Creating Resonance: Part 2, GDC '21

I was honored to participate in the Board Game Summit for the all virtual GDC this year. My talk was pre-recorded and aired for participants on Monday, July 19th. This is Part 2 of the script for my GDC 2021 talk: Creating Resonance with Thematic Design. (Part 1 is available here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here.) The script has been lightly edited for ease of reading and annotated with links to other posts for additional thoughts on certain topics. 

Let’s move on from general principles and look at specific ways to make games more resonant. But first, here’s my definition for resonance: Resonance is familiarity plus unexpectedness minus chaff. This is the formula I developed to explain what makes a game resonate. This formula is inspired by the concepts in Made to Stick: Why Some ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. They developed the “SUCCESs” model, which stands for Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotions, and Stories. It is a handy mnemonic, but the authors admit it doesn’t show the relationship that exists between the traits they outline.

I reworked the model to show interconnectedness and cut the element (credible) that is mostly outside the scope of design. Credibility can be built within a piece of entertainment or art by having internal credibility through the use of vivid details that support the core idea. I’m proposing that by following my formula for resonance, you will produce this feeling in players anyway, so including this trait would ultimately be redundant. Internal Credibility is the product of resonance, not a cause, and external credibility is outside the scope of this discussion. 

Now let’s break down what familiarity plus unexpectedness minus chaff means. Familiarity is a concept that should seem obvious but has a lot going on with it. Familiarity is best described by “of course” moments. Of course wheat makes bread (or flour or charcoal or cattle). Of course the ground floor must be built before the second floor. The more your audience already knows, the less you have to teach them, which makes rules intuitive. Familiarity taps into ‘show don’t tell’ which is the major axiom of storytelling. You don’t have to explain that two factions hate each other if the emotion comes through in your game. Just because you state something in your lore doesn’t mean that the gameplay will support that story. You have to show players what the world is like through your gameplay. Let’s talk about how. 

Familiarity can be expressed in two ways: though emotions and through story elements. We want players emotionally connected to and engaged with our games. A game that touches us emotionally gets talked about more than a game of similar weight that is merely a good puzzle. Essentially, it’s the difference between Pandemic and Pandemic Legacy: Season 1. Designing for emotions in players who play our games seems like a daunting task, but it’s worth striving for. And it is a skill you can get better at. When designing for emotions it is important to remember: everything has emotional content.

Game elements can be divided into the tangible and non-tangible, or physical and mental. The way physical and visual elements produce emotional responses is the subject of entire fields of design. We are used to the idea that colors can create certain moods, but so can shapes, textures, rhythms, and sounds. 

We see this in board games with upgraded components. Players like metal coins because they have a more pleasant emotional response to the weight and texture of metal coins than to cardboard chits. A game’s tempo can create emotions, spanning a spectrum from methodical to frenzied. How players move their bodies— where they look, what they reach for, what they hold in their hands— can all produce emotions in players. Studying areas like product design or visual design can increase your awareness of how these types of physical elements can affect players. Think of it as cross-training to improve your design muscles. But don’t overlook studying the body language of your playtesters. This is a big reason why digital playtesting will never replace in person playtests. Board games are physical objects with layers of emotional content. 

Non-physical elements such as ideas also produce emotional responses. Narrative elements such as settings, stories, and even characters are capable of producing complex emotional experiences. Just ask anyone who has played TIME Stories [about Bob]. In addition to narrative elements, strategies and other elements of emergent gameplay can create emotions in games. I’m not going to touch on strategy here, because there are other better resources out there that discuss game arcs and player engagement. The point is that everything produces emotions, and the only emotion we really want to avoid is boredom.

Emotions are something to be aware of and even playtest for, but can be somewhat ethereal when we are attempting to list design principles. Designing for emotions comes with practice. Let’s move on to story elements, which are more concrete and easy to implement into designs. 

In 1570, Lodovico Castelvetro codified what became known as the classical unities of theatre: unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time. This meant that the story of a play needed to occur in one location, during one day, and be about one thing. This was supposed to prevent audience confusion about what was taking place on stage. Anyone who has watched Hamilton knows that these unities didn’t stick as guiding principles of theatre. However, we can use the classical unities as a jumping off point to create “of course” moments in our games’ stories. 

The purpose of the classical unities was to make sure the audience knew what was going on. One of the traits of resonance is clarity. I know I said one of the other traits was depth, but we need to prioritize clarity, because players need to be able to see what they are doing clearly before they can appreciate the breadth and scope of your game world. 

