allowing theatre-goers to be 'swept away' by the story. However, not every epoch of theatre prioritized immersion. 

Bertolt Brecht (1891-1956) was a famous playwright who promoted a type of performance style known as Epic Theatre. For modern audiences, "epic" theatre would feel anything but. Brecht promoted making the technical elements of a production visible, rather than hidden. He wanted actors to regard their characters as if in the third person, creating a philosophical space between actor and character. He thought unity was redundant. His style, now referred to as Brechtian, was crafted to create what he referred to as 'alienation' in the audience.  By not connecting emotionally to a familiar subject, the audience would be freed to think critically about the subject. Contemplation, not emotion, was the desired outcome. 

In today's productions, Brecht's ideas are usually sampled rather than followed prescriptively. Hamilton's minimalist staging and simplified base costumes are Brechtian, the musical itself is not. Emotional experiences dominate theatre from the highly immersive to the bare bones productions. Even more than movies, theatre is about emotion. On this front Brecht seems to have lost. However, if we extrapolate his ideas beyond theatre, we may find new uses for them. 

Tabletop role playing games are having a moment. Immersive storytelling is widely seen as a hallmark of an excellent campaign. If you watch any online TTRPGs, pay attention to the immersive scenes. What you won't see is much in the way of dice or rules or stats. Essentially, the game part is on hold while the players act out a dramatic improv scene. (I am not criticizing; it's my favorite part of DnD.) The take away is that rules break immersion. The bad news is that there are more rules per minute played in board games than in TTRPGs. 

Another break in immersion in (most) board games is that they are too short on narrative for the players to connect emotionally to the characters in the same way an audience member connects to a character in a movie. For one thing, the 'actors' in the board game have no script, no director, no rehearsal process. 

There are a host of other ways board games break immersion by their very nature (top down, third person, lack of sound track). There are a few ways to cope with these inconvenient facts. One is to add an app to your game with a sound track and extensive, dynamic narration. Another is to quit games and make escape rooms or theatre. The rest of us can turn to Brecht. Experiences do not have to be immersive to be an experience. Immersion excites us because we feel a small amount of risk in being pulled into a world other than the one we spend most of our time in. But immersion also excites  us because of the number of senses (real or imaginary) that we have to engage. We can engage our players in ways that excite them while not designing 'immersive' games.

One thing to keep in mind is that critical thinking is in opposition to emotion. The more thinky a game, the less immersive it is likely to be. Detective games skirt this issue by making the players take on the personas of people who think critically for a living, but that trick is limited in its scope. A game does not have to be all one or the other, but an individual element is unlikely to be both. Decisions players have control over will usually engage critical thinking more, and random events will engage emotion more. That is, unless the decisions are not gameplay related, such as which color token to use. Additionally, theme integration helps increase the emotional content of strategic elements.

Most 'immersive' games end up being a balance of immersion and critical thinking. Just like how Brecht is selectively used in theatrical productions, games must be selective in the immersion content. Each element provides a part of the overall experience. Designers must decide what sort of experience it will provide. 

For this post, I referenced History of Theatre by Brockett and Hildy, available here.

How to Design Experiences

There is an increasing call among board game designers to design for experience over theme or mechanics. This is probably the right move and potentially inevitable as the hobby matures. However, there is seemingly a split in the design world over whether making your players feel a certain way is even possible. Some posit that by extensive play testing and observation, eventually you can have an idea of if your design has landed in a certain emotional space. Others will argue such considerations are silly, because you can never guarantee the emotional response of a given player. I think it would be a good idea to look at what experiences are. 

Experiences are made up of (at least) a couple different types of input: sensory and mental. Sensory input consists of touch, sound, smell, sight, and passage of time. For our purposes, we will ignore taste. In board games, this translates to the texture and weight of components, the smells of wood, cardboard, and plastic, the sounds of components interacting, the art and graphics, and the objective and perceived length of the game. Mental input consists of instructions, math, logic, pattern recognition, and story elements. Rules of play, strategies, mechanics, theme, characters, and narrative are all types of mental input. 

Mental and sensory input combine to create subjective personal experiences. We respond to experiences with emotions: pleasure, excitement, sadness, irritation, etc.  In other words, mental and sensory input are processed by our brains and eventually output emotions. That means the type of input matters if we want certain emotions, on average, to come out. Because designers/publishers control the input, they can create certain desired emotions in players. Yes, really. This isn't a bizarre concept for artists of any type; it is baked into how art is made. Art, by definition, is something that is viewed by an audience in order to create an emotional response in the viewer(s). 

