Narrative Framing

I've started to refer to crafting a game's story as theme-building. Worldbuilding (Which I guess is one word? I only just now looked it up.) often refers to the background story elements that inform what happens in your story. Theme-building is crafting the story itself in relation to the mechanics of a game. Within theme-building we encounter narrative framing. Narrative framing is the boundaries of the story and how the story is expressed. 

Let me unpack that a bit. Think of narrative framing as similar to cinematography. In film, you can have a good script, good acting, and good directing, but if the cinematographer does a bad job, your movie might be incomprehensible. Similarly, in board games you can have a good story in the rulebook about your world and you can have good mechanics, but if the theme is not knitted to the mechanics the game won't make narrative sense. 

Narrative framing is a tool we can use to help us knit together our theme and mechanics. Narrative framing focuses on who gets the spotlight and which parts of the story get told. Board games by their nature have to present an abstraction of a story. Narrative framing is the process of deciding what details get airbrushed out and what details get emphasized. There are a few basic questions to ask to determine your narrative framing.

Who are the players? You may have a story in mind, but the type of game you are trying to make will partially determine who the main characters are. In cooperative games, characters have a single purpose and work together to achieve it. In competitive games, characters have conflicting desires even if they have the same goal. In a competitive game, you would not want to depict characters who are all on the same team unless you include an element of betrayal. Players may control separate teams of characters, however. Your choice of PCs has a strong effect on how players will relate to the game world. Characters are the way that players access the world of the game. Sometimes changing who the main characters are in the story will focus the story on the type of experience you want players to have. Read these posts for more about shaping playable characters. 

What are the characters doing? What are their goals? A character's goals should line up with the win condition (or their win condition) of the game. Even if the mechanics don't change, changing goals thematically can raise the emotional stakes which in turn increases player investment in the game narrative. Did players seem to care about the main task of the game? That goal should feel important enough to the PCs that the players also become invested in achieving it. 

How are they doing it? What actions are they taking? The actions of a game should be the method by which a character achieves their goal. Actions should feel 'in character' for PCs. If a character acts in a way that doesn't flow from the logic of the narrative, players will disconnect from the story. Actions are how the story is told, so retheme as necessary to produce the best experience. 

Why are they trying to achieve a certain goal? Why are they going about it that way? Goals and the methods used to achieve them should make narrative sense. It should be clear why the characters want what they want and why they employ the methods that they use. Either through the types of actions available to a character, their special power, or flavor text, let players know what the character values. A character's values give insight into why the character is trying to achieve a certain goal. I talk more about character motivation in this post. 

When & where is this happening? Setting is very important for providing context clues to players about the game world. Players can use their existing knowledge of a genre or time period or location to fill in some of the gaps in worldbuilding. This means that your chosen setting can also provide an experience you don't want players to have. For example, Puerto Rico's setting combined with the brown colored discs suggests that the players are slave owners, even if the game makes an effort to deny that fact. Changing the setting to occur after slavery was abolished is much more effective than simply trying to name the discs. 

Playtesters, especially those who have been in the hobby awhile, are quick to give feedback about mechanics but not narrative. You may have to ask what they thought of the story of the game. I would give a two sentence explanation of the game world prior to playing the game, then see if their experiences mesh with your vision of what the story is. As a designer, you likely see all the background worldbuilding that may not be apparent to the average player. 

When I design, I want to feel invested in my PC's goal. I want to care about the main task and actions of the game. "Why should I care?" is the question I ask most often in the early design process, before things like balance come into play. If I can nail down the emotional core of the game, the rest will follow eventually. I'm amazed by designers who think that any theme can fit any game. I believe that going forward, we will see a rise of themes strongly knitted to mechanics. And if you don't learn how to design theme, you will get left behind. 

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