Our players need to know why they are performing the actions of the game. To design a more thematic game, there needs to be unity of action between the mechanics and the theme. I label this as plot. Game objectives should align with the theme. Which is to say, the plot of your gameplay should align with the plot of your theme. 

And your theme should be a complete sentence and not just a noun. "Dogs" is not a theme. "Dogs chasing mail carriers" is a theme. "Can the Dogs work together to protect their house from trespassing mail carriers?" is a resonant theme. Themes should have verbs. Verbs indicate actions. Themes without verbs will almost always feel pasted-on. Themes should be able to be stated as questions, because the outcome of a game is not predetermined the way the end of a novel is. 

Make how you win the game the crux of your theme. If a game claims to be about conservation, but the main mechanic is cutting down trees to build lumber mills, the theme is not in line with the objective. Every action a player takes should further the narrative arc. Or to put it another way, the actions taken in the game ARE the story and the theme should match the action. Don’t claim your plot is something other than what is present in the gameplay. 

One way to achieve this is to try to incorporate as many evocative actions as possible. Evocative actions are game actions that use thematic words as the names of the actions. They evoke the theme. So, you 'build a house' instead of 'placing a piece.' There is a balance here with rules comprehension, but when done well evocative actions will actually make your rules easier to learn. 

Yes, these are technically all ways to create mechanic-theme alignment, but this is a more detailed, story-focused perspective. This is the process of thematic integration. Well, there’s more and we’re getting to it. 

Since we’re discussing plot, I want to address fluff, which is the term I use for all flavor text and lore that is not required reading in order to play the game. My particular concern here is the fluff found on the first page of the rulebook. Introductory, world-building fluff at the beginning of a rulebook should lead into gameplay by explaining why characters are in the position that they are in on the first turn of the game, because the goal of every thematic detail in the box should be clarity. Use the lore paragraph before setup to create incentive to play the game to find out more about the world. Including too many thematic details when players are trying to internalize rules can contribute to information overload. This is where unity of action really comes in. I’ve read a number of rulebooks where the lore fluff didn’t seem to have very much to do with the actual game. This paragraph or two is the opportunity to set the stage and establish tone for the actual game. Don’t waste that opportunity by trying to cram in all the world-building you possibly can. There are places for your world building, but the page before setup is not one of them. 

Now let’s turn to unity of place, which I call location. Location isn’t just setting. It’s also world physics and character physics. Setting is where an event takes place. World physics is the manifestation of the rules of that world such as gravity, propulsion, heat, or visibility. Character physics usually manifests as direction of movement and speed but could also be inventory size, strength, need to eat, etc. I include character physics in location because all game physics help establish the ‘rules’ and feel of your world. Location can be expressed through illustration, components, and mechanics. 

The conveyor belts in Sushi Roll are such a small addition but they do so much to add a sense of place. In Sushi Go! players collect sushi to form their meals, but they seem to do so in a void. By that I mean that there is no indication in the game of where the players are when they are collecting sushi. The only sense of location is the chop sticks, which do little other than remind us that we are not eating with our hands. Not only are the conveyor belt tiles in Sushi Roll useful mechanically, but they go a long way to evoking location: we are in a conveyor belt sushi restaurant. That’s a way cooler place to be than a void. 

The building rules in Walking in Burano are one example of how using recognizable physics can help teach the rules of the game. In Burano, players are constructing buildings one floor at a time, but must build from the ground up unless they use scaffolding as a temporary floor. It seems like such a little thing, but a board game that acknowledges gravity clearly sets that game in a world that is comprehensible to the players. And because the world is comprehensible, the rules are easier to remember.  

I may be alone in this, but I am a big fan of the rondel mechanic in Scorpius Freighter. The action locations are visited by ships that are slowly orbiting planets. This mechanic ties the circular rondel shape to orbits and the limited movement per turn evokes the vastness of space, whether or not an actual orbit would be that slow. 

Location is about creating a sense of reality through game elements. As humans, we can relate to physics that match what we see in the real world. However, I am not saying that the physics of the game world needs to be scientifically rigorous, merely somewhat logical to players. The pagoda in Four Gardens does not create a sense of location because its physics are not analogous to the real world. Even skyscrapers with spinning restaurants only spin part of the building and only one way. There is nothing in the physics of Four Gardens’ pagoda that evokes the real world. Just being a pagoda is setting, not world physics. That doesn’t mean Four Gardens isn’t resonant at all, but it does mean that it doesn’t use recognizable physics to build resonance. More on that later.

