I am a huge fan of Mark Johnson’s podcast Boardgames to Go. He has one particularly epic episode on boardgames and themes. He just followed up with another episode where they “focus” on fantasy versus realistic themes. I use focus in quotes because it was a particularly disjointed episode, but if you are at all the type to listen to podcasts both are well worth your time.
The first podcast discussion had a lot of discussion of theme as metaphor and narrative, with them being plotted on an XY axis. Feldmafx did a nice little diagram of that graph.
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While it feels like it makes sense, the graph doesn’t work once you try to locate games within the chart. Snoozefest proposed an alternate chart.
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I also jumped in with my own chart trying to grapple with individual games on a narrative/mechanism slice of the world
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In the end, no one ended up with an exciting model and the conversation just kind of died.
But this latest podcast got me thinking. Maybe the problem is that the word “narrative” and “metaphor” are confusing. What if we went to more easily grasped ideas of “modeling” and “setting”. Using an XY graph you would have Modeling, Abstract to Specific, and Setting would be Fantastical-None-Historical. As I write this, I realize this doesn’t account for the story telling aspect of gameplay.
Hmmm…back to the drawing board, but before I go here is a draft of what a chart might look like:
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Originally posted on Boardgamegeek.com