Discomfort vs. Offense

Continuing this miniseries on characters and world building, I'd like to build on some issues I touched on in my last post. 

In my own designs, I quite like making people question their assumptions. There is an element of surprise when things work out differently than you expect. There is also an element of discomfort. I don't mind that discomfort in games— if, and only if, it's there for a good reason. Discomfort can be caused by empathy, immersion, or learning uncomfortable truths. Embracing empathy as a design goal means embracing discomfort. Flash Point: Fire Rescue is often described as an uncomfortable game because you might not save everyone. This game came out a decade ago and we've only seen a handful of similarly uncomfortable themes since then. Most of the games that spring to my mind (The Grizzled, Holding On, Pandemic Legacy: Season 1) are cooperative games. I think that perhaps because cooperative games aren't inherently about player dominance, they have moved more easily away from straightforward power fantasies into new thematic territory. But while cooperative games may always be the testing ground for new types of emotional experiences, there's no inherent reason competitive games can't explore these themes as well. The thematic expression and emotional experience of a cooperative game will always be different from a competitive game, but that doesn't mean they can't both cover serious topics. 

I think that a number of game designers see the value of discomfort but choose a harmful shortcut to get there. The easiest way to achieve discomfort in players is thru an offensive theme. Not everything that is uncomfortable is offensive, but everything offensive is uncomfortable (to somebody). If offense didn't cause discomfort, it wouldn't be offensive. 

There are, however, layers to what makes something offensive. The first, surface layer, is what I think of as shock and awe. This type of offense creates nervous laughter and gasps at its irreverence. Think of it as unexpectedness (a good thing in small doses) turned up to eleven in the worst way possible. This is where Cards Against Humanity lives. The purpose of that game is to offend. The game components themselves are offensive. I don't believe shock and awe to be a redeemable quality in games. Or in anything, really. Shock and awe shuts down discourse and the possibility of other emotional experiences. 'Shutting down' is the opposite of my goal when I'm contemplating challenging themes. 

The next layer is asking players to violate taboos. Requiring players to read CAH cards out loud would fall under this category (although you can in theory play without ever speaking the cards aloud). In this layer of offense, players are actually doing the taboo-breaking. Another example is 'Spin the Bottle.' Many traditional teenage games center violating taboos. And I think that can be healthy in folk games that are at least loosely monitored by an adult. But I'm more skeptical about published games. There is plenty of space for abuse in these types of games/themes. If violating taboos were a genre someone wanted to reform in tabletop, I'd start with adding safety measures like those incorporated into indie TTRPGs or LARPs. However, I don't think board games are the best medium to explore IRL taboo-breaking. Board games are defined by written rules that imply a safely delineated social experience. Taboo-bending folk games exist in a more liminal space delineated by the social pressure of your peers. I'm not sure the two mix well. I want board games to be a haven for the socially awkward. 

Go one layer further and we find representational taboo-breaking. In these games, the characters, not the players, violate taboos. Here, finally, there is an argument both for and against. Thematic taboo-breaking can deliver a unique emotional experience and, if you are conscientious about the theme, a powerful message. On the flip side, your thematic elements might be in poor taste. Some themes may be situational and some may be non-starters. For example, killing your husband is situational. No one wants to play a 'modern-times' game about murdering their spouse. But set the game in the Victorian era and now people are willing to play. (I've literally changed peoples minds about whether they wanted to play my game, Deadly Dowagers, by clarifying the setting.) On the other hand, a game about adults hurting little kids is a non-starter. Punching down is always in poor taste, and there are some things that we cannot frame in a way that makes them more palatable. 

The next layer skirts the edge of taboo-breaking: making the unsympathetic sympathetic. This may be an unintentional result of using a difficult theme or of making a villain the main character. This layer and the previous rely on framing to avoid being offensive. You don't want to treat serious topics tritely. Taking serious topics seriously is the easiest way to stay out of trouble. But you also run the risk of celebrating a topic even if you treat it seriously. Making the villains the heroes is one way to accidentally celebrate evil acts. But so is making a Euro-centric game about colonialism. Personally, I think that fictional villains are a better way to go than historical atrocities. But some issues (i.e. slavery) should remain unsympathetic regardless of the setting. Make sure the unsympathetic stays unsympathetic in your game, unless you have a powerful reason to create a sympathetic villain. Regardless, be intentional and empathetic when handling unsympathetic themes. 

Finally, misrepresentation of another culture is offensive. I place this one last because it is often the most well-intentioned as well as unintentional. Cultural inaccuracies can range from the annoying to the harmful. If you aren't willing to do the necessary research and sensitivity tests, you are likely better off creating a fictional setting or designing with a theme from your own culture. Even then, many fictional tropes are stolen from marginalized cultures (i.e. shamans). There is a culture of exoticism in board games that feels eighty years behind the times. Blatant inaccuracies translate to your audience as "The designer did not care; they were just looking to profit off someone else's culture." It's past time to let different cultures speak for themselves. 

Your design reflects your values. You must be intentional and empathetic when designing difficult themes. Listen to feedback about your theme. Don't include something just because it sounds cool. The more you want players to be uncomfortable the more carefully you have to tread. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Baddies in Board Games

I'm going to be building on last week's post about non-narrative characters. In this post, I'd like to discuss the thorny problem of evil player characters in non-narrative games. 

What qualifies as evil, especially in a non-narrative game? The problem with discussing villains is that the discussion can swing wildly from creative writing techniques to real world ethics (whether or not the person speaking is qualified to speak about ethics). So, let's set a simple definition for the sake of this discussion and try not to wade to deep into topics I'm not qualified to talk about. Let's define fictional evil as intentional harm to others for selfish or other immoral reasons. 

What type of evil PCs (or NPCs) already exist in board games? There's a whole spectrum, but most people tend to think about supervillains and forget the others. Disney and comic book villains are at the less evil end of the spectrum. We don't see much of their motivation in gameplay and these games are typically family friendly. As a result, the actions of the heroes and villains don't feel very different from one another. Similarly, some faction-based games have clear good and bad sides, but that knowledge comes from an outside source (e.g. any Lord of the Rings game where you can play as orcs). Anti-hero PCs, like in any given heist game, tend to have a clearly selfish motivation but the harm they do is typically either non-violent or violent against someone who is portrayed as more evil. Sometimes, baddies aren't more evil than the good characters, but instead are secretly a faction with hidden motivation. These games may end in a betrayal, but if the betrayal is not for immoral or selfish reasons then the character is not evil by our definition. Finally, we have characters that are clearly evil based on their actions within the game. These characters are the trickiest to design well. 

A believably evil character has goals and few moral compunctions about how they reach those goals. Not every game has the ability to showcase a character's values and motivation during gameplay (although I think you should try). Recognizable characters are able to lean on outside sources to establish why the baddies are bad. However, this means that your game must make sense within that larger context. If the Sauron in your game is trying to amass gold and dominate trade routes, any preexisting knowledge players have of the IP will only cause dissonance. 

Player characters that are believably evil are a tricky proposition. Often they must rely on either abstraction or absurdity, even if they have external sources. Vile acts carry a strong emotional component for audiences. Abstraction and/or absurdity helps relieve that emotional stress. Think about the abstracted murders of the many Jack the Ripper themed games. An excellent example of both abstraction and absurdity is The Bloody Inn. (Any small-ish card game will be necessarily abstracted.) In The Bloody Inn, murder is simply represented by moving a card to your player area. The absurdity of The Bloody Inn comes from the sheer number of crimes you'll be committing all while also attempting to run a profitable business. The Bloody Inn also uses cartoonishly macabre art to set the absurd tone of the game. 

