Games As Stories
Theme can be as important as mechanics when it comes to creating a memorible expereince. As important as it is to have great mechanics in your games, having a strong theme is integral to creating experiences that players will remember long after the game has finished.
Something we’ve seen really come to fruition in recent years is games with themes that permeate the entirety of the experience. These themes have ranged from things like investigating eldritch horrors to Portuguese tile laying. While you may write off some themes as “needless” or “inconsequential” I would argue that gamess can live and die by their theming even those that you might think you’re playing solely for the gameplay.
Theme is something that range from very subtle to integral to gameplay, but regardless of which end of the spectrum a game’s use of theme lies its extraordinarily important to the experience overall. The important of theme in a game like the Arkham Horror LCG, a cooperative story based card game, is immediately apparent as without the theme telling a story is simply impossible. But what about something like Wingspan? In a world without theme Wingspan still functions sure, but when there are hundreds of engine building games out there how much is it going to stand apart given it’s superior gameplay alone? With theme its infinitely easier to remember and identify as a masterpiece of gameplay but also as a game that is set apart by its extremely unique themeing, something that fits the gameplay so well.
Theme can evolve beyond just the artwork of a game when truly married to the mechanics, this allows games and their players to create something beyond what the game lays out, truly making stories of their own. Games that I’ve personally experienced this with are Betrayal at House on the Hill and Nemesis, two games with extrodinary themes that, through harmonous gameplay, allow players to craft memorable stories and experiences that can be told for years after the fact.
Both of these games created movie-like experiences, creating stories that my friends and family can still talk about almost 10 years after the fact. The tale of defeating a werewolf by disappearing and reappearing with a magic elevator or betraying a crewmate by locking them in with the Alien Queen are just 2 of dozens of stories I’d be able to vividly describe given the time. Sure I’d have been able to play these games without the themes, but would i have created memories that stand the test of time?
One might think that you can escape the needs of theme by through something like chess, but even there theme is an important throughline that has expanded its terminology outside the scope of the game. At first glance you might think it a themeless game, until you remember each piece type has names turning the board from battling pieces to two kings at war.
It would be quite impossible not to concede that there are simply some games without theme, but these days they are certainly few and far between, and will most definitely struggle to create the same type of stories told by those games with theme.
I certainly see more games trying to become more narrative in the future because the best way for a game to be remembered isn’t necessarily gameplay, but a marriage between gameplay and mechanics, the catalyst for stories to be born, and stories are what live on in the end.
