In The [board] Games Journal, Greg Aleknevicus writes that German Games are Fraudulent.
His basic complaint is that in German board games, the game mechanic and the theme are often completely disconnected:
The point to be made is simple?the wholesale grafting of a theme onto a set of mechanics is dishonest if those mechanics have no real world connection to that theme. Can a game really be about exploring the Amazon if it can easily be re-themed to the terror of the French Revolution? Is it realistic to simply add floors to an existing skyscraper? Did ancient explorers really decide the orientation of the islands they discovered?
This, I think, is the most important aesthetic question in video games. It’s not interactivity vs. narrativity (the open vs. the predetermined). The most important question is the rules (mechanics) vs. the fiction (theme). It’s really what my Ph.D. was about, but it’s a question that pops up all the time: It’s always straightforward to assume that the fiction of a game is arbitrary and unimportant compared to the rules. However, fiction matters, but in strange ways and with different degrees to different people.
For example, the hardcore RTS players who first picked up Age of Empires would recognize the game as an RTS, and think of it in that frame (rules). But someone new to games might think of it in terms of medieval wars (fiction).
Oh, and Frank Lantz also discusses the issue in Rules of Play.
It would seem to me that there are a lot of video game rule sets that are independent of their themes to varying degrees. Aren’t basic video game mechanics intrinsically abstract? Is that dishonest?
It also seems like fiction tends to govern one’s initial interest in the game, but for the long term most people’s interest might be held more strongly by the actual rules. What do you think of such an association?
Fantastic point! It’s my biggest problem with games…the back of the box promises the story/fantasy, but the reality inside the box is all about resource managing, map tracking, and learning special combo attacks. Really sucks because what I want more than anything is the fantasy promised on the back of the box! Arghhh!
Would be interested in reading your paper…is it online?
I’ll name my favorite example of all time: Planescape: Torment. They took a common game mechanic of an RPG–dying and restarting–and wrote it into the core narrative thematics of the game. Dying was integral to the gameplay–if you always went back to your last save point and ‘refused’ to die, you couldn’t advance. That’s an especially clever instance of integration of mechanic and theme, but it suggests the possibilities, because there’s an intense synergy when the mechanic and theme match up. It can be accomplished simply by trying to work the mechanic into the thematics–say if you’re controlling units from an isometric perspective, a “framing fiction” that explains you’re actually a general in orbit issuing commands or some such thing can have a transformatively powerful effect on the experience of the game itself.
I’d agree that there are games which become sufficiently abstracted from a setting or theme where this is no longer necessary–you don’t have to have a framing metafiction to enjoy chess, Texas hold’em poker or Tetris. But for the more complicated kinds of computer and video games out there, I think it’s very important.
Timothy…have you ever played the old game SPYCRAFT? I loved it because the entire story tied into every mechanic you did because the story had you using computers to solve the puzzles. So it really put you in the world. Sort of like the old game HACKER from the 80’s…yeah, that’s a really good point you have. I love games like that. I just got MISSING SINCE JANUARY from THE ADVENTURE COMPANY mainly because it promises to do something similar….
Well, theme tends to be metaphor: a way to explain the machinations of the rules to the player in a “natural” way. The problem arises when the mechanics being explained no longer match the metaphor, like when you “take an example too far”.
Essentially, you’re being selective about people’s preconceptions about the theme: “Yes, you can use a shotgun. No you can not empty all the gunpower from the cartridges into a bucket and throw it into an enemy’s eyes”. Reality as a theme is one we use a hell of a lot, and although it’s a useful rule of thumb to never imply a false freedom, we seem to have battered players into accepting “Okay, so this *looks* like reality, but actually, I know from experience that I’m only going to have a cut down vocabulary of actions in this world”.
Working either from theme first, or mechanic first, and filling in the detail later is not a healthy choice for a designer. Whether you’re narratologically or ludologically bent, it’s best that mechanic and metaphor both enhance and imply each other in a complementary and symbiotic way during the design of the game rules, and game theme. Turn it into a “which comes first, the chicken or the egg?” affair – neither comes first, but they evolve with each other.
Ara says: “Aren?t basic video game mechanics intrinsically abstract?”
In the sense that they _really_ are programming, yes. But then the world is in a way abstract if you express physics using mathematics.
It’s the rules/mechanics that makes something a game, but that doesn’t prevent people from using the game for imagining a world. The theme/fiction matters, also for helping people understand the rules of the game. And then after a while you may forget the theme/fiction and just think in terms of rules.
At the end of the day, I think the most important misunderstanding floating around is that abstract rules are for geeks, and that fiction is for everybody else. A lot of casual games are semi-abstract, so there’s clearly more to it than that.
The Ph.D. looks like it will become a book in the not too distant future, but I think I want to do the Rules & Fiction thing as a conference paper before that.