A quick note about abstraction— All board games abstract theme to a certain extent. However, the type of thematic abstraction we see in The Bloody Inn carries weight. Instead of focusing on graphic realism, this sort of abstraction allows designers to shift the players' focus to the decisions involved in evil acts. I'm not sure there is much value in grossing out players or making them violate taboos (more on this in a coming post), however exploring the decisions that can lead to devaluing human life, especially at an abstracted remove, is very interesting to me. Think about the difference between plays and movies. Plays often (not always) eschew special effects in favor of exploring the psychology behind actions. I think that emotional journey is a great reason to make a game with evil PCs and an even greater reason to include a certain amount of abstraction. 

A game that I feel does not succeed in this vein is Abomination: Heir of Frankenstein. Right off the bat, this game is much less abstracted, both in player actions and art assets. Again, abstraction provides a useful mental buffer for players to not get too emotionally affected by the actions they are taking. Further, while the number and severity of crimes in Abomination does trend to the absurd, the game plays it straight and not for laughs. Laughter is also a useful mental buffer when playing games with murder. The art style is macabre in a more serious tone, like what you would see in a grim dark RPG. Still, I think that where the game really falls down is in fumbling its source material. The serious tone and graphic nature of the game could have been forgiven if the external source it relied upon in theming lined up with the action of the game. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein uses the horrific setting of the book to make a point about the monstrous nature of society. In Abomination, you (a mad scientist type) are the monstrous one, not society. The tonal mismatch means that while the theme helps you understand what you are doing, it does little to address why. As a result, this game can't rely on the source material to justify your actions. [NB: Much of the positive feedback for this game was how well the theme came through a euro-style game. But I feel that is a failing of other euros, not a saving grace of Abomination.]

If you are going to design a game with truly evil playable characters, you really need to have either internal or external sources for motivation (ideally both). The Bloody Inn succeeds because we believe that the characters are greedy and that their greed drives them to commit horrific crimes. Even with external sources, Abomination fails at character motivation. "Because you want to be like Dr. Frankenstein" is a bad motivation based on the source material (spoiler alert: he dies) and "because the monster is forcing me to do it" is even worse, as it is not a motivation at all. Better motivators for evil acts would be single word traits, like pride, ambition, greed, or revenge. These traits can be made explicit through a character's actions throughout the game. One of the actions in The Bloody Inn is money laundering, which seems mostly to exist to drive home the idea of greed as a motivation.

Playable characters require more justification for their actions than non-playable characters. Asking players to perform actions that represent evil acts should not be a decision you make lightly. Whether your game is silly or serious, it will make some sort of statement about evil. That statement can be either simple or complex. The Bloody Inn makes a fairly simple statement: that greed is the root of greater acts of evil. I try to make a more complicated statement in Deadly Dowagers: strong ambition in a repressive society can lead to evil acts. I rely on both internal and external sources of motivation to justify character actions. My game more or less requires players to have a passing familiarity with the role of women in the Victorian era. Internally, the mechanics attempt to show that repressiveness as well as showing the single-minded pursuit of gain by distilling otherwise thematically named actions down to monetary transactions. Unlike The Bloody Inn, Deadly Dowagers tries to (mostly) avoid absurdity by portraying a more complex motivation for the characters. (One side effect of this complexity is that your villains may become somewhat sympathetic to your players.) 

Believable villain PCs need context, motivation, abstraction, and a message about the nature of evil to be effective. Absurdity is optional but helps draw players in. Should you design evil PCs in board games? If you are interested in emotion-driven design and thoughtful thematic integration, evil PCs can pack a punch. If you are only interested in evil PCs because they sound cool, I wouldn't recommend them to you for reasons I'm going to unpack in my next post. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

Non-narrative Characters

Over the past few years, narrative board games have been getting better and better. With representatives like Forgotten Waters, Sleeping Gods, and Destinies, more attention has been paid to the quality of character arcs (or simply interesting character descriptions) in games. The problem with stopping the discussion at narrative games is that most board games cannot rely on narrative tools to help shape characters (and certainly narrative games also use non-narrative tools as well). So, how do we show characterization in non-narrative games?

First, we need to recognize that a game character only exists for the duration of the game. Every instantiation of that character outside of gameplay is merely additional lore that can either support and flesh out a character or contradict what is revealed during gameplay (which is a bad thing). The game is the window through which we experience the character's world. What we know about the game is what we know about the character. It also follows that the characters we create for a world should feel like they are a part of that world. 

As I have written several times before, character goals (what a character desires most) should align with their win condition. Characters may have secondary goals, values, or desires, but characters must be driven by their win conditions to be believable. They should have a purpose in life that closely ties to the 'why' of gameplay. In other words, both the player and the character should be invested in the outcome of the game. 

A character's powers/unique mechanics denote their values. You only get better at building things by spending a lot of time building things (take it from me, a theatrical carpenter), therefore a character who is better than average at building must value their role in society as a builder. (Most likely, that is. Unless you indicate otherwise, your audience will generally assume a character performs an action because they choose to. Board games are, after all, largely about choices.) Since all we know about a character is what they do in a game, we assume what they do must be important to them or to the society they live in. How someone solves a problem says a lot about their worldview, which is why character mechanics are so foundational to a character's values. 

Rules systems beyond individual powers indicate cultural norms. If a thematic rule is not rationalized by physics we can assume the rule exists because of the culture within the game world. Scoring that doesn't allow a player to win by more than two points might indicate a culture steeped in notions of honor and fair play. A scoring system that only allows a player to win if they are ahead by more than two points might indicate a culture that places emphasis on merit and achievement. A theme will always feel pasted on if the core system does not largely resemble the world it represents. My game, Deadly Dowagers, uses rules restrictions to represent the restrictive nature of Victorian society, especially for women. 

Characters exist within the cultural norms of the rules and respond to them. Characters might be trying to be the best within their cultural system, or they might fight against it. Factions are the result of conflicting cultural norms. Factions are more believable if their values and beliefs are in conflict with another faction. Values and beliefs, of course, are expressed by their unique faction mechanics. Root displays this concept beautifully. You don't need to read the lore for Root to understand the values and friction of the factions, all of that is present in the mechanics. The Eyrie places value on tradition which is expressed through a programming mechanic. (Programming, like tradition, is slow to change in the face of new information.) Their isolation to one spot on the board shows how their previous power has waned and contracted. Their history and values shine through during set up and rules explanation, only to be reinforced by gameplay. Root also displays a shining example of faction friction with the Cats and the Alliance. You only need to glance from the sawmills to the faction named the Woodland Alliance to see the conflict brewing. The facts that the sawmills are being built by cats and that the Alliance are small prey creatures only underscores the conflict. So we end up with a faction that prizes industry above the homes and lives of others, a faction bound by tradition, a faction inherently weaker that must rely on coalition building, and a character who works outside of the rule of law, much the same way he operates outside the lines on the map. Any lore only exists to explicitly state and underscore what is shown in gameplay. 

So, what is the purpose of lore, other than clearly stating what the mechanics may only have implied? Any lore that isn't directly related to the action of the game exists to establish the atmosphere of the world. Setting the tone thematically adds texture to your world but also allows you to prime your players for a certain experience. A jokey tone implies a different gameplay experience than a chilling tone. So, You've Been Eaten has some of the best intro fluff I've come across in that it establishes the world of the game that exists during gameplay, sets the tone of a light, not-so-serious game, and is funny in its own right. Fluff that doesn't underscore the events of the game or set the mood will instead distract from and muddy the gameplay experience. Which isn't to say you can't make jokes, but they need to be jokes that make sense in the universe of the game. 

