(note: this post came as a response to the great discussion on the forumsof Ludology's episode 105, Teach the Controversy - well worth a listen!)


In a comment on the forums of the podcast Ludology, designer Gil Hova said the following:

Gil Hova wrote:
I feel that there's a strong distinction between recreational and transformative games that will help us here. I think the two kinds of games work at cross purposes.

A transformative game is all about enlightening us on a certain topic and changing us in some way by playing it. A recreational game is all about flow and fiero. In other words, the purpose of a transformative game is to reflect the world; the purpose of a recreational game is to obliterate it.

And then also this:

I like to divide commercial recreational games into three categories: contests, puzzles, and worlds. It's very difficult to assign some significant external meaning to a contest and still have the contest be relevant. Contests can be only about themselves, so they have a very hard time reflecting the real world.

Since board games tend to be contests instead of puzzles or worlds, they have a very hard time carrying artistic meaning. Transformative designers therefore tend to work in genres with a lower barrier to entry, and in a game style that can more easily carry real-world meaning.


I’d like to respectfully disagree with Gil Hova. Though I like his typology and find it useful and illuminating, I don’t think it’s true that contests have a hard time carrying artistic meaning. I don’t find the distinction between recreational and transformative games as instructive – so many bridge the gap that I don’t know that the distinction really holds. The first that comes to mind is Twilight Struggle but the same is true about Dead of Winter, Tammany Hall and many many others. Almost any game with a theme really. Of course, much depends on how you understand “the purpose of a transformative game is to reflect the world” – and we can quibble about whether the purpose of Dead of Winter is to reflect the world or is it a by-product of what the game is doing, but in my opinion the only reason it places you in the extreme situation of a zombie apocalypse is that it’s a brilliant laboratory for revealing truths about human interactions in extreme conditions with a mixture of conflicting and joint interests. I use it in the classroom for exactly that reason. It might be true that the reason Isaac and Jon use it in Dead of Winter is because it’s fun for people and not because it ‘enlighten us on a certain topic and changes us in some way by playing it’ but enlightened we are, and also changed – whether we want it or not.

I’ve written it in greater length in response to the interview that Bruno Faidutti gave on this very find podcast – I think it’s a mistake to think that games (of the contest kind) are ‘too thin’ to carry an artistic meaning or that they are ‘just for fun’ and so we shouldn’t take it seriously even if they do. Any game with a theme has no choice but doing something to reflect the world. So unless you’re Red7 (I was expecting Mike to bring this one up in the safe, non-controversial games… though I’m sure someone will have an analysis of the power relations reflects in its abstract rainbow hierarchy), you will be saying something about the world. And I think designer should embrace it, not avoid it. And we should spend more time, as a community, thinking about the themes of our games.

I’m not going to say that every game has as deep a message as all others, and indeed it’s my point that many games have themes that weren’t really thought through (in other words, I think their artistic meaning is pretty poor), but even a tiny game like Love Letter sends a bunch of messages. Even my 7 year old niece had a bunch questions to ask about this game – why is the princess only receiving letters? Why can’t she send some of her own? Can she ask questions? Why can’t she just choose the one she wants? And so forth. This is clearly a case where the designer just took a stock cultural artifact off the shelf and applied it to the mechanics, and that’s totally fine. But in my opinion, you’re still responsible for the product that you produce even if you’ve used the tried and true cultural stories we all know and love. The point is: theme matters. Contests are not just about themselves when they have theme. And I much prefer the Batman Love Letter, not because I like Batman (I don't), but because the theme makes sense and fits the mechanics. I enjoy the game more that way. 

