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.

Compounding Thematic Elements

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

If your design goal includes a transportive* thematic experience, a knitted theme may not be enough to provide that experience. In order to provide a deeper thematic experience, thematic elements must build on one another to add texture and tension to gameplay. There are a number of techniques you can employ that all fall under the umbrella of compounding thematic elements. 

When thematic elements are presented as separate items that primarily interact mechanically but not thematically with each other, a game will provide a thematic experience that is nonetheless more strongly focused on the mechanical experience. When thematic elements build on each other and respond to each other, the resulting experience will have a stronger focus on theme. 

Compounding thematic elements indicate a dynamic game world to players. A dynamic and responsive world provides a deeper thematic experience than a static world. Compounding elements may be as simple as synergies between resources, but for more dramatic effects you can utilize one or more of the following techniques. 

Progressive goals are way points or win conditions that change as players progress thru the game. Open world games and certain kinds of campaign games may employ progressive goals in order to hide the main conflict/antagonist from players at the beginning of the game. Other games may present all possible win conditions up front, but some may be locked until certain conditions are met. These types of goals must be tightly woven with the theme to produce a compounding thematic effect. So, while the 'You Win' card in Space Base is a progressive goal, it is not a thematic goal and thus does not qualify as a compounding thematic element. 

One way to keep players engaged with the theme is to have outside forces intrude on them during play. This can break players out of a pure numbers/efficiency mindset when executed well. Persistent effects, positive or negative, can shift player focus back to the game world. These effects are most impactful when layered on top of a thematic core game loop. Persistent effects can either be individual effects or global events that affect every player. Global events can be used to increase tension by providing an escalating threat to the players. Persistent effects can also raise tension by afflicting players with multiple negative effects at once. Multiple individual negative effects are a safer design choice for cooperative games, where a temporary goal may be to rescue a player from their negative effects. Multiple individual effects in competitive games will likely feel unfair to the player(s) who falls behind as a result of the effects. Global events are particularly poignant in competitive games, because they can unite the players in moments of shared frustration or elation. 

The goal of the mechanics discussed in this post is to create a game world that feels dynamic and a game arc that has thematic tension. Designers are lauded for their ability to interweave mechanisms together. The same care can be taken to interweave theme such that the end result is a game that is both thematically and mechanically compelling. 

*Transportation is an aspect of immersion. Absorption is another. I prefer the clarity of these terms rather than using immersion. 

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

Selective Thematic Abstraction

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

Tabletop board games require abstraction. Even simulations must choose what it is that they simulate. However, what you choose to abstract informs the story that your game tells. 

When learning to design lighting for the stage, designers are taught that the way to make something look brighter is to remove lights, not add them. When every light is on, nothing is emphasized. By turning some lights off, areas can be spotlighted to draw the audience's attention. The non-obvious result is that turning lights off can make a stage appear brighter. 

Abstraction works the same way when it comes to thematic expression in board games. If you want to tell a certain story or provide a certain experience within your theme, what you abstract is as important as what you simulate. Too many details often result in a cluttered experience where no clear story emerges. Whereas selective abstraction allows for your intended thematic experience to shine. 

An easy way to understand this concept is to compare two similar games: The Grizzled and The Coldest Night. Both are small, cooperative card games. Both involve playing a card from your hand on your turn to a shared tableau. Both have negative effect cards that can accumulate in front of a player. But the experience evoked by each is very different. 

The Grizzled leans into the importance of camaraderie between soldiers in WWI. The cards played into the shared tableau are less important thematically than helping your squad get what they need to stay alive. The well-being of your squad is the thematic goal of the game and succeeding in missions takes a back seat to that goal. The Grizzled accomplishes this by abstracting the fighting aspect of the theme away almost entirely and simulating the mental trauma caused by warfare. This design choice creates a play experience where the predominate emotion is empathy for the other people around the table. 

The Coldest Night, by contrast, has a stronger focus on the environmental setting of the game. In the game, players are trying to keep a fire burning all night by feeding it fuel scavenged from an abandoned house. The health of your group is still important, but it takes a back seat to the primary goal of keeping the fire burning. Unlike The Grizzled, The Coldest Night is set in a single location on a single night. The theme plays with a universal human fear of getting caught in the cold. Thematically, hope is centered around the fire, not fellow players. 

Neither game is more correct for what it chose to abstract vs. simulate. The Grizzled has more heads up gameplay as players discuss who they need to help. The Coldest Night is more heads down as players agonize over how to play out their hands. The Grizzled can pack a stronger emotional punch because the theme emphasizes relationships. However, it can also force players to make unthematic plays in order to win the game. By focusing on a simpler experience, The Coldest Night provides a stronger simulation. 

Importantly, neither game tries to emphasize both an environmental simulation and an emotional one. We don't know where we are in France in The Grizzled or why we are stuck with the other players in The Coldest Night. Those details aren't only unnecessary; they would detract from the clean experiences the games currently provide. 