Creating rich characters in board games will never look the same as it does in novels or movies. That doesn't mean, however, that we shouldn't be creating compelling characters in our games. But the primary way we do that is by world-building through our mechanics, not apart from them. The game is the world. The actions are the character. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Community Questions

In this post, I'm answering a couple of community questions that I received on Meeple Syrup Shop Talk on Facebook. 

David Weiss asks, "How do we take overused themes and twist them to produce new types of gameplay experiences?" 

The short answer is: your theme has to be a story. Not a noun and a pre-generated set of artwork. I've indexed some of my posts on theme here, so I won't go into too much detail about how nouns are insufficient as themes. (A lot of my answer to this question is in those posts, so check them out.) A compelling story or set of characters is vital to overcome over-saturation of a theme. Sometimes, fresh art direction or component development can work instead, but I don't think this guarantees a memorable game the way a compelling story hook does. What are some shortcuts to developing a compelling story? 

• You can change up the protagonist. Make the zombies the heroes.
• You can change the ending. The Axis falls to zombies. 
• You can avoid stereotypes/tropes. Zombies now like liver. 
• You can change the mechanics to better fit the theme. Clank! is a great example. 
• You can develop the moral code of your characters. Give them a worldview. 

Ok, that last one needs some unpacking, but that's largely for a later post. In brief, games are stories and like narrative stories they express values. If you are aware of the values you/your characters are expressing, you can leverage your story to be more emotionally powerful. I guess that's not really a shortcut, and it's not easy to just start doing. However, I'm going to be increasing my focus on value-expression in the coming weeks if that's of interest to you. 

JahFree Secrest asks, "How can player interaction or lack thereof be used to support the theme of a tabletop game?" 

Well, to start we need to recognize that player interaction falls under mechanics and our goal is 'theme and mechanic alignment.' My first tip is to find the movement. Player interaction frequently involves movement such as passing cards, and movement is where theme can become embodied. Eye contact and, yes, dialogue are also important thematic elements of player interaction. It's my go to example,  but Sheriff of Nottingham has players passing components and talking to each other as part of the mechanics. 

Another angle is to look at mechanics as the way characters express their worldview. A cut throat game needs an appropriately cutthroat theme. If players lie or bluff or steal in game, that must inform the theme. I'll be writing more about the intersection of player-characters and mechanics soon. As an aside, player interaction doesn't have to involve conflict. How players interact in a cooperative game also indicates the worldview of the characters. 

The only thing we truly know about a game world is the experience of gameplay. The only things we know about characters are the actions they take. Player interactions are the only window we have into how characters feel about each other. Forget art and lore; the world is found in the game mechanics, including player interaction. Build out the theme around the experience. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Empathy in Wingspan

Happy 100th Post! I asked the denizens of Meeple Syrup Shop Talk to contribute ideas for my 100th post. I'll be using some of the other responses in future posts (because I simply cannot be brief), but I chose this topic based on a question by Elizabeth Hargrave. 

Elizabeth asks, "How can we experience or encourage love and empathy in games?" 

My first reaction to this question was, "But I know you know the answer. After all, you designed Wingspan." Then I realized that unpacking that statement could help me explain a concept that I feel I have struggled to explain in the past. 

Let me start with a scenario. You see a donation link online for a nature preserve. How likely are you to donate $5 to that particular preserve? What if I told you that that preserve was an important habitat for the scissor-tailed flycatcher, the bird on the cover of Wingspan? Does your familiarity with that image increase your chances of donating? 

The thing I love about Wingspan is that the game relies on attention to detail to express its love of birds. We are never presented with injured or distressed birds that we have to save, just details unique to each bird. And that's what I'm getting at. 

Theme with proper attention to detail can get people to care about a topic. However, I believe that positive imagery creates a better emotional response that negative imagery. The African American community has spoken out about the fact that quality of representation matters as much if not more than amount of representation. Positive depictions of cultures in entertainment media has a real world impact on how cultures are perceived. 

But positivity cannot be forced. It needs to come from genuine care. (If you yourself do not possess empathy, but want to make a game that produces empathy in others, that's going to be an uphill battle.) False positivity comes off as creepy and agenda driven. Positive depictions rooted in real cultural practices invite viewers to "imagine others complexly" to quote John Green. Then the next time viewers are presented with an aspect of that culture, they will remember the positive associations they already have about the culture. In other words, I love the cover of Wingspan, so I'm making a donation. (This is a made up scenario; flycatchers aren't a threatened species.)

Lots of the things we "love" are just feelings of nostalgia for what we remember. Games are great vehicles for creating nostalgia— we make happy memories with people we care about. What better mind-state to introduce people to topics that need more empathy, like marginalized groups or threatened species? 

I'm not saying that negative depictions don't have a place. But especially for marginalized groups, negative depictions (in this case, negative refers to depictions of victimization or villainy or stereotypes) can be actively harmful,  particularly when created without input from the groups in question. Having empathy means not trying to speak for or over others.

Having a deep appreciation for a culture leads to attention to detail, which in turn helps foster appreciation for that culture. Even if the culture in question is birders. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Thoughts on Sustainability

One of my pandemic hobbies has been to watch environmentally conscious YouTube videos. I've found channels dedicated to climate change, channels that break down the issues with recycling, and channels that look at the environmental footprint of various materials. I'd like to apply some of the things I've learned to board games. 

First off, we can't determine a material's sustainability by only looking at its end-of-life OR by only looking at the materials used to produce it. We have to consider both, plus emissions from transportation. And from my limited knowledge, transportation is probably the biggest environmental problem in board games (see DW Planet A link below for more about shipping). Shipping from China all over the world in container ships is industry standard but it's not good for the environment. So, in an ideal world we would have local micro-factories that could produce components and assemble games for each region you would otherwise ship to. Obviously, that's a huge shift that comes with a host of problems logistically. (Counterpoint: we already do localization for games; this would just take it a bug step further.) But local manufacturing is what I think would be the most sustainable (probably even after a swift to all electric transport). For now though, the lighter the components, the fewer shipping emissions (an argument in favor of sometimes using plastic). 

Then there are smaller steps that are happening now. Reducing or eliminating plastic wrap packaging is a good goal, provided the games arrive safe and playable. Losing inventory is possibly worse for the environment than thin plastic is, because of the energy required to replace it. I would say though, that papertape sticker tabs would be more environmentally friendly than plastic stickers (most stickers and tape are non-recyclable plastic). The less there is to throw away in a game, the better for the environment. But if something needs to be tossed, it would be nice for it to be biodegradable. I'd also like to see board game companies include 'how to recycle' instructions in the game box. 

Ideally, all paper products would be recyclable and made of recycled materials; wood components would be made from certified sustainably harvested wood; and all metal or plastic components derived from recycled material. If you want to do a really deep dive though, you need to consider inks and finishes. A plastic layer on paper goods can be sort of separated from the paper, but only the paper gets recycled using current methods. Inks should be produced by companies that aren't pumping pollution by-product straight into rivers (actually, that goes for all factories). Additionally, the longer components last, the better for the environment. The board game resale market is one of the most sustainable things about the hobby. (Because print-and-plays cut out global shipping, they are fairly sustainable as well.)

When looking at manufacturing companies, there are a number of certifications (like Certified B Corporations) that let you know that a company is actually doing the environmentally positive things they say they are. Other terms to look for would be carbon neutral or carbon negative. 

Some things I don't think are sustainable in the long term: 3D printers on a large scale (unless you're running them on renewable energy, you reuse the excess filament and miss prints, and you ship locally), non-replayable/resellable games like escape room games, expansion FOMO in Kickstarters that encourages people to buy more game than they'll ever play, and 'table presence' components that lack game function. The 3D printer thing is largely based on how long they take to run compared to injection molding or laser cutting combined with current limitations on the materials they can use. 