A caveat before I continue – when I criticize games, that does not mean that I’m in favor of banning them. This is not about censorship, and neither is the case of Five Tribes. I’m glad that Days of Wonder changed their mind in response to the pressure for two reasons. First, it wasn’t just knee-jerk reaction of some people, but raised a serious discussion on the portrayal of slaves in this game. It wasn’t just an irrational reaction, but a bunch of people who didn’t have a problem with it at first were convinced that it’s gratuitous and inappropriate. Second, it really didn’t seem that slaves were in any way a conscious part of the artistic vision of the game. Cathala says about it in his designer diary is "Because in ancient times, we still need a little slave at home." The appeal to historical authenticity was echoed in comments that Days of Wonder people said later and is particularly ridiculous, as others have also noticed, in a game that features Djinns prominently. But even if this was a historical theme, or if you think fidelity to the myth of Arabian Nights was guiding Cathala, the choice to put slaves is indefensible (and elsewhere I explained why I think there’s a difference between the depiction of slaves and that of assassins, but this is getting too long). When you’re making a game, you pick and choose. I didn’t see that Cathala included the rape and execution of multiple virgin queens as part of his game – though it’s the most prominent feature, indeed the driving force, of the Arabian Nights framework. For some reason, it didn’t seem ‘fun’ to him to include the constant cycle of rape execution in his game. But the Djinns are fun. The spices are fun. The carpets are sweet. And the slaves. Cathala is a brilliant designer that I really admire but I really think this was not a careful choice, but rather an attitude that we shouldn’t take this so seriously (as articulated by Faidutti in his interview). If this was an integral part of the artistic vision of the game, I doubt they would have changed it. And if he stuck to his plan with some serious explanation I wouldn’t fault him for it (though I would be disappointed). I haven’t played it yet, but from what I gather it seems that Tomorrow is an example of a game where the controversial elements were integral to the artistic vision. There would always be people doing all sorts of games and themes that are offensive or crazy, and that’s totally fine. But we need to have a conversation about the norms of our hobby – what is accepted as a mainstream, what we consume without thinking because it’s fine.

Which leads me to my second point is that I think we can learn a lot about our culture from what is and what isn’t controversial. The fact that colonialism and ‘discovery’ of the new world (whether historical or hypothetical) is, I think, revealing. The fact that I can easily think of ten great games that have no women in them or only a handful in very stereotypical depictions is a problem. These are example of what Hova calls ‘invisible ropes’, which are everywhere in our hobby. Things might be shifting on this, but the tides of cultural change are typically very slow.

To make my point even sharper and perhaps more controversial (so meta) – I want to discuss another game that is seemingly unassuming and inoffensive as can be. And for the most part, I think it is. But I think it does hide some interesting elements. The game is Harbour– a small box game from Tasty Minstrel and Scott Almes that attempts to distill and streamline a resource management game like Le Havre by making a worker placement game with just one worker. It’s a cute little game that I got on Kickstarter, in part because of the really amazing art that the game comes with.

The theme of the game is pasted on in the same way that the theme of Abyss is pasted on – both games are classic Euro games that basically try to mimic and idealized image of medieval Europe. In Abyss they said something like ‘what if make this under the water? That would be awesome!’ but nothing in the game really changed because of that, you just use squids and weird creatures to do exactly what you would if you were gathering peasants and artisans to attract lords and buy mansions. But the art is amazing. In any case, Harbour has the same deal: we take a Euro games mechanics of trading in a harbor and paste a fantasy theme on it to make it interesting. The fact these are Orcs and Goblins, Wizards and Dwarves means absolutely nothing – the game would just play just as plausibly with regular people carrying out their everyday business. They even have a beholder, one of D&D’s most terrifying monsters, as a librarian (which raises the question – how are you not turned into stone when you check out a book?). 

So what’s going on here? In placing D&D monsters and fantasy creatures in the mundane setting of a harbor, the designer and publisher were probably just trying to have a bit of fun by placing these creatures where we wouldn’t expect them, at the same time making their dry ‘trading in the Mediterranean’ theme spiced up with some fancy art. Why can’t an Orc be a cartographer? They ask, and of course we can see that an Orc can be cartographer because there he is, hunched over the desk. Orcs are imaginary creature and we can imagine them to be whatever we want them to be. And maybe some beholders are kind? Why must they all be evil?

