Marco Arnaudo - Storytelling in the Modern Board Game: Narrative Trends from the Late 1960s to Today

STUDIES IN GAMING

The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays (Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, editor, 2016)

Player and Avatar: The Affective Potential of Videogames (David Owen, 2017)

Responding to Call of Duty: Critical Essays on the Game Franchise (Nate Garrelts, editor, 2017)

Speedrunning: Interviews with the Quickest Gamers (David Snyder, 2017)

Storytelling in Video Games: The Art of the DigitalNarrative (Amy M. Green, 2017)

The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews with Cult and Classic Video Game Developers (Patrick Hickey, Jr., 2018)

The Postmodern Joy of Role-Playing Games: Agency, Ritual and Meaning in the Medium (Ren Reinhold Schallegger, 2018)

Storytelling in the Modern Board Game: Narrative Trends from the Late 1960s to Today (Marco Arnaudo, 2018)

Teach Like a Gamer: Adapting the Instructional Design of Digital Role-Playing Games (Carly Finseth, 2018)

Video Gaming in Science Fiction: A Critical Study (Jason Barr, 2018)

STUDIES IN GAMING
Series Editor Matthew Wilhelm Kapell

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-3360-2

2018 Marco Arnaudo. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover image by Mark Turner (iStock)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

The topic of this book is board games that tell stories. This immediately places the work at the intersection of two apparently very distant disciplines: game studies, and narratology. Game studies provides this book with its object of inquiry and a good portion of the methodology, as it is one of my intentions to investigate games according to their own unique characteristics. Narratology, on the other hand, supplies the perspective from which we are going to examine our topic. If board games can tell stories, after all, the best way to make sense of the narratives in such designs must be to apply analytical tools mediated from the study of traditional narrative forms like novels and movies. In moving in this direction, the pull from the other focus of the research (game studies) becomes essential. Analog games may have developed a narrative potential comparable to that of film and literature, but they achieved this result through a series of innovations across a very specific medium, and it would be a disservice to dissolve the personality of this medium into a mold from a different context. A book has written pages, and a movie moving images, but a game is an intrinsically heterogeneous artifact. Boards, cards, pawns, dice, spinners, miniatures, tokens, beads, play money, tiles, are only some of the elements that a design can employ to create a narrative content in the mind of its players. If these are the blocks of the story in a game, then they must be analyzed in their own semantic characteristics, and not as replacements for words or moving images. An analog game, moreover, is a complex, fragile, and lazy machineone that performs no work by itself, and that must be constantly solicited by the players through the active manipulation of its physical components. In this sense, if a story emerges from the gameplay of an analog game, it will be in extremely specialized and highly interactive manners. Literature- and film-based narratology can tell us what kind of story a game can tell, but only game studies can tell us how that result is achieved, and how the ludic and material elements of a design contribute to the construction and perception of the message.

The bifocal methodology of this study is also mirrored by the overall structure of the book. The first two chapters are grounded more directly on narratology, and discuss how, exactly, an analog game can create a narrative experience for its players. The following chapters trace a sort of history of how games have learned to generate increasingly more sophisticated and rewarding narratives over the years. In this section the history and theory of gaming come to the fore, but not to the point of obscuring the narratological foundations laid before. Rather, this part of the book presents a series of case studies that constitute the application of narratological concepts to a large variety of designs. The purpose is not to recount the history of modern hobby gaming in general, but to reconstruct the evolution of narrative techniques in recent gaming.

Attempts to describe whether and how games can tell stories have been made many times in video game studies. In the field of analog game studies, the discussion has been much more sporadic, and lacking a systematic approach. And why study stories in games in the first place? And why limit the research to approximately the last four decades (the temporal frame of this work)? One reason is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that we live in a Renaissance era of board gaming, and the presence of storytelling in recent games can contribute to partially explain this sudden and vast expansion of the hobby. Games that have a strong story element rank among the most highly appreciated in todays world of analog gaming, and by studying how that element manifests itself, and how it appeals to its players, we may be able to improve our understanding of the reasons behind this Renaissance. As for the second question above, it is mainly in the last four decades that games have learned to tell stories, that is, that designers have been exploring the idea of creating a narrative through a synergy of game rules, material components, and players action. The impulse came undoubtedly from the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (1974)itself a narrative game deeply informed by board game conventionsand from there it has propelled game design in highly creative directions. Games inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, versions of Dungeons & Dragons that are bona fide board games, character-driven tactical wargames, paragraph-based games that come with large textual apparatus, hybrids between board games and app games, and even perishable board games that can be played only a limited number of times, are some of the types of games that attempted to convey a sense of story in the last decades. This book provides a general profile of each category or trend, and offers detailed examples based on key representative games.

The purpose of this inquiry is to offer insights to different types of readers. The theorist of gaming should be able to derive analytical tools that can also be applied to other types of playable entertainment. The historian will be offered a picture of modern analog gaming in which some well-known landmarks in the hobby will be connected in unusual ways, revealing a vibrant galaxy of commonly held ideas and inspirations. The game designer will find a plethora of very practical considerations on what works and what doesnt when trying to infuse a game design with the functions and properties of storytelling. Suggestions and cautionary tales will abound, and they might contribute to sharpen ones future design decisions. The narratologist will find reasons to expand the range of activities that can be considered to have a storytelling element to include board gamesa field that has not been systematically understood in such terms. As for the hobby player (arguably the most important category of them all), the book presents a vast landscape of games that one may be interested in exploring (or, equally important, avoiding). Appreciation for stories in games is a major force in todays hobby, and the many cases analyzed in this book may help players interact with designs they may not have known before, or whose narrative potential they had overlooked.