Why We Say Theme

Previously, I have defined theme as "noun plus verb plus win condition" with an optional question mark at the end. I still stand by that definition. Today I want to briefly discuss why we use the word theme at all. 

Many times, when people hear the word theme they think of high school English class and writing essays about what a work of literature means. In this case, theme means the idea that pervades a work. That use of theme is still important to games, notably game criticism. However, it is the less common usage of the word across the English language. 

Board game themes use the more common definition of theme, a subject or topic. We see this usage in theme parks and themed parties. If you were invited to a costume party, you might ask, "What's the theme?" This definition and general usage meshes well with how themes were most commonly presented in board games until relatively recently: as window dressing. By this definition theme is a costume a game wears depending on what the publisher thinks will sell. We are now somewhat saddled with the term even as board games move on to more integrated themes. 

I'm not bothered by the evolution of our expectations for what theme should be. Art changes as our expectations change, but the terms don't always change with it. (For example, deus ex machina typically refers to a plot device in storytelling, whereas originally it referred to actual machines that made representations of the gods show up in Roman theatre.) Designers now distinguish between setting and theme. Setting is the window dressing, the background art. Theme is what is actually happening, the emergent narrative. We might also list a game's thematic genre, such as horror or western. This is different from setting in that setting is more specific to a particular game and thematic genre is a more broad generalization of a topic that usually includes other media such as movies. Thematic genre is also different from mechanic genre because a game can be both a worker placement game and a horror game at the same time. 

The way we use the term theme does, however, run afoul of any attempt at criticism. For one thing, we can't use theme in reference to ideas or meaning in the game. I usually default to 'subtext' or just 'meaning', but neither term is really a great substitute. On the whole though, games critics seem to be coping without being able to use a word that makes you sound like a literature teacher. Where I do think we start to see problems is with designers/gamers who still see theme as window dressing. Because if theme is only window dressing, what right does a game critic have to criticize it? From this perspective, window dressing does not have meaning; it is just an art style. (I suppose the idea that all art has inherent meaning does not enter into the equation because we are talking about art and not Art.) Fundamentally, the argument over whether you even should discuss a game's subtext is an argument over the definition of theme as it relates to board games. Is theme merely window dressing that can be changed out for any other style of window dressing? Or is theme important both to the narrative of gameplay and the value systems presented by the narrative? Does theme have meaning to game design and the game designer? 

In all likelihood, your design style is affected by which definition you use. For me, theme is an entire topic of study, an undiscovered country, that will elevate board game design in the decades to come to an indisputable genre of art, with its own museums and college 101 classes and high school interscholastic tournament competitions. Window dressing, even with excellent mechanics, doesn't have the emotional resonance necessary to move us into that future. Besides which, integrated theme sells. And the more it sells, the less patience gamers have for poorly integrated theme. 

Theme is important. How we use the term affects how we understand game design and game criticism. If you want to read more posts about designing  theme click here for a curated list. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Why Themes Matter

With all the discussions about historical accuracy, representation, and diverse perspectives in games, we really need to have a discussion on why any of that matters. Why does it matter what theme a designer uses? Why does it matter how that theme is handled? 

There are a lot of reasons why theme matters in games. Better themes make for better games. Themes make games easier to learn and more immersive. Different themes draw different people in. Theme can be the thing that takes a game from a sequence of mechanisms and makes it art. (I'm pretty sure people wouldn't have talked nearly as much about Holding On or The Grizzled if not for their themes.) Themes make games pretty, comprehensible, and meaningful. 

But there is a larger discussion to be had about theme and why it matters. Theme matters because our primary way of making sense of the world is through art. Yes, really. Let me explain. Art, in the form of books, movies, games, and other media, is where we write our myths. A myth is just a story that attempts to explain why the world is the way it is. And here's the kicker: we believe our myths over our histories. 

History is large and somewhat incomprehensible. Sometimes in history things just happen randomly. In myths, everything has a reason. Our myths are simpler and easier to remember. Our concept of the American West is largely a product of books and movies; it is mythical. (Side note for illustrators: Utah has buttes, Texas does not. Be advised.)

Our reliance on myth is very human and I am not advocating we throw out stories in favor of empirical research. Myths are simply better at communicating truth than facts are. For instance, people are more likely to change their mind if they know someone affected by an issue than if you just show them studies saying they are wrong. Stories have an emotional power that facts and statistics don't have. 

