This post is a repost of a repost of Isaac Shalev's twitter thread that was inspired by my blog, thus completing the circle. I'm grateful Isaac let me post it here so that I didn't have to plagiarize it excessively paraphrase it with proper attribution.
"Theme" in boardgames and game reviews
Recently our community has been more critical of what games are about: the topics, stories, historical settings, and roles that players inhabit.
This is good.
I would like to add some vocabulary to this conversation.
In my 20s I hung out at a place called the Dive Bar. The bar's decor was deep-sea diving. The bar's ambience was dive bar, complete with bar nuts and cheap lagers. The way we use the word theme colloquially could express either of these ideas. In casual conversation, theme is used really broadly, and that's ok. In games, Sarah Shipp's definition that "Theme encompasses the setting, story, and tone/mood of a game" is very useful.
But as our conversations about games turns to cultural critique, we need better and more specific words to make clearer arguments and express what we mean better. In literature and other art-critical fields, we use the terms 'Setting', 'Subject', and 'Theme'. Let's go over them briefly
Setting is the historical, geographical, political, and related contexts that the work exists within. In The Old Man and the Sea, the setting is a fishing village near Havana in 1940s, with most of the action set in a boat in the adjacent sea.
Subject is the topic of the work. The subject of the The Old Man and the Sea is one man's fateful fishing trip and epic battle with the sea.
Theme is 'the messages and ideas explored in a work. Theme is what the work has to say about the subject. What point is the work arguing for? Theme starts from, but typically transcends the subject.
tOMatS's subject is fishing, but its themes are the nobility of the human struggle against the odds and the ideal of grace under pressure. It would be misguided to say that tOMatS reveals how Hemingway feels about fishing.
In games, when we say 'theme' we mean 'setting' and 'subject', and we're discussing how well the setting and subject are married to the game in terms of gameplay, components, experience, and simulation. When we want to discuss the game's theme in the sense of the ideas it puts forth, we don't have a word, and too often, we mistakenly turn this into a discussion of the designer's intent.
I propose that we use the word 'Vision' to mean in games what 'Theme' means in literary analysis. The Vision of Catan is of colonizers exploiting a welcoming land that is empty of history and is eager for subjugation. The vision of Wingspan is the harmony and beauty of a well-managed ecosystem. The vision of Pandemic is the horror, the heroism and the desperation of addressing a global crisis.
This would allow us to also discuss whether we experience the game's vision in the gameplay itself. Pandemic inoculates its players from and personal experience of risk or tragedy, so we don't experience the game's vision much at all. It's not important to Pandemic to make us feel this way, and indeed, players largely don't weigh the moral consequences of treating Miami vs Lima. They also don't fear entering a city ravaged by multiple plagues, or experience impacts of societal strain or collapse.
Dead of Winter, [on the other hand], makes players experiencing its vision really important. Players routinely experience the deaths of their own characters, and are exposed to the tragedy of a ravaged world.
When a game doesn't care much about its vision, we can critique it through the lens of culture, but we should see it as a cultural artifact, not an intentional argument for a particular idea or value. Many colonialist games fall into this category.
When a game is designed around a vision, is expressive, we ought to take it seriously, and consider what it has to say not only about games, but about humanity, culture, and values.
End/ Recap: Vision is a word we can use to describe what a game means, what ideas it is exploring, what arguments it makes. It will help our critical conversation to talk about to what a game's vision is, and to what extent it is trying to express it.
ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.
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