Except for the article on Napoleon's Triumph, most of my articles are created as a reaction to something that someone posts on the Something Awful board game thread, which has pretty much become my home since I feel that I can talk about board games there without some of the idiocy that I've come to expect out of rest of the internet as a whole. Most of my readers are going to come from Something Awful but for anyone that has found this blog somehow and is not aware of how the Something Awful forums operate, they have both a paywall and a moderation policy strict enough to keep most of the idiots that seem to infest the other places that seem to discuss nerdy interests on the internet. There have been long discussions on the thread recently on what constitutes a thematic game, but in this article I want to primarily express my own views on the subject and how the boundaries can be and should be blurred.
Now, as you might have guessed, I am a huge fan of Caylus: it's a cut-throat game in which it is possible to have several different strategies to victory and the rules work in a beautifully way, feeding off each other that allows a lot of choice while still creating an element of uncertainty. On the other hand, Caylus is truly one of the better examples of rules over theme, since the theme itself is as bare-bones as possible without reaching the heights of <insert any Reiner Knizia game here>. In the end, you are just exchanging blocks to put other blocks down, although there are elements of feeling like you are building a town as you construct more buildings going down the road and eventually replace existing buildings with residential buildings and eventually replace those with larger buildings: in that at least, the game can feel organic. What I have heard though is that the game itself doesn't feel much like building a castle because you are placing little houses to represent the castle instead of building the castle itself, and comparisons between Caylus and Pillars of the Earth are made. What I find interesting about these comments and what brings us nicely to my first point, is the difference between theme as substance and theme as style. It would be very easy to replace the little house-tokens in Caylus with sections of walls or whatever that you join together to make a model of a castle: by some of the arguments made before, this would suddenly make Caylus much more thematic, because instead of using tokens as an abstraction of building a castle, you are building an actual castle. This might be an exaggeration of the argument, but this is certainly within the field of Theme as Style, in which the look of the game and the extra effort made in order to make certain parts of the game more tactile make the game more thematic even if the rules themselves remain the same.
What exactly do I mean by Theme as Style? If I was to use an example, many of the Fantasy Flight Games would be within this field. Many of their games are considered thematic due to the amount of art assets poured into the game in order to conform to the theme and the various miniatures that the company produces for its games can certainly add to the impact that the game has in a thematic sense. If you replaced the miniatures in Descent with tokens it certainly would have have the same impact. This can indirectly lead to certain popular themes automatically making a game thematic just on the pure popularity of that particular theme: there is certainly a large number of games that rely on being in Space, or having Zombies, or being Fantasy in order to be considered thematic, while on the other hand games that deal with a medieval town are usually not considered to fall within the category of 'thematic'.
In of itself, Theme as Style is essentially harmless, since the production of games with an heavy emphasis on the art assets and with certain popular themes is not going to impact the rest of the hobby and if people like that sort of thing, more power to them. What I do find troubling, though, is the polarization that Theme as Style seems to cause within the hobby. The boundaries created by the terms Ameritrash and Eurogame (irrespective of their historical connotations of where those games were actually produced) seems to stunt the ability of people to acknowledge that not ALL games that feature Zombie need to be badly ruled dice-a-thons, while on the other hand games that involve medieval towns do not necessarily have a paint-by-numbers theme that can be easily replaced by something else. It seems to suggest that theme or rules are two sides of a coin and that it is impossible to both have theme and rules at the same time, which is patently untrue.
To bring a few examples, let's first of all consider Agricola. Agricola is well known as being pretty heavily in the Eurogame camp. I have argued in the past, though, that it is the prime example of how even the most Euro of games can be extremely thematic. Within Agricola, you do feel like you are truly creating your own little farm, from humble beginnings to being able to feed an entire family. Now, you might argue that it has elements which mean that it is not thematic. One of the most used examples in this respect is why actions slots are taken up, so if you plow a field, your neighbor can't. These can either a) be explained through abstraction (you are in a village, there's only one ox to plow and if you use it, someone else can't use it) or b) say "So what?". Even thematic games, even Arkham Horror, have rules that in context of the game itself don't make thematic sense (why don't I get killed by the monsters? Why, when I get lost in time and space, I end up at the correct time/place again? Why are GOOs so goddamn puny and weak?), yet no one would argue that the game itself is thematic. What Agricola does best is to make you FEEL like you are running that family of farmers, with needing to scrape every resource, find any source of food and constantly having to worry and plan in order to not starve: there's a real sense of both urgency and dread that you might not have enough food by the next harvest. So, at least to me, the reason why Arkham Horror is considered thematic and Agricola isn't is due to personal preferences of theme: Arkham Horror is thematic purely because it is based on a cool theme about alien monsters that you have to fight.
My example about Agricola above neatly segues into an explanation of Theme as Substance. What I mean by this kind of theme is theme in which the actions that you do within the game can directly translate into the actions that the people/groups you control within the game would do within the game. As Broken Loose defined in the thread (although I disagree somewhat with the level of connectedness within Arkham Horror), if you are feeling the same feelings that the people you control are feeling, then the game is doing a good job at connecting theme with the rules. Although I agree with Broken Loose in many of his points and I generally prefer Rules as Substance over Rules as Style, I still think they are both equally important in order to create a game that truly exploits the use of Theme as a whole, rather than only in parts. Hence, even if some games that are stripped of their art assets would evoke the same feelings as compared to ones in which the art assets evoke the entirety of the theme, it is important to have both work together or otherwise it will always feel like you are pushing blocks around instead of appreciating the theme of the game.
I think a principal example of how to combine the two aspects of Theme well is any of Vlaada Chvatil's games, or even Napoleon's Triumph. The former games are truly evocative of how you can combine art assets and good rules in order to create games that truly are innovative. Take Dungeon Lords or Dungeon Petz: they both have beautiful art assets in which ease of use is sometimes neglected in favour of beautiful looking boards, but both games have robust rules that have very thematic flavours attached to them. One example is that in Dungeon Lords, Priests don't heal unless the hero party fought with monsters that turn: this is given a humorous explanation within the manual that the priests have been contracted to 'provide healing after a battle', hence no battle, no healing. This rule, when analysed, is clearly present as a sort of balance to the game, but the thematic explanation of it does add to the game (much as if a thematic explanation had been given about the Agricola only-one-worker-per-action rule). Similarly, although Napoleon's Triumph rules are very solid, it is clear that some of the design decisions of the game were done for purely thematic reasons in order to make the game visually similar to Kriegspiel/old battle maps.
In conclusion, I think the whole argument of Eurogames vs Ameritrash is completely overblown and that in recent years, it has been shown to be a complete misapprehension of what the spectra of games available actually are. Rules and theme are not by any means mutually exclusive, and the real argument needs to start in analysing games in terms of how they approach the subject of theme instead of simply arguing about the theme they might have/have not. In the future I think it will be important to judge a game more by how it connects to its theme through Theme by Substance rather than the superficial analysis of Theme by Style that seems to be prevalent now.
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