But you see we have created Orcs and Goblins as imaginary monsters as a representation some things that we have found in the world. In various sources Orcs and Trolls are depicted as ‘dumb’ and ‘savage’ people – down to the accent that was considered barbaric by the people writing it. Orcs and Trolls represented actual people in the world we were afraid of – bad people, often from a different race or that speak a different language. In our imaginary worlds we give ourselves permission to paint little horns on their heads in our anger and hatred (because it helps deal with it!) but the stories we tell, our children and each other, about the Trolls that will snatch young kids from a villages and towns are not unrelated to the history of relationships between different peoples.
In transposing the Orcs and Trolls into an ordinary, mundane human world – the game unwittingly is telling us ‘there are not monsters in this world. Even those you think are pure evil are creatures with emotions, that really just wanted to develop their artistic skills but ended up as menial laborers because they had no choice’. And if that’s not controversial, than I don’t know what is.     

Game designers often think, rightly, that when they design a board game, theme and mechanics should match. Some designers start with an idea for a mechanic, and then find a theme that works well with it; others have a passion for a theme they want to have covered in gaming; there are few who start from inspiring components but it seems like many (most?) start with an idea of the mechanics they want and a vague theme that they are attracted to, often inspired by another game that they love.

For all these folks, matching theme with mechanics helps make the game more compelling and exciting. While it's true that a good mechanic can usually survive retheming (or even carry a game with little or no theme), theme helps make mechanics comprehensible, intuitive and easy to learn. What Eric Zimmerman, designer of Quantum, says about cards is true in general: "[a] card title and image serve as a kind of cognitive 'gateway' into understanding the card function. They help orient the player, making the rules component of the card easier to digest (and remember)." A tight match of theme and mechanics simplifies a complicated game, makes it easier to learn and retain the rules and helps keeping the game going smoothly. If you think about the adding of cards to your character as 'equipping' them, your mind will automatically makes assumptions that help the game: you can use it while others can't, you can't have too many things equipped at the same time, you can hand it over to someone who is nearby and so forth. At the same time, a game that violates thematic assumptions ("what? I can equip this but never drop it? How does that make sense?!") can be confusing, disorienting and very frustrating. Lastly, even most hardcore mechanic oriented players like a theme a little bit - it fills in the blanks of their superior wits in XXX, and gives a bit of meaning to what they did when they destroyed you just there.

For thematic oriented players and designers, who typically care more about the narrative of the game, there is sometimes a tendency to add more and more mechanics to accommodate the needs of the story. A game like Descent, that focuses on story and character development, ends up adding more and more rules as the game progresses. Each scenario has some special rules that are added in order to capture the situation of that specific mission - its goal, its circumstances and the twists and turns of the plot. Every piece of equipment and even every monster is a little rulebook which changes the game a bit to give you the feeling that your character is progressing on its narrative arc in the world of the game. This is a very challenging design work, because there's still a need to keep the mechanics balanced within the great variety of options. The strength of thematic games is that they let people experience the story more closely - and it's no coincidence that they are somewhat similar to role-playing games, as they aim for the same kind of experience. But they are weaker if their mechanics don't present a great challenge, are are ever-changing or just don't make any sense. A good thematic game has decisions that make sense even if you strip them down to their mechanical bare bones. A good example of that is Dead of Winter, where each crossroads card has a story that presents you with a thematic decision like 'should we accept more survivors to the colony'. At the same time, it presents you with a great strategic decision that can be considered mechanically - do I pay the costs of one extra food token per round in exchange for an extra action die, another pawn to move around and a random special ability from the deck?

So much about matching theme and mechanic, on which much has been said. I raise this old issue again not to give another answer to the question 'how should we balance the requirements of theme and mechanics in a game'  but rather to discuss how the choices made in the balancing of theme and mechanics impact the politics of a game, or as I like to call it - the little social world created by the game. My previous post on political analysis, which explains that it focuses on the way players relate to each other within the game, might suggest that it is mainly concerned with mechanics. When I asked 'what can players do to each other in this game' I mostly gave examples of mechanics - they can take resources from each other or they can't, they get assigned special roles by the game or they don't. Does it matter what thematic explanation is given to describe the fact that you take a cube from somebody else's reserves?

