As soon as you tell people you design games they ask you how. Obviously, like any creative process that’s impossibly to answer both comprehensively AND succinctly, but a thing I think is graspable, unique, and interesting about this hobby of ours, is how you have to blend theme and mechanic, but can start designing from either focus.
When these two aspects are running in harmony though, that’s the chef’s kiss of game design.
Before we delve a little more into this, and what on earth I actually mean by “Diegetic Design”, a small announcement: It’s my birthday! Well it is if you’re reading this Aug16 when the article goes live. You didn’t get me anything? Well I know you already know all about Which Witch? and how excited I am about it, but how about you just get one other gaming friend to register their interest in us? Honestly, it would be the greatest gift; no other recommendation beats word of mouth.
The wonder Gifts Given art by Jason Chan
When a theme and a mechanic love each other very much…
The raw mechanics of a game are entirely abstract. From a purely mechanical perspective, whether you draw cards from a deck, or chips from a bag is irrelevant - you’re getting a random thing from a collection either way. But they feel different, they have different associations to people, and as a designer picking one can greatly influence how people react to it.
As you play a board game there are things you have to do, as part of a turn order, or as a cost, or to take an action. How these meld with the theme can make them feel natural and smooth, or jarring and awkward.
Mechanisms you do in game that feel like they’re working directly with the theme, within the narrative of what you’re playing, are the ones I call diegetic.
Why “diegetic”?
The term originally refers to narrative elements that occur both within the story and to the audience. Consider these two action scenes (clips below, about a minute each): in the first a character in Star Trek Beyond actively plays Beastie Boys’ Sabotage, and thus the movie soundtrack is also in narrative. In the second (Captain Marvel), No Doubt’s Just A Girl kicks in, and whilst thematically linked, it’s not present in universe to the characters (despite one of them crashing in to a literal Jukebox).
In video games diegetic-UI explains the information you need to know to play the game, but presents the information in a way that is visible to or on the character within the world. For example, in a racing game, the dashboard of the car shows you your speed and revs like in a real car. In a third person game like Zelda, there are a number of common elements you need to know (like health, stamina, ammunition), but displaying that diegetically will come at a cost of clarity. Whilst it’s not impossible to do well (see Dead Space’s health bar/sci fi suit), generally the more a game tries to abstract information you need to know into diegetic forms (e.g. how many bombs are you carrying by visualising them on your person)….the less clear it becomes. Frustrating controls/UI will break a user from the fiction faster than a tidy abstraction.
Only whilst climbing does my stamina wheel appear. This avoids cluttering the HUD, but is still an abstract representation. Aesthetic, not diegetic.
Back to the table
Board games are naturally abstract, in that whatever theme they have, and however focused they are on narrative and story, to be a game there has to be some form of interaction. The good thing is us players understand this - and generally are far more forgiving if the way we take an action in game isn’t that close to the represented action. Playing a card isn’t much like casting an actual spell [I assume], but if you have to channel the right mana to do it, if it has mystic art and a cool name, you feel more attuned to the premise of this being you casting a spell.
What you need is a suspension of disbelief. We can watch the Lord of the Rings, and completely buy into the story because the world, whilst impossible, is true to its inhabitants. They believe in it, so we as the audience can too. The characters feel like people, with emotion and depth. But if Frodo suddenly pulled out a gun, or asked Gandalf about Hogwarts, that immersion would fall apart.
When I play a fantasy game, and want to engage in the fantasy of being a graceful elven archer, I don’t want to actually sleep in the woods and resolve combat by physically drawing a bow, loosing an arrow, and inevitably missing the broad side of a barn. Whilst the action would be very similar, I am not Legolas or Link, and the fantasy would be even more broken than it is by me rolling a die to determine my success at archery. This is because I’ve become focused on the action itself, and not the fiction of it.
There’s a lot wrong with Universes Beyond in MTG, but one issue is it breaks the fundamental premise. Fireball feels like a spell. Rent Is Due does not feel like a magical enchantment.
When a game has to do something overly awkward because it’s mechanic is too isolated from it’s theme, it breaks this suspension of disbelief. As long as the kind of actions feel consistent, we can believe that playing a card will summon a monster from the depths of hell, or preserve a bird in an aviary.
The more diegetic an action can be, the easier it is to learn, and to play correctly every turn, round, game and tournament.
Imagine an aquarium building game. Once you’ve gotten over a hurdle of “cards are fish”, the concept of “fish need food” is pretty familiar, and so remembering that playing a card costs food becomes pretty natural. But if playing a card meant needing to discard 3 other cards…what’s happening to those fish exactly? Am I playing a Shark?
Fitting the fantasy well
Survive has players trying to get their people off an island collapsing into the sea to safe ground. The island is made up of 3 terrain types, which will erode in order. Importantly, whilst rock is thematically harder than sand, the physical tile piece is also three times the size (vertically, still one space). This makes the mechanic “take away smallest first” easy to remember and get right, because it feels natural that all the sandy beaches fall into the sea before the rocky mountains do.
Sharks eat people, whales eat boats. Logic.
Fitting it poorly
In some versions of Warhammer 40K, in combat you have the following steps:
Roll to hit - you roll a bunch of dice and each needs to beat a value based on your squad’s accuracy, weapon type, distance to target and cover
Roll to wound - for each hit, roll dice and see if the hit wounds the enemy, based on your weapon’s power, and the armour/dexterity of the target
Roll to save - for each wound your opponent can try and not be wounded, based on…er…luck?
Mechanically, 40K is all about rolling buckets of D6. The game play needs more nuance in success than a simple roll can provide. One attack requiring multiple rolls provides more levers to the designers to manage balance and power.
It’s the last step that I always struggle with. I think perhaps it’s about resilience of the target, or whether the wound was fatal or glancing, but it always feels to me like I’ve already determined this (if I both hit and wound, then the shot hit something vital and pierced the armour).
Unfair Comparisons
Not all games have narrative theming. Fully abstract games aren’t ever going to be diegetic, because there’s no theme to gel with.
Games with lighter touch theming, like Azul, Calico, and Sagrada, are much easier to swap around because the theme is non narrative, and not really tied in to the mechanics. These don’t feel clunky though, because they’re not attempting the cohesion.
In Sagrada, players draft dice which they place into a pattern that represents a stained glass window, and have some tools they can use to help them manipulate dice numbers and colours. This could be about a sewing circle making patchwork quilts, and no mechanic in the game would become harder to use or learn because it became less diegetic.
Fully abstract games can still be beautiful and tactile. Aesthetic quality is independent of theme integration. These tiles from Hive feel so nice to hold.
Is Which Witch? Diegetic?
So she’s a magical goddess associated with crows, and her mechanic is all about crows. Seems to fit…
Practise what you preach… I’ll be talking more soon about the choice of witches, and one element of that was about how their lore corresponds to their individual mechanics, which helps you understand what they each do. Similarly, some evolutions in the game’s mechanics came from thematic inspirations, whilst other times the challenge was finding the aspect of our theme that would fit a mechanic. So the game evolved from both directions at times. Perhaps in another article I’ll talk about the thematic ideas tried and dropped because they weren’t diegetic enough (I spent too long trying to build in the witch’s road). Now that I’ve ear-wormed you with written text, I’ll escape on my broomstick…
Tell me more!
Have you hit a clanger of a mechanic that you can just never play correctly? Have you a game where a mechanic wowed you with its sympathy to its theme? Come tell us in our Discord!