Theme and the Construction of Shared Imaginative Space

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I’ve been listening to a metric ton of boardgaming podcasts lately.  In many of them, there’s a lot of talk about the theme of games, and whether or not it’s important to have strong theme, or mechanics that reflect the theme.  (If you want to take a listen, here’s a Q&A with Reiner Knizia where he talks about theme and his process quite a bit.)

A lot of talk about theme centers around the idea of a game ‘feeling’ right: Does a merchant game give you a taste of the experience of being a merchant trying to make it in 15th century Florence?  Does Lifeboat give you the feeling of trying to talk your way out of a grim death at the bottom of the ocean?

RPGs, particularly story-games, are all about theme.  They tend to be smaller in scope and focus their mechanical energy towards the theme that the designer has in mind.  For example, Jason Morningstar’s excellent Grey Ranks.  It’s a game about playing a teenage resistance fighter during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.  More to the point, it’s about the emotional lives of those soldiers during the intensity of combat.  The character sheet and the grid that the game is played on are tightly bound to the theme – there’s no hit location charts for combat, no list of skills – nothing that you’d traditionally associate with a game about war and combat.

What’s most interesting about these two ideas, however, is how theme is approached differently between board game design and RPG design.  Theme in boardgames is primarily a physical function: do the pieces, the board art reflect the desired theme?  Process, while certainly part of the equation, has a much smaller role – many board game processes are identical to each other, or are structured around existing mechanical paradigms – the ‘chase game’, for example.  So theme, if we talk about it from an AGE Model perspective, is a function of the manipulation of resources in the gamespace.

This is inverted when we talk about roleplaying games.  Physicality is removed from many modern RPGs – dice and a character sheet can only do so much.  So theme emerges through play – do the patterns of the characters’ interactions conform to the themes as expressed in the rules?  So while the wellspring of theme is the same between RPGs and board games, the gamespace, theme’s ‘proper place’ in RPGs is in the emspace – in the shared narrative, and how the players interact.

Stepping back a bit – are these as different as they might at first seem?  It seems to me that board games simply don’t have explicit constructors for emspace – there’s nothing in the rules of Pandemic or Race to the Galaxy that promotes the idea of putting yourself inside the narrative flow of the game.  So does this mean that emspace doesn’t exist in boardgames?  No – I’ve played a lot of Pandemic lately, and Amy and I do enter a shared space inside the game.  We talk about our pawns in the first person (‘I’ll go to Bogota and cure there.’) – so the emspace appears to be present, though to a much lesser degree than in RPGs because of the lack of explicit construction of the shared imaginative space.

So is the emspace inevitable?  Is it inherent in play?  Reflexively, I’d say no – but there is an intriguing possiblity: perhaps there are two imaginative spaces: an emspace (or explicitly constructed shared imaginative world), and a second kind of shared world, formed from the collapse of the gamespace and the playspace.  I’d call this the gameplayspace, but that’s a very Germanic construct.  How about Ludospace (or Ludispace? – declension was never my strong suit)?  This, then, is the space constructed by theme in boardgames – the enhancement of the ‘magic circle’ of a game to include thematic elements.

How is this a different animal from the Emspace?

At first blush, the Emspace, while tied to the rules of the game (no matter how loosely), includes a much larger extraludic narrative component that exists independent of the rules of the game.  This is best explained (by me, at least), in computer terms: the Ludospace is a function of the Playspace and the Gamespace, and is wholly encompassed by the two.  For the Emspace, however, the game is a service - exposing some of the imaginative space to manipulation by the players, but not in its entirety – the rest of the space is manipulated directly by the players.  Again – a large portion of this is mediated in the Playspace, but is understood not to be encompassed by that. 

Taken another way, the Emspace in RPGs is assumed to be autonomous; in board games, it is wholly dependent on the structure of the game.  This essential difference is what gives RPGs their open-ended nature: the rules are the starting point of the narrative, instead of a description of it.