Elegance Vs. Obscurity

I had an amazing time at Tabletop Network '22. I came away with new ways of looking at design topics and several ideas for posts. This post follows some of my thoughts about another group's topic. 

I like this definition of elegance in board games: elegance is the elimination of unnecessary complexity. The elegance presentation at TTN this year did an excellent job of pointing to the various ways unnecessary complexity creeps into design. However, it is difficult for a designer to identify what is necessary complexity in their own designs. I think it could be helpful to take a look at what inelegance is in board games and how to avoid it. 

I think of the bad kind of inelegance as obscurity. I am not referring to hidden info or obscured scoring, but rather an experience that is hazy, foggy, muddy, or otherwise unclear. By identifying how much obscurity is in your game you also have a measure of how elegant the game is—the less obscurity, the more elegance is likely present. But how should we determine the amount of obscurity? 

Unintentional player confusion, via rules or components or what-have-you, is the easiest target to eliminate from your game. By this, I mean that you did not intend for players to be confused by those elements of your design and therefore their confusion is an undesirable by product of some sort of inelegance. Clarity and simplicity are the solution here. You can pretty well determine how elegant a game is or isn't by the amount of errata listed in BGG forums. 

However, sometimes inelegance can be a goal. Intentional player confusion can be a part of the play experience, especially in an atmospheric co-op. Or you may find that the game is more fun with a few rough edges left in rather than an overly smooth experience. These choices should be intentional. Intentional inelegance is a design choice; unintentional obscurity is not. 

I believe elegance is primarily about simplicity and clarity. Thus the more complexity  that is present the less elegant the game can be. However, a game can still be the most elegant within its genre of mechanism or weight. But speaking of weight, obscurity artificially increases the weight of a game. Many games would be noticeably lighter (and more welcoming) if the rules, graphics, and components had eliminated all unnecessary complexity. It feels increasingly gatekeeper-ish to me to publish a 'gamers' game that is heavier than necessary due to inelegant product design choices. 

Lastly, cleverness often gets conflated with elegance. I believe this is because the elegant choice is often the cleverest design solution. However, I do not believe there is full overlap between what is clever and what is elegant. Many times clever mechanics have to be removed from a game because they are too clunky within the overall play experience. Likewise, sometimes the simplest choices are the most elegant but not the most clever. 

To conclude, I'm not sure that complexity is the best way to think about elegance, because as designers we will tend to believe that all of our complexity is necessary. Obscurity (or muddiness, if you need a more visceral metaphor) allows us to ask questions of our design, such as "what is preventing players from accessing the fun parts of the game?" Or to put it another way, what poor design choices are obscuring the good ones?

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

Improving Thematic Engagement

I had an amazing time at Tabletop Network '22. I came away with new ways of looking at design topics and several ideas for posts. This post expands on several points made by the group I was in during the conference.

The Ludology episode GameTek 213.5—The Incan Gold Experiment discusses an experiment to see whether players would disengage with a theme over time. Having just re-listened to the episode, I have to say that the experiment didn't find anything definitive in this respect. However, most of us know by experience that it doesn't take very many plays of a game for us to stop engaging with the theme and instead focus on efficiency. 

The question then is: is this progression away from thematic engagement inevitable? Can this progression be slowed?

I think that there is a trap we could fall into if we try to make every play of a game as surprising and engaging thematically as a first play. The first time you view a piece of art or watch a movie or read a book will be a much different experience than subsequent exposures. The question should not be "how do I replicate this experience infinitely?" but "how do I make subsequent experiences also engaging?" I regularly reread novels; most people rewatch movies. Any given radio station only plays about 20 songs. Clearly humans have a capacity for repeated engagement with content. And if I asked you to name a song that always makes you cry you probably could, showing that we can repeatedly engage with emotional content as well. 

So what then is going on with our disengagement with theme in board games? I would posit that in early plays of a game we are more likely to engage with opt-in thematic elements and in later plays we ignore that content. Also, any emotions we experience will feel stronger because they are unexpected. In subsequent plays, we will expect the arc of the game and thus our emotional experience may be more muted. If the majority of the thematic experience relies on surface level theme and novelty, the theme likely will fade faster in subsequent plays. 

