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itt i swoon over cole wehrle's game design
i.
Back when the "are video games art" debate was raging in the 2010s blogosphere (and what a quaint-looking debate that is nowadays, haha), the piece I often cited as the go-to example of what an Art Game should do was a little 15-minute text-parser-based parlor trick, "maybe make some change". Not because it was my favorite game or the only game that I thought of as art, but because it accomplished the marriage of narrative and gameplay in such a tidy and decisive way.
The game consists of a single puzzle. The solution to the puzzle and the emotional epiphany at the core of the story are one in the same. Solving the puzzle gives you the epiphany; the epiphany is the solution to the puzzle.
If I were to engage in that sort of discussion today... well, first off, I'd go read some actual literature on how people define / think about art first, haha. And I'd do away with the distinction I previously held between gameplay and narrative—too often they're impossible to pull apart, and even a game without any of the stuff I'd associate with a "story," characters and plots beats and such, can still have a narrative. And I'd actually accord more respect to the various Square Enix RPGs than I did at the time—my complaint back then was that they aped too much from cinema to really be thought of as their own kind of thing, and the seeming total separation of narrative from gameplay concerns held them back, whereas now I'd argue there's quite a bit more interplay between the two than I'd first thought.
But I'd still hold "maybe make some change" in pretty high regard. That perfect marriage of mechanical and emotional insight isn't something that makes a game art, but it's still a neat damn thing to pull off*.
* This review of Riven makes it sound like that game has accomplished a similar trick & I'm dying to try it out sometime.
ii.
But what about board games?
I'm sure there is discussion out there about "are board games art," but I've never seen it—partially because I just haven't sought it out, and presumably at least in part because video games have like a bajillion times the market share of board games. I can guess at some other reasons, too—the multiplayer aspect of (most) board games throws some sand in the gears of people trying to come at them in an auteur theory kinda way, for one. (When people discussed the "video games as art" question back in the day, you rarely saw them discuss things like Counterstrike or DotA; it was almost always one-player experiences.)
Anyway. I played Oath last weekend and goddamn if it didn't give me that same glorious marriage-of-mechanics-and-narrative feeling that I got from "maybe make some change."
The game's schtick, in brief: one person is playing the Empire, and everyone else is an Exile, trying to stir up trouble and generally take over the Empire for themselves.
I was the fifth wheel, crashing a game night at which the other four players had already played this game, and thus knew the rules—and as one of them started explaining the rules to me, oh boy, I was sweating. I'd been promised the game "wasn't that hard," but board game people always say that, and while I love a sweaty crunchy game of Power Grid as much as the next degen, I hate being the only one learning for the first time; it's like being the slowest person in a hiking group, always dragging behind.
The mechanics are... involved, but not the way typical engine- or empire-building games are involved. First of all, any engine you do manage to build is going to be finicky and highly contingent, due to the high degree of randomization among the cards themselves. Combat, similarly, is not a straightforward matter of "the person with more warbands wins" or even "the person with more warbands is more likely to win;" the main thing that changes with more units is that combat gets swingier (more likely for the defensive team to hit some huge multiplier, or vice versa). So area control is nowhere near as certain a thing as it would be in a classic wargame.
And something about how all these mechanics fit together made experimenting and bumbling with my moves feel, not only acceptable, but the right thing to do. I mean, I think that's generally the right strategy when playing a new board game anyway—you're never going to bigbrain The Optimal Way To Play just from reading the rules super-carefully, so might as well just try out all the systems and see what clicks—but here it felt very much like I was a wily rebel, sussing out some angle of approach toward the throne, rather than fumbling through a Wall Of Rules.
And near the end, I found myself at a crossroads. I had the opportunity to claw back a potentially-game-winning banner that had slipped out of my grasp earlier in the game, though I had no way to actually hold on to that game-winner until the end—so I'd be reclaiming it too late for it to matter. A purely pyrrhic victory.
Or, I could knock out one of the Empire's armies to maybe—maybe—give another Exile a thin hope of winning himself. I wouldn't be sharing in the spoils; there can only be one winner. But at least the Empire wouldn't win.
And yet damn I felt so tempted by the "throw the game for the other Exile" option.
I don't know I've ever experienced that in a board game before. Where I was tempted to throw the game for someone else, but not because I was trolling or goofing around or just trying to grief someone as vengeance, but because it felt like the correct thing to do, the thing all these mechanics were working in tandem with me to discover.
