Worldbuilding & Writing 201: Games
Greetings and syncline! Yes, I can make origami with the earth. Today we are doing… games! And my dear sister and one of my best friends, Lady Verbosa (aka Anne Winchell), joins us to talk about one of her great passions, games! Start us off, birthday girl! And everyone give her a hip hip hurra (as we say in 🇸🇪)! Failure to bring cake and presents will be punished harshly! (A few days late but she still deserves it!)
(Anne:) Thanks, Vivian! Games are indeed a passion even in my newly advanced age, and there are so many kinds! Vivian and I are going to start with definitions because, if you’ve read this blog before, you know we always do, and then we’ll look at some different types! There are so many ways that games can be played, and after going through the basics, we’ll explore how this can work in your worlds and your stories. You might even get some examples of our games if you’re lucky! So draw your cards, roll the dice, and let’s get going!
What are games?
(Anne:) This seems like a silly question at first glance, doesn’t it? We all know what games are! But wait… do we? There might be an activity that one person considers a game and another doesn’t, and, of course, we can turn all sorts of things into games! So… what makes a game a game?
Definition
(Vivian:) I will be giving the definition for what constitutes a game!
A game is an activity which often but not necessarily requires props such as dice, boards, pieces, etc. involving one or more individuals with the expressed purpose of entertaining the people involved, and that has specific rules on how said activity is allowed to progress and develop through the actions of the player(s).
(Anne:) This is a great definition! …For a beginning 😉 No, this actually does cover almost everything. I would clarify that in addition to the specific rules, there has to be a win state and a loss state and/or an objective, no matter how vague (is it really a loss to be tagged it? Or is that really just a different type of win state? Regardless, it’s an objective signalling a new phase).
The one other thing I would add is an element of interactivity, and it needs to be interactivity with more than just passive use of the medium. Reading a book isn’t a game… unless you make it one by imposing rules and the other requirements, thus interacting with the book more than just turning pages.
(Vivian:) Fantastic addition. So together it becomes
A game is an interactive activity which often but not necessarily requires props such as dice, boards, pieces, etc. involving one or more individuals with the expressed purpose of entertaining the people involved, and that has specific rules on how said activity is allowed to progress and develop through the actions of the players including either a win/loss state and/or objectives that change the phases of the activity.
Types
(Anne:) For the sake of this post, we’re going to define the types of games in relation to the props used (or lack thereof). The ones we’re focused on are board games, card games, dice games, physical games, video/computer/virtual games, and role playing games. There are others, naturally, but these are the ones that are most common, and they tend to be easiest to incorporate into worldbuilding and stories. Vivian, am I forgetting anything major?
(Vivian:) I don’t think so! Besides, you know, running through and defining them.
(Anne:) You want me to say even more?
(Vivian:) I have allotted 7000 words in this blog for you 😀
(Anne:) Okay, I’d better conserve for the writing part. You know me and overwriting! Here’s a run down of the types, though most are self-explanatory.
Board games: These games involve one or more boards and at least some pieces in addition to the board. If it’s just a bunch of boards with no pieces, well, that’s a card game with weird cards. Pieces usually include meeples (which represent players and are generally people-shaped) or something to indicate the player but can have many other purposes as well. Sometimes the board itself represents the player!
Card games: So, these games obviously have cards, which just means pieces that are generally flat and made of a papery-ish substance that are used to play the game (as opposed to “cards” that contain rules or something). The majority of card games in the Western world on Earth use the 52-card deck we’re probably all familiar with. While there may be additional pieces such as poker chips, these are used to mark possessions of some sort and not to represent the player.
Dice games: Again, you can probably guess this one. The defining characteristic is the use of dice, which are pieces with multiple predetermined faces that, when used (generally rolled), create a randomised (but probabilistic) result. There are all sorts of dice, with the D6 being standard (a 6-sided cube with one number per side going from 1-6). (Vivian: Quick addition, historically dice have not always been regular, and this is a fairly recent invention; they have often been irregular in order to make them even more unpredictable.)
Physical games: Think children’s games! Tag is the classic, but hopscotch, jump rope, the floor is lava, and really anything that involves large physical movement as the core of how you play. For adults, well, there’s twister, and depending on how you do it, sex could be a game as well! And, of course, there’s the obvious for everyone… SPORTS!
Video/computer/virtual games: My favourite! These are basically any other type of game–on a screen! Yes, we’ve got pixels instead of boards, cards, and dice, perhaps a nice Wii controller for some physical games. Ah, the Wii! Nowadays, of course, AR and VR are claiming the physical games territory. You also have genres like shooting games, simulators of various sorts, mobile games, the list goes on!