Artists are not merely emotion-driven creatures, they are emotion manipulators. Certain colors do tend to elicit certain emotions. Hence Picasso's Blue Period. Ballet shows us that movement also affects us emotionally. Anyone who has watched a movie scene before the sound track is added knows the emotional impact of sound. We do not have to start from scratch and guess at the emotional impact of our design decisions. We know that round length and turn length will affect how players feel during a game. Not whether they like a game, but how frenetic the game feels. We know that making changes to turn length can tune the output of players' emotions. 

This all seems deceptively simple. It takes a certain amount of vigilance to pursue every detail of game's design with the eye to making sure the input matches the desired output. This effort is worth it. Players will remember how a game made them feel long after they have forgotten how to play. By stepping into the emotional realm of other artists, game designers are committing to creating memories in other people. I like that feeling. 

The Terrible Tragedy of Unreadable Fluff: or Why You Should Exercise Restraint With Lore

Fluff. The blah-blah. Deep lore. Conventional wisdom says that die hard fans always want more lore, so lore might as well be included in a game to show fans that there is a larger world that your game is set in. 

The reality is that you are so enamored of your lore that you are forcing it into spaces it doesn't belong. Like inside the game box. 

World-building is a good way to set your game in a rich thematic framework. I am a proponent of world-building; I am anti-fluff. When does world-building become fluff? When it is implemented poorly. 

The most common forms of fluff are found in lore booklets. At first the player thinks, "More rules I need to learn," only to discover a short story about a game world that the players have not experienced yet. Usually these booklets are in low to medium narrative games, because high narrative games include the narrative in gameplay. The inclusion of this booklet assumes that enough players will care about the backstory of the game to justify the cost of printing it. I'm not convinced that is true, especially if the game is a new property. Most people open a game box to play a game (or learn the rules) not to read a work of short fiction. 

Unnecessary fluff becomes more egregious when the events it describes are unconnected to the events of gameplay. If the game is about farming, players don't need a ten page story setting up the socio-political landscape of the world. If the characters are given rich personalities, players may be disappointed if the gameplay is largely abstracted. Lore should feel relevant to the events that occur in the game. Lore should not read like fan fiction of your game.

Fluff enters into ridiculous territories when it assumes a game will do well enough to have sequels or spin-offs (and that those will also do well). Love Letter and the other games in that thematic series (Tempest) suffered from this assumption. Fortunately for Love Letter, it exists well as a standalone game without much fluff. Players should be given time to develop affection for a new property in ways that leave them wanting more. Assuming every world can support a series of games is hubris. 

Nomads is notable offender.  It comes with a lore booklet. Each character has a bio that has no connection to gameplay. The story feels out of sync with the gameplay. And the game begs multiple times for you to check out a now defunct website for more games and stories in the same world. I like the game, but it is a masterclass on what not to do with fluff. 

What are good ways to deploy lore? Lore found in the box should be mechanically relevant. That means any backstory to set the scene probably shouldn't exceed two paragraphs. Further thematic tie-ins should be interspersed in the rules, conventionally in italics, to explain the 'why' of the actions in the game. Flavor text can also appear on cards or the game board. Pillars of the Earth does a good job describing just enough theme to contextualize game play. 

Lore should also emerge thru art and mechanics. 'Show don't tell' is a great rule of thumb for board games. Written lore may only serve to increase the cognitive load if done wrong. Don't tell me your character uses a bow staff expertly, show me in the art and mechanics. The more lore you can deploy in the game components (including the art on the components) the shorter your world setting description can be. That's a good thing, because the truth about lore is that most people will skip it. 

Lore presented in bits and pieces as you learn and play the game creates an emergent narrative. This can also be true across games in the same universe. None of Ryan Laukat's World of Azrium characters had names until it became mechanically beneficial in Roam. Now, pictures of Sleeping Gods seem to show that trend in lore development continuing. The benefit here is that you are only developing the lore you need for each game as it happens. If you are lucky fans engage with your world then you can develop more. Don't put your cart before the horse. If you really just want to write a novel, consider publishing it online instead of in the game box. 

A game is justly criticized for having unnecessary mechanics or components. A good, unified design should contain only elements that support the whole. We must extend that to our lore. Games with just enough lore to function will not restrict the creative development of future games. The lore you build now may not suit your needs for future games. You will be less restricted by it if you don't give players access to all of your world-building.  

Good lore should add to the immersion of play. If it doesn't, it doesn't belong in your game. 

Board Games and the Theatre Arts Perspective Part II

I think I will periodically post in this series various arguments to build my case that board games would benefit from approaching design and production from a theatre perspective, as opposed to a purely product perspective or what have you. 

The board game industry is often portrayed as having been passed and eclipsed by the video game industry. Reproducibility and accessibility, not to mention average price per unit, have a huge affect on this trend. This same trend is one we see with plays and movies. There are many areas where video games have more in common with movies than they do with board games, with many video games becoming essentially interactive movies. 