Designers often interpret 'integrate theme and mechanics' to mean 'theme everything.' This is a good place to start. However if certain thematic details get in the way of the intended experience, you can streamline your thematic elements to better fit your vision. 

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

Discouragement is a Part of the Creative Process

Have you seen those author memes? The ones where the author goes back and forth between hating and loving their work. This post is basically about that. 

There are different types of discouragement. You might be discouraged by failure or other external influences. You might be discouraged by the long wait times involved in producing games (see this post about doldrums). Those forms of discouragement are frustrating and difficult, but for me nothing compares to the internal discouragement that is bound up with the act of creation. 

This form of discouragement is disconnected from whether you have received outside validation. Your game may be doing well with playtesters, but that doesn't stop your brain from telling you that you will fail. For me, this discouragement occurs at two points in the creative process: At the very beginning and at the very end. At the beginning of the process I am excited to run with a new idea—until I look at all the work I will need to do to make the game actually good. This is especially hard if I have just wrapped up a design that I feel is pretty good. To start back at square one with a not-yet-good design can be hard. Especially when there is no guarantee that the design will ever become good. (Some design deserve to be abandoned; read more here.) 

The other point where I get discouraged is at the very end. I have done most of the creative work and what's left is the professional work needed to get the design in front of publishers. Finishing projects can be difficult because it means admitting that they are as good as you are capable of getting them (and if they are rejected, it can feel like it is because you aren't good enough.) Plus, the end of a project means you have already done the fun stuff, so now all you have to look forward to is the hard stuff. 

Whether or not this is exactly true for you, it is human nature to be discouraged by our own creative output. Artists are stereotyped as moody for a reason. So, what can you do?

First, learn when you are likely to experience internal discouragement in your own design process. Try to differentiate from other types of discouragement. Learn to recognize internal discouragement as it arises. Then learn to set it aside. This may take external motivation, like an accountability partner or a commitment to a playtesting group. 

For me, my internal monolog looks like this: "I know I feel like a failure and I don't want to work on this game anymore. BUT, I always feel this way when putting together submission materials, and that feeling has no relation to the potential success of the game. So I am going to do the thing, even though it sucks." Then I get my husband to check my work, because sometimes really not wanting to do a thing makes me worse at proofreading.

The point is how you feel doesn't necessarily correspond with the quality of your work. Every creative person feels discouraged while creating. Recognizing this type of discouragement for what it is is a necessary step to becoming a better creator. 

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

Narrative Structure in Games

This topic could be a book by itself. Narrative structure is a complex subject in more traditional storytelling mediums to begin with. On top of that, mechanical game arcs are a layered topic for which there is no single, authoritative reference source. And discussing narrative arcs in games requires knowledge of both. I will leave the subject of game arcs as much as possible to other people and try to focus on some general concepts around narrative structure in board games. 

I have seen board gameplay described as 'all rising action.' I disagree, although I allow that that is a simple way to align most gameplay with traditional, three act structure. Any game with a single pivot point, like Clank!, has both rising and falling action. A boss-battler could be considered a single, climactic scene. Traditional narrative structures are easiest to incorporate into games when a game has a campaign mode or sequential scenarios, because of the ability to include different challenges and challenge levels that lead to a sense of story progression. 

There are, of course, different types of narrative structure, from slice of life to five act to absurdism. I'm not sure that translating gameplay arcs to existing narrative structures is all that useful to designers. I propose an analysis style more closely aligned with acting: scene work. I won't describe how actors go about scene work here, instead I want to jump straight to my suggested mode of narrative analysis. 

Scene work for game narrative starts with goals. The player character should have one major goal that drives them to perform the actions of the game. That goal should align with the win condition of the game. The player character will have any number of minor goals. Those goals will align with actions taken or attempted in the game. Minor goals might include completing a set of objects or achieving an objective first or claiming a card before someone else can. If the minor goals tend to fall into stages during gameplay that shift from one stage to the next, then the game has distinct scenes. If not, the game may only have one scene. Individual scenes will have different goals and strategies, but will further the major goal of the game. (If this all sounds like I am describing mechanical game arcs and not narrative, that is because acting and game design employ such similar language.)

Believable goals, especially minor goals, are the key to compelling characters. If I believe that a character is acting in accordance with their desires, that character comes alive. As a player, if character motivation makes sense, then I will be emotionally invested in my character. In a game without characters, I can still be invested in actions that further my goals thematically. However, I increasingly believe that it is interesting characters, not interesting stories, that matter for emotional investment. Interesting stories will arise if attention is paid to what characters want and what they are willing to do to get it. 

Of course, scenes are not just made up of goals, but obstacles and actions and resolutions. All of which should be pushing the player toward the major goal. Thinking in terms of goals and scenes can help ensure that the game narrative is thematically satisfying. 

You may find it helpful to think in terms of three act structure. You may find your game narratives naturally want to shape themselves into traditional structure, because that style of storytelling feels satisfying. There is nothing wrong with that. But designers do not need to feel limited by traditional structures (unless the game is text heavy, in which case different rules apply). 

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