Like, I can tell great stories about Magic: the Gathering games I've played, games where I was goofing around or playing a weird deck or just trying to get a goofy combo to go off, but the mechanics still want to be About Winning; even at its goofiest you are Attempting To Slay Your Enemy, even if you're inserting extra steps in-between to amuse yourself.
And I can tell great stories about LARPs or tabletop RPGs I've played before, but those stories are—assisted by mechanics, but don't feel tied to the mechanics, if that makes sense? It ends up having the feel of an improv theatre session, where a setting has been lovingly described and you've been handed some index cards with prompts, but at some point you move from "doing Game Things" to "doing RP Things" and it feels like you're just suspended above the game, close enough to touch but nonetheless apart.
I'm probably doing a bad job of describing this, huh. Sorry! It was weird! and exciting! and I liked it so much!
iii.
And I do think that effect's very intentional. I went trawling to see what people online were saying about the game, and promptly discovered multiple interviews with the game's designer, Cole Wehrle, as well as a podcast episode with him, and a whole lot of his game design diaries (and yes I absolutely devoured them and promptly developed a brain-crush, please and thank you).
I like the way this dude thinks and talks about games (emphases mine):
iv.
I'm sure Oath isn't the only board game around to achieve such a thing, to be clear—Wehrle dropped like a dozen recs/inspirations in that podcast episode that I must play ASAP—but man, it's neat to feel like I'm looking at board games a whole new way now.
Anyway here's one last random game design thought that didn't fit in anywhere above but I got to rambling and here we are:
I read a lot of those little indie pen-n-paper RPGs, like, the ones you find on DriveThruRPG and the like. Unfortunately I have not worked up the nerve to ask people to play them with me, haha (they tend SO narrative heavy and I am shy!), but the sense I get from a lot of them is a sort of... high-handedness...? from the creators of the games? Like, there's a certain point where you're dictating so many details about the world, how to engage with it, and so on, that it stops feeling like an exploration and more like I'm just acting out your short story.
And yet, when I complained about this once, to a friend deeply involved in his local LARPing scene, telling him that The Quiet Year really seemed to want to shove its message into the players' throats—he told me, oh yeah, I played that game once, and turns out, even with all that high-handedness, most his players seemed to focus on "ooh, making a map! how fun! i want to draw a horsie!" rather than the intended themes of the game, so, y'know, maybe I'm all wrong and they aren't as railroad-y as they look, haha. I need to try some out sometime...
Back when the "are video games art" debate was raging in the 2010s blogosphere (and what a quaint-looking debate that is nowadays, haha), the piece I often cited as the go-to example of what an Art Game should do was a little 15-minute text-parser-based parlor trick, "maybe make some change". Not because it was my favorite game or the only game that I thought of as art, but because it accomplished the marriage of narrative and gameplay in such a tidy and decisive way.
The game consists of a single puzzle. The solution to the puzzle and the emotional epiphany at the core of the story are one in the same. Solving the puzzle gives you the epiphany; the epiphany is the solution to the puzzle.
If I were to engage in that sort of discussion today... well, first off, I'd go read some actual literature on how people define / think about art first, haha. And I'd do away with the distinction I previously held between gameplay and narrative—too often they're impossible to pull apart, and even a game without any of the stuff I'd associate with a "story," characters and plots beats and such, can still have a narrative. And I'd actually accord more respect to the various Square Enix RPGs than I did at the time—my complaint back then was that they aped too much from cinema to really be thought of as their own kind of thing, and the seeming total separation of narrative from gameplay concerns held them back, whereas now I'd argue there's quite a bit more interplay between the two than I'd first thought.
But I'd still hold "maybe make some change" in pretty high regard. That perfect marriage of mechanical and emotional insight isn't something that makes a game art, but it's still a neat damn thing to pull off*.
* This review of Riven makes it sound like that game has accomplished a similar trick & I'm dying to try it out sometime.
ii.
But what about board games?
I'm sure there is discussion out there about "are board games art," but I've never seen it—partially because I just haven't sought it out, and presumably at least in part because video games have like a bajillion times the market share of board games. I can guess at some other reasons, too—the multiplayer aspect of (most) board games throws some sand in the gears of people trying to come at them in an auteur theory kinda way, for one. (When people discussed the "video games as art" question back in the day, you rarely saw them discuss things like Counterstrike or DotA; it was almost always one-player experiences.)
Anyway. I played Oath last weekend and goddamn if it didn't give me that same glorious marriage-of-mechanics-and-narrative feeling that I got from "maybe make some change."