Perhaps it is unfair to say that board games are more like plays than they are like video games, but looking at the requirements of these two hobbies can perhaps help predict what the board game industry can expect in the future. 

Both plays and board games are analog. If given too much of a tech upgrade they cease to be what they started as. If you film a play, it becomes a movie. A digital board game is by definition a video game. The core of the game is still the same, but the experience has fundamentally changed. 

Plays and board games are both live experiences bounded by a semi-fluid time frame. Unlike movies, the run-time of a play can vary from night to night. Plays and board games both change based on the consumers' input. Not drastically, but that variability is what makes live entertainment so unique. Video games have variability created by consumer input and can often be played with people in a shared room, but the focus is on the screen, so much of the live feel of social interaction is lost. Additionally, video games are not constrained by short time limits. Very few board games exceed eight hours in play time (although that would be short for Diplomacy), but very many video games do exceed eight hours to just finish the main quest line. 

I'm going to move away from video games and movies and just talk about some of the overlap of board games and theatre. Both fields have a high number of hobby practitioners and a much smaller subset of full time professionals. Very few people working full time in either field make an impressive amount of money. Becoming a professional actor or board game designer has a minimum start up cost, which can push out people who aren't privileged with a decent main income or a strong safety net. This tends to show up as a diversity problem in both fields, which is especially embarrassing for theatre in that theatre has been an industry much longer and likes to publicly espouse its liberalness. 

Both board game design and theatre design encourage practitioners to learn a little bit about a lot of areas of study: math, psychology, philosophy, art, history, etc. I have dabbled in the shallow end of structural engineering, computer-aided drafting, graphic design, electrical wiring, literary criticism, event planning, security, facilities management, etc. I'm not qualified to do any of those things full-time as a professional. Complex creative projects require learning a broad set of skills. Psychology is especially interesting. Board game designers talk about player psychology and how to get better feed back from play testers. Someone with a psychology degree can tell you why certain behaviors happen and how to predict player response based on a given stimulus. But actors and directors can tell you how to manipulate your viewer, how to make them cry or laugh or gasp. Tuning the production  to evoke immediate an emotional response is purview of the theatre practitioner. 

In other ways, board games are only just starting to move into areas theatre has been in for a long time. As I have stated before in this blog, there is some confusion in the industry about the rising production values of games. Some people believe the attraction is only the nice art or toy factor. But consider the consumer. Most television shows these days have an expectation of consistency of story, thanks largely to ability of viewers to watch the episodes in intended order. Thirty years ago (or less), this was not the case. Spotting production errors in movies has become a national pastime. Disney's takeover of Broadway has led to higher expectations for production values in musical productions. Consumers of media have increased standards for consistency and detail, which I would argue extends to board games. Ergo, consumers of board games are looking for high production values (good art and components) that display consistency and attention to detail. Integrated design will be the default expectation very shortly in the hobby. Narrative, art, mechanics, and components will all need to feel seamlessly part of a whole. One way theaters do this is by hiring artistic directors. An artistic director in the board game world would be different from an art director. Artistic directors guide every project from the time the company adds it to the production calendar until it is finished. Artistic directors ensure that the project is up to the company's standards of production but also that each element of the production is of equal quality with the others. Right now in board games, the person guiding the product vision seems to be the owner of a publishing company. As companies continue to consolidate and production standards continue to rise, I predict we will see a move toward hiring someone to function as an artistic director in publishing companies. 

I would like to see board game designers viewed as artists and board game production more as collaborative art-making. Designers create experiences much like directors; they build stories like playwrights; they design settings like set designers. To contract a designer is to (hopefully) buy into their design vision. Giving the various artists in a production access to each produces tighter, better final products. This is something baked into theatre, although there are plenty of examples of productions where the artists didn't deign to collaborate and that is also evident in the final product. Limiting the scope of artists' input, however, is vital to meeting deadlines. I have personally been a part of theatrical productions where new large set pieces were added the week of opening. Knowing when to say no or limit input while still fostering collaboration is a delicate balance that some publishers (Stonemeier comes to mind) are better at than others. The easiest way to see a platonic version of all parts serving the whole is to look at designer/artist/publisher Ryan Laukat, who doesn't have to sacrifice artistic vision due to the lack of competing artistic opinions in the process. For the rest of us, treating designers and artists as collaborators on a 'designed experience' is the best way to achieve an integrated design. 

Board games have for many years now been seen as practical problems with somewhat creative solutions. Creative math is still math. Mechanics and components are discussed from an engineering standpoint. Art is seen as either mere flourish or marketing. We have to move away from this. Theatre has plenty of engineering problems, which involve actual engines and programming, not facsimiles. Yet we categorize theatre as one of the arts. I think we have to change how we talk about board games from product development to art production. It's what we're already doing, so we should acknowledge it. 

