Books, Games, Art & Creation

Board games and literature are happy bedfellows.

Games like Thousand Year Old Vampire, or a campaign of Dungeons & Dragons are an exploration of creative storytelling.

Many games take inspiration from literature, with entire genres built around the traditions of Lovecraftian Horror and Tolkienesque Fantasy. Then there are direct adaptations like Red Rising, and The Stormlight Archives (both excellent book series if you are on the hunt for some summer reading).

In the other direction you have board games becoming literature. There are Magic the Gathering and Grimdark Warhammer novels. One of my favorite books of all-time, Through the Looking Glass, is inspired by chess. Books like Malazan and The Squares of the City grew from a roll playing campaign and a specific game of chess (respectively).

It is all interesting stuff to the bibliophile gamer, but what I am really interested in is the idea of game designer as author, and author as game designer.

This might just be my own observational biases, but it seems that a lot of game designers have an interest in creative writing. It’s a common thread through the Board Game Design Lab interview archives, and some big names like Mark Rosewater (head designer of Magic: The Gathering), and Jamey Stegmaier (Wingspan, Scythe) have written professionally, or had aspirations to be a novelist.

This phenomenon - real or imagined - has gotten me thinking about the overlap of game design and fiction.

A Drive to Create

I consider myself an aspiring author. I have a few cogent drafts of novels in the proverbial desk drawer, and the discarded carcasses of a dozen more spilling out of computer folders and long forgotten notebooks.

Mechanically creating and publishing a board game is vastly different from writing. But, they both scratch a similar itch. That is that I get the fulfilment of creating something, and the nervous joy of putting it in front of others.

With both I have the opportunity to connect with people, to bring them joy, and to make them think.

Escapism

On a fundamental level, board games and novels offer us escapism. In fiction it is through immersion in story and character. In board games it is a little more complicated.

Some board games lose us in the story of the game. You can imagine yourself fighting a dragon, expanding a galactic empire, or maybe tilling a twelfth century agrarian plot.

But not all games have a strong story element. They still offer us escapism, it’s just that the form of that escapism varies from genre to genre, from game to game.

There are three forms of escape that games offer: through story, puzzle, and social interaction. Different games will engage us more or less in each element. Crunchy Euros may focus on the puzzle element, whereas a party game is clearly social.

Other games offer us multiple or all of the elements, a co-op escape room for instance can engage us as a puzzle, as a cooperative social experience, and through a high stakes story.

There is a genre of games that don’t obviously engage us through immersion in a story, through solving a puzzle, or through social interaction. These create drama through high stakes variance. Gambler’s games. But, for most board games, luck is just an element that compliments the broader game and adds drama and suspense.

Low Stakes High Stakes

Fiction allows us to experience high stakes situations and drama in a low stakes environment. Very few of us actually want to fight off a killer clown in a sewer, but many of us love imagining ourselves in Richie and Beverley’s shoes, feeling their fear and anxiety while burrowed under a blanket (bonus points if it is a rainy day and you have a cup of cocoa).

Through game mechanics and flavor, we can create visceral emotional experiences in players. We can make them feel like they are being stalked through a hunk of space junk, create the diplomatic drama of kingdoms on the cusp of war, the fear of confronting eldritch horror, or the anxiety of a race against the clock.

But at the end of a game, we can tuck it away safely in its box. We can laugh with friends about a well-timed betrayal, we can complain about rotten luck, and we can smile at the remembered tension of a high stakes moment.  

Writing and game design are the forms of artistic expression that I most connect with creatively. But I am sure many of these principals apply to other types of art, to dance, to painting, and to song.

How do you express yourself creatively? How does your medium engage with your audience?