The True Measure of a Game
Sometime in the last few weeks, I was listening to a recent episode of I've Been Diced where Tom Grant was interviewing Alan Emrich of Victory Point Games. It was a really great interview about a truly interesting company in our hobby and the man who created it. But at one point, around 43 minutes into the interview, Alan said something that really got my attention:
"You've got to get the player to live the story in the game, and you have to find that special thing in the game that the player's going to take away. Games are measured in playing time; they're measured in hours and minutes... but they're remembered in moments."
For most of my gaming career, I'd have agreed with this statement without even thinking about it. And even when I heard Alan say it, I had sort of a visceral agreement with it. But then as I started thinking about some of my favorite games from the last few years, I had a really hard time remembering any particular "moments" that made them stand out to me. Take Puerto Rico, for example, which is the game I've most recently given a "10" rating to. After a typical game, it would be unlikely that I'd remember any particular decision or moment from play. But I almost always remember the struggle of trying to out-maneuver and out-guess my opponents all game long.
And what about Dominion (or any other deck-building game for that matter)? Does anyone ever really remember its turn-by-turn moments or any one particular big event that took place from playing it?
The thing about "moments" is that they are specifically tied to games with strong narrative theme, which tell a story through play. But what about games that are more abstract or which have more metaphoric theme? Can't they be memorable too?
If anything, I'd say that games have gotten efficient enough that I'd sometimes consider an entire game to be the "moment" that Alan was suggesting. It's certainly true of Puerto Rico and Dominion, as well as some other games that actually do have a narrative element (such as Pandemic and my recent plays of Letters from Whitechapel). When the tesion or excitement or challenge of a game is so great and so intense that you're engaged all game long, why does it need any specific moments to make it memorable?
Heck, the more of those "hours and minutes" I have to sit through to get to the next memorable "moment" in a game, the less and less I think of that game these days. And that's especially true when I find those moments are due to the interaction of the players (social moments) rather than anything actually facilitated by the mechanics of the game.
Theme and narrative are important, but a game needs to have good, interesting, and evocative mechanics as well.
While generally I do not measure games in terms of memorable "moments" (after all, it is a hobby - not philosophy or a major life event), there have certainly been a few instances that were indeed memorable. For example, the time my daughter went through her entire Dominion deck of about 40 cards in one turn - something that at least we have never seen since; and continue to laugh about. All gamers probably have similar stories.
I would guess that hardcore gamers play so many games that it'd be hard to mentally compile too many memorable moments. Instead, the measurement of a game is more apt to be more what you suggest - sort of a blend between a conscious and unconscious processing of how the theme vs. mechanics work together to build a story and tension (I'm a major theme-guy myself). Of course, that theory is thrown right out the window in regards to the appeal of abstract games...ha!
Apologies for the long comment - have lurked around your blog for a long time - you do good work.
Reply to this
Your comment isn't that long; don't worry about that at all. Thanks for the compliment and for participating in the discussion!
Obviously, I write a lot of session reports and take tons of pictures from my game night, so I sort of have to pay more attention than the average gamer would to things like game narrative and big "moments" that I can talk about. But it's sort of ironic that often times, the games that I like the most and am most engaged in have some of the least "report" coverage (since I'm so consumed with the actual game experience). I try to make up for it in the "commentary" section most of the time, but I still hate that I often forget to take pictures in these games!
For instance, when I wrote my review for Hansa Teutonica, I had to actually find time for a "photo shoot" to get some usable pictures to include, because the quick and interactive turns in HT continually prevented me from pulling back enough to get actual pictures from play!
Reply to this