Design Practicum: Dissecting "Roam"

Today, I am going to take a close look at a board game that is well-designed in order to review some of the principles and elements of design and to show a real example of how those principles can be implemented. The game I'm looking at is Roam by Ryan Laukat. Follow the link to see photos of the game if you aren't familiar with it.

Ryan Laukat has been mentioned in this blog a couple of times as the exception to the rule as a  designer who does just about everything short of manufacturing the final components. Most designers are going to get better results by not trying to do everything. However, because Laukat's games have such a singular artistic vision, they are perfect specimens to examine for design principles.

Not going to lie, I chose Roam because I own it. But it also works well as a practical example because it is simple and short and thus fairly easy to dissect. Let's break down what's good about it.

Unity (A+)
Laukat's art is always gorgeous. My favorite part is that the art on the game box is used on the cards. More importantly, all the art feels like it belongs in the same world. I find gorgeous boxes with ugly boards deeply upsetting. The art also supports the light-hearted, friendly feel of the theme. The characters are heroes, but there is no real danger of death and the art reflects that. The mechanics also support the mood of the game. I don't usually think of area majority as a friendly mechanic. The way pieces rotate out of play in Roam gives players regular chances to catch up and claim new territory in a way that keeps less strategic players from feeling defeated. Hidden scoring also helps. [I don't have the Kickstarter exclusive expansion, but from what I've seen, it feels less unified with the rest of the game.]

Emphasis (A)
I guess the focal points in this game are the art and smooth mechanics. Not much gets in the way of that. The narrative elements are brief and to the point; they add charm, but this game is not a story-telling game. Roam has the elegance of an abstract game, but I would argue the theme is not pasted-on. It merely takes a back seat to art and mechanics.

Scale/Proportion (B)
I love how one side of the cards is a zoomed out map, but when you claim a card and flip it over you see a zoomed in bust of a character you have found. That playing with scale is delightful and feels intentional, as though the characters are looking at a map together, then at one another. We can also see Hierarchic Scaling in how much bigger the cards are than the artifact tiles. On the human scale, Roam was designed for a fairly narrow context of play. The ideal way to play, if you are playing with four players, is at a smallish square or round table, such as a card table. The issue being that players need to be able to properly align their character cards with their orientation of play relative to the map, be able to reach the map, and read the symbols on their cards.

Balance (A)
This is a very balanced game. The mechanics are beautifully balanced. The map arrangement is a stellar example of both bilateral symmetry (one half mirrors the other) and crystallographic balance (each card is in balance with the others, visually).

Rhythm (A-)
In terms of time, gameplay is very smooth. There just isn't enough complexity for analysis paralysis to occur. Turns do get longer late in the game, when players have more characters to choose from, but the gradual ramp up of choices keeps the decisions from being overwhelming. The cycling of cards keeps options on the map from dwindling and resources (well, money) from running out. There is very little ramp up though, keeping Roam squarely in the alternating rhythm category (a sequence that doesn't change as it progresses). The rhythm of the visuals matches well with the rhythm of gameplay.

Mood (A+)
The atmospheres of the gameplay and the art sync up nicely. The playfulness of the oranges and blues help keep the competitiveness of gameplay on the light-hearted side. None of the characters appear fierce so much as they appear determined. The tactical nature of the gameplay is also rather forgiving if you make some sub-optimal plays, which reinforces the friendliness of the theme.

Character, Narrative, and Theme (B+)
The characters are all charming, which comes through in the art style and one sentence descriptions on the cards. The narrative presented on the first page of the rulebook, explaining how all the characters got lost, is thin and doesn't really come through in gameplay. A brief rewrite of the lore could fix this issue or art. Basically, the lore says the characters all wandered off due to a 'sleeping sickness' which is why they are scattered all over the map. Perhaps this makes more sense in the context of Laukat's other games, which I have not played. Gameplay, however, clearly reinforces the search for lost or wandering characters, but the why isn't there. When you find the characters, they were all engaged in charming and harmless activities, not waking up from some sort of sickness. The theme of finding lost characters, however, is very strong. The board is a map made up of cards and when you complete a card someone discovers a character, presumably from that area of the map. The artifacts don't really add much to the theme although they add some depth to the world and a lot of depth to gameplay. The title is the theme of the game, which is great in my book.

Genre, Style, and Conventions (A+)
I would probably say the genre of Roam is 'unconventional-fantasy themed games that are accessible to a wide range of players.' Catacombs is in the same genre. Laukat has created his own signature style, both in his art by itself and in his game experiences. Because of his shared world-building across his games, I'm positive all of his design choices are motivated by the larger lore, rather than just included for purely aesthetic reasons. Conventions are tricky to look at from a theme perspective, as they would be conventions built across Laukat's other games, which I have not played. Mechanically, the game introduces enough new ideas to feel fresh while still feeling like a fairly conventional area majority game. I guess I'll lump graphics and the rule book in conventions; both are very good.

