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.