Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design
Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design
Gordon Calleja
The MIT Press
ISBN 9780262543858
As its title suggests, Gordon Calleja’s Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design, published by MIT Press in 2022, offers an exploration of player experience and the ways in which game designers work to create those experiences. Calleja draws on interviews with thirty-two leading board game designers and critics, and the inclusion of the insights of these well-known designers (alongside a wide range of scholarly material) results in a book that is extremely readable, while offering in-depth discussions of games and game design, and practical in turning these discussions towards game making and game playing.
The book opens with a discussion of play, drawing on a range of key theories from game studies and beyond, before offering the following working definition that will inform the book: ‘Play is a dynamic process of interaction with structures that afford a degree of designed uncertainty. Play heightens awareness of the present moment and is fuelled by imagination. When others are involved in the play situation, it has the potential of creating a sense of togetherness’ (11). Two elements that are central to this account of play are the ideas that play is an activity that fuels the imagination (much of what follows will draw on this idea) and that the player experience is facilitated by designed ‘structures.’ The second chapter builds on this sense of play, establishing two of the book’s key terms: ‘attention’ – ‘the structure of cognitive resources we have at our disposal and how we direct these resources while playing’ (24) – and ‘involvement’, ‘the various forms of experiences we have while our attention is directed towards the game’ (24). With these terms established, the following chapters detail the various types of involvement, and the experiences they might generate before turning to the ways in which game designers work to shape that experience. Throughout these discussions, the voices of game designers and critics – rather than players – are central. Calleja draws extensively on interviews, anchoring his arguments in design practice. It is a remarkably practical volume in this sense.
Chapter three is about ludic involvement (players’ engagement with rules, mechanics and goals) and focuses on the topic of rules, which are described as ‘generative’ because they enable player’s actions and interactions, as opposed to what Calleja calls the ‘restrictive’ rules of everyday life (such as those that govern our behaviour in public, or rate our performance in industry). The main difference, Calleja argues, is that game rules create a combination of predictable and unpredictable outcomes while rules in everyday life are designed to reduce unpredictability.
The fourth chapter turns to sociality – to the sense of togetherness (specifically, face-to-face) that Calleja suggests is a major draw to board games over other forms of game. In fact, for Calleja, board games ‘provide a respite from, if not a restorative balm for, the negative effects that our always-on, hyperconnected, social-media-saturated existence has on our well-being’ (68). This is an appealing sentiment but perhaps requires more space to establish and evidence. Hopefully it is a topic which Calleja will revisit, perhaps in a volume of its own. This reservation notwithstanding, the chapter offers a useful account of player interaction that draws on Erving Goffman’s frame analysis to explore the idea of interaction taking place at different levels. These ideas, brought into game studies by Gary Alan Fine, in his Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games As Social Worlds (1983), and later discussed in Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play, enable a discussion of the ‘primary frame’ – ‘the individual as themselves’ – the ‘player frame’ – ‘the individual as a player of a game’, and the ‘character frame’ – ‘the individual as a character in the game world’ (78). In Calleja’s hands, the result is the division of player interaction into six types: Formal direct – player interaction is part of the rules (i.e. they can directly attack each other); Formal indirect – players compete without affecting each other (race game); Informal direct – players negotiate/threaten but without validation of the rules (his example is RISK); Informal indirect – such as conversation around the game table; Cooperative; and Competitive. Spelt out in with clarity, these terms prompt useful reflection in terms of the design for experience that Calleja advocates.
Chapters five and six are closely related, discussing the ways in which games claim their players’ attention through the creation of, or prompting of, imaginative worlds. Chapter five, ‘Fiction’, begins by questioning the use of ‘theme’ in discussions of games, which Calleja notes is often used in multiple ways. Ultimately, Calleja offers the term ‘fiction’ as an alternative, focusing on the interaction of mechanics and fiction in a discussion of the ‘mental image in the mind of the player that fuels both the individual player’s experience of the game and the way players communicate and share the experience of its world (125). Here Calleja draws on reader response theory, coupled productively with Kendal Walton’s work on props, to argue that acts of the imagination are prompted by the play of games and the ways in which a players interact with components, art, and rules. Chapter six, ‘Narrative’ continues the discussion of theme/fiction, turning attention to the ways in which board games tell stories (narrative in this sense accounts for the way that board games work to facilitate the connection of fictive moments into a meaningful sequential story). While the chapter is perhaps the most complex of the book, drawing on a range of theories from classical to post-classical narratology (its argument ranges from Genette and Seymour Chatman to Marie-Laure Ryan and Richard Walsh) the upshot is remarkably straightforward, offering a matrix of board game narrative types (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. The board game narrative model (p. 155)
Set out in this way, Calleja offers a set of terms that should prove useful in both game analysis and design, inviting critics and designers to consider games in terms of scale (Macro, Scene, Micro); narrative type (Emergent, Scripted [a term that Calleja uses in place of the more familiar ‘embedded’], and Emergent-Scripted; and involvement (or perspective) ranging from Character, to Group to World.
