All themes great and small
So battles lines is allegedly a game about the battles of Alexander and Darius – and personally invokes the feeling of being a general in the ancient world but does not make me feel like either Alexander or Darius. Does that have a themed lightly papered on? It has certainly failed to draw out it’s specific theme but with regards it’s general theme it’s done very well.
Then there is Caverna which makes me feel like a farmer; with the sending of people out to work and the breeding of animals the growing of food it really does invoke farmer to me. Dwarf on the other hand – I don’t really get that. The art work does, the names of the cards are fine, but the game play does not make me feel dwarven. Which is a shame – as I do love a good dwarf.
These are both case where a game invokes its grand theme but fails to invoke a more specific theme.
I suspect that grand theme can be invoked by game mechanics but invoking a specific theme requires fidelity. The game mechanics can make you feel like a civil war general but only fidelity will make you feel like you are commanding at Gettysburg.
As a side note I'm not sure how a game would make me feel like Alexander the Great other than by convincing me I could not possibly lose before the game started, giving my opponent all the possible benefits and then have me still winning. Hmmmm maybe Darius gets all the fixed advantages – more troops, better supplies but Alexander gets a big hand of cards that lets him break the rules and win anyway…… Digression over.
Weakly Themed Games
For some people a game having a weak theme is a problem but it’s not a new thing - theming has been here since the first person looked at a chess board and said “we call that one castle”. Not every game has a theme – new abstract games are being produced but they are definitely in a minority. Why did Reiner Kentize look at the bidding and set collection game design that became Ra and think “Ancient Egypt – that’s what this says to me……”
I can think of 4 reasons to theme a game.
The first reason is money – a game about ancient Egypt will sell better than ‘utterly abstract set collection game’ if only because it gives marketing weasels something to hang hooks on. I can certainly see somebody turning up with their game and being told ‘pirates are big right now – make it about pirates’. I've no practical experience that says either way– but I've been told it happens in novels. Apparently most serialised novels start life as standalone novels, get told it’s not good enough but if they change it around a bit it would work. Which is why sometimes events/technology/actions occur that make no damn sense in world – I'm looking at you Babylon 5 book where they set their PPG’s to stun….
The second reason is design drift – it started off connected to the theme but over the course of the design as things got updated, altered, or even completely changed it lost that connection. Having seen how much changed over the course of Giant Stone Head this I can believe – when faced with playability/balance issues I was willing to ditch theme/fidelity pretty easily because that first set matter a lot more.
The third reason is that game designers are weird people –and see connections that other people just would not. If Giant Stone Head had ever been published then people might well have looked at it and gone ‘the theme is just pasted on!” despite the fact that it was always themed around Giant Stone Heads and the destruction of your environment in pursuit of something impractical.
The fourth is that everything needs to be called something. You've designed a novel and interesting mechanic now you need a way of refereeing everything. You could invent words or symbols but that’s awkward. Players often do stop using the words you chose and say ‘you’ll need three blue and a green’ so it’s not impossible but it’s easier for them to do if they choose then you to enforce it. Actually is that a decent way of detecting ‘Weak Theme’? If the players stop calling it what the game says it represents and starts calling it by some name that is a descriptor for example blue cube?
Anyway – that need for reference is especially true of a really complicated game – you might consider Ora et Labora to be weekly themed around monks and it’s a fair cop. But try and imagine that game without any theme at all –keeping track of the different resources and how they interact and update would be hellish.
Using names also allows you to hit another key word- intuitive. A game where things flow together and make sense is easier learn and generally better than one where things don’t mesh. The rule X turns into Y is awkward– where as iron turns into weapons is much easier to remember. Considering Ra - A’s force discard of B’s unless C is harder to remember then drought forces loss of Nile unless there is a flood because that already got somewhere to hang that info in your brain.
Feeling is expectation
So this article by game designer Bruno Faidutti (the designer of Ad astra) is an interesting look at the meaning behind the themes that board game designers choose– and how certain elements get ignored. I mean does anybody think those little brown disk in Peurto Rico are really ‘colonists’? It’s ok there’s an English translation below the foreign.
I liked the article and it chimed a cord with me; after all having played (and enjoyed Brass) I found I was struck by the total absence of people and the hideous working conditions they underwent to make the industrial revolution happen. Which is why one of the ideas in the game design pad is ‘these dark satanic mills’ in which while you mine coal and process cotton your victory points come from maiming and killing poor people in your hideous factory’s. It has never got beyond the concept stage sadly.
For me the standout sentence of the article was
“For the game designer, India or Chine, Middle Ages or Antiquity, are not geographical places or historical times, they are just topoi, sets of standard references, which must not be more sophisticated than those mastered by the player.”
This fits my idea that theme is really about feeling. Because if I as a game designer was 100% accurate in what I did but you as a player had a different understanding of the circumstances then the game would lose any thematic feel to the player. Playing Istanbul over Essen weekend somebody said “Of course there’s are rugs – if you set a game in Istanbul and there were no rugs I’d be really disappointed’ I agreed with him – of course there are rugs in a game about Istanbul because that’s the stereotype I share with him. Somebody over at board game geek has already suggested an additional character to encounter – the dancing girl! Why because it’s the mythic orient – and that’s got dancing girls. Full stop. End off. But why does the game have a location called ‘the great mosque’ rather than the Hagia Sophia? It’s believable that the game designer simply felt that not enough of the player base would know what that was – that it would not ring true enough with the players.
I had an interesting clash of theme over the weekend while playing Arkwright over Essen weekend. It’s a heavyweight game of building factory’s in the Victorian age, while managing costs and quality in order maximise profit. It’s good, smooth and hits a fine spot between fidelity and playability for me. Despite that I found myself slightly rubbed up the wrong way by a couple of things because of my own personal expectations and beliefs.
Hiring people increase the demand for goods and also increase the cost of labour – which is fine and a really net mechanic. But when you fire people the cost of labour does not go down, nor does the demand – or more accurately it does but only very very slowly. That rubbed me up the wrong way – it ran counter to my expectations and world view. I'm happy enough in brass where that whole aspect is just ignored and abstracted away but once you made it a feature it needed it to reflect my own internal vision.*
Likewise as the pile of unemployed people grows nothing bad happens – there is no fear of rebellion, no threat of the working classes overthrowing there oppressors, not even a general strike. Equally there is no way of being Titus Salt – or any other great Victorian philanthropist- it simply does not exist in this game you either mechanise or lose money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Salt
I should point out that Bruno Faidutti is definitely wrong about at least one thing -there is steampunk music and it sounds likes this…... (Any excuse to post a link to the Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing and there shouty music).
He’s not wrong however in that Steampunk is primarily aesthetic movement and I think he’s correct that a lot of its fans want to go back to a reassuring world where drinking tea is the answer to all of life’s problems**.
It’s certainly a good theme to drape around a game – allows for cool art and fantastical situations well still allowing access to something that feels familiar to western board game players (by far and away the majority).
*Interestingly enough the game designer has explained what they think is going on here - and why they think this is as sufficient fidelity over at board game geek
**Not all of them however as seen by the fact that Andrew O’Neill the lead guitarist for the Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing (and cross dressing, vegan, occult, death metal comedian – niche hardly does him credit) published a rant entitled ‘Fuck Steampunk’ railing about how Steampunk was twee. By published I mean on paper - I think there are about 100 copies in the whole world and it’s not on the internet anywhere.***
*** Turns out my years of hanging round with Dr Geof has given me more than a passing knowledge of that sub culture despite not being a part of it.
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