No, what I am advocating for is that we become more conscious myth-makers. We need to understand both the actual history behind our themes and the implications of our stories. For example, we have inherited the desire to discover a terra nullius, a concept that historically has been used to justify taking land from indigenous peoples. What does our desire for stories and themes centered on terra nullius say about us? What other ideas might we be perpetuating? Certainly games set in the real world have had an overwhelming tendency to ignore the voice and often the existence of native peoples, which is terra nullius, explicitly. 

But what about games not set on Earth? In some ways fantasy (used here to mean "not reality") is a stronger conveyer of our values, because we are not tied to following 'what really happened.' We are able to explore what could have been and what could be. To then use fantasy to double down on the exploitation and extermination of 'the other' is troubling. Fantastical themes need to know how they are connected to the real world. A fantasy setting can be a powerful tool to make a sharp critique of our culture or our history because we are not bound by historical accuracy. Fantasy can also be used to celebrate ideas that we have yet to see truly flourish in reality. The benefit of conscious myth-crafting is that you're unlikely to be accused of being 'generic' fantasy. 

Art has meaning. Themes have meaning. Systems have meaning. The stories we tell are how we make sense of the world. Given that that is the case, we should treat our themes as more than window dressing. Our themes do not just convey our personal worldview; they shape the reality of our players in a small way. Of course, how you choose to shape your myths will depend on your values. 

One way we can be better myth-makers is by having a better understanding of actual history. Did you know that historians believe that one in four cowboys was black? You wouldn't know that from our myths.  Accuracy to historical record is probably the 'safest' route when myth-making, because if you make someone upset you can appeal to history. Fortunately for us, history is so vast that it contains plenty of interesting details to mine. All it takes is research. Remember that what you think is history may only be myth. Another route we can take is to present ahistorical themes— details not true to the historical record. However, we still need to know the real history and the implications of our story. I don't mean to say that we need to justify that our fantasy could happen, but rather that we need to know what message our story has about our world. 

Theme and mechanics both matter for solid game design but only theme has the power to affect our understanding of reality. This isn't something you can opt out of. Your themes will affect your players perspective whether you like it or not. If you don't want to be a myth-maker, stick to designing abstract games. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Meeples and Gender

This post is a continuation of my last post where I wrote about how much I love the world building in A Fistful of Meeples. Before getting into today's topic, a few notes: First, I am mostly writing this to share an interesting (to me) insight into world building and psychology that happens to be about gender. Second, any criticism I have of A Fistful of Meeples does not detract from the fact that I love this game. 

Let me begin with an assertion I hope is not controversial: meeples are inherently genderless. Even in games where gender might make sense. Reproduction in Agricola works the same way it does in Minecraft: any two adults can make a baby. Of course, not all meeples present as genderless, in spite of  the fact that they are abstracted pieces of wood. And that's what I want to explore. 

I argued in the last post that the world of A Fistful of Meeples is a meeple world in the same way that The Lego Movie depicts a lego world. Because I view the world as an animated playset and because meeples are genderless, I see the main worker roles—deputy, robber, miner, and builder— as genderless, something any person could pretend to be. At least, I begin to, until the madame enters the world. (I don't want to sit here and argue that women could be robbers in the Old West. Meeple Old West can be egalitarian if it wants to.) The point is, I don't think those jobs are inherently gendered, even in the context of the genre setting, but the job of a madame is inherently gendered. The word indicates a woman and the job requires a woman. (I consider a madame and a pimp to be fundamentally different jobs.) So what happens when a female character enters a genderless cast?

All the other characters become male. This is a purely psychological effect that manifests from a culture that views male as default. Once any non-male gender is defined, the remaining characters shift from genderless to "default gender" unless specified otherwise. I think the case for this is strongest in A Fistful of Meeples because of the context of soiled doves and who they serviced. The publisher doubled down by making the madame sculpt the only unique sculpt in the game. (She's wearing a skirt.) However, we can also see this dynamic at play in The Table is Lava and its expansion: the meeples were genderless until the expansion added pink meeples that were specifically coded as women. (The expansion is called Coconuts Edition.) I should note that The Table is Lava is also set in a world where the characters are meeples. Both of these games mix actual meeples and gender in a way I find jarring. 