Role playing games: These are games where the objective is the development of a character who represents the player. These overlap with the other types and can actually fall into everything else, but the objective makes them unique, plus I like them, so in they go!
Combination games: I didn’t mention this above, but there’s plenty of crossover and combos available. Have fun!
Shoot, I went overboard… Okay, gotta limit my word count in the future!
Games in Worldbuilding
(Vivian:) You can, of course, have it so you take real life games, slap some speculative fiction rebranding on them, and call it a day, but that is BORING! Most games, except maybe the simplest physical games, are a product of culture. Fun fact: games like hide and seek, tag, and a few others, are very universal, and it is thought to be so because they prepare children for both hunting and hiding, which were necessary in ancient times.
Anyway, we are not here to be lazy; we are here to worldbuild!
What does the species/culture value and find fun?
(Vivian:) I will split this up a bit, namely into children’s physical games and the rest. It is because of the aforementioned fun fact. When it comes to younglings’ games, up to about puberty and around 13 years of age (or equivalently for the species), a lot of games are physical. This is likely not a coincidence evolutionarily as even kittens and puppies have these, but as members of species grow older, their entertainment shifts. However, their games as younglings are often related to what is required as an adult. (Anne: I spent quite a lot of time playing school with my friends where I was the teacher, and look at me now!)
So think about what history the species has evolved in and what their requirements back then were like. A prey species is more likely to do physical games that teach kids to hide and not be seen or evade a predator when they are chasing you. Hunting species are more likely to prefer games that will enhance their ability to hunt, chase, and take down the prey they want. This, of course, will take the shape of entirely harmless activities like hide and seek, tag, and various other ones where no one is any real threat. After all, you don’t want kiddos to kill each other!
As adults, games get trickier and seem to be more related with general social bonding. A game’s main purpose of fun is to strengthen social bonds and give opportunities to bond. We all know the classical scene of people sitting and playing cards, and as they do, they spill the beans on their past, their lives, etc. It is a classic because by gaming together in a calm and safe environment, everyone has lowered their guards and is silently agreeing to be fair together for the joy of each other, and that helps create a sense of group and belonging that allows things to come out. This is also why cheaters are likely so incredibly hated even in games where nothing matters in the end; they violate this implicit trust. (Anne: And then there are bluffing games which actually strengthen this same skill of identifying and expelling deceit, though in this case by encouraging people to practise it. And hey, it never hurts to be a good liar! As long as you’re not caught, that is…) There is also a difference between knowing you will deceive vs when you are expected not to do it.
What technology do they have?
(Vivian:) The level of technology, or magic, is vital to many games. Physical games are older than civilization and even older than a species, so they are independent of this. But when it comes to those that require props, your ability to make them affects a lot. Mancala is an example of a very old board game because the board is easy to make and thus something almost everyone can do as long as there is wood or something you can dig out of. Dice games are harder, but you can still do it with some sloppy wood pieces or bone pieces or with a great deal of patience. Card games were harder, and as history shows, came considerably later. Computerised gaming is, of course, for the digital age, and hologames that use holograms as props is future stuff.
What are their cultural influences?
(Vivian:) Culture naturally has a huge impact on games and how they are designed. Games are often designed with cultural motives and ideas embedded in them. The classical card deck’s suits traditionally came from representing the four classes of people of the time. Why 13 in each is not known, but hypotheses range from 13 lunar months per year to 13 weeks per season for a total of 52 weeks per year.
Snakes and ladders comes from India originally, and it was meant as a symbolic game showing how one is reborn back into life and the struggle to move from the cycle. (Anne: Check out the history of Monopoly sometime if you want a wild ride of changing cultural morals!) So games take inspiration in design from their culture and the values the culture has, though sometimes things are just happenstance.
Worldbuilding Minipracticum
(Vivian:) So, want an example, huh? Well tough shit!
Fffffffiiiiineeee!
Alright, Anne and I have worked on a deck of cards for my beloved species, the Raixher. Short version is that they are a militaristic planimal people loosely based on the Prussians. But one thing I decided was that the card deck would not be symmetrical in order to foster different types of card games than what you humans are used to.
I am a math nerd, so I used prime powers as much as I could, but that was for meta reasons more than anything. The motives are based on their views and culture and have changed quite a bit over time, and the game is now over 500 years old. So how is the deck structured? The card deck has 59 cards, and we have 3 suits: Thorn, Leaf, Flower–this is based on what their head vines grow. There are 17 thorns, 19 leaves, and 23 flowers. They are often, but not always, like jack, queen, and king in that you see a person whose face can be aimed left, right, or centre. They can also have their hand holding an object in some direction or having the hand pointing in a direction. Some cards are pure symbols, too.