I think it does, and an example might serve to explain. In Village, your meeples die as time passes. Presumably, they die of old age after a long and satisfying life as a carriage maker, traveler or monk. Mechanically speaking, time is a resource you can spend (and usually, though not always, avoid spending) to gain some other resources. The cost of spending time is that occasionally, specifically every 10 units you spend, you have to give up one of your pawns (aka meeples/workers/etc.), in a certain order. Technically, that's not very different than trading sheep for wood, but in Village the game goes to great length to persuade you that the meeple really did die in peace, literally laying them to rest in the Village's chronicle or the graves behind the church.  

A different approach is taken by the designer of Arctic Scavengers, though he presents you with basically the same choice: give up one of your guys for some resource. Yet in this case, the image that the game presents you as the pretext of this trading action is very grim. Indeed, not quite sheep for wood in this case, more like sheep for... I'm not gonna go there.

In any case, I think it seems to me that putting your meeple to sleep on the pretty board in front of you feels very different from trashing a card, returning it to the box, while the evil cannibal is literally gazing at you from the table, holding his hands above a bloody plate. And this difference makes sense - Village is a game about the euphemized and imagined peaceful life of medieval Europe, which some have compared to a nice cup of tea for good reason. That meeples can die in this game is pretty surprising, as it belongs to a genre of games that avoids conflict and really doesn't want to make you feel bad in your stomach as you play. That they can pull it off and still appeal to the Euro crowd is an impressive achievement, especially since it is sometimes in your favor to have your meeples die sooner rather than later and the game incentives you to control this process. This thematic incongruence which is successfully integrated into the game is what most reivewers cite as its main innovation. In contrast, Arctic Scavengers does not want to make you feel nice. The game description starts with the death of the 90% of the world's population and then adds, if you missed the point that the "The world of Arctic Scavengers is cold and brutal" (emphasis, I kid you not, is in the original). no wonder some people said it was going to make you feel scared, and they said it while pretending that people are shooting at them. Go figure. 

 

Consider again the crossroads card from Dead of Winter. The beauty of them is that they present choices that make sense from a thematic as well as mechanic point of view, and those match. But players' intuitions might pull them in different directions: the same choice, presented in mechanic terms, might lead people to choose differently than if thought about it in thematic terms. And Dead of Winter forces players to have that discussion, which is brilliant. Someone may say 'we cannot afford to have more mouths to feed, our colony is food' which is, essentially a strategic (mechanical) consideration, while another may respond thematically by saying 'we cannot leave these people to die out there in the cold'. Of course, both people could be thinking about both implications - or they could be thinking just about the mechanics, while using thematic explanations as excuses. But I have seen many people make decisions on the basis of thematic considerations, out of concern for the aesthetic or moral position of their character/s. The sacred and eternal battle between the min/maxers and the role-players, the author said, is the oldest and most intense feud in the history of tabletop, and indeed it will rage until the end of days. And in any case, Dead of Winter makes you feel guilty when you turn away helpless survivors because you know in your heart of hearts that it's wrong, but you think it's the right decision given the game situation.

To sum, the theme of a game is very important for political analysis. Not because you can only analyze political games that have an explicitly politically theme, like 1960: The Making of the President, but because there's a lot to learn about a game from exploring the story it tries to tell, and the way it ties it to the mechanics. Sometimes a game tries to tell you that it's not very serious about its thematic commitment - as when a character 'dies' but comes back right away. This is a mechanic hint that the explicit theme is not to be taken too seriously. Analyzing the game politically requires looking at the intersection between theme and mechanics to see what the game purports to say and what it actually says, and how the relationship between these two things affects the way players, which are real people, treat each other around the table as well as on it. It starts with the basic setup of the game - are players fighting each other? Competing? Working together? And it continues to the actual actions people take and the ways they affect other players. What does the game call it when I take one of your resources?

How one understands a theme is open for interpretations and will vary from person to person. Of course, this doesn't mean that it's meaningless to have a discussion about it or point to some aspects that are not completely subjective. This is, of course, dangerous waters, but it's part of the mission of the political gamer.