Why does this matter? It matters because as designers we have to be intentional about our world building. We need to understand what the ramifications of specifically gendering one character are. In A Fistful of Meeples, by calling the character a madame rather than a bartender we end up with a cast of thirty male characters and one female. (There are more female meeples in the box cover art than in the game.) I know I have argued for specificity in world building in the past, but this is tokenization. Yes, the madame action is thematic to that role, but it could work just as well as a bartender or a card sharp. By coding every other character as a man the game creates a world where the only other implied females are whores. ("Is it family friendly?" "Yes—well, except for the whores.") Not only are they whores, but they are offscreen whores with no power or voice in the game. The only woman character in the game profits from implied female characters that have no purpose other than to rationalize what the builders are paying for at the saloon. Regardless of what you think about sex work in real life, this isn't what I would call good representation. 

I don't think there is any way to know if the gender breakdown in A Fistful of Meeples was intentional without asking the designers. It seems like the designers just pulled from famous archetypes that meshed with the mechanisms. But that's my point. World building should be intentional. Not all board games need the same levels of world building. I'm fairly neutral on surface level representation. Yes, it can be valuable, but I also see arguments for abstraction, such as the argument I make here. I want the level of world building to be motivated by the theme and mechanics. I want representation to be motivated by the story told in the game. And in the case of A Fistful of Meeples, I find the representation to be unnecessary to the point of slightly detracting from my enjoyment of the game. 

This psychological effect of assuming a gender binary is cultural and may fade over time. But there will always be choices in world building that we make or don't make that will change how our game is perceived. Sometimes abstraction might feel like silencing character stories and sometimes it might feel like opening them up to many interpretations. We have to know what kind of stories we are trying to tell. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

World Building in A Fistful of Meeples

I've been looking at methods for world building recently on this blog (most notably here and here), and today I want to spend some time looking at (yet another) example of a game that does it well. I recently acquired A Fistful of Meeples because I really like the mechanisms. But what impressed me after playing the game was the world building. 

There is no lore fluff in this game. Our sense of this world comes from the components, the mechanisms, and the illustration. The game takes itself seriously by eschewing jokey flavor text but not so seriously that I am asked to read a background novella. I love this. I am asked to simply accept the premise of the game on its face, and I do. The reason I can, however, is because everything else about the game works together to build the world. 

The board takes the basic shape of a mancala board and overlays it atop the main street of an old west town. The movement of the meeples as a part of the main mechanic feels like the flow of a group of people who all have multiple errands to run. All of the actions make sense and are thematic. There is some dissonance between active and inactive meeples, such as when a robber steals from a miner in a store that also has a deputy in it. But I believe in this world so much that I just accept that that's the way things work in the "Meeple Old West."

All of the characters are defined by what they want. Robbers want to steal. Deputies want to catch robbers. Builders want to improve the town. Miners want to buy supplies (or that's how I interpret it, anyway). These characters interact with one another mechanically but in such a way as to make their relationships clear. It's a simple view, but we are talking about a one street town. 

One of the things that makes the world work so well for me is that the meeples are not symbolic representations of human characters. The characters are meeples. The art is very clear on that point. I don't think that's the right choice for every game world, but I find it so easy to suspend disbelief in A Fistful of Meeples. The world feels incredibly consistent because the iconography and what it represents are so similar. The icon of a meeple represents a meeple. The board is the town. 

In some ways, this game reminds me of the beginning of The Lego Movie—a realistic view of a city portrayed through the medium of toys. But this game (like many games) is also reminiscent of The Sims. The players in A Fistful of Meeples are gods dictating the lives and paths of the characters. But players are also seemingly investors building up business empires in this small town. This is the only aspect of the game I wish were better explained. Who are we when we play? Why do robbers give us loot but also deputies? Is this town corrupted by corporate interests? In some ways I prefer playing as a god because the other interpretation takes the straightforward character agendas and muddies them. In the end, getting resources and points feels mechanical; it has to be there to be a game. But that feeling occurs entirely off the board, outside of the city and as a result only does minor damage to my buy-in of the world. World building in non-narrative board games is always going to be a little messy. While I wish this game meshed player gains with meeple actions in a way that made more sense, I still love how much world building there is in a small-box, 45 minute game. 

It's rare for me to play a game so grounded in a single place with such clear character goals. A Fistful of Meeples doesn't sacrifice concise, tight mechanics for theme, but instead leverages its mechanics to make the theme come alive. I love it. There is, however, one more odd moment in the game created by the one character I haven't talked about. In next week's post, I'm going to discuss the Madame. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

Characters with Agendas

I've written a number of times that characters need goals and desires. In this post, I'd like to look closer at how to develop those goals. 