Chapter seven, ‘Materiality’ turns attention from imaginative response to the aesthetic experience of games (defined as the sensory, cognitive and emotional response to board games) that Calleja terms ‘material involvement’ (167). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the focus is on touch (rather than on the visual and aural) and one interesting suggestion is that players underestimate the pleasure that comes from board game pieces, and argument that runs counter to the focus of many players and critics who often dismiss the contemporary tendency for games to be accompanied by increasingly impressive and numerous playing pieces. This rise, that Calleja connects with Kickstarter might well be about sales, and (not but) also might also reflect the fact that players enjoy the theme and the miniatures Calleja cites Shut Up & Sit Down’s Quintin Smith here, ‘I think when people play Blood Rage and they enjoy the theme and the miniatures, they walk away and go, “Well, that’s a fantastic and well-designed game,” whereas in actuality that’s not what they’re enjoying at all’ (181). This insight, linked to a discussion of behavioural design which draws on Donald Norman’s Emotional Design to explore combination of aesthetics and functionality, offers an insightful, and above all practical, sense of the role of material objects in game play.
The eighth chapter brings these ideas together to explore immersion, which Callejo contrasts with attention. For Calleja, immersion it is bound up with imaginative relocation rather than engagement, requiring three criteria – a textual world, the anchoring of the player as a character in that world, and the possibility of emergent narrative through the act of play. In this, it is closer to literary studies (his definition stays close to the oft-cited account offered by Janet Murray in Hamlet in the Holodeck) while other competing accounts of immersion are set aside as versions of engagement. Whether there are identified as different types of immersion as Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä have suggested, or immersion and different modes of involvement as Calleja holds is perhaps largely a matter of terminology, but for Calleja’s purposes the distinction provides clarity.
The book’s ideas are neatly drawn together in the last chapter, ‘Unboxed’, and the conclusion that discusses the ways in which board games generate affect, arguing that for most designers and critics what is most exciting about playing and making board games is the creation and sharing of an intended experience, and that at the heart of that experience are the players’ emotions (237). This focus on affect (variously discussed in terms of attention, interaction, engagement, fiction, and immersion) is perhaps what characterises the book as a whole. As, it is fair to say, is the idea of intentionality which reveals a focus on games as designed experience. It is this latter aspect that makes the book so clearly useful for game designers. While there’s a risk here of overemphasizing intentionality, Calleja takes care to recognise the experience of games as encounters with designed objects, allowing the possibility of multiple player experiences (in this his work is close to that of the reader-response theorists that he draws on in his discussions of game fictions). Above all though, it remains a book about experiential design: ‘The board game design process can thus be characterized as the guiding of players’ attention through a number of forms of involvement that are structured in such a way as to yield a desired experience and emotional affect’ (241).
It is perhaps worth noting, as Calleja does in his introduction, that there is an issue with the diversity in the cohort of designers and critics interviewed: ‘it quickly became clear there was a glaring issue with diversity in the selection, in terms of both gender and cultural representation’ (xiii). Interviewees were selected according to two criteria: they must have published at least five games over a span of five years or more, one of which must be in the top two hundred games listed on BoardGameGeek. While these criteria generated an interesting and significant set of interviewees, they necessarily preclude new voices, which is where a more diverse selection of game designers might have been found. Moreover, the value attributed to rankings on BoardGameGeek also seems likely to yield a predictable set of names given both its algorithms and the demographic of its user base. The book therefore runs the risk of promoting a particular kind of game design, prioritising games with mass appeal, and perhaps those designed by and for a particular demographic. While this is a significant issue, and is something that readers should bear in mind, Unboxed has much to say to board game designers, game studies scholars, and keen game players. Its writing is admirable for its clarity, and, while dealing with complex issues and demonstrating an impressive knowledge of game studies, it is always engaging and thought provoking. It also deserves praise for the selection of games discussed, moving the discussion of board games on from the obvious ‘go to’ board games to a host of well-chosen contemporary examples that include titles such as Scythe, Fog of Love, Gloomhaven, and Dead of Winter alongside Calleja’s own games which are discussed with an engaging and endearing level of honesty and openness. Written by an academic and game designer Unboxed is well deserving of shelf space alongside books such as Characteristics of Games by George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield and K. Robert Gutschera and Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design by Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev, both of which are also written by academics and game designers.
Paul Wake