Overall, my only two complaints with Roam are the oddness of the lore and the table-shape problem you can run into with four players. I gave this game a 9 on BGG and an A- average here, which lines up pretty well.

Creating Empathy in Board Games

First off, you should practice empathy until it is the only way you interact with the world. This is the best way to be human.

Empathy as a designer is usually talked about in terms of listening to playtesters and incorporating culturally sensitive feedback. This is important too.

Also, maybe don't design around culturally offensive themes to begin with?

The above statements, along with most of the discussion I have seen online, are about you developing empathy as a designer. I don't really have anything to add to that other than: "Do the thing!" But there does seem to be a misconception that designers cannot create empathy in players. Not only is this not true, but there are concrete steps you can take to make a game more empathy-inducing.

Let's start with my game design philosophy: players are improv actors given the rules of the scene by you, the director. If you can believe this is true, then all the rules of theatre apply to board games.

What does it mean to create empathy in an actor? We think of actors creating all of their emotions independently as a part of their process. But any actor will tell you that set, props, lights, and costumes (especially shoes) can really propel a character into existence. Also, the script is pretty important when it comes to creating emotion, just saying. So, how do we create empathy in an actor?

Rule one: The actor has to want to feel empathy. An actor who is not there to play with what they're given is not going feel anything from it either. A subset of uncooperative people does not invalidate the attempt at emotional immersion.

Rule two: The character(s) should be engaged in meaningful activity. It really helps if the actor is playing a distinct character with goals. Those goals should have emotional stakes. The emotion behind an activity is what makes it meaningful. Emotional stakes create empathy. Emotional stakes should be apparent in the script, not something the actor has to dream up. Emotional stakes usually lead to 'higher meaning' themes.

Now, let's switch to the bridge genre between acting and board games: tabletop roleplaying games. One of the benefits of TTRPGs is that players can put on 'masks' in the form of ridiculous characters in order to explore emotions and difficult situations in a less vulnerable way. TTRPGs have been studied for their ability to create empathy in players. Practice pretending to be someone else has a positive impact on empathy (provided the player engages emotionally, see rule one). This is not that different than children 'playing pretend', another activity that develops empathy.

So, how can empathy be created in board games? Is a narrative-heavy script required? No. We do not have to copy narrative techniques in plays or books or movies to build emotional responses. Our audience is our actors. Instead of manipulating an actor whose performance manipulates an audience, we are one step closer to our audience. We can manipulate them (semi) directly.

How? Create feelings of imbalance, so the players can't assume their emotional response. Do this by avoiding stereotypes and flipping tropes. Forcing players to play characters they are uncomfortable with will cause players to confront their own biases. This may be difficult in a 'diverse' game if every player is able to choose the character that most closely matches themselves. Design a game about CEOs where every character is a woman, POC, WOC, queer, etc, but try picking just one minority. Then tie that character choice mechanically to gameplay, so that it makes sense and is difficult to retheme. Actions taken by characters should be unexpected but realistic. You will have players that push back on the idea of a game about African American women CEOs. As you get this feedback, you will be able to feel your players try to put your narrative or characters back in the boxes you are trying to free them from. Do not cave and make your game "more believable." My game Deadly Dowagers does this very intentionally. (I don't like using my own WIPs as examples, generally. But I don't think I've played a published game that works as an example.) Every character is a Victorian era woman who is greedy, ambitious, and murderous. None of those adjectives are very 'feminine'. This creates discomfort in my players. Some playtesters try to lessen the feeling by suggesting what 'should' be in the game: balls, fancy clothes, rumors, gossip, etc. Some of those ideas have been implemented to help build the world, but I have pushed back very hard that my characters need to be girlier. Making players comfortable with your theme is not always the goal of a design; often it shouldn't be.

Your game should also have a clear narrative. That narrative must be closely tied to actual gameplay. Imagine explaining Spirit Island without explaining narrative elements. I'm not sure it's possible, but also, why would you? You can explain the rules in a way that tells players why they are playing. Every element of a game should be motivated so that the 'why' is clear. When players know why they are taking actions, they can identify with their character. When the narrative is clear, players can look beyond the narrative to the emotional content. When the narrative is unclear, it is harder to imagine how a character would feel, because you can't tell what their underlying goals are. Narrative does not have to come in the form of a long lore dump. Your rules, mechanics, and art should all come together to paint a singular compelling narrative.