I'm excited to see publishers actively exploring options for increasing sustainability. However, it's a long road and we won't get there if we stop at the plastic wrap. The first step is increased awareness at what true sustainability would look like. I recommend checking out these YouTube channels: Gittemary Johansen's Impact of videos, Our Changing Climate, and DW Planet A. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

The Secret Sauce

Every game idea is an egg that, given effort, can hatch into a fully playable game. Not all of these games will get (or need to get) published. Every designer is capable of designing bad-to-mediocre games. But spending time on a design that will never transcend mediocrity can be a waste of time and effort (depending on your design goals). How do you figure out which of your designs has the greatest potential to succeed? 

If you're still in the idea stage, you don't. You don't know how a game will play out until it's been played. Get some notecards, a pencil, a dry erase board and marker, and cubes from the nearest copy of Pandemic, and make a prototype. Play it by yourself and then with other people. Make improvements. Eventually, you will have a playable game. Should you keep working on it? 

The truth is, knowing when to abandon a game is an important skill. But in practice that skill looks more like a deep understanding of what makes a game publishable.

The first question I ask myself with a new design is: "Does this game excite me?" If the answer is no, hit pause on that game and work on something else. If you aren't excited by your own ideas, no one else will be. I get excited about different aspects of different games: the theme, the mechanics, the table presence, etc. But I have to have something that I'm invested in, because that usually ends up being the selling point of the game at the end of the design process. 

The next question I ask myself is: "Is this design a step forward for me?" In interview after interview, designers and publishers have said variations on the idea that whatever their latest game is is the best thing they've ever worked on. It doesn't matter if it's objectively true; it needs to feel that way to you. Something about your game needs to feel better than what you've done before. This is similar to my first question and is also about my investment level in my own design. It's also about approaching game design with a mindset of discovery and growth. 

Later in the process, I focus on finding the hook. A hook is what makes a game interesting before you play it. It's a single sentence that 'hooks' players into playing the game. Games will change during the design process, and sometimes that means the hook will change as well. I need to pay attention to what resonates with playtesters and lean into that if I can. If I can't locate an interesting enough hook, my conclusion is that, until I can, my game would not be very marketable. If my game looks and sounds too much like a dozen other games on the market, I will probably abandon it because I don't need to put that much effort into something that already exists. 

Before I even think of submitting to a publisher, my game needs to excite my playtesters. A game isn't finished when it's playable. A game needs to generate interest and excitement with playtesters, especially ones who have played it before and want to play again. Friends and family don't count here. Playtest with gamers, designers, and your target audience. 

When I've taken a game as far as I can with regular playtesting (including playtesting with other designers), I make an effort to playtest with publishers.  Sometimes this looks like submitting a game to a publisher for their consideration, but I don't recommend that as a first step. There are a lot of small publishers (who are also designers) at conventions and protospiels (including online events). Get at least one to play your game. Developers are also a good option, but I like the cold dose of reality that a publisher brings to a playtest. If your goal is to have a traditionally published game, at some point you need to seek out serious critical feedback. My biggest redesigns are always after conversations with publishers. Publishers know how to get a game to become a product. 

Sometimes I develop games for months before abandoning them. You can't always tell right away which games are worth pursuing. If my game excites me, excites playtesters, and works as a product with a marketable hook, that's the secret sauce. That's when I would shift gears to pitching (or self-publishing). At any step along the way, I might shelve or abandon a game. My goal is to identify and move past mediocre games so that I can put my effort into the games with the greatest potential. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Being Better Playtesters

I want to talk about playtesting as a designer. No, not your game; other games. A lot has been said about designers who derail feedback sessions with suggestions that attempt to redesign the game on the fly. In my experience, those instances are outliers. (But, you know, don't do that.) Usually, I can expect 50% or more of players to barely provide feedback if at all. This post is for that 50% and anyone who wants to become a better playtester.

Let's start at the beginning. Ask before you play. Ask what genre of game a designer has brought before sitting down at the table. Ask how long the playtest will be. Don't put yourself in an unhelpful situation. Your job as a playtester is to be useful. You will not be useful if you need to leave halfway thru the game or if you hate the type of game being presented. I generally avoid 2-player card combat games (of any flavor) because I have no experience playing them and don't really care to. However, I will sometimes approach a game if the designer is specifically looking for unexperienced players. Usually, these playtests only involve rules explanations and a couple of turns, which is more reasonable since I don't care for these types of games. (And yes, hint to designers: low investment playtests for noobs are a good idea when testing rules and icon clarity.) 

Once you agree to play a game, take notes.  I recommend taking notes on your phone. It's always with you, and you can delete the notes after. (I recommend using a notebook for your own games though, so the notes are all together and chronological.) At the beginning of a playtest, I often pose questions in my notes: "Will X become a problem?" "Does Y work how I think it will?" I also tend to be very brief: "Card draws- confusing." I can generally remember what I meant when feedback starts. Writing for too long can slow the game down in some cases, so it's better to be brief. Taking notes helps track your experience throughout the game, including the rules explanation.

When feedback starts, state your biases and competences. Do you tend to like this type of game? What are your strengths as a playtester? For example, I always let designers know that I'm better with early ideas and late stage polishing, but I'm not great at math and balancing. However, I'm a good test case for if your rules overhead is too much for a gateway+ gamer. (I'm really bad at learning rules by being spoken at AND by reading them. I need a combo plus visual examples.) You should have at least some idea of when you give the most helpful feedback as a playtester and let designers know. This information should be presented as useful context (I've played a lot of this mechanic, so I was already familiar with the basic rules.") and not obnoxious braggadocio ("I'm so over deck-builders so I didn't have fun, but I can totally make your game better than all of those other games."). 

During your feedback, address problems before suggestions. Identifying what's not working is a good skill to hone as a designer, and playtesting is a great time to build that skill. Try to categorize each of the problems: UX, rules complexity, imbalanced strategy, edge cases, etc. A lot of times, a game's rules and experience are being obscured by confusing implementation (or a poor teach), and as designers we should be able to identify if the problem is a rule or bad iconography. 

When it comes to suggestions, offer paths to solutions. For my own games, I tend to ignore playtesters' suggestions in favor of simpler solutions that achieve the same results, and I expect other designers to do the same. As a result, I tend to point towards the experiences I was hoping for but that didn't occur. Sometimes, there are obvious ways to get there, and in those cases I will tell the designer what I think needs to change. (And I have had well-known and respected designers do the same to my games. Which flys in the face of "don't give suggestions" as a general rule.) More often though, I will say things like: "I was looking for a bigger risk-to-reward scenario, but I don't know how you could get there," or "I really wanted the gems to mean something thematically, but that's up to you." The goal of this kind of feedback is to set the designer up to get inspired and explore the problems in a deeper way after the playtest is over. 

Address practicalities and limitations, especially when playtesting digitally. But tailor your feedback to the stage of design. If the design is at the 'throw everything at the wall' stage, the designer probably isn't all that concerned about the cost of dice. Still, throw a comment in about it, but it can look more like: "When you get there, you need to consider streamlining your components." Also, address the target market. Just because I would prefer all games be designed with me in mind, doesn't mean my feedback needs to be only about my preferences. It helps if you are aware of lots of games and can point the designer towards examples of games to research even if you aren't a fan of those games. (Top 10 or top 100 lists can help you get familiar with a lot of games very fast. Those lists usually hit on the main mechanic and unique trait of the games mentioned. They can be great for finding lesser known games from which to draw inspiration.) 

