Board Stiff with Formalism

Photo via Henrik Berger Jørgensen

There's nothing like being fashionably late to a party, or a debate about formalism and games.  Oh, wait- I mean, a debate about formalism and digital games.  Because if you've read all the posts and back-and-forth's, you probably noticed one thing; it almost entirely centers on the medium of digital games.  Which is not a bad thing, really.  It just happens to be a shame, because the topic is larger than the digital and should, rightfully, include the medium of board games.

First off, I want to be clear that I'm not going to discuss the grand old question 'are games art?'  Personally, I find that question to be inane and a complete waste of energy.  Others agree.  I'm totally certain that others disagree vehemently, but that's my stance and you won't convince me otherwise.

What I want to investigate here is an altogether deeper issue.  Why, in all this debate on the question of formalism, have board games been mostly ignored?  Because it seems to me that the board-based brethren get short shrift when it comes to the debates circulating around the larger topic of 'games'.  Raph Koster, who let loose a salvo in the formalist fracas with his 'A Letter to Leigh', does mention board games, but he also cloaks their presence, and by extension the absence of other 'non-games', under larger issues of player agency and 'gameness'.  While I don't agree with Koster's overall assessment, which I detail below, I do want to make clear that by bringing board games into the conversation Koster has done the debate a huge service.

Zack Morris time out: Pop quiz- what makes a game a game?  Would you be amazed to know I'm playing a game right now?  It's called, 'Write a Blog Post' and I'm currently kicking the ass out of it.  I'm winning in every way, despite having no defined objectives (if I finish, did I really complete the game?  If I quit writing my blog post, have I not achieved some sort of win state?  Does it go on, ad infinitum?), and the only person playing is myself.  I just earned bonus points for writing this.  End Zack Morris time out.

Specifically, let me address one particular board game Koster brings up in his post- Brenda Romero's Train.  Koster categorizes this 'game' as one that "uses the fact of engaging with it at all to accomplish its effect," before asking if this type of 'game' is really just embracing 'narrative moves' over "game-like moves."  He questions the aesthetic, implying that it is "something that should probably only be done once, marveled at, and then moved past."  By suggesting that Train is a game where "the only moral move is not to play," Koster questions, at a very fundamental level, if the aesthetic of play in this type of game is not merely a twist, a sort of trick of narrative, thus making it not a game at all.

But is the only moral move not to play?  To me, this is very indicative of a 'formalist' critique.  This is something board games have to constantly deal with, probably more so than digital games, because many players categorize the board games they play according to very formalist schemas.  Caylus is a worker placement game, Twilight Struggle is an area control game, Agricola is part of the larger family of Euro games, and so forth.  It's easy to think of board games this way.  But that's not the whole story.  If you take a look at many reviews of games, they focus on more than mechanics- they ask deeper questions of story, of theme, of how the game actually plays.  These reviews, without explicitly stating it, ask, "How does this game give me a narrative to interact with?" - which, in my mind, is something deeper than a formalist critique.  It's a humanist critique.  How does this game make me react as a human?  Formalism is a product of the rational.  Humanism is a product of the metaphysical.

Returning to the question, "Is the only moral move (of Train) not to play?", my answer is: no.  It's not just no, it's a hell no.  Why?  Train is about providing the player a sense, terrible as it is, of the sort of grotesque, normalizing effects that focusing on transporting Jews to concentration camps presents to those attempting to maximize and make efficient such transportation.  Playing Train isn't supposed to be pretty, or even fun.  It's meant to be torturous, it's meant to make you ask and question the source of your own humanity. 

Did you take glee, ignorantly, of moving the most amount of people to the end of the line?  Probably.  And when you discovered the true purpose of the game- moving representative figures to their representative death- did you recoil and become sick at the idea?  The ethical answer is yes.  But would you have encountered this full range of quandary, of questioning your own humanity, if you simply refused to play the game out of moral concerns?  To be honest, the moral question brought up by Koster assumes you know what the game is about before you play it.  But that posits perfect knowledge, which *any* game must assume you don't possess at the first go-around.  So my answer is that if you want to know what this game is about, you absolutely have to play it.  And in doing so, in playing the game of Train as it was meant to be played, perhaps you can affirm a part of your soul and it's place among the larger population of humanity.  Does this deny player agency?  Does Train embody the qualities of gameness?  Is this just a trick of narrative?

Asking these sort of questions, to me, is sort of like the old adage: If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.  If you have to ask do these qualities make Train a game, you probably shouldn't play it.  I say this in no affront to Koster, but I do think asking these sort of questions is indicative of the formalist trap of evaluation.  Which is, to say, I think this falls along the same issues as asking if 'games are art'.  Should you only play Train once?  Perhaps.  Does that mean you can't watch others play it, see their reactions, and take that experience in conjunction with your own?  Brenda Romero designed the game, has seen it played many times- and I'm pretty sure her answer would be 'no'.  Because, in a metaphysical sense, watching others play Train can be just as powerful as playing it yourself, even if that game lessens its 'gameplay' effect after one session.