Along the lines of a clear narrative, your theme should be a one sentence story. "Dogs" is not a theme; it is an art suggestion. "Dogs racing to unbury bones" is a theme. "Dogs racing to save humans from a collapsed building" is a theme with strong emotional content. However, a game can create empathy without needing the high drama of "save people from dying". Again, avoiding stereotypes and searching out unexpected stories can create empathy. Presenting low drama themes from unexpected angles can arguably create more empathy than high drama themes. This is because it requires more reflection on who the characters are as people in order to 'buy in' to the narrative. I don't find diversity in a post-apocalyptic setting to be as compelling as diversity in a contemporary or historical one, because we have more assumptions about history than we do about a fictional dystopia.

It should be obvious, but the most productive use of creating empathy is in realistic human characters. I am not convinced that feeling empathy towards rubbery aliens translates to feeling empathy toward minority groups. If your design goal is to create feelings of empathy in your players, your characters need to be human. Your characters should also feel human, while avoiding stereotypes. Ideally, your humans should be interesting in ways that feel 'foreign' to players. Do this by challenging assumptions about what types of humans belong in what types of roles. Need practice? Take a popcorn ensemble movie and list the characters and roles of the main squad, separately. Then shuffle the roles and deal them out to the characters. Now, rewrite the premise to rationalize why the 'tank' is the short, skinny kid. It may not make much sense, but you'll start to see the underlying assumptions made when casting those types of movies, most of which are not written to create empathy.

To summarize, create empathy in games by:

1. Introducing thematic imbalances to push the players out of their comfort zone.

2. Have a clear narrative to explain the 'why' of the game.

3. Have a one sentence theme that combines thematic imbalance and clear narrative.

4. Have human characters.

Note that none of these suggestions involves mechanics that require role-play. Players can identify with their characters and feel for them without having to act them out. Not all players are comfortable with role-playing. Besides, expecting players to do the work of creating empathy on their own is a design cop out. Any game could have spontaneous role-play break out if the character design is interesting enough. If you want to create empathy in your games, focus on what you can control: well-crafted themes, narratives, and characters.

Does having empathy as a designer make designing games that create empathy easier? Probably. For me the key is moving past assumptions of how people should behave and looking at how characters could behave under certain circumstances. That is the essence of theatre. 

The Set Design Approach Part II: Script Analysis

This is a continuation of The Set Design Approach. In that post, I skipped over 'story analysis' as a step that theatrical designers take in their design process, partially for length but partially because script analysis is a topic in its own right. 

When directors and designers 'break down' a script, they are looking for specific elements to give insight into the themes and structure of a play. Board game designers can use story analysis techniques to examine their own designs for thematically consistent, dramatically logical narratives. By narrative, I do not mean only narrative-driven games. Any game that has a theme tells a story, in that it has a setting, characters, actions, events, and an ending in which the world-state is noticeably different than the beginning. For the rest of this post, when I talk about game design I am referring to games with recognizable themes. Abstract games, including those with a pasted on theme such as Seikatsu, would not benefit much from story analysis. 

The first step in story analysis is a scenic breakdown: creating a list of locations that occur in the story. This step, and many of the following, will seem unnecessary for board game design. Do it anyway. You should be able to easily articulate the setting and other story details when describing your game. Also, by actually breaking down these elements, you can find any areas that are not fully developed or are disconnected from other elements. For your locations, you should be able to describe the world of the game in simple terms that aid and do not hinder the learning of the game. Put another way, knowing where the game is set should add to the internal logic of gameplay. Part of your location breakdown should include when the game is set in the overall world history of the game world. Historical games require historical research. Fantasy games (in the sense that fantasy means "not real life") require having a sense of the world state at the beginning of the game. 

Next, we turn to dramatic structure. Dramatic structure requires a logical progression of events from the beginning to the conclusion. Drama starts with exposition, which is where the situation and rules of the world are laid out. In most board games, exposition for the world should exist in the rules explanation. As in, "Here's why you are gathering resources and turning them into points." Most board game narratives start at the point of attack: the action(s) that kick off the drama of the story. Theatre assumes that there are no dramatic actions before the first action in the play. After all, if there were wouldn't the play be about that instead? The most interesting, dramatic actions in board games should be the ones the players take. The players should not be disappointed by playing a game after hearing exciting and dramatic lore. The central dramatic question that kicks off the point of attack is the inciting incident. This would be the event that occurred immediately before a game starts. Everything after the inciting incident is action (including the point of attack). However, much as we discovered when looking at scene work for actors, actions viewed from a dramatic structure viewpoint are more emotionally charged than we are used to thinking about in board games. Consider this quote: "The playwright then goes on to create a series of events or actions through which the emotional responses and tensions of an audience will vary based on how closely we come to achieving the major dramatic question." (Dunham, Stage Lighting p 174) In game design, the actors are also the audience. The thematic tension is tied to how close the players are to winning or losing. Thus, the emotional responses to the theme should be closely tied to the mechanical win conditions. With this understood, you can take rising and falling action, climax, and resolution from traditional dramatic structure and translate them to gameplay moments. The key is tying the narrative moments to the meta-narrative of the gameplay. 

