{"id":237,"date":"2010-06-14T23:07:29","date_gmt":"2010-06-15T06:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/?p=237"},"modified":"2012-05-30T01:38:16","modified_gmt":"2012-05-30T08:38:16","slug":"game-developer-column-11-theme-is-not-meaning-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/game-developer-column-11-theme-is-not-meaning-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"GD Column 11: Theme is Not Meaning (Part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following was published in the February 2010 issue of Game Developer<\/a> magazine\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Who decides what a game is about?<\/p>\n

At first glance, the popular board game\u00a0Ticket to Ride<\/em> seems to be another link in the great chain of rail baron games, such as\u00a0Age of Steam<\/em>,\u00a0Eurorails<\/em> and the\u00a01830<\/em> series. During the game, the player draws unique route challenges, to connect certain pairs of cities – New York to San Francisco, Miami to Chicago, and so on.<\/p>\n

To complete them, she must claim a series of tracks that connect adjacent cities while also trying to block her opponents from finishing their own challenges. There are sub goals too, such as having the longest contiguous rail line and completing one\u2019s network first, which ends the game for everyone.<\/p>\n

Thus, most players would describe\u00a0Ticket to Ride<\/em> as a game about building the best rail service, by grabbing choice routes and cutting off the competition. However, the introduction in the rules tells a different story:<\/p>\n

On a blustery autumn evening five old friends met in the backroom of one of the city\u2019s oldest and most private clubs. Each had traveled a long distance – from all corners of the world – to meet on this very specific day\u2026 October 2, 1900 – 28 years to the day that the London eccentric, Phileas Fogg, accepted and then won a \u00a320,000 bet that he could travel\u00a0Around the World in 80 Days<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Each succeeding year, they met to celebrate the anniversary and pay tribute to Fogg. And each year a new expedition (always more difficult) was proposed. Now at the dawn of the century it was time for a new impossible journey. The stakes: $1 Million in a winner-takes-all competition. The objective: to see which of them could travel by rail to the most cities in North America – in just 7 days.<\/p>\n

The official story comes as a surprise to many players, even veterans of the game, because the theme simply does not match the gameplay. For example, how can a player \u201cclaim\u201d a route just by riding on it? Do the trains shut down, preventing anyone else from using that line? On the other hand, claiming routes matches perfectly the fiction of ruthless rail barons trying to control the best connections.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, routes can be claimed in any order – there is no sense that the player actually exists in the world as a traveler with real, physical limitation. Instead, claiming routes feels a lot more like buying them rather than traveling on them.<\/p>\n

Mechanics Give Meaning<\/strong><\/p>\n

This disconnect leads to some interesting questions. Does a game\u2019s designer have the right to say what a game is about if it doesn\u2019t match what\u2019s going on inside the players\u2019 heads? And if the designer doesn\u2019t have this right, then does a game\u2019s official \u201cstory\u201d ever matter at all because it can be invalidated so easily? Isn\u2019t a game about what one actually\u00a0does<\/em> during play and how that feels to the player?<\/p>\n

Ultimately, designers need to recognize that a game\u2019s theme does not determine its meaning. Instead, meaning emerges from a game\u2019s mechanics \u2013 the set of decisions and consequences unique to each one. What does a game ask of the player? What does it punish, and what does it reward? What strategies and styles does the game encourage? Answering these questions reveals what a game is actually about.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, while people buy games for the promise of the theme (\u201cI want to be a space marine!\u201d), the fun comes from the mechanics themselves (actually shooting the aliens). When there is a severe dissonance between the two, players can feel cheated, as if the designers executed a bait-and-switch.<\/p>\n

The reception of\u00a0Spore<\/em>, a game sold with an evolutionary theme, provides a recent example. In the October 2008 issue of\u00a0Science<\/em> magazine, John Bohannon wrote the following about how the game delivered on the theme\u2019s promise:<\/p>\n

I’ve been playing\u00a0Spore<\/em> with a team of scientists, grading the game on each of its scientific themes. When it comes to biology, and particularly evolution,\u00a0Spore<\/em> failed miserably. According to the scientists, the problem isn’t just that\u00a0Spore<\/em> dumbs down the science or gets a few things wrong–it’s meant to be a game, after all–but rather, it gets most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.<\/p>\n

The source of this dissonance is that, even though it was sold as such,\u00a0Spore<\/em> is not really a game about evolution.\u00a0Spore<\/em> is actually a game about creativity \u2013 the reason to play the game was to behold the wonder of other players\u2019 imaginations as they used (and misused) the editors to create objects not imagined by the game\u2019s designers \u2013 from musical instruments to fantastical creatures to dramatic scenes.<\/p>\n

However, even though\u00a0Spore<\/em> is not about evolution, the scientists should keep looking because one of the most popular games actually\u00a0is<\/em> about evolution \u2013\u00a0World of Warcraft<\/em>. The game may have a swords-and-sorcery theme, but the mechanics encourage the players to conduct their own form of natural selection when deciding how to develop their characters.<\/p>\n

