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.

Fundamental Challenges Part 2: Spatial Challenges

The next challenge type in our survey of fundamental game elements brings us to the Spatial Challenge. The Spatial Challenge is a fundamental component of almost all games, and is particularly important to video games due to their inherent narrative elements. Almost all video games feature a (engrossing at best, superficial at worst) storyline with characters, which implies entities, which imply space. Beyond that, even more traditional games almost always include space. The only one I can think of off the top of my head that doesn't include space is The Prisoner's Dilemma. The importance can't be understated, so without further ado:

A Spatial Challenge is a challenge involving manipulation of positional relationships between the player (or his avatar, minions, etc.) and other agents or obstacles within the game space.

What do I mean by that? Let's use Chess as an example. Chess is primarily a game of spatial relationships. Each piece owns a single point on the board (the spot its sitting on), but also controls all the spaces it can attack. The bishop for example, applies pressure on diagonals. If a pawn is diagonally aligned with a bishop, it's being threatened by the bishop through their spatial relationship. If a queen is sitting right behind the pawn however, the spatial relationship between the queen and the pawn protect it from its relationship to the bishop. Chess is an extreme example but it really highlights the complexities of spatial relationships, especially when you factor in all the pieces on the board.

Chess, however, does not cover all aspects of Spatial Challenges. I would argue there is a second component at play in spatial challenges that is particularly absent from Chess: Orientation. Chess has no real orientation factor (besides Pawn's forced forward procession), but for a First Person Shooter, orientation is critical. First Person Shooters present their players with a two level spatial challenge. Not only must you position your body/gun to be at a coordinate where it can fire on the enemy, but you must also orient your body/gun to score a head shot.

Maybe a stronger example of orientation being a factor of spatial relationships is Tetris. The spatial relationships between pieces in Tetris are defined by their orientation. The pieces need to be oriented to fit in snugly with the current set up of pieces. The magic of Tetris is how the spatial relationships of pieces are completely redefined each time the next piece is rotated.

Spatial Challenges (both involving orientation and not)exist in almost all games. Poker, for example is a game with a surprisingly important spatial component in via the dealer button. In Poker, the players farthest from the dealer button have the most information about other players (the dealer button determines turn order). They can play riskier hands because of this spatial advantage. Puzzle games, likewise, almost always involve a spatial component. From Tetris to Gunpey to Polarium.

An interesting note of Spatial Challenges is that they often dictate the Timing Challenges of a game. In Super Mario Bros. for example, the timing of Mario jumping to land on a Goomba is completely dependent on the spatial relationship between Mario and the Goomba. The Active Window in this case is a function of Mario's jump height (spatial), and the Warning Window is defined by the Goomba's distance from Mario (spatial). If a platform is a long jump away, the player must press jump right before the end of the platform he's running on. The Warning Window is essentially the distance of the platform up until the range where a jump will be successful, which begins the Action Window.

While I don't think this challenge type is as practically useful as the others (it's so essential that any game is almost guaranteed to already have one), it is helpful to have in hand. Stick around for the next post where we start getting into one of the more lacking challenges in modern game design.