Stories are made up of time, place, actions, and characters. I find most published board games have a decent grasp of time, place, and action but get hazy when it comes to character. Characters should be used to help illuminate why certain actions are being taken and how those actions relate to the central dramatic question. Again, as we saw in the scene work post, knowing your character's motivation in the form of knowing their goals helps the player understand why they are doing what they are doing. All of the players can be playing the same unnamed units, with the same powers, but they should still know what those units are and why they take the actions they take. Pillars of the Earth is an excellent example of unnamed workers who have clear motivation and logic behind the actions they take. That game tells a story, even though the players are not playing a named protagonist. It should be noted that Pillars of the Earth still abstracts the actions of the 'master builders'. Board games, like theatre, will always require suspension of disbelief. As long as the internal logic is sound, abstraction for the benefit of mechanics is not only okay, but required. 

I have mentioned the central dramatic question a couple of times. Also called the super-objective or the dramatic spine, this question is the core to the theme of a narrative. A dramatic question can be posed as a question that gameplay is seeking to answer, such as "Who is the best merchant in the Mediterranean?" or "Can my team stop the apocalypse before time runs out?" Theme should be more specific than genre though. A contest to see who is the best merchant is a theme, whereas trading in the Mediterranean is a genre. Theme is also closely aligned with mood (see previous post about image research). Your theme, mood, and narrative should be closely entwined. To check if they are, see if the following statement is true about your game: "The theme is X because the narrative is Y which creates a mood of Z." The more 'because' statements you can come up with, the more connected your theme and mood and narrative. This is easier to achieve if your main theme is present throughout your game. When a theme is deeply connected to a game, certain mechanisms will be rejected because they adversely affect the mood or narrative of a game. Befriending the eldritch horror or murdering the other merchant competitors may stem from fun and interesting game mechanics but don't advance the central narrative of your game. Of course, you could change the narrative. However, in my experience, once you have built the internal logic of your game world you will find it difficult to change any element that goes against the spirit (or ethics) of your game. This is doubly true if you are invested in the theme. Wingspan was only ever going to be a game about birds, because of Elizabeth Hargrave's integration and investment in the theme. This is perhaps not the literary definition of theme, and as board game design progresses we are seeing more 'higher meaning' behind the themes of games, but I believe that starting with theme integration naturally leads to deeper, universal themes. The more you think about your underlying narrative, the more theme you can get back out of it. 

This is a lot of terms to consider, but I believe you can boil it down to some simple questions to answer when analyzing your design: 

-Do the locations make sense and connect to the overall design?

-Can the rules be explained in the context of the narrative?

-Does the tension of gameplay line up with the dramatic tension of the narrative?

-Do the players know who they are playing and why that matters?

-Does the purported theme of the game mesh well with the narrative that plays out? With the mood?

I firmly believe that having a theme in a design means having a story. Theme is story; art is story. Narrative-driven games require that more effort be put into their stories, but every themed game should have consideration for its story. Anything less is merely an abstract game with art.

For this post, I relied heavily on Stage Lighting: Fundamentals and Applications, by Richard Dunham, found here, as my scenic design teacher didn't teach from a text book.

The 'Set Design' Approach

When I was planning my wedding, I didn't pick out wedding colors; I picked out a painting: Edgar Degas' Dancers, Pink and Green. I told my florist, cake baker, and bridesmaids that I didn't care what colors they went with as long as the colors were found in the painting. The painting also served as a texture reference for flowers and fabrics. Most people I shared the painting with had never heard of someone approaching wedding planning like that. 

Recently on Facebook, someone responded to a post I made by saying that it sounded like I 'lean creative' when designing board games, meaning I use the artistic and not analytic parts of my brain. I would argue I can't help it. Turns out my default approach to creative problems is to treat them like set design. When you're a Freudian, every problem looks like suppressed sexual energy. For me, every creative problem looks like a set design challenge. 

Scenic design, stage design, and set design are terms used for the conceptualization and rendering/modeling of scenery for theatre. Since the term 'set' implies traditionally produced plays, that's the term I'll use when talking about standard design practices in theatre. 'Theatrical' design includes set, lighting, costume, and sound design. 

There are a number of ways to start designing a set. The order matters less than the creative process of going thru the steps. For our purposes, I list them as: concept, image research, text research, story analysis, sketch, and iteration. The real step one in theatrical design is to read the script, but since board games don't exist before we design them, I'm skipping this step. 