There are many other reasons for why thematic disengagement happens. However, as I am not a psychologist, I can only speak to processes that are within a designer's control. So, let us look at ways to improve the lifespan of thematic engagement rather than trying to settle the exact mechanisms of disengagement. 

Make the efficient play thematic. The main axiom of disengagement seems to be that players who are engaged with theme will play suboptimally and as they become disengaged will shift to more optimal play. On the one hand, I think that suboptimal game play should always be fun and theme can be a source of that fun. On the other hand, why can't the efficient play be thematic as well? If optimal play causes total disengagement with the theme, I have to wonder how well-knitted the theme is with gameplay to begin with. There are some games where it seems like it would be difficult to totally disengage with the theme, such as racing games like Flamme Rouge, where the efficient play (making use of slipstreams and only pulling ahead at the end) is the thematic play. My axiom for board games is that the win condition is the theme, and the rest of the fluff needs to align with that. 

Get players to speak in thematic terms. Speaking of thematic alignment, the words players speak while playing will drive engagement with the theme. In a race game, players will probably use terms like 'finish line' automatically. Your product design will affect whether players refer to the components by their color or a more thematic term. Board game design is all about crafting how players will use and experience your game. One aspect to pay attention to is how players speak and describe what they are doing during gameplay. If the language isn't thematic, the game experience likely isn't either. 

Continuing our focus on thematic alignment, player emotions should fit with the experience the theme provides. This is often touted as a way to avoid ludonarrative dissonance, but there is another reason. When you watch a horror movie, feeling scared deepens your experience of the movie. When players feel emotions that make sense for their avatar in the game, that deepens their experience of the game. These emotions feed back into the theme and can serve as a thematic reminder to experienced players of why they should care about the theme. 

Provide a clear narrative framework. Of course, the easiest way (I think it's cheating) to maintain thematic engagement is to make a narrative driven game. Forcing players to engage with a written narrative keeps their focus on the theme, even when the mechanics are unthematic. However, we can do similar things by providing a clear narrative framework with our mechanics and win conditions. By telling players who they are and what they want we allow them to become invested in the game world. If we then give them mechanics that flow logically from the game world we have established, we can co-create a narrative with our players.

Lastly, pay attention to the amount of calculation in the game. When players are spending a lot of time analyzing all possible moves, they are likely less engaged with the theme. While certain amounts of calculation will not detract from theme (and certain themes can align with calculation), narrative and calculation tend to be one or the other for our brains. When I am doing math I cannot also think about my avatar's desires and struggles. One solution is to alternate moments of math with narrative or to provide narrative check points during game pauses. Another solution is to make the calculation 'in character' for the avatar. Or to minimize calculation, which has a side benefit of speeding up gameplay.

By integrating theme at all levels of gameplay, designers can offer players richer experiences that unfold over multiple plays, where surface theme gives way to deeper mechanical theming. This allows players to explore the theme, perhaps moving back and forth between optimal and suboptimal strategies from play to play. 

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

On Satire

Satire is a deeply misunderstood genre. If we want to have satiric board games, it behooves us to understand it better. Satire is not another word for comedy. Satire is not another word for commentary. It's both, but it's not just both. Satire is "the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices." However, like most simple definitions of complex ideas, this does not adequately convey what satire is. You cannot simply make fun of people you find to be stupid and call it satire. So, let's take a closer look at what satire really is and how it can be expressed in board games. 

Satire seeks to "embarrass, humble, or discredit its targets." Those targets could be people, institutions, ideas, or systems. Satire may involve gentle, good-natured mocking or anger and outrage. Satire generally purports to be serious, mimicking the structure of the thing it is satirizing and pretending to values it does not hold. Satire must argue that something about its target is wrong and may call for some improvement of the situation. Satire employs parody, but must go beyond parody to commentary in order to be satire. (Munchkin is parody, not satire.) 

There are two key pillars of satire that often trip creators up. Firstly, satire "must take aim at a target that is larger or more powerful than the author." Satire must punch up. Punching down is just bullying. So, I cannot satirize an oppressed group, but in theory I could satirize their leaders if they hold considerably more power than I do. (This is highly context dependent and possibly a bad idea for other reasons, but we're only looking from the angle of defining satire at the moment.) 