The next story element is time. I don’t view time exactly the way unity of time works in theatre. Games don’t have to tell linear stories to be understandable by players. Time behaves differently in games than in linear entertainment. This is because perception of time passing has a lot to do with how a players feels while playing a game. Time is about pacing, rhythm, and scale, not about game length or linear narrative. How we theme our games should be informed by the pace of gameplay. Game progress should align with the amount of time represented by the game’s theme. Civ games tend to be slow because accumulating that much history is slow. Some themes need to feel pressed for time. Bomb defusal games should avoid analysis paralysis. Turn length, round length, and scoring style affect the pacing of a game, but a player’s physical movement and handling of game components can also contribute to the perception of timescale in a game. An exciting game with a short round structure can feel like a shorter game than it actually is. A thinky game will feel slow even if the game isn’t very long. 

Combining time and location, I use the phrase ‘find the movement’ as a great place to start when rethemeing a game. Start with what the game feels like, its rhythm, how things move, and build the theme from there. That’s because the pace and physics of a game are what will contribute most to a feeling of verisimilitude between the theme and mechanics. This method is harder than just picking a cool-sounding theme, but it yields better results. Alternatively, be prepared to change your mechanics to match your theme. 

I add character to Castelvetro’s list of plot, location, and time. I think of player characters more like miniature plots unto themselves. But I separate character from plot because in storytelling characters are often at odds with the overall plot. Characters have desires, faults, and ideals. So, this category is more about a character’s goals than their physical traits, which I place in location. Characters’ in-world desires should match their mechanical goals. In good fiction writing, characters have goals and obstacles to those goals. Good game design works the same way, so it only makes sense to have a character’s deepest desires line up with their win condition. Root does this surprisingly well, in that the mechanics and win conditions of the different factions express so much about the socio-political environment of that world. 

Individual characters are easier to identify with (and thus more empathetic) than faceless collectives like factions or corporations. Humans are also more empathetic than aliens. (Remember the goal is to create an emotional response in players and one way to do that is empathy.) We like what we can relate to. One concrete element that can add a lot of emotion to a theme is relationships. This doesn’t have to be fully developed Fog of Love-style relationships. Two brothers raising armies and going to war is a better story than two factions going to war.

I experienced this in my first signed game. I started with a game about how the aristocracy built generational wealth, but I felt the theme didn’t resonate as well as I wanted. I didn’t care about money being passed on generationally from father to son. I wanted players to play as a single person that they could identify with. However, a single person receiving an inheritance from multiple sources becomes increasingly implausible with each inheritance. I wanted a stronger sense of relationship than that that would raise the emotional stakes of the theme. So I changed the theme to Victorian women killing their husbands for inheritance money and called it Deadly Dowagers. In addition to only playing a single character, the re-theme added relationships between the player characters and NPCs. This may not be a theme that pulls in everyone, but it is memorable, evocative, and resonant.

Part 3 details further tools to use to create resonance.  

Creating Resonance: Part 1, GDC '21

I was honored to participate in the Board Game Summit for the all virtual GDC this year. My talk was pre-recorded and aired for participants on Monday, July 19th. This is Part 1 of the script for my GDC 2021 talk: Creating Resonance with Thematic Design. (Part 2 is available here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here.) The script has been lightly edited for ease of reading and annotated with links to other posts for additional thoughts on certain topics. 

Hello, my name is Sarah Shipp and this is Creating Resonance with Thematic Design. My background is in professional theatre, so I approach game design from a ‘fine arts as craft’ perspective. I have about eight years experience doing theatre professionally. I’ve only been designing games for three years, but a few things have struck me about how board game designers view design compared to theatrical designers. 

I feel that many board game designers, especially starting out, view game design as an engineering problem. But I contend that game design isn’t engineering; it’s architecture. Architecture needs engineering in order to build buildings, but architecture is also art. Game design needs math and probability and a solid technical foundation, but if we stay there then we will stop developing as a field. We need the language of art to move forward. 

This is especially true when it comes to designing themes. Yes, I said designing themes. Thematic design is just as much about which thematic details you include as it is about how the mechanics relate to the theme. To that end, I’ve pulled from Classical, Renaissance, and modern thinkers to create a formula for resonance within thematic design. I use the term thematic design to indicate that I am designing both the theme and the mechanics, and I use the term resonance to refer to how players respond to the presentation or experience of a design. 

I don’t use the phrase ‘experience design’ very often because I feel that it isn’t specific enough to the aspects of design [that] I’m talking about. You can design for experiences in a themeless, abstract game. I have an entire series of posts on my blog discussing different categories of experience design that I’ve developed if you’re interested in hearing more about my thoughts on that. 

