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 3 of the script for my GDC 2021 talk: Creating Resonance with Thematic Design. (Part 1 is available here. Part 2 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.
Familiarity isn’t enough to make a game stand out. Unexpectedness adds spice to familiarity. Unexpected elements grab attention and generate interest through breaks in a pattern. However, this requires that you establish a pattern before you disrupt it. If everything is unexpected then nothing is.
Unexpectedness can occur thematically as 'whimsy' or fantastical elements that depart from reality, as reversals or flipped tropes, as uniqueness and innovation, or as high production values. But again, once everyone has games with miniatures or the latest hotness, that ceases to be a draw for any particular game. The trick to adding unexpected elements is to keep them unexpected.
I explain whimsy as the defining aesthetic of a Miyazaki film. In design language, fantasy means images and themes that depict things that could never exist in reality— more along the lines of the flying whales from Fantasia 2000 and less medieval wizards. Whimsy is inclusion of fantasy elements with a lighter touch. This is where Four Gardens fits thematically for me— a 3D, rotating tower of resources is whimsical and creates the unexpectedness needed for resonance.
Reversals take familiar storylines and flip the script. This is an easy “unexpectedness hack” but not everything is made better by using a reversal. The story you tell still needs to feel motivated by the actions and needs to create the proper emotional responses in players. Trope subversion doesn’t have to be a complete reversal, however. Subverting expectations is a powerful storytelling method and resonance generator. Reversals or subversions can create feelings of imbalance in players that can draw them into a game emotionally because they no longer know exactly what to expect.
While we’re talking about tropes, reversals are a good way to avoid stereotypes. However, regardless of whether an element is presented as true to type or as a subversion, we should take care to present our themes in a manner that is well thought out and respectful. I find that most harmful stereotypes appear in designs in which the designer simply didn’t care enough to put in the work to make the theme more vibrant and respectful. I hope one take away from this panel is that good themes don’t just happen; they take work.
Innovation or other forms of uniqueness will always create excitement. But (similar to production values) there is a limit to how far uniqueness can take you. Innovation generally will lead to more critical acclaim than commercial appeal. And uniqueness is difficult to set as a design goal. While it’s great to stumble into genuine innovation, high quality iteration is easier to plan for and achieve. Also, by making a really resonant game, you can make a game that feels innovative even if every concept is a rehash of something else.
A lot of games rely on production values to generate excitement. Previously, production values could be used as a type of uniqueness. I am a proponent of good looking, high quality games. But, as high production values become commonplace and expected, they will no longer be able to be relied upon to singlehandedly generate interest in a game. In other words, production values can still provide a hit of unexpectedness, but jury’s out on how much longer that will remain true. Also, as a designer, production values are typically outside of my control as I don’t plan to ever self-publish.
There are trends within the product design of board games to try to generate interest: miniatures, custom-shaped or screen-printed meeples, scenario books that replace boards, apps, etc. One that I find interesting is verticality, the implementation of components that make significant use of the y-axis. I find verticality interesting because some designs seem to be including it only to increase table presence and don’t connect it to gameplay.
Speaking of table presence, let’s talk about gimmicks. Relying on big, splashy elements to grab attention quickly can feel gimmicky. Instead, ask interesting questions of your design. What component would most help drive home the theme? What would make players care more about the characters or story in the game? How can I subvert expectations? I particularly like trope-flipping because it requires a minimal amount of effort to achieve results. And theme-forward techniques like that don’t increase the cost of the game the way adding miniatures does. Asking questions of your design requires that you engage with your theme. Never, ever expect your audience to do imaginative work that you were unwilling to do. I don’t mean that you have to spell everything out for your players. I mean that you need to critically examine your theme to see where engagement or interest could be added. Engage your theme and interrogate it. You’ll be surprised where you end up.
When you know what your theme is- its emotions, plot, location, rhythm, characters and twist- cut everything else out. Do as little as possible to build the world beyond what is represented in the game. Figure out what the core of the theme is and get rid of everything else. Try to always leave your players wanting more. That feeling will drive engagement more readily than extensive world-building will. Feel free to write a novel about your world, but don’t put it in the game box. However, putting a limit on the amount of detail expressed by your theme is not a license to skimp on research. Really good research will inform which details are most necessary and evocative.
“The components ought to be so firmly compacted that if any one of them is shifted to another place, the whole is loosened up and dislocated; for an element whose addition or subtraction makes no perceptible difference is not really a part of the whole.” -Aristotle
This is my favorite quote about board game design, even though it’s actually about theatrical design. Many people have said similar things throughout history, but not only did Aristotle say it first, he said it best. (Sidenote: the classical unities come from the neoclassical era, but they were an attempt to build on Aristotle’s rules for theatre. Theatre history has a lot of good advice for board game design.)
Good design is about removing clutter. Every detail of your game should reinforce the core theme. Just because a detail fits into the world doesn’t mean it belongs in the game. (If you really must add details, I do recommend using illustration as a way to convey details that doesn’t impede gameplay.) Including a detail just because it’s cool will feel gimmicky because it is a gimmick.
I define a gimmick as anything that brings a sense of novelty and appeal but not much else. (If you are including an unnecessary element that you don’t think is cool, why are you doing that? Don’t do that.) A gimmick looks cool, but either isn't functional or impedes usability. A gimmick adds more cost than the value of what is received. Every element should feel necessary to the game experience; anything else is a distraction. Your core theme will create your core emotional experience. Adding extraneous elements dilutes that emotional experience. In other words, too much fluff makes your game less resonant.
But there is a compromise here. I like to think of flavor text and certain similar thematic details as “opt-in” details. Meaning a player can ignore these details if they choose. Flavor text is usually in a small font at the bottom of a card. I have the choice to read it or not. Components and even card art don’t give me the option to opt-out; they’re too prominent for my eyes to skip over. That’s the reason I get frustrated by the lore at the beginning of rulebooks: I can’t tell straight away if it contains important information about the game or not. If you want to include extra detail in your game that only provides flavor, it needs to be the kind of detail that players can choose to opt-in to or not.
Removing chaff is also about finding the proportion between the familiar and the unexpected. Too much unexpectedness is jarring and will disconnect players from the theme. Too much familiarity only becomes a problem when the details stray from the core theme. So, generally speaking, leave unexpectedness to a few surprising twists compared to the rest of the game.
Part 4 explores how resonance has been implemented into 2 published games.
No comments:
Post a Comment