Unless you would buy the game right now, don't focus on fun and boredom. As a designer-playtester, I limit my adjectives to what I find interesting and exciting (or not interesting and not exciting). I never ask designers if they had fun playing my game because I don't care if they did. They weren't playing to have fun; they were playing to find flaws. Better questions to ask: Where did the game feel slow? Did you want one more turn or one fewer turn? Were you invested in what you were doing? You can ask these questions of yourself as you playtest, as well. Don't forget to take notes about the answers. 

Mention what worked. I don't get worked up about the ratio of good-to-negative feedback as a playtester.  If you're giving quality feedback, most designers will want to hear it. So, positive feedback (ideally) isn't about making a designer feel better. It's about convincing them to preserve what is already working in the game: "These are the parts that work; don't change them." Sometimes the beating heart of the game is located in a different place than where the designer thinks it is. Talking about what you liked helps a designer find or confirm where the core of the game-experience truly is. 

I've only ever had one truly negative designer playtest. Far more often, designers are either too nice or have nothing much to say at all. And if that's the case, then why playtest? I need my game improved more than I need to hear nice things. The great part about becoming a better playtester is that you can model the behavior you want to see and hopefully contribute to a more productive culture of playtesting. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Start Here

After nearly a hundred posts, I feel compelled to offer a reading list of some of the highlights of this blog. I've divided the posts into categories of interest and ordered them by how I think they will flow best conceptually. I'm aware my blog is not the easiest to navigate, but I simply can't be bothered to learn better web design. I won't do another one of these types of posts until after another hundred or so posts. 

If you are interested in theme, start here:

So You Need a Theme: Answering the most asked question regarding theme, "How can I retheme my game?"

The Anatomy of a Theme: My first attempt at defining parts of a theme.

Defining Theme: A more detailed attempt to define theme that builds on much of my writing.

The Three Levels of Theme: Ways theme can be expressed in a game. 

Thematic Transportation: One way to think about immersion.

How to Tell When a Thematic Element is a Gimmick 

Creating Resonance: A series based on my GDC talk. 

Abstraction, Representationalism, & Choice: Why specificity is better than abstraction. 

On the Subject of Subtext 

If you are interested in designing for emotions, start here: 

Emotion-Driven Design

Empathy-Driven Design

Creating Emotions in Players: A look at two emotional arcs used in games. 

Tools to Create Emotions: My most popular post. 

A Close Look at Endowment Effect: How one of my designs used loss aversion for emotional effect. 

If you want to learn about how game design intersects with art, start here: 

Are Designers Artists?: YES. 

Art Versus Craft: Are craftspeople artists? ALSO YES.

Collaboration in the Arts: All art is collaborative. Just like in making board games. 

Limitations in Art: All art has limitations. 

Art, Pandering, & Propaganda: Defining some terms. 

If you want to read what little I've written about mechanics and adjacent topics, start here: 

The Seven Action Categories of Board Games: A method of thinking about mechanical elements. 

Mechanics Roundup: Acquisition (Cards): Every way to get a card during gameplay. 

The Heaviest Mechanism: What makes a mechanism heavy?

Types of Information: How information is presented via different components and mechanics. 

Everything a Game Does: A short list of game elements that tend to get relegated to apps. 

Design for Learning: Player aids, glossaries, and more. 

Board Game Titles: Just a bit of fun.

If you are looking for general design discussion, start here:

Breaking the Rules: An outline of the design process that addresses the why of the process. 

Tough Love: Questions to ask of your design. 

Innovation vs. Refinement: Relative merits of each. 

Sources of Inspiration: Where can inspiration come from?

Development Directions and Ways to Stand Out in a Crowded Market: How can my game get noticed?

Elevator Pitches: One way to get your game noticed.

The Other Complexity Creep

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Elevator Pitches

I am probably better at elevator pitches than I am at designing. So, I thought I would put a few pointers together that should strengthen your elevator pitch game. 

An elevator pitch is a short paragraph designed to get someone (usually a publisher) interested enough in your game to listen to a full pitch. Stylistically, elevator pitches should follow the ABC's: accuracy, brevity, and clarity. Be brief, be clear, be to the point. If your elevator pitch is a little lackluster, the first thing you could try is cutting as many words as possible while still sounding professional. Leave out all superlatives and generic adjectives or adverbs, such as "fun," "unique," or "very." One way I like to start writing an elevator pitch is to write a potential tagline for my game and expand on it. For example, "Urban Decay is a city unbuilding game that combines tile-flipping and pattern-building" developed from "Urban Decay: A City Unbuilding Game." 

The most important information should be in the first sentence. Don't bury the lede. I like to combine the thematic hook of a game with the major mechanic(s). Normally, I would recommend stating the thematic hook as a question, but I don't think that is necessary with an elevator pitch. Instead, just stick to noun + verb + thematic win condition/player goal. A thematic win condition would be something like "makes the best hats" rather than "gets the most points." "Noun" refers to who the players are and "verb" is what they are doing in the game. NO world-building lore in elevator pitches.

Include the mechanic/genre most gamers would use to describe your game in your pitch: party game, auction game, social deduction game, etc. You want to set expectations as much as possible. If your war-themed game is auction driven, you need to say so or you may inadvertently set false expectations. The point of an elevator pitch is to convey as much information as possible in a couple sentences, so it's vital to use the knowledge publishers already have about games. 

I also like to include player count, game length, and general heaviness. These elements tend to get shuffled  into the second (or third) sentence if the first has gotten too clunky. I tend to think of this type of sentence as a postscript of additional information: it needs to be fast and informative. (e. g. "Deadly Dowagers is a medium-light 30 minute game for 2-6 players.") 

Depending on how much I need clarity over brevity, I may have a another sentence that expands on either the theme or the mechanics. This sentence could be before, after, or between the other two. In my Urban Decay example above, I would probably want to add a little more about the theme: "Players destroy buildings, grow forests, and spread waterways as nature reclaims an abandoned city." You may want to mention a mechanic that makes your game unique instead of expanding on the theme. However, the first question an interested publisher will ask is "what makes your game unique?" I'd, personally, rather give a clear impression of my theme in my elevator pitch and be ready for follow-up questions about mechanics. 

Learning to communicate the substance of your game efficiently and evocatively is an important skill for a designer to have. Elevator pitches are one of the best ways to hone that skill. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

The Three Levels of Theme

The thematic experience of playing a game is created by a number of elements that operate in different ways as we play a game. Ideally, a game should have consistent theming at all levels to produce a deep thematic experience. Understanding how theme is expressed at different levels can help you identify where your theme may be weak or underdeveloped. 

Level 1: Core Gameplay

A game system is a series of rules and mechanics that produces an experience even when divorced from theme. This is easiest to see when you play two versions of the same game with a different theme (see numerous Reiner Knizia titles). It is possible to build a theme from a complete set of mechanics or even just a core mechanic that enhances the existing experience of a game system. The experience of core gameplay includes mechanics, rhythm or flow of play, and the tension of decisions (such as loss aversion).  These will be present regardless of setting and need to be taken into account when theming a game. Failure to factor in how a game actually plays to the thematic expression of a game will often create ludonarrative dissonance. Arguably, this level isn't theme, but theme is about creating a specific experience and core gameplay is all about player experience. 

