2024 non-fiction. How can theme be effectively built into the design
of a board game, rather than pasted on at the end?
It looks as though Shipp and I are both thematic-first players:
all other things being equal, I'll favour a game with an interesting
setting, and particularly one that causes the player to make the same
decisions that the notional protagonist would have to make, over one
with particularly elegant mechanics. (For example, I favour Firefly:
the Game and Rock Hard 1977, not to mention Shipp's own Deadly
Dowagers.)
But the book, I believe mostly gathered from blog posts in various
places and packaged up by CRC Press into a £40 etext/paperback or £60
hardback (gotta be stupidly expensive to be a serious textbook,
right?), is written in a desperately pseudo-academic style which
undermines its points even as it's making them. The prose is turgid
and repetitive, and some ideas are justified at length (like the
specific use of "theme" in this book) while others are rapidly skated
over without any analysis (like a rigid five-degree classification of
how thematic an action can be; or Reiss's 1998 list of sixteen basic
human desires, to which Shipp adds some more, but even her expanded
list doesn't mention the simple desire for mental activity which is a
large part of the fun of boardgames for many people).
Look, I've read real academic writing. It does not need to repeat
the same point in many redundant nearly-identical ways; it makes it
once, clearly. It is a joy to read, not a slog. It doesn't casually
haul in obscure words ("agential", when "mechanical" would do just as
well) unless there's a need, and then it explains them at first use.
This style is what a student might produce if they've read a book they
don't understand and come to believe that all academic books are like
that. (There is, sadly, a great deal of this pseudery in the nascent
literature of board game design.)
"In Flamme Rouge, the avatars are differentiated by the type of
cycler they are." The term is cyclist, and even if you didn't know
that you could have read the rulebook and found out (it would also
have suggested the more appropriate rider).
There really are good ideas here. But picking them out of the sludge
is remarkably hard work.
An honest editor would have sent this book back for a complete style
rewrite, and a cut to about half its length. But an honest editor
presumably wouldn't be working for a publisher that charges £40 for
recycled blog posts with a pretty (public-domain art) cover.