On Board Games vs Video Games

I had a pretty interesting thought recently on the big differences between board games and video games.

Besides the mainstream stuff like Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders, my real introduction to board games came when I met some folks in college who showed me the meat and potatoes of board game geeks. Settlers of Catan, Carcassone, Dominion and the like. Initially I felt board games were substantially more strategic than video games, which was refreshing like a mint julep in a sauna. They also made the necessity of Schell's 4 Pillars of game design (my term) more obvious (particularly the pillar of "technology"), so analyzing them was a good exercise. But playing board games felt different from playing video games, and trying to figure out why was like trying to bob for apples in a shark tank, impossible using traditional techniques.

I believe now, that the difference is a matter of player approach. I'll put it this way: Board games encourage modeling, video games encourage discovery.

What do I mean by modeling? Making models, ala Mouse Trap? No. I mean mental models. Board games exist almost entirely in the players heads. I will argue that a box of Monopoly pieces is really just a set of physical mnemonics and a random number generator. You open the box and you begin to play using an agreed upon rule set, which you can modify on the spot (with bullshit rules like taxes go to Free Parking, for example). If someone makes an illegal move, someone has to notice that it doesn't fit the mental model that the players are supposed to share, and prove it with the rulebook if necessary (which actually adds a fun meta game to an already meta genre). Board games are to rules what Kinect is to video games. There's virtually no feedback from the game itself about any of the actions you take. Board games are the drunken father who let's his kids play with shotguns because it shuts them up for five minutes. I think this is also why board games seem more strategically focused. You're forced to absorb a set of logical premises for manipulation, which are more pointed and discrete to allow stronger mental modeling.

Compare this with video games: Video games I would say are discovery driven because only in the most simplistic of video games can the rules be conveyed with an adequate level of precision in less than 30 pages. Because you have a computer acting as ultimate arbiter of the model of the game (replete with large fluffy beard), you don't even have to bother memorizing the rules, and better yet, because of inherent flaws in computer software design, the game's creators might not even know all of the rules. They know the rules they wanted, but only the code knows (makes?) the real rules of the game. Furthermore then Bearded Judge allows players to "feel out" a solution to their problems by supplying feedback for whatever gameplay experiment they engage in. DISCOVERY.

Thinking about games this way does ignore the more tactile sense of video games, and the freedom inherent in board games (and incidentally, all non video games) which is another important distinction. Sometimes a video game is more than just a puzzle. Tricking the proprioceptive sense and putting the player in the game.If a board game is boring, you can easily change it to make it more exciting for your particular social blend. These are important differences if I were to host a real debate on board games versus video games. But I think this discussion of approach is interesting.