Directors and designers usually will have general concepts for the direction they want the design to go. For instance, a traditionally performed version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream could have a set design concept of Van Gogh's Starry Night. Initial concepts are usually one to two sentences. For board game design, concepts generally start on idea lists. You could also develop your concept into a design vision statement that your refer back to throughout the whole design process. This is not particularly new territory, so let's move on. 

Image research is the area that was drilled into me in college but few people outside of theatre seem familiar with. The idea is not to find images that represent your design, but images that have the same feel. These images are frequently arranged into 'mood boards'. You have to know the mood of your design before you actually start designing. While you could list some emotions, or write a story, or listen to some music, I contend that the best way to decide on the mood of a visual design is by looking at other images. Even if this does not become a regular part of your design process (I have yet to design board games with a mood board), it is still a good exercise in focusing creatively on the feelings you wish to evoke in a design. It could also be a good idea if you are not a good artist but want to better convey your ideas on how the final product could feel, particularly if you are trying to communicate the potential feel of a design to a co-designer early in the design process. The great part about image research is that even though you shouldn't go looking for ideas to directly rip-off, you will frequently find that styles, colors, and other elements from your images will seep into your design.

I don't expect board game designers to start making mood boards. On the other hand, there is no such thing as too much text research. Text research may still involve images, but the information can easily be conveyed in written form, whereas image research cannot. First and foremost, every game designer should research the structure of their game. If theatrical designers have to be familiar with dramatic structure, in spite of not being authors, board game designers should be required to know as much as they can possibly learn about the mechanics they have designed into their games: terms, usage in other games, common pitfalls. 99% of the time, board game design is part of a larger collaboration to create a product. While some may argue that designing in a vacuum is important to their creative process, staying in a vacuum will result in letting down your collaborators by not putting forth the effort to actually understand the area of design you are working in. Board games are not like novels, where most of the creative work is done by one person (Ryan Laukat excepted); board games are like theatre, each member of the team contributes to the artistic success of the whole. And part of the design process for theatre is research. (Obviously, authors do a lot of research as well, but many won't read other contemporary works in the genre they write in.)

In addition to structure research, there are other important areas of text research. Theatrical designers study genre, style, and conventions. Genre is a broad classification of subject matter. In theatre, genres include comedy, tragedy, musical, farce, and melodrama. If you are designing a horror game, you should be generally familiar with the horror genre across mediums. Style is the manner in which the genre is expressed. Typical theatrical styles include realism/naturalism, period/historical, and abstract (as in art, not games). Another way to describe style is a recurring way of doing things. Sticking to a single style helps keep elements consistent in look and feel. Within style, elements can be motivated or non-motivated (these are lighting design terms). Motivated elements have a practical rationale for their existence. Non-motivated elements only add to the mood, but have no practical purpose. Conventions are stock short-hand methods to convey certain things to your viewer. Conventions are usually unique to certain styles or genres. Breaking conventions can make your game feel fresh, but the more conventions you adhere to the easier your game will be to learn. This is true even if the conventions are thematic ties and not purely mechanical. In short, conventions reduce mental load for players. Research styles and conventions by selecting a genre and taking a close look at the elements from that genre you wish to include in your game. Try to keep track of what you pull inspiration from, so you can return to it if you need future inspiration. 

I'll be going into story analysis in another post. The short version is that every game has a story, so every designer should carefully consider the story elements of their game. Especially if the game has a theme (even if it doesn't tell a story). 

After all of that research and analysis, it's time to sketch! I tend to sketch ideas for boards or tableaus just before starting to prototype. Set designers will sketch a number of different looks or scenes that occur during a play. I find that mentally or visually planning the visual/physical impact of a game design helps me make decisions about which directions to take the design in the early stages of the design process. These sketches should primarily be the basic shapes and functionality of the physical game. 

Just like game designers, set designers iterate. After sketching, designers will usually build a white model of the set, similar to black-and-white prototypes. Then set designers will begin work on color renderings (two-dimensional color images of the set or set pieces) and a final model. Even then, there will be iterations based as the rehearsal process finalizes how the set must function. Eventually, someone else (hopefully) builds the set to look like the model and renderings. Sound familiar? 

Here's the whole process again, but from a board game perspective:

-Come up with a concept for a game. 

-Decide how you want the game to feel.

-Research mechanics and genre/theme. 

-Consider the story your game tells. 

-Sketch some rough ideas.

-Build a prototype. 

I realize this list feels like it goes against the 'rush to prototype' mantra. But you could do everything on the list prior to prototyping in a few hours or less. Sure, you'll have to do more research later, but you don't have to spend too long on the other steps. Eventually, these steps can become so instinctual that you'll never be able to design any other way. At least, that's been my experience. 

For this post, I relied heavily on Stage Lighting: Fundamentals and Applications, by Richard Dunham, found here, as my scenic design teacher didn't teach from a text book.