Over years of experience, veterans of\u00a0WoW<\/em> have established a number of upgrade paths (or \u201cbuilds\u201d) for each class, depending on what role the player wants the character to fill. For example, the Paladin class has three main builds: Holy (for healing), Protection (for tanking), and Retribution (for damage-per-second). Further, underneath these main categories, sub-builds exist for player-vs-player, player-vs-environment, and mob grinding. These paths have evolved organically over the years as players tried out different combinations, depending on what the game rewarded or punished.<\/p>\n

Seeing Past the Theme<\/strong><\/p>\n

One can look at any number of games through the lens of how the mechanics affect the user experience to find out what the game actually means.\u00a0Super Mario Bros.<\/em>, for example, is a game about timing, certainly not about plumbing.\u00a0Battlefield <\/em>games are about teamwork, not World War II or modern combat.\u00a0Peggle<\/em> is a game about chaos theory, not unicorns or rainbows.<\/p>\n

Indeed, games with the same theme can actually be about different things. For example, human conflict with aliens has certainly been a popular theme across video game history. Nonetheless, each alien-themed game can mean something very different depending on the rule set.\u00a0Galaga<\/em> is actually about pattern matching.\u00a0X-Com<\/em> is about decision-making with limited information.\u00a0Gears of War<\/em> is about using cover as a defensive weapon.\u00a0StarCraft<\/em> is about the challenges of asymmetrical combat.<\/p>\n

Conversely, games with different themes but the same mechanics are actually about the same thing.\u00a0Civilization<\/em> and\u00a0Alpha Centauri<\/em> are set on completely different planets, but the mechanics are largely the same.\u00a0Alpha Centauri<\/em>\u2019s mind worms, probe teams, and Secret Projects are essentially identical to\u00a0Civilization\u2019s<\/em> barbarians, spies, and World Wonders. Players can easily see past the game\u2019s chrome to see that they are still making the same decisions with the same tradeoffs.<\/p>\n

Genre choice can also affect the meaning of a game. Players expect a theme to deliver on certain nouns and verbs. (\u201cI am a Mage – I can cast powerful Magic!\u201d) Unfortunately, genre conventions often put a barrier between a player and the game he imagined while holding a copy in the store. Once again, players buy games for the theme – if the mechanics and traditions of the genre are wildly unfamiliar to the player, at odds with the game in his head, he may feel cheated.<\/p>\n

For example, two recent console games –\u00a0Halo Wars<\/em> and\u00a0Brutal Legend<\/em> – surprised players by being strategy games. With the former, many players expected a\u00a0Halo<\/em> game to be about reflex-based combat; with the latter, heavy-metal music is not inherently strategic. Because strategy games are often played at a considered distance, players expecting the visceral thrill promised by the games\u2019 themes were disappointed. The designers may have built fun and interesting rule sets, but the themes sold the games to the wrong fans.<\/p>\n

Uniting Theme and Mechanics<\/strong><\/p>\n

One interesting comparison is the board games\u00a0Risk <\/em>and\u00a0Diplomacy<\/em>, which have identical themes of world conquest. Indeed, at first glance, the two games also seem quite similar mechanically. The game board is split up into territories, which the players control with generic army or (in the case of\u00a0Diplomacy<\/em>) navy tokens. These territories switch hands as battles are fought, and – in turn – the victors are able to field larger militaries from their new lands.<\/p>\n

However, a small difference in the rules makes the two games about something very different. In\u00a0Risk<\/em>, turns occur sequentially while, in\u00a0Diplomacy<\/em>, they execute simultaneously. This difference makes\u00a0Risk <\/em>a game about risk while\u00a0Diplomacy <\/em>becomes a game about diplomacy. In the former, players must decide how much they can achieve during their own turn and then hope the dice are not unkind. With\u00a0Diplomacy<\/em>, however, there are no dice; players can only succeed with the help of others, which can only be promised but not actually delivered during the negotiation round. Only when the secretly-written orders are revealed between turns is it clear who is a true friend and who is a backstabbing traitor.<\/p>\n

Diplomacy<\/em>, in particular, is a perfect marriage between theme and mechanics. Indeed, President John F. Kennedy considered it his favorite game. The game is about exactly what it claims to be about – the twists and turns of diplomatic negotiations. On the other hand, when a game\u2019s theme and mechanics are sharply divorced, players can react negatively to the dissonance. Part II<\/a> shall discuss examples of games which made a successful union of the two and ones which did not – and the rewards and costs of doing so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following was published in the February 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine\u2026 Who decides what a game is about? At first glance, the popular board game\u00a0Ticket to Ride seems to be another link in the great chain of rail … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3EGlq-3P","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":661,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions\/661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}