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.
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.
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