Level 2: Baked-in Thematic Elements

Elements that are baked into a game are thematic elements that cannot be avoided when playing a game (without third party modification). These elements largely define the theme of the game (or create the most ludonarrative dissonance). Baked-in elements include illustration, components, icons/graphics, layout, and terminology. Terminology sits on the cusp between this level and the next, because so many terms are ignored in favor of color or shape names. I would argue that is the result of bad theming, however. All of these elements define the parameters of the game world because they are so closely tied to the actions of gameplay. You can't help but look at, hold, and manipulate tokens and cards while taking actions. In strongly themed games, what players call the tokens should at least closely resemble their actual names. So, while I may consistently get the names of the resources wrong in Everdell, stones and sticks aren't that far off from pebbles and twigs. And, yes, cubes are inherently more difficult to incorporate thematically because nothing about them, except color, helps reinforce the theme. (Looking at you, Century: Spice Road.)

Level 3: Opt-in Thematic Elements

Opt-in elements are elements that can be ignored during gameplay. This includes flavor text, rules fluff, narrative or dialogue breaks (in some cases), additional lore or components located in companion products, and meta-play. The difference between opt-in and baked-in is that opt-in elements invariably distract from or break the flow of gameplay. That doesn't mean they are inherently bad, but it does help explain why so many players choose to ignore flavor text. These elements exist for the players who want to engage with them and should enhance the overall play experience for those players (by working with the other levels and not against them). Meta-play is difficult to design for. Meta-play includes role-play, describing your character's reactions, silly voices, etc. Some notable games that encourage meta-play are Gloom and Sheriff of Nottingham. (I may revisit meta-play in a future post.) The important thing to know about this level is that opt-in elements cannot be where your theme begins and ends. Opt-in elements should be the final touches on a game that feels thematic even when players ignore those elements. 

I hate when flavor text breaks the fourth wall, or when icons and tokens don't have matching shapes, or when cubes don't represent anything. And I have made my feelings about rules fluff abundantly clear on many occasions. The world of the game exists from set-up until final scoring. The theme should enhance what happens in that period of time. Flavor text alone will not make your game thematic. Build your theme from the core outwards with every element reinforcing the others. After all, I've never heard anyone complain that a game experience felt too thematic. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

The Heaviest Mechanism

What is the heaviest mechanism? I'd say there are a few clear contenders that all share similar traits. But I'd like to point out one mechanism that while not the absolute heaviest in existence is far more difficult than it gets credit for. 

Most of the 'heaviness' of games comes from how mechanics fit together—either their resulting rules overhead or their emergent strategy, depending on which you qualify as being heavy. Individual mechanics are generally pretty light, unless they require multiplication or division. The heaviness of strategy games generally comes from spinning a lot of plates. 

Ideally, each mechanism in board game design could be 1) performed on one turn and 2) explained with one line of text. But some mechanisms need context to reveal themselves. So, "pickup resources" and "deliver resources" combine to become something more distinct as "pickup and deliver." And mechanics that reveal themselves thru context cannot usually be explained by a single line of text. I classify these mechanics as inherently heavier. 

For my money, the various multi-phase auction mechanics are probably the heaviest mechanics currently in the BGG database (but I'm not combing thru all of them or even all of the auctions to give a definite winner). They require the context of multiple players over multiple bids before they can be understood. This in turn requires a more in depth rules explanation. (They also require implicit understanding of the value of items and a certain amount of mental math and probability tracking to strategize well.) 

The mechanic I want to bring to your attention is nearly as difficult: multi-turn, multi-player context is required. It requires a paragraph of rules text. It has certain unintuitive conditions that trip up new players. It's pick-and-pass drafting. 

Pick-and-pass drafting (here on out, drafting) is a mechanic that has to be described in full, across an entire round and often into the following round before players have full context of what they are doing, let alone why. Just telling them to "take one card and pass the hand to the left" leaves out what you do with the card you take and whether you can swap that card for a future card. I'm blaming Spoons for making drafting so difficult to teach. (At least with American players above a certain age.) In Spoons, you keep a hand and pass a single card. There is only one hand that is yours. In drafting you can have your tableau, your hand, and the hand of cards you are passing. Players have to be taught explicitly what cards they own, what are locked in place, what gets passed, what can be discarded. And then they have to not get those categories confused. Which is difficult because it's all the same deck of cards. How many times have you played Sushi Go! only to have a player run out of cards before everyone else? For me, it's every time. 

To add to the rules complexity, most drafting games have additional rules around the direction of the draft. Whether it's left-right-left or a snake draft, these rules add complexity to an already complex system. Then you get the 2-player variants, which require you to understand the original rules so you can know what to do differently. I play a lot of games 2-player on the first play, so this standard of rules writing is maddening. Give me the whole turn structure in the variant section. 

Designers tend to think of drafting as a simple mechanic. Then they add it to games to increase complexity (e.g. Terraforming Mars). As someone who has designed a drafting game, how we are using the mechanic is more in line with what drafting really is: a complexity adder. In my experience, drafting is heavier than engine building. Both require knowledge of all of the cards and what they do, but drafting requires that knowledge to be given beforehand since the draft isn't open the way placing a card on the table is. This is why card glossaries are necessary. I can hand the rules to a player and tell them to look up the card in their hand, rather than having to explain out loud what the card does. Pool drafting is inherently lighter because the drafting is open on the table but also because it can be explained as a single action. (For what it's worth, "I cut; you chose" is heavier than drafting—because you are predicting other players' wants—but is often open information.) 

Engine building generally doesn't generate player interaction (expect maybe when you run your engine). Drafting requires consideration around not only what you are keeping but what you are giving away. Not only do you have to understand all of the cards, but also their values at given points in the game and what your neighbor may find valuable based on what they have played thus far. We've racked up a lot of spinning plates for a single mechanism. 

We often assume that everyone in the hobby has played a drafting game. I have playtested with a lot of designers who had never played a drafting game. I rarely had a playtest where I didn't have to teach "how to draft." Drafting is by far the heaviest mechanic in my game. Even if you aren't designing a drafting game, be aware of how context creates complexity. The longer something takes to explain the heavier it is. Some gamers may come to your game with context pre-installed, but you can't count on that. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

A Close Look at Endowment Effect

I've been struggling with the endowment effect since around July 2018, but I didn't know what it was until a few months ago. Spoiler alert: I'm going to talk a lot about one of my designs in this post. 

Endowment effect is related to loss aversion. When you give a player something that is 'theirs' they will not want to give it up, even for something of greater value. You can deal with endowment effect in two ways: you can make it easier for players to progress by reducing the feeling of loss (by not taking their stuff or by not giving them stuff to begin with) OR you can ramp up the feeling of loss to create tension. Geoff Engelstein breaks these options down mechanically in Achievement Relocked. In his examples, the options above are presented to make a game feel more forgiving or less forgiving and that seems to correspond to lighter or heavier games. Which is a good starting place for understanding endowment effect. But I want to look at a third option: embracing endowment effect in lighter (or any) games as a way to drive home the theme. And I can really only do that by taking a close look at my upcoming game, Deadly Dowagers (signed and in development; not yet announced). 

Deadly Dowagers is a pick-and-pass drafting and tableau-building game for 2-6 players that plays in 45 minutes. Players take on the roles of Victorian women who would kill to marry a Duke. 

When I invite players to join a game of Deadly Dowagers, the ones who agree are typically excited at the prospect of the theme: Victorian women killing their husbands to marry richer ones (rinse and repeat). But once they start playing they seem to have a change of heart. Why can't they just get a divorce, they ask. Or, they will stay married long after they should have 'ended things' in order to win the game. The second and third (and so on) husbands are usually dispatched much more quickly. What makes the first husbands special? Well, for one they are the first, but, more importantly, the first husbands are 'purchased' as a part of set up. They are your starting gear. And unlike items in digital RPGs, you have to get rid of one before you can upgrade to the next one. That by itself creates some feelings. But then you layer on the cultural context of the theme. You are married to that portrait on that card. That is your husband. Players already wouldn't want to give up starting gear that they are still actively using. Starting husbands are that much more emotionally charged. 