The game's schtick, in brief: one person is playing the Empire, and everyone else is an Exile, trying to stir up trouble and generally take over the Empire for themselves.
I was the fifth wheel, crashing a game night at which the other four players had already played this game, and thus knew the rules—and as one of them started explaining the rules to me, oh boy, I was sweating. I'd been promised the game "wasn't that hard," but board game people always say that, and while I love a sweaty crunchy game of Power Grid as much as the next degen, I hate being the only one learning for the first time; it's like being the slowest person in a hiking group, always dragging behind.
The mechanics are... involved, but not the way typical engine- or empire-building games are involved. First of all, any engine you do manage to build is going to be finicky and highly contingent, due to the high degree of randomization among the cards themselves. Combat, similarly, is not a straightforward matter of "the person with more warbands wins" or even "the person with more warbands is more likely to win;" the main thing that changes with more units is that combat gets swingier (more likely for the defensive team to hit some huge multiplier, or vice versa). So area control is nowhere near as certain a thing as it would be in a classic wargame.
And something about how all these mechanics fit together made experimenting and bumbling with my moves feel, not only acceptable, but the right thing to do. I mean, I think that's generally the right strategy when playing a new board game anyway—you're never going to bigbrain The Optimal Way To Play just from reading the rules super-carefully, so might as well just try out all the systems and see what clicks—but here it felt very much like I was a wily rebel, sussing out some angle of approach toward the throne, rather than fumbling through a Wall Of Rules.
And near the end, I found myself at a crossroads. I had the opportunity to claw back a potentially-game-winning banner that had slipped out of my grasp earlier in the game, though I had no way to actually hold on to that game-winner until the end—so I'd be reclaiming it too late for it to matter. A purely pyrrhic victory.
Or, I could knock out one of the Empire's armies to maybe—maybe—give another Exile a thin hope of winning himself. I wouldn't be sharing in the spoils; there can only be one winner. But at least the Empire wouldn't win.
And yet damn I felt so tempted by the "throw the game for the other Exile" option.
I don't know I've ever experienced that in a board game before. Where I was tempted to throw the game for someone else, but not because I was trolling or goofing around or just trying to grief someone as vengeance, but because it felt like the correct thing to do, the thing all these mechanics were working in tandem with me to discover.
Like, I can tell great stories about Magic: the Gathering games I've played, games where I was goofing around or playing a weird deck or just trying to get a goofy combo to go off, but the mechanics still want to be About Winning; even at its goofiest you are Attempting To Slay Your Enemy, even if you're inserting extra steps in-between to amuse yourself.
And I can tell great stories about LARPs or tabletop RPGs I've played before, but those stories are—assisted by mechanics, but don't feel tied to the mechanics, if that makes sense? It ends up having the feel of an improv theatre session, where a setting has been lovingly described and you've been handed some index cards with prompts, but at some point you move from "doing Game Things" to "doing RP Things" and it feels like you're just suspended above the game, close enough to touch but nonetheless apart.
I'm probably doing a bad job of describing this, huh. Sorry! It was weird! and exciting! and I liked it so much!
iii.
And I do think that effect's very intentional. I went trawling to see what people online were saying about the game, and promptly discovered multiple interviews with the game's designer, Cole Wehrle, as well as a podcast episode with him, and a whole lot of his game design diaries (and yes I absolutely devoured them and promptly developed a brain-crush, please and thank you).
I like the way this dude thinks and talks about games (emphases mine):
One of the things about the way I iterate is I will tear down a lot right up until the finish line. I'll be like, "Oh, we're scrapping this whole thing, we're gonna rebuild it." It's a very scary way to operate. And for a publisher there are always easier ways out. I'll use the example of an event deck. You're like, "Oh, this is where I want to put a lot of the colour of the game." But as you play, when someone draws a card that's like "You broke a leg", that's not a very good card, you don't want that card. So instead of making it so your character is slower you're like, "You broke your leg, minus two victory points." "Well, that's a little too swingy. Let's just make minus one victory point." So a lot of event decks, the more you play, the more they are in development, they get milder and milder and milder. Because what they're doing is they're optimising for fun and they're optimising against "feel bad" moments.
From my own design aesthetic, both of those things are horrible things to optimise for. Whenever I am working at Leder, we have friends in or people are visiting or working on games, if ever people start talking about "fun" or "feel bad", I'm like, "No, you can't use those words." Because we're not trying to make the game fun. We're trying to make the game good. So "fun" to me is this word that doesn't really mean anything. Games have this massive emotional range - why would you want to make the game just about the giggles? You could do that too but, when you're optimizing for it, you're going to remove a lot of the character of the project.
iv.