But what is resonance? Every designer wants to make a resonant game. This is one of the current buzzwords in the industry used to describe games that really stand out, but it’s a term no one can define. 

Opera singers know that resonance is depth, shape, and clarity of tone. That’s also the dictionary definition. To create resonant themes, we have to strive for those qualities in our games as well. Or we can avoid themes that are amorphous, muddy, or shallow. Other terms you may hear when talking about resonance are evocative, sticky, or memorable. I originally stopped my definition of resonance as depth, shape, and clarity of theme, but I think there is a more useful definition for the designer. 

I’m going to be talking about how to make themes that are more resonant. Mechanics can resonate with players but only to players who are already in the gaming ecosystem. Nobody outside of gaming knows what a worker placement game is. I personally didn’t learn the names of board game mechanics until I started designing, in spite of several years of exposure to hobby games before then. When someone asks what a game is about, we usually respond by telling them the theme. Resonant themes are the best tools we have to pull in new players to the hobby. By ignoring certain aspects of thematic design (by not treating theme as a skill that can be learned), you will severely limit your potential audience.  

When asked, many designers will tell you that resonant games are ones where the mechanics and theme align. I think that’s putting the cart before the horse in terms of a good definition. First, we must understand what theme is.

Theme encompasses the setting, story, and tone of a game. Theme is expressed in a variety of ways in board games: illustration, components, mechanics, narrative description, and flavor text. I’ll be referring to these as a game’s elements. 

Elements of a game can be motivated or unmotivated. I’m taking these terms from theatrical lighting design. A motivated element is one that has an in-world explanation for existing. Unmotivated elements may not be abstract, but they do not have a clear reason for existing. In theatre, light shining through a window is motivated- we imagine the sun causing the light on the stage, whereas if all of the lights suddenly shift to red, that is unmotivated- we cannot imagine a realistic reason for the light change. Iron ingot components in a game about manufacturing are motivated, whereas the same components are unmotivated in a game about butterflies. The player pieces in Monopoly fall into this category. In spite of their interesting history, they are not motivated by the theme of the game. Unmotivated elements are not inherently bad, but they can make a game feel themeless or like the theme is pasted-on. Motivated elements add resonance because they are a form of world-building. What you are saying when you include motivated elements is that these things exist in your game world for a reason. Some unmotivated elements are necessary, such as scoring conditions that can’t logically arise from the theme. The trick here is balance. There needs to be enough motivated elements to offset the necessity of including elements that aid rules comprehension and gameplay. If you don’t find this balance, the game will either be incomprehensible or the theme will feel pasted-on. 

I refer to games where the theme and the mechanics mesh well and that work together to produce a complete experience as being thematically well-integrated. An element could be motivated and still not be integrated. When this happens, those elements will either feel superfluous or like the theme is pasted-on to them. Each individual card in the hand-building game Fantasy Realms is thematically motivated, but the experience of gameplay lacks a thematic cohesion. Cards go in and out of your hand quickly and for no thematic reason. Only when you finish the game can you describe the world you created. The focus of the game is getting the most points, not establishing a believable game world. Comparatively, in the deck building game Star Realms (no relation) each turn visualizes an episode of space commerce, combat, and politics. I won’t go into all the ways this game works thematically, because I’m going to be taking a close look at some other games. But I would recommend these two games as solid examples of the spectrum of how to implement theme. Both are saturated with motivated elements. However, Star Realms has an integrated theme; Fantasy Realms does not. 

Thematic games don’t have to be sprawling epics to be considered thematic. Motivated, integrated themes will feel resonant even in filler length games. I think we as a hobby are prone to confusing thematic games with games that are narrative heavy and tell a complete linear story by the time you’ve finished playing. I reject that narrow definition. For me, a thematic game is any game where the players can feel the theme through the gameplay.

Part 2 contains my new definition of resonance and the tools to achieve it. 

Design for Learning

Presenting information in multiple ways aids learning comprehension. (Learn more here.) We take advantage of this by including diagrams and examples of play in our rulebooks. Increasingly, rulebooks may link to videos to provide further variety in presentation style. So far, so good. 

What I've been thinking about lately is how designers can better serve players by considering the most common usage of this information. How are games actually learned in the wild? Most often, one person learns the rules and teaches them to the rest of the players. What are the implications of this reality? All of that work that went into making the rulebook easy to learn is funneled into a fraction of the total audience who then proceeds to explain the rules in a less varied and polished way. "Rules explaining" has been the subject of podcasts, etc. for awhile, with the focus on training gamers to be better at sharing the hobby. I don't want to retread that ground. I want to explore how designers can create better teaching and learning experiences. 

