Long time readers of this blog will know that the concept of immersion can be divided into absorption and transportation. Transportation is the sensation of being transported into another world for a time. The term comes from literary criticism where it is known as narrative transportation. I refer to transportation in board games as thematic transportation so as to include games without traditional narrative structure. This post is just an observation about thematic transportation.
Transportation, generally, is most effective on passive audiences. When we watch movies or plays or read books, the only thing we are asked to do is suspend our disbelief so that the story can affect us. For the span of a few hours, we can almost fully set aside our real world concerns.
I contend that more active participants in an activity must juggle competing concerns of safety, rules, and transportation, thus making transportation more difficult to achieve. The next level from audience is "serious improv" where actors perform dramatic scenes without lines or instructions on how to act. This level adds safety concerns, which are significant because this kind of improv can delve into traumatizing topics. LARPs and TTRPGs can at times fall into this category, although they typically also have rules.
The more a participant must actively think about concerns beyond experiencing the narrative, the less transporting that narrative can be. This is one reason why actors rehearse, to reduce how much they have to actively think about their blocking and lines. The more they can rely on muscle memory, the more they can immerse themselves in the scene. We see this as well in complex TTRPGs. The more rules you have memorized, the more space you have to explore the setting. Players new to D&D, for example, will have their heads down in the books trying to figure out what they can do rather than interacting with imaginary world around them. This crosses over into board games as well: the more time players spend stuck in the rulebook during play, the less time they will spend experiencing the theme.
But board games takes this difficulty a step further. Because players cannot simply experience the theme. They have goals as players that must be achieved in order to play the game correctly. There is a game state that must be managed. When we design thematic games, we ask players to stand in two worlds at once. We want them to be transported by the theme, but we also want them to remain aware of the rules and win conditions. This hampers their ability to be fully transported.
We can take steps to mitigate this phenomenon. We can theme the scoring and end game so that players are always acting as their characters. We can limit the amount of non-thematic elements and icons. Such measures don't always make the game easier to play, but we can also simplify the rules. Another trick is to add blocks of narrative text. Alternating passive listening with active play allows players moments when they have no competing concerns and can focus solely on being transported. I'm not a big fan of this option because it only works if the writing is good and if it makes sense to pause the gameplay.
Thematic board games strive to achieve an experience that they aren't really equipped to do well. But if we were to change board games in order to make them better at transportation, they would cease to be board games. The things that make board games a distinctive activity are the things that impede transportation. It is a Sisyphean task. However, those moments of transportation, when players get swept away by the theme, make the imperfect conditions worth it. Perhaps more so, because the deck is stacked against us.
ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.
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