I'm sure Oath isn't the only board game around to achieve such a thing, to be clear—Wehrle dropped like a dozen recs/inspirations in that podcast episode that I must play ASAP—but man, it's neat to feel like I'm looking at board games a whole new way now.
Anyway here's one last random game design thought that didn't fit in anywhere above but I got to rambling and here we are:
I read a lot of those little indie pen-n-paper RPGs, like, the ones you find on DriveThruRPG and the like. Unfortunately I have not worked up the nerve to ask people to play them with me, haha (they tend SO narrative heavy and I am shy!), but the sense I get from a lot of them is a sort of... high-handedness...? from the creators of the games? Like, there's a certain point where you're dictating so many details about the world, how to engage with it, and so on, that it stops feeling like an exploration and more like I'm just acting out your short story.
And yet, when I complained about this once, to a friend deeply involved in his local LARPing scene, telling him that The Quiet Year really seemed to want to shove its message into the players' throats—he told me, oh yeah, I played that game once, and turns out, even with all that high-handedness, most his players seemed to focus on "ooh, making a map! how fun! i want to draw a horsie!" rather than the intended themes of the game, so, y'know, maybe I'm all wrong and they aren't as railroad-y as they look, haha. I need to try some out sometime...
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(basically, we don't like sports without narrative, hence sports writing. Or well, we didn't. Sports bettors don't care about narrative)
eta: i also have a large stack of pen+paper rpgs I have wanted to play, if you ever want to get a group together on discord or whatever.
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i don't think i'd thought of spectator sports themselves as art but tbh, post-this-game-of-Oath, yeah, i'm definitely open to that angle now
[re: your edit: DULY NOTED. i haven't done much discord gaming but i'd be willing to give it a shot, once i'm done with my present move and such~~]
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I read a lot of those little indie pen-n-paper RPGs, like, the ones you find on DriveThruRPG and the like. Unfortunately I have not worked up the nerve to ask people to play them with me, haha (they tend SO narrative heavy and I am shy!), but the sense I get from a lot of them is a sort of... high-handedness...? from the creators of the games? Like, there's a certain point where you're dictating so many details about the world, how to engage with it, and so on, that it stops feeling like an exploration and more like I'm just acting out your short story.
And yet, when I complained about this once, to a friend deeply involved in his local LARPing scene, telling him that The Quiet Year really seemed to want to shove its message into the players' throats—he told me, oh yeah, I played that game once, and turns out, even with all that high-handedness, most his players seemed to focus on "ooh, making a map! how fun! i want to draw a horsie!" rather than the intended themes of the game, so, y'know, maybe I'm all wrong and they aren't as railroad-y as they look, haha. I need to try some out sometime...
indeed this is very much the experience I've had playing Quiet Year and listening to LPs of Quiet Year! but this doesn't make me disagree with your original point, either, I think they're not contradictory. I have no strong feelings about how to accomplish this in game design but I am increasingly convinced that 'flavor text' isn't it, or I should say isn't only it. The mechanics themselves must create the effect! when players given a game that is intended to create x y z emotional effect, but instead creates a different one or doesn't create one at all, having a loving book written about how it's actually supposed to be 'about' a community on the brink of loss won't make it so. Mechanics can't be asked to do everything in a ttrpg, otherwise you're not getting any of the RP nutrients, but they have to not work against the emotions you want to create! Ludonarrative dissonance is so so real, and so is consonance, when everything gets going the right way...
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thanks for the comment!
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The most incredible board gaming experience I have ever had: it was a very old-school Dune board game. You play as one of the main factions (Atreides, Harkonnen, Bene Gesserit, etc.) and at the beginning of the game you get two cards with, basically, super-actions that you can use at any point. I am abysmal at strategy; I had only half an idea what was going on; I kept losing battles. OK.
In Dune, there is a Shield Wall that protects units from the sandstorm which otherwise would wipe them out.
We're getting to the end of the game. The other four players decide to hash it out in a battle royale on the shield wall.
My two cards? "blow up the shield wall" and "Move the storm up to 12 spaces."
Wiped out four armies in one turn and was the de facto winner.
I will never play that board game again because I can never top that experience, lmao. Total accident.
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love it. incredible win. literally cackling as i read that lol
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