Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Jargon and Named Mechanisms in Game Design
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- Pick Up & Deliver 823: Jargon and Named Mechanisms in Game Design Transcript Welcome to Pickup and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk home. I'm Brendan Riley. [opening music] Greetings, listeners. It's a, I guess I was going to say lovely day here in suburban Chicago because I generally try to be positive about the weather, but it's actually kind of crummy. It was sunny and really nice a couple hours ago, and now it's overcast and a little bit drizzly. Like I'm getting rained on just a little bit. So that's a bummer. It's not drenched in drenching rain, at least not yet. But I am going to be a little wet by the time I get home, so that's a bit of a bummer. Nonetheless, I'm happy to be talking to you about games. So I had an exchange on board game geek that I wanted to share with you. I'm going to paraphrase, although I will find the thread for the episode notes so you can read it yourself if you like. I think it was in the board game design forums, although it could have been in the general forums. A new user and you could tell they're a new user because they have a tag as new user. If your account's within thirty days of its creation, you get this little badge of shame. And they posted and they said, �hey, I've got this game I've been working on for a while and I've played a few games, but not a ton of them. Mostly magic or tcgs� they said. And so on. �I've got some ideas, but I really don't know how to describe my ideas in the context of board games, so I was wondering if people could help me out a little bit.� And then they described essentially like some sort of game where you're drawing creatures from a deck, and then you place them on a hex board. That's kind of what they said. And a few people responded. And then and then there would be points of interest that need to be controlled. So some people responded with mechanisms from the BoardGameGeek Mechanism library. There was some conversation about area control, some conversation about King of the hill mechanisms, a little bit about deck building or deck construction, because they mentioned tcgs. And usually when someone mentions Tcgs, what they mean are trading card games like Magic the Gathering. And often people who haven't thought this through very carefully will refer to TCG as a play style or a game style rather than what it is, which is A distribution model that is not inherently tied to a particular play style, although most of the games in that distribution model tend to be that play style. They are not, they're not inherently that way. Just like in America, we often say we often tie democracy and capitalism together, and those don't inherently go together. They are distinct ideologies and need not overlap. And then a couple of people ask questions and they replied. And when they were replying, they were asking more questions, sort of trying to get more specific jargon, and I found myself feeling a little ungenerous and thinking, okay, what this person's trying to do is they are trying to craft a very good prompt for an AI to make a game for them, and they're trying to get the lingo correct. So the AI will use will come up with a rule set that more explicitly fits the kinds of things that they want to do. Boo. That's what I thought in my head. And that's still may be true, I don't know. They have continued to interact with people and they're interacting very enthusiastically. So maybe they maybe it's both. Maybe they are both an enthusiastic aspiring game designer and somebody who doesn't think it's artistically vacant to have an AI do the designing for you. Whatever. I'm. I was done with the forum, but it did get me thinking a little bit in from my teacher brain, particularly the part of me that teaches writing and rhetoric a little bit about the value of jargon in game design. So that's what I'm talking about today. So I want to talk about the role of named mechanisms and jargon in game design. So what do I mean by that? When I say named mechanisms and jargon, it often means like half the words I use on this podcast. So named mechanisms would be the various concepts that allow us to describe how games interact, right? If you are playing Dominion and you start with a deck of cards, then as the game goes along, you acquire other cards for that deck and you cycle through them in interesting ways. That is according to the game development hobby that is a deck builder. If you assemble a deck before the game starts using a selection of cards from a bigger pool, that is a deck construction game. So those two things, there is some overlap in semantics, right? No reasonable person out in the world would think deck builder and Deck construction game are inherently different. Those sound like homonyms, but in the field, that is a distinct distinguishing characteristic of the two different ways that you might add to a deck as you go along. There are also numerous other terms which I've learned to not use too cavalierly, because I'm often teaching classes where we talk about board games with people who have not played any of those games. I will use those terms some when I'm introducing a game that, you know, if I'm talking about Dominion, Dominion uses what's called deck building, in which you're going to acquire new cards and add them to your personal deck, right? So sort of explaining the terms. So the students have it, but I wouldn't deploy those terms without talking to them first. So what I thought I'd do today is talk a little bit about how those terms come up in the various discourse communities of the hobby and where I think they're useful and where I think they get in the way. So to start with thinking of hobby hobbyists in general, the Named terms serve as a shorthand for other enthusiasts in the hobby, just as works for all jargon and all specialized language in all hobbies, right? The idea that you know about a specific term and that helps you talk about a game more easily with other people who are already enthusiastic. This is a worker placement game. This is a deck building game. This is a deck a deck building game with a little bit of worker placement. This is a worker worker placement game with a little bit of deck building and some auctions, right. You can there's this whole grab bag of different terms which carry meaning in the context of the board of board games and help people understand the mechanisms at work in those games. Now, theme and setting also have their own kind of sets of expectations when you are communicating a game. But interestingly, interestingly, those terms all assume that we are from the same perspective in the space where we're talking about games, namely enthusiasts, hobbyists, because we might express the experience of the game through setting or thematic tone. And often I do that also, you know, the Libertalia is a hand management game with a bit of bluffing or player anticipation. I don't know, for a lack of a better phrase. Themed around being an airship pirate with anthropomorphic crew, there's your explanation of libertalia full of jargon. Now, if I'm going to play libertalia with people who I think could reasonably