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.