Visceral Gaming - Eliciting an Emotional Response

Great board games elicit an emotional response. Board games are fun, crunchy and fulfilling. But how broad is the emotional response they give us - what about fear, love, anxiety?

Like novels, and movies, games are a microcosm of our emotional range. They allow us to approach scary, painful, and stressful emotions in a safe environment. But we don’t often talk about intentional game design to elicit specific and thematic emotional responses.

I first heard of this concept on Mark Rosewater’s podcast. He was talking about the design of the Magic: The Gathering set Innistrad - a gothic horror themed world full of vampires, werewolves, zombies, spirits, creepy spiders, and pockets of humanity on their backfoot against the horrors of the night.

The design team was faced with the challenge of creating the emotion of fear, hopelessness, and in some cases miraculous salvation in a game consisting of pieces of cardboard.

Some of the most memorable gaming experiences tie this emotional response into the theme of the game, immersing us into another world. Here are a few games that I think do this successfully.

Dead of Winter

There are a number of games that do a great job eliciting the stress of impending doom. Dead of Winter is one of them. Set during a zombie apocalypse there are a few mechanics that feed into the tone of the overall game.

Dead of Winter, bloody dice and all

First is the spawning of zombies. The playing board starts relatively depopulated of walking dead. However, every round new zombies shamble in. It quickly becomes over-crowded, overrun, and the probability of making it out alive slips away. It is a similar mechanical feel to the outbreak mechanic in pandemic (a similar race against time as the world falls apart type game). The exponential growth of zombies really presses home a feeling of a fight against all odds.

It gets even better. Every time a player character moves they need to roll a dice – and they might die. And if they die, they might infect other players and kill them as well.

Then there are limited resources, where players must scavenge for food or else face starvation. But, scavenging for food takes you away from their primary objective, disincentivizes you from saving survivors, and of course puts you at risk of getting bitten.

And of course, betrayal. On top of a challenging primary objective, players have individual objectives which include sabotaging the overall group. Few games are as immersive as Dead of Winter. In a recent game I was a cult leader, and ever sense then I’ve been wearing a lot of linen, sandals, and growing out my beard.

Dune Imperium

I’m reading the Dune books for the first time and have been struck by how much Dune Imperium got right in eliciting the emotional feel of Arrakis (the planet Dune). The game is a worker placement game with a card drafting element.

Dune Imperium

In Dune players draft cards, which allow them to take actions – move workers to specific areas of the map, get bonuses, recruit fighters, or draft more cards. My personal experience with worker placement games is that it is very easy to fall out of the immersion of the world. Resources become colored cubes, and locations become the thing that they do.

Dune Imperium breaks the mold.

In Dune you really do feel like you are sending your emissaries across the planet. That you are playing a tricky game of diplomacy, and trying to scrape by with just enough, or not quite enough water. The game has a few mechanics that elevate it thematically and help maintain player immersion.

The first is the resources and their relative scarcity. Water is more precious than gold (solarium). With only a few locations to source water, and with players fighting over sending their workers there, it truly feels like a desert world.

The second is hidden intrigue cards which capture the backstabbing and secret nature of the world. A lot of games have some level of hidden information or cards that effect end of game scoring. Dune’s use of the mechanic – sending workers to lobby the factions, and then springing cards on unsuspecting foes feels like you are hatching a plot.

What games do you love that use mechanics to convey a specific emotional response, and add to our immersion?