Obviously, a clearly laid out rulebook is a must. The rules explainer has to learn the game, after all. However, there are two things I want to see more often in games: a quick start guide and a glossary of hard-to-remember rules. Quick start guides will help anyone already familiar with the game, be it the rules explainer or players returning to a game for subsequent plays. Quick start guides need to include brief set up instructions ("How many cards are we dealt, again?") and a full turn structure including how to begin the next turn ("What happens after the clean-up phase?"). This could be the back page of a rulebook, or inside the first page, or on a single separate sheet. If it's more than one page, it's not a quick start. The point of this guide is to help players who mostly know the rules get into a game without having to flip through the entire rulebook. This guide probably isn't needed after the first turn. 

A brief rules glossary might list ability effects or rules FAQs. It is most useful on the back page of the rulebook. These will most likely be fringe rules or cases that occur outside of the core loop. This guide may be referenced throughout the gameplay, but usually only by one player at a time. 

Player aids aren't just a rules reminder; they are a rules teacher. Player aids can be a combination of quick start guide and rules glossary. They can also be an icon dictionary, scoring table, and win condition reminder. Including all of those is probably too much for a player aid, however. If information is generally not referenced after the first turn, it may be better as a quick start guide. If the information presented is too wordy, it probably should be a larger format rules glossary. In some games, the player aid will be the only written version of the rules that many players see. During an info-dump rules explanation, a player aid is a safety blanket for me. It signals that if I don't absorb all the rules the game will still help me get through my turn—I'm not alone; I have help. 

I'm not a fan of tutorial versions of games, particularly if the rules are significantly different from the main game and it has separate components. I struggle to learn rules, so I don't want to learn them more than once. I also don't want to keep up with components I may play with once and never again. If there is a version of the game that focuses on the core loop but ignores some side boards and bonus scoring, that is my preferred way to learn more complex games. I'm still learning the main game rules, but I'm learning them in chunks. 

I would prefer to always learn games that could be taught using only a quick start guide, a player aid, and the components themselves. But many of my favorite games require more explanation than that. And that's ok. But I also find that, as a designer, the better I am at presenting information the shorter my rulebooks end up. [Hint: that's because they're more streamlined.] Focusing on how a game is taught or relearned on subsequent plays just seems like the next step in becoming a better designer. 

Designing for Others and for Myself

There are two schools of thought among designers. One is to design the type of game you want to play and not worry if there is an audience. The other is to design primarily with your audience in mind. Both of these concepts are a little foreign to me. 

As an independent designer, I find motivation to design when I enjoy the games I'm working on. So, at the beginning of the process I am designing for myself. This is further compounded by the fact that many of my game ideas will never see the light of day. In order to keep exploring new designs to find the good ones, I need to amuse myself. In order to keep working on a game to get it to a sharable state, I need to care about it. For me, I care about a game most when I am excited by the theme. When I get excited by a theme, I am more willing to put in the three to five years of work it will take to get the game (potentially) published. 

It's only once I'm playtesting that I start to get invested in the game as a product. I begin to trim down my wild ideas, cut mechanics, and dial in gameplay. All of which is done with an audience in mind. Because I am also not working three to five years on a game if no one else wants to play it. This is where I start to focus more on mechanics that draw players in and that create the experience I want. I'm generally willing to add, cut, and rearrange elements in order to improve gameplay and make a more appealing product. I'm less flexible on thematic changes during playtesting, unless I'm in talks with a publisher. 

When it comes time to pitch, I'm prepared to change anything thematic or mechanic. I've likely spent several years working on my game. Now, a publisher wants to pay me for it and take over some of the work that the game still needs. If a publisher wants to see some changes before they offer a contract, I will make those changes to the best of my ability. There is no other feeling like a publisher getting excited about your vision and wanting to make it real. That's the real reason I'll never self-publish. The game may end up vastly different from what I imagined, but as long as there is a healthy line of communication I don't mind. After all, I'm not the one investing thousands of dollars in production. (Of course some things can hurt to change. I have started responding to certain feedback by saying "I'll mull it over and see what I can do" to give myself a window to feel sad then get excited again about the new direction.)

Unless you are a full-time employee at a design studio and don't get to pick your projects, you should work on games because they excite you. Then you should spend the rest of the design process making your game excite other people.