In game design, action oriented decisions help propel players down various strategy paths. In world building for board games, character design should also be action oriented. You can write in the fluff that your character likes ice cream, but if ice cream isn't relevant to gameplay, your character's desire for it doesn't do much to create a sense of character. Irrelevant surface details are fine to include, but those should come last and as much as possible should be used to add texture to your game world by being congruous with the setting. 

How do we make a character's goals action oriented and thematic? I like to think of it as giving my characters agendas. They don't just have goals or desires; they have agendas. Those agendas drive them to take action. Those actions make up the game. A list of personality traits doesn't make a character. But give a character an agenda and the player will be able to imagine the personality of the character on their own.

Agendas imply desires, goals, and personality traits. Competing agendas can create conflict. Agendas don't have to be rational as long as they are apparent in the game mechanics. Agendas aren't just what a character wants but why they want it. The agenda in Agricola is to be prosperous and keep your family from starving. The characters don't have much in the way of personality, but the real need to eat makes those workers feel more like characters than many other farming euros. 

Giving your characters agendas is just the bare minimum, however. The goal should be to give them interesting agendas.  I've mentioned in the past that I am a fan of trope-flipping. But if you flip a trope enough, the reverse of the trope will also become a trope. So, instead, I am becoming a fan of what I call "thinking sideways." To explain this method, I first have to explain how I build characters in Dungeons and Dragons. 

If you play D&D long enough, you will eventually have to make a character solely to fill a gap in your party's composition. So you build a character that works mechanically and fits in the world, but has no personality yet. (Actually, that kind of sounds like most characters in board games.) Fortunately, the Player's Handbook has tables you can roll on to give you direction for roleplaying your character. Unfortunately, the tables are filled with tired tropes that don't really help make a character with the nuance I'm looking for. This is where thinking sideways comes into play. I usually choose a background (pg. 127 in the PHB) for my character based on what abilities it grants me rather than as backstory fodder. However, early in my roleplaying career I was rolling on the traits, ideals, and bonds tables and noticed how interesting my results were. I then realized that I was looking at the wrong tables for my background and was instead rolling on the tables of the previous background that were on the facing page. The results were interesting because they were no longer generic fantasy tropes when coupled with the 'wrong' background. The traits now suggested a unique and interesting character. (And, if I'm being honest, I think that it should be one big trait table for all the backgrounds to give a more interesting selection.) 

By looking sideways at adjacent character tropes and using them outside of their expected context, I can create better characters. Sometimes that means changing the agenda and sometimes that means changing the character. I can take a stock evil supervillain and give him a family and a need to protect them. Thanos is interesting because he isn't just the embodiment of evil; he has an agenda that's tied to emotions that are comprehensible to viewers. 

On the other hand, I can recast a character to better fit the agenda present in my game. I recast my inheritance game that featured multiple generations of aristocratic men and replaced them with murderous women who marry for wealth. Deadly Dowagers is still about accruing wealth and moving up the nobility ladder. The core mechanics didn't change a whole lot (at least not right away). But the game became more interesting because the cast was more interesting. Not simply because they are now women; that would be an art choice by itself. No, it's because the characters have a more interesting agenda. "Become rich and powerful over the course of generations" is a boring agenda. "Take matters into your own hands in spite of societal and moral objections" is a much more interesting agenda. 

If you're designing a dungeon crawler, write out a break down of a typical party. Then shuffle the traits around. Now, you won't be able to call someone an archer if they don't use a bow. But maybe dwarves with longbows and elves with axes can spark ways to develop your world in a unique direction. This same process can work in a lot of genres of games and is especially good for art direction. But don't discount the thematic and mechanic interplay of giving characters agendas and personalities. 

A note on character personalities: I describe the characters in Deadly Dowagers as murderous because that adjective describes their actions during gameplay. A character who regularly donates to religious charities might be described as pious. I would avoid personality descriptors that relate to mood—cranky, bubbly, gloomy, sunny— or those that relate to appearance. Show; don't tell. Your character's appearance belongs in their illustration. Your character's mood might appear in dialog, if there is any. If there isn't any dialog, I'd merely suggest mood through the art as well. 

Interrogate your designs. Why do my characters want to win? What is at stake for them? What are they willing to give up to succeed? How do their agendas conflict with other characters and with the world around them? At the very least, this method should make your characters more memorable, which hopefully transfers to a more memorable game. Best case scenario, your game experience is elevated by tight thematic/mechanic integration that also has greater emotional breadth and a unique world. 

Here's my agenda: I want to see more interesting characters in (non-narrative) board games. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.