be asked to play it right, there are gamers that I would not ask to play, that people who are new to the hobby, and I don't yet know where their interest lies. People who have already shown themselves to be not interested in complicated games. I might not ask them to play Libertalia, but there might also be people who I think could handle it and would enjoy it, but aren't hobbyists, per se. And for those people, I might say this is a game about being a pirate on an airship. We are going to go on journeys, collect treasure, try to outwit each other a little bit. Right? So I haven't explained anything in the context of mechanisms, either using jargon or really even talking about what the mechanisms are. I'm setting up the narrative so the game learning and will make sense and the playing of it will follow through. So I think that in the hobbyist space, it really depends on the audience for your message, the people you're talking to, whether they know that jargon already, whether they're in the hobby and using it in the wrong group can seem very exclusionary, right? If you're if somebody shows up and like, what kind of games do you like? Do you like worker placement games? Do you like area control games? And people are like, well, I don't know. That is very that's a big turnoff for your game community to interrogate new participants with that kind of focus. So for the hobby perspective, jargon and game design mechanisms are useful for talking to other hobbyists. But as you open it up to people who maybe aren't as deep in the hobby, you want to be very careful with using those terms so that you don't sound or gatekeeper. Now, if you're talking to other designers, there's a whole different set of things to think about when you think about using different terms. Oh boy. It's going to start really raining now with designers. You want to use terms that are going to help the other designers figure out what you think your game is about. This becomes the same kind of shorthand we're talking about with regard to hobbyists, but a little bit more elaborate, because it allows for quick conversation about what a game is and how it works. For example, the same sort of thing. I've designed a new game, but this is where a sort of assumption about how much knowledge somebody has about the genre becomes really useful, as you can try to figure out how to communicate with them, what your game is, being able to reference specific games. The old canard about like the way that Hollywood producers would pitch movies, you know, it's like Jumanji, only the characters are all ghosts or whatever, right? Having having a kind of back of the envelope, elevator pitch or elevator pitch, it's two different versions of a of a shortened thing. Having an elevator pitch for your game, being able to give it a logline and help someone understand what it is as another designer is really useful in the context of talking with other designers. One of the ways that this kind of language, I think works really well is to give a designer a sense of the exception that proves the rule of your game. For example, if you were describing QE, you're like, you could say it's a bidding game where you're trying to get the most and you don't want to spend the most money, but you can spend any amount of money you want, and the other players don't know how much money you've spent. That's a great little four sentence summary that gives a really strong idea about what's going on in QE and helps another designer or another player understand it in the context of mechanism. Now, another group that could, that can and has sometimes made use of mechanism jargon are game retailers. Now again, like hobbyists and like designers when talking to other members, the game retailer has, it has a motivation to use the mechanisms and the language that's common to the hobby space. This gives them an opportunity to, again, speak in shorthand, quickly convey what a thing is. What I find really interesting is how the. How different retailers wrestle with the question of what they're doing in their store regarding those kind of mechanisms. I have been in stores where the design, where the store has some labels connecting mechanisms or play styles with the audience or with the customers. Now, in this case, often this kind of connection is more about the filtering that a customer would do to try to figure out whether they want a game or not, than it is about helping a hobbyist figure out what a game it is. For example, the friendly local game store I go to has some shelves for young people's games. They have some shelves for cooperative games. They have some shelves for two two player games. What they don't have are work replacement shelves or even strategy game shelves. Basically, once you're past those filters that I've just mentioned, they're actually. That's not true. They do have a party game area as well. So here the filter is not so much about what the game is, but who the audience for the game is. And then the game itself presents itself through box art and other marketing choices that are less focused on the jargon of the industry and more focused on other kinds of presentation. So the last thing I want to talk about are the barriers that jargon or game design language creates for the audience of that discussion. I've touched on both of these already, but I'm going to reiterate them. One is confusion that there are a variety of game design terms that have a variety of nuanced meanings. And using those terms without making sure your audience understands them is a good way to have people be confused. The deck construction versus deck builder is a good example there. The fact that people will often say TCG to go after the card game, which also means trading card game, and then often gets confused into game that plays like magic. Uh, that part is particularly interesting as a place where there is confusion. I would also say the bigger issue is gatekeeping that like many hobbies, the enthusiasts sometimes intentionally through kind of snobby, oh, do you know how to play this? Or rude assumptions about how much somebody knows will get in the way of a player enjoying a game or getting into a game? On the other hand, sometimes genuine enthusiasm will still result in confusion or somebody feeling disaffected about the experience of playing the game or trying the game because they don't know the language. So somebody who's talking enthusiastically about different kinds of games, �oh, you like board games too? What kind do you like?� And then spewing off a bunch of different mechanisms. Sometimes we'll leave someone a little bewildered, a little turned off. They'll feel a little excluded because they don't understand the conversation you're having. You suddenly started using all this junk. So I don't know that I had an answer here, except that, like all things, really giving yourself a lot of time and energy to think about the nature of communication you're doing is an important piece of being an ambassador for the board game hobby, which I hope we are all doing. Well, that's about it for me today. I want to say thanks for joining me on my walk, and I hope that your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. [closing music] Brought to you by Rattlebox games.