Now I'm fully aware that opening your argument with a game like Train is a bit like dropping a hydrogen bomb to solve an ant problem in your house.  It's a bit of overkill.  But I make this example as a way to demonstrate that similar metaphysical games, like so many Twine examples, can easily be sunk in this same formalist quicksand without considering, truly, their full effect on the player, or even those not playing but merely observing a Twine game being played.  If your evaluative criteria is that "You can't do better at Train", then you have blatantly favored the rational over the metaphysical.  Which is fine, to a point.  But it certainly isn't applicable to the nebulous category that we call 'games'.  Games are, by their very nature, a blending of the rational and the metaphysical.  Board games tend to draw this blending out in a way that video games do not, so easily, reveal.  Because with board games, you have to address the form they present at a basic level. But you absolutely have to go past that for any real critique.  You have to go past mechanics to consider the humanist perspective.

Koster says 'art games' and AAA are about control, that "they are…more about the author than the player."  But I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss player agency the way Koster is comfortable doing, especially with regard to deeply personal games- like Dys4ia.  As a player of these of games, am I not affirming my place in the broader perspective of humanity when I play a deeply personal game?  Why is the narrative effect a hindrance in Twine games, but for other games- like Andean Abyss or Twilight Struggle- the narrative effect adds to their luster and allure?  When you step out of the strictly rational bounds of critique, when you go beyond the form of the game, you enter into a territory much less defined by exclusives or schematizations.  You enter into the being of the player themselves, their ability to take what is presented and draw their own lessons from the act of play.  I can think of no greater surrendering of control than to let someone bring his or her own interpretation to the fore.

Koster calls this process out "as rhetoric and not…dialectic," with the consequence being that Twine games (or really any deeply personal games) "move against the fundamental current of gameness."  But I think this makes the mistake of placing the game on a central pillar and reducing the role, the agency, of the player who approaches this pillar.  Koster says, "the unique power of games, to me, lies in the conversation between player and designer."  But I disagree- the unique power of games lies in the conversation between the player and themselves while interacting with a designers interpretation.  If we place the game on the pillar, as is the tendency of the formalist critique, then we are accepting the supremacy of the rational over the metaphysical.  If we place the player on the pillar, then we reaffirm the humanity in the game and accept the presence of the metaphysical in conjunction with the rational.  In the end, the pillar disappears under this ideal and we no longer are bound by rhetoric.  We become the dialectical.

Play is not something that begins when the game starts and ends when it is put away.  Play is the process of using a rhetorical device to engage in a dialectic with ourselves.  That's why I can't agree with Koster when he says, "games have had nothing to say for so long."  They have so much to say that it's easy to just link this outpouring strictly to mechanics and then reject what the game has to say by rejecting the mechanics linked to its outpouring.  When you imply that Twine games impose a narrative rather than have the player construct a narrative, that critique is easy to accept or recognize because the mechanics of Twine are rather straightforward.  But to look only at mechanics and not ask the deeper, metaphysical questions of what play in this medium produces as far as conversation between the player and themselves is to miss a very large part of why games exist at all.

Or, to put it another way, to frame a game experience as between a player and designer is to favor, exclusively, the mechanical over anything else.  But if we frame a game experience as between a player and themselves, we can elude the trap of formalism and go straight to the dialectical process play intrinsically produces.

But I've digressed far too much from my main question- why have board games been largely left out of this formalist debate?  Why are digital games entering this phase now?  I think, in part, digital games are coming to terms with the *way* in which they are played.  When people begin to critique the effectiveness of Bioshock as a first person shooter, what they are really critiquing is the necessity of using a standard game controller to interact with the digital medium.  Digital games have long been experiences mediated through various controllers, and this recent 'piercing of the veil' with regards to Bioshock should be seen as a turn away from the formalist obsession with mechanics, and the controllers that facilitate them, towards a bigger question of how does this formalist 'roadblock' hinder or not hinder the conversation the player is having with themselves while playing the game.

That's why board games can, and should, provide the digital game critiques with an exemplar of how to negotiate around various formalist roadblocks.  So many players of board games ask these sort of questions every time they play.  While many do, admittedly, frame this inquiry around a mechanical theme- does the card driven mechanic of Twilight Struggle enhance the gameplay experience?- the larger questions asked go to the heart of what it means to interpret the game experience as a player.  The various 'controllers' utilized in board games are hardly fixed in place, and the numerous mods or house rules scrawled on box tops are a testament to the wide degree of flexibility board games enjoy over their more rigid digital cousins.  Now I would be the first to admit the board game/digital game relationship is not a 1:1 experience, and there is only so far comparative analyses can go in these sort of endeavors.  But the links are there, waiting to be explored.

So while I find myself almost totally at odds with what Koster presented in his 'Open Letter', I nevertheless admire his insistence on bringing the question of board games back into this larger debate.