The second is that the preponderance of the audience must be aware that your work is a satire. (Without labelling it as such.) In order to parody something in a way that expresses disapproval which is evident to the audience, satire usually employs an absurdism of extremes. The text of A Modest Proposal reads earnestly, but the suggestion it makes is absurd. Simply 'unrealistic' content does not go far enough to qualify as satire. Twilight Struggle examines seriously a political concept that has been throughly discredited. But the concept is not ridiculous enough for the average lay person to recognize it as absurd. I would classify Twilight Struggle as commentary but not satire. The side benefit of absurdity is that it generally adds humor to satire. (Comedy is a side effect, not the primary goal.)

There are some more general rules that I would put forth to board game designers trying to design a satiric game:

• The game needs to have a firm understanding of the subject matter. If too many of your details are ahistorical, your game will not be framed well enough for you to satirize your subject. For example, the thematic details of Puerto Rico are such a mess that the game can barely be said to be set in Puerto Rico. (I'm not saying Puerto Rico claims to be a satire, but that it couldn't if it wanted to.)
• The game needs to be self-aware of the harm done by the subject of the satire. Not only can the game not punch down, but it must understand how the framework it adopts has harmed various groups. Spirit Island is an example of self-aware commentary on colonialism. (It fails at being satire because it does not pretend to be pro-colonialism.) Many board games can appear self-aware when played by one group of players and not when played by another, such as Ladies & Gentlemen. This harkens back to one of our key pillars: the audience must be aware of the satire. 
• While the game must adopt the framework of the target, the game must be clearly not serious in its adoption. If most of your audience thinks you were serious, you failed at being satire. Applying your framework to an absurd extreme is the most easily recognizable form of satire, however you bear the risk that your audience may take your extremes seriously. See also: Fight Club, the movie, and its unfortunate fanboys. 
• The game must have a single, simple message. My game, Deadly Dowagers, contains two conflicting messages, one satiric and one cathartic. Since the cathartic message was emergent from the theme rather than intentional, I can't easily remove it to draw focus to the satire. As a result, the satire is muted and less apparent to the audience. I actually think this tension makes the commentary in the game more interesting, but it fails as effective satire. 

Now for a few best practices. I think, although I do not insist, that satire in board games needs to be absurd ideas with serious execution. The reverse, serious ideas with absurd execution, seems to fall down on a number of levels. But more generally, broad parody in the illustration seems like it would reliably undermine satire in board games. Satire uses parody but that does not mean that all forms of parody are suitable for satire. In the case of board games, ridiculous art has been used so often for purposes other than satire that the message would likely be lost or muddied. 

I also feel that board games are better suited to satirize systems and ideas rather than people or particular institutions. Highly topical satire tends to be ephemeral and the development cycle of a board game is not well suited to take aim at a person who may not be quite so relevant by the time the game is released (at least not if you want the game to be good.) Additionally, if you want the game to have broad appeal and age well, aiming at more general systems and injustices seems the better route. 

What game is a good example of satire? It's hard for me to say whether a game works as satire or not without playing it or listening to someone else critique it. (I'm relying on the critique of people I trust for most of the games mentioned in this post.) There is one game, though, that has all the hallmarks of satire on its face. Campaign for North Africa is (supposedly) a functional war game. It also appears to be a satire of war games as a genre. The play time and level of simulation are intentionally absurd and certainly self-aware. Richard Berg certainly knows the subject matter. I also don't believe he ever seriously expected anyone to play the full game. The message could be "some people take war games too seriously, but even they won't play this game." Campaign for North Africa is arguably satire as performance art rather than satire as board game, but it is the best fit for what I have been outlining. 

Even in literature, satire is relatively rare. Satire is extremely difficult to pull off well. But board games are well suited to commentary on systems and thus deserve exploration as vehicles for satire. Even barring that, many of the points I make here are good guide posts for more effective commentary in games. The main difference is the level of sincerity with which you present your subject matter. Critically thinking about systems and the impact they have is an admirable goal when designing a game, whether your game is satirical or not. 

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