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.
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