I think at this point I need to make clear that this is a light, fun game. This moment of tension in the early game isn't there for every player and doesn't seem to ruin the experience (for people who are willing to play a game with this theme to begin with). Still, some designers would try to avoid that negative feeling in a light game. Not me. I wish that feeling happened with every husband in the game. However, as it stands, the fact that the first murder is the hardest feels metaphoric of a descent into a life of crime. The player psychology and rhythm of gameplay feed into and reinforce the theme. Which is always my goal in game design. 

So, if you wanted to leverage endowment effect for emotional effect, how should you go about it? First you must give the players (or let them choose from a selection) something of value. This needs to be the only task occurring. In Deadly Dowagers, players make two choices during set up: which portrait represents them and which husband they want to marry. (Husbands cost a certain amount of your starting money. It's a dowry system.) Later husbands are married while players are juggling tableaus of property, larger amounts of cash, and other players who are at a different phase of the game. (Play is mostly simultaneous.) I would have to slow the game down a lot to recreate the first husband feeling. 

Layering value deepens the emotional experience. Importantly, husbands are of mechanical value but also thematic value as mentioned above. Scarcity is another way to add perceived value, even if the item doesn't have the largest intrinsic value. Making players pay for the item adds another layer of value. (Creating loss around something of cultural value also creates the sense of violating a taboo. I'd be careful about making that the goal of the game, but it works in Deadly Dowagers.)

Once players have something of value, that item must be pitted against an opportunity loss. Husbands have special powers while they are alive, but leave you fortunes when they die. Do you need the power more or the money? If you run out of money, you may have a dead turn because you will be unable to build your tableau. This tension is what makes the negative feelings about loss worth it. 

If you really want to ramp up the feeling, make the loss permanent and have consequences. Obviously, death is permanent in Deadly Dowagers and creates an emotional response. But players also have to juggle the infamy of having buried their husbands under "mysterious" circumstances. To drive this home, not only is there an infamy track, but players place dead husbands in a personal husband graveyard that generates infamy for the rest of the game. The husband cards don't return to the 'market' but are left in the tableau as a momento mori. This system creates immediate and delayed consequences which is both thematic and adds tension. 

Make the loss player-driven. Every round in Deadly Dowagers has a husband phase during which players can get married to or murder a husband. Or they could pass. The decision to advance is on the players. Making the choice deepens the emotion. Forcing the loss thru a regular event feels scripted which decreases the tension. Forcing the loss thru a random event feels arbitrary and bad. If you give players an out by forcing the loss or avoiding the loss, they will take it to avoid mechanics that make them even slightly uncomfortable. On the other hand, you can give your players the hope of a way out. There is one single card in all of Deadly Dowagers that kills your husband by natural causes. Players feel better knowing there is a chance that they could avoid the decision that makes them feel bad, even though they would see that card at most twice in a game (you need to kill four husbands on average). 

Be aware of the goal gradient effect. Players' motivation to achieve a goal increases as players near the goal. What this means for Deadly Dowagers is that the closer players get to the end of the game, the more  murder-for-profit takes precedence over any other consideration. Again, this plays into the narrative arc of a descent into a life of crime. It also means that endowment effect would be even harder to implement past the halfway or two-thirds point in the game. "This thing is mine" becomes increasingly less important over time compared to "reaching the goal." 

I didn't have a language for any of this when I designed my game. I stumbled into a dynamic that worked the way I wanted it to and leaned into it. If I had known about endowment effect, I would have spent less time banging my head against a wall trying to make every husband feel valuable and would have embraced the arc present in the game sooner. You don't need to know every design term to design a good game, but knowing why something works the way it does can prevent you from wandering down too many rabbit trails during the design process. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

Tools to Create Emotions

For this post, I'm combining some thoughts from Emotional Design, Achievement Relocked, these videos by Cogito Design, and my thoughts on resonance. 

I'm developing a list of tools and resources for ways to create emotions in players. I've divided the list into three sections: rhythm, transportation, and loss aversion. My thoughts on this subject are still evolving, so my categories may shift in the future. 

Rhythm sets the mood of a game. Rhythm is the feeling of a game's mechanics during play across the whole game. Turn structure, when a strategy pays off, the amount of randomness, etc. all impact the flow of a game. Setting the mood through mechanical flow primes players to have certain emotional experiences. Games can be casual activities, intense duels, exciting adventures, and each of those types of experiences relies on a different rhythm of play. Rhythm can also be used to create investment in a game. This video talks about anticipation arcs in games. A well-crafted sense of anticipation leads to investment and excitement. (Go watch the video, because there's too much for me to break down here.) Rhythm is also powerful because once established a rhythm can be broken. Unexpectedness creates surprise. A succession of surprises can inspire a sense of discovery, however each surprise is likely to be less individually impactful than a single major plot twist. Too many surprises could just lead to a game feeling overly random. Breaks in rhythm should be carefully crafted to build the desired emotional experience. 

Rhythm is mechanical. Let's take a look at theme. Transportation is what most people mean when they talk about immersion. In other words, transportation occurs when the theme 'transports' you into the world of the game. Role-play is one method that can lead to immersion, however it is not the only method. Role-play is generally an 'above the table' activity in board games. To encourage role-play, designers should focus on mechanics with player interaction that requires communication: bluffing, trading, cooperation, etc. Then, those mechanics have to be closely tied thematically to who the player is playing as. While both games have high player interaction, Sheriff of Nottingham does an excellent job encouraging role-play; Bohnanza does not. Either related to role-play or not, relationships add verisimilitude and emotional impact to games. How does a PC relate to the world around it? Worlds feel more real when characters are in relationship with the people and things around them. This is why Sheriff of Nottingham works so well. Every player knows what their relationship is to the other players in a given round. Simulative actions are more mechanical methods to create transportation. They are mechanisms that simulate a real activity (for example, the pointing mechanism in Ca$h 'n Guns). I've mentioned it before, but Gil Hova's player/avatar/agent model is an excellent look at how the relationship between theme and mechanics can affect player experiences if you want to explore this dynamic further. 

Loss aversion is a psychological and economic phenomenon that has a huge impact on board game design. At its heart, loss aversion is the tenet that players are more bothered by losing something than they are excited by gaining something. There's a lot to unpack here for game designers and I highly recommend reading Achievement Relocked. The elements that jumped out to me while reading the book were the ones that provoked certain specific emotions. Clear consequences, created when actions affect the story of the game, build tension and investment because players know what they stand to gain or lose based on their decisions. Obfuscated outcomes have fewer emotional hooks (which is sometimes desirable when trying to avoid the "feels bad" experience in players). Permanence is clear consequences taken to its logical conclusion. The appeal of legacy games comes from the "permanent" effect your decisions has on the game. (Permanence is one way to enhance transportation as well.) One way to signal clear consequences of a decision is by creating scarcity. Scarcity indicates what players should value. Gaining or losing something that has clear value creates a stronger emotional response. Lastly, the endowment effect is the "tendency to give something more value because it belongs to you." Players are loathe to give up something they've been given, even if doing so is how you advance in the game. I'm going to dedicate a whole, separate post to this concept, because I think it can be leveraged to create truly interesting emotional experiences. 

This is just a collection of the methods I've come across (mostly) recently that designers can use to craft emotional experiences. Obviously, I think this is a topic that deserves more focus in board game design. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays. 

Creating Emotions in Players

I've been reading Emotional Design by Don Norman. This book is half a philosophical discussion of product design and half speculation about future technology. But the parts I found the most useful were the descriptions of how emotions result from and guide a user's interaction with a product. In this post, I am distilling out those emotional chain reactions (my term) and applying them to board game design. [NB: I'm not an expert on emotion and this information is not meant to be used outside of game design.] 

