Soren Johnson spent five years working on the Civilization series for Firaxis, eventually landing the job of lead designer for Civilization IV. He also did work on Spore, amongst many other things. He also gave the keynote address of the 2010 Serious Games Summit.
Johnson’s talk, “Theme is Not Meaning,” opened with a simple question: who decides the meaning of a game? The designer, or the player?
Hit the jump for the answer to that question, and a summary of Johnson’s keynote.
It’s the player.
The designer might want a mechanic or a story to mean one thing, but the player is the one intimately dealing with that game, and so his decision as to what the overall theme is will always be the correct one.
When comparing a game’s theme versus a game’s mechanics, though, what defines that game’s ultimate meaning? The theme is, in Johnson’s words, “essentially the skin of the game.” You can buy Star Wars Risk or Lord of the Rings Risk, but it’s still Risk from a mechanical standpoint no matter what the game tokens look like. But to the player, theme is important: you buy Star Wars Risk because you really like Star Wars.
So, thinking about theme, which is the true successor to Warcraft: World of Warcraft, or Starcraft? One takes place int he same fictional universe but with drastically different gameplay, while the other is basically “Warcraft in space.” Depending on whether you value theme over mechanic or vice-versa, your answer may differ.
Johnson moved on and talked about Ticket to Ride, which he called “one of the greatest board games to come out of the last decade.” Over the course of the game, you draw cards and create routes, and you get more points based on how long your route is. It’s a typical railroad management game.
The problem is that the manual thematically frames the game as a sort of Around the World in 80 Days-esque adventure, where the objective is to see which of the game’s characters can travel by rail to the most US cities in just 7 days. According to the manual and the designer-authored theme, the game isn’t about management and building an empire, it’s about travelling.
The actual mechanics, however, don’t jibe with this. If you’re just a traveler, why can you claim routes in any order? Why do claimed routes close for other players? Why does your physical presence on the game board not matter?
So, who decides what Ticket to Ride is about? The player will say they’re playing as a rail baron, and they’re not wrong just because the manual says otherwise – it’s their experience, and they’re the ones playing.
Going back to Risk, Johnson compared it against a similar board game called Democracy. Both games involve conquering territories and using army tokens, except for two seemingly minor distances: Risk has sequel turns while Democracy has simultaneous turns, and the combat in Democracy doesn’t involve any die-rolling.
Though these may seem like small changes, they completely change the experience of playing each game. Democracy is about mystery, and trying to read your opponents and imagine what they’ll do, and Risk is about everyone knowing what everyone else is doing, and potentially taking risks to go reach their objectives. There is a great coupling between the the thematic and the mechanical: “Risk is about risk,” Johnson said, “and Democracy is about Democracy.”
Having worked on Spore, Johnson brought it up as a thematically contentious game. It was pitched as a game about evolution, but the creature creator was more about encouraging and exploring the player’s creativity. The theme and the mechanics didn’t sync up.
But are there any games that are truly, mechanically about evolution? Johnson argued for World of Warcraft as a possible contender, due to the community-created idea of builds. Whatever type of character you wanna create, there is an optimum series of upgrades and things you need to do. Johnson referred to this as “Paladin Natural Selection,” as the idea of optimizing your own specialized character shares a lot in common with Darwin’s finches, even though the authored theme is about orcs and war.
Similarly, the Mario games are about timing, not plumbing. Peggle is about chaos theory, not unicorns. Even though Battlefield 2 and Left 4 Dead have different outward themes — “modern combat” and “zombies,” respectively — they are both actually about cooperation.
X-Com is about limited information, not aliens, thanks to the fog of war.
Gears of War is about cover, not aliens.
Starcraft is about asymmetry, not aliens. The three races are fundamentally different gameplay-wise. You can rush, you can boom, or turtle.
Galaga is about pattern matching, not aliens. The player has to predict where are the aliens gonna come from, where are they gonna end up.
After four consecutive examples in this vein, Johnson pointed out that “aliens” is a really common theme for games because it’s an easy theme to map your own mechanics onto.
Players come to certain games with expectations of what they should be, and sci-fi prevents you from relying on those sole expectations. When you play Civ IV, you feel that archers MUST do a particular thing based on what you know about archers — they’ve gotta be long-range attackers. Conversely, in Alpha Centauri, you have no idea what a “mind worm” is, so the designers can create totally new mechanics for that unit without worrying that they seem thematically wrong, in some way.
But what happens when a game’s mechanics don’t match its theme? Johnson brought up Jon Blow’s argument that BioShock claims to be about altruism and the difficulty of being a good person, but the fact that you get the same amount of Adam for either killing or harvesting all the little sisters makes this a thematic lie. “Players see right through this,” Johnson said.
So, who decides what a game like Spore is about?
Science magazine reviewed Spore‘s basic depictions of biology, and found it a total failure.
That’s because they were sold on the idea that the game was specifically about evolution. Not only was Spore not giving you something meaningful about evolution – it was giving you WRONG information about evolution. If you bought into the whole “evolution” theme, that was a real problem.
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