There are two main chains of emotions described in the book (although not as explicitly as I have depicted them here): the anxiety chain and the happiness chain (again, my own terms). The anxiety chain starts either with frustration or confusion.  Frustration can result from struggling to learn or to execute actions or from a sense of danger (such as the danger of losing). This type of frustration can be used to build tension in a gameplay arc. Frustration can also result from feeling a lack of control. Feeling a lack of control can lead to a lack of trust in the design. Frustration can lead to anxiety. Confusion should be avoided in game design, but will lead to a similar state of anxiety as frustration does. Anxiety causes increased concentration on the details of a problem. Anxiety produces focus. Focus is useful in heavy strategy games. High levels of anxiety can produce the desire for escape. These sensations can create fear. Fear, if overcome (or if the threat is overcome), produces pride and a sense of achievement. Players also feel pride in overcoming obstacles and refining their strategy. However, high anxiety coupled with lack of control will lead to anger. 

Notice that this chain of emotions is fairly linear, which mirrors the style of thinking created by this chain, which is marked by intense focus. Emotions in parentheses are the undesired emotions that can occur at the same point in the chain as more desirable emotions. I have extrapolated that struggle and danger are created by challenges and threats, which I include on my model. Also, this is more a look at how emotions progress and less how to create each emotion in the chain. I'll be writing more about creating emotion in future posts. 

There are some important things to note about anxiety chains. Too much frustration will drive away players. On the other hand, shared experience of these "negative" emotions can lead to increased social bonding—a positive outcome. Players in a state of anxiety will be less open to interruptions, as such prevent the concentration created by their anxiety. Humans are less able to learn while in a state of anxiety. Any new rules must be presented clearly and be easily referred back to. Anxiety chains seem best suited to intellect-challenging designs or horror-themed games.

Emotional Design helpfully includes a list of things that can produce feelings that belong in the anxiety chain: heights; sudden, unexpected loud sounds or bright lights; looming objects; extreme hot or cold; darkness; empty, flat terrain; crowded, dense terrain; crowds of people; rotting smells; decaying foods; bitter tastes; sharp objects; harsh, abrupt sounds; grating, discordant sounds; misshapen human bodies; snakes and spiders; bodily fluids and vomit. I don't think these are needed to produce tension in a euro game, but in horror games they fit right in. You could also use only one or two elements—a few sharp objects in an eerily empty terrain, for instance—to shift the tone of a location to a tenser, more anxious feel. 

The happiness chain starts with some combination of attraction, fun, and/or pleasure. Attraction is our response to aesthetics, in this case specifically non-utilitarian pleasure. (Much of aesthetics, fun, and pleasure overlap, so I attempted to emphasize the least overlapping, most relevant aspects.) Of the eight types of fun, I feel that fantasy, narrative, discovery, and expression best fit as a description of "fun" within the happiness chain (again, due to overlap). However, the only type of fun I would leave out of the chain is challenge, as it clearly belongs on the anxiety chain. Don Norman cites Patrick Jordan's study, Designing Pleasurable Products, to explain the four types of pleasure. Of those four, two are useful here: physio-pleasure and socio-pleasure. Simply put, pleasure arises from our physical senses and our social interactions. Clearly, these two elements could be lumped into "fun," but I will leave fun and pleasure separate as Mr. Norman did. Attraction, fun, and pleasure lead to positive feelings of enjoyment, which he terms happiness. Players in such a positive state will be more inclined to curiosity and creativity. Problem solving and learning are also more likely outcomes. Positive emotions such as in happiness chains produce better conditions for brain storming than negative emotions. 

The happiness chain is not very linear. It resembles a method of brain-storming, which is fitting since the style of thinking promoted by this chain is well suited to brain-storming. 

Happiness chains allow players to be more open to interruptions and more receptive to new ideas. However, happiness chains produce less concentration and focus as a result. Happiness chains are well suited for party games, games with high randomness, and games that require a certain amount of flexible thinking during gameplay. 

Dan Norman also supplies us with a list of things that produce the positive emotions found in the happiness chain: warm, comfortably lit places; temperate climate; sweet tastes and smells; bright, highly saturated hues; soothing sounds; simple melodies and rhythms; harmonious music and sounds; caresses; smiling faces; rhythmic beats; 'attractive' people; symmetrical objects; rounded, smooth objects; 'sensuous' feelings, sounds, and shapes. Kids' and family games tend to showcase art emblematic of this list. These images produce feelings of peace and safety. You probably don't want to visually design your combat game around this list, although Root made a high-conflict, high-strategy game more approachable by using friendly looking art. Just be aware of what emotions your design choices will create. 

In addition to the two main chains, Emotional Design mentions how to create other emotions or what those emotions in turn inspire. Joy (a subset of happiness, presumably) creates an urge to play. Interest (perhaps another term for curiosity) creates a desire to explore. Hope is created by the expectation of a positive result. (Anxiety can also be characterized by the expectation of a negative outcome.) Relief occurs when an expected negative outcome doesn't happen. Disappointment results from an expected positive outcome not occurring. Remorse occurs when you perceive a negative outcome as your fault. Reproach occurs when a negative outcome is perceived as someone else's fault. Gratification is the result of a positive outcome that you are responsible for. Admiration results when a positive outcome occurs because of someone else. Surprise occurs when a situation does not unfold as anticipated and results in the need to reassess plans. Trust requires reliance, confidence, and integrity. Trust is required for cooperation. Embarrassment reflects your individual sense of appropriateness of behavior. 

Hopefully, this breakdown provides useful tools for designing emotions (intentionally) into games as well as diagnosing why some emotions feel out of place in certain games. The anxiety chain can additionally be used to figure out why playtesters are frustrated at various times while playing a prototype. Understanding the 'logic' behind emotions is a powerful tool in a designer's toolbox. 

Everything a Game Does

Here's something a little different. At GDC (online) this year, I watched a presentation on research surrounding app assisted games by Dr. Melissa Rogerson of the University of Melbourne. The research focused on categorizing how apps are/can be used in tabletop games. The unintended consequence (in my opinion) is that the list also doubles for many of the ways a game can require upkeep outside of player-driven actions. This makes sense because the main reason to have an app is to automate those elements of a game. 

The researchers identified eight functions used in apps: timing, randomizing, housekeeping, remembering, calculating, storytelling, teaching, and informing. Timing refers to actually tracking time. Randomizing is what it sounds like. Housekeeping includes game AI/automa upkeep. Remembering involves tracking progress, high scores, and unlocking new content. Calculating does all the mathy stuff like scoring. Storytelling is where all the lore/dialogue/flavor text is found. Teaching provides answers to rules questions or presents examples. Informing includes stuff not in the other categories like providing gates to hidden information. 

When using an app, all of these functions are (ideally) presented in a streamlined, optimized way. The existence of apps makes players less forgiving of analog upkeep. After all, apps remove the necessity for components like sand timers. So, is the solution to always go with an app? I would argue that apps and their functions are pointing us toward areas of analog design where we need more innovation, elegant solutions, and general creativity. 

This list also points us to the pain points of many games: the parts that feel like work. That's why these elements get moved to an app. For those of us designing app-less games, it's up to us to keep the work load low and the fun quotient high. I plan to use this list as a diagnostic for my games: How clunky is the calculation? How fiddly is the housekeeping? How effective are the informing elements? 

Short post today, especially given the title. And I probably misrepresented one or more of the functions to a degree, my apologies. However, I thought this was a useful list, and maybe you will too.