As you can see just from this, a lot of options exist for the cards, and things are not balanced to make it so there are equal amounts of things. This is a design choice, as stated earlier. Anne and I are still working on more games for the cards and might release it some day… I wonder if Tabletop Simulator is a good test place?
Games in Storytelling
(Anne:) It’s good and fun to design games in the abstract for your world, but once you start writing (or putting your world into concrete form regardless of what that form is), you’ll need to figure out a few things. Obviously, you don’t want to stop everything to explain your entire game in detail. If you’ve developed your game in reality (see below), then you might add the game as supplementary information, but not in the middle of the story.
How much to include?
(Anne:) Unless you’re telling a story in the form of a game (like a video game) where you actually might want to stop everything and do a tutorial, you want to limit things like explanations of rules and examples and explanations of pieces. You don’t really want to stop and describe how your game fits the evolution and technology of your people. Why? Because that’s “telling,” and you want to “show, don’t tell.”
(Vivian:)
AI’s rendition of Vivian Catgirl in delight.
(Anne:) When you show a game, you want to put the game into the story naturally. While you don’t want to go over every rule, you might spell out the basic ones. And if it’s something where there’s only maybe three or less rules, you can say them.
“There’s only one rule: winner takes all.”
See, that works! Normally, though, you only want to straight-out say a rule if it’s especially relevant to the story, like it serves as a metaphor for another conflict or scenario, or if it reveals one of the characters in some way, like that it reveals their attitude or playstyle (since playstyle often correlates to personality).
If at all possible, though, don’t say the rules at all. Just show them. Show a dealer turning over a triangle card, the character counting up the pieces hidden in their pouch, finding three circles and two triangles, and biting back their joy while upping the bet. Do we know what any of that means? Well, not technically, but we can guess that this is a betting game that involves bluffing, since that’s familiar to most people, and we can guess that something great just happened. Really, that’s all you need for it to work in most stories.
How do the objectives align?
(Anne:) Games reflect the world, as Vivian discussed, but if you want to justify including a game in your story, it has to reflect the story as well. It might mirror the rules of the world similar to how children’s games mirror their adult realities, it might highlight especially relevant themes like cooperation (or deceit), or it might reveal a character’s motivations. Of course, the more it fits and reflects your story, the better!
With multiplayer games, you can get great interplay of characters. Vivian mentioned above the classic scene of a group sitting around playing games and sharing secrets and backstories. Make sure to avoid infodumps, obviously (and see my post on exposition to learn how), but this is a wonderful scene. As I personally love bluffing games, I like including these to show how well characters lie and deceive each other, who sees through whom, whether anyone cooperates against a common “foe,” and so on.
With single-player games, you can learn about that particular character. What kinds of games do they choose? How does it reflect their state of mind at that particular moment? Mindless entertainment or brain-sharpening puzzle? So much potential!
Writing Minipracticum
(Anne:) While this draws on a real Swedish game, Skitgubbe, instead of being a totally new creation, Vivian and I developed a card game for the third book in my Imperial Saga, Heart of the Guardian. Well, since zhi knows the game, I basically wrote the scenes to fit the characters and to the best of my knowledge of the game, and zhi helped correct me and brainstorm different and better hands and strategies to better reflect the characters of Tahirah and the Emperor. I didn’t want to go into the rules in too much detail, just enough so that the reader could follow along, so even though Vivian (and I to a lesser extent) knew all of the rules, they don’t show up except in fragments.
The game is played in a few key scenes throughout, building in difficulty and intensity as the story progresses and the overall tension heightens, and the stakes rise with each game. I also wanted to show the relationship between Tahirah and the Emperor, always keeping in mind my tight point of view with Tahirah as the focus. If she doesn’t know it, neither do we, though, of course, we can infer things from the actions she sees even if she doesn’t draw the connection.
In the first game, I was somewhat explicit with the rules, stating that twos and tens were special because that comes up multiple times in the games and is the turning point in most of them. One that I don’t really explain is the three. It’s inferred that this is generally the worst card, but in almost every game, Tahirah plays a three that results in the Emperor losing. Not only is this a metaphor for her goal of defeating the Emperor, it also mirrors the fact that he is increasingly willing to let her win in many circumstances (something that she takes advantage of to get ahead). The three becomes “her” card in many ways, and I hope for this to carry through in the later books.
Summa Summarum
(Vivian:) So what can we take from this? Well, hopefully a lot. One thing that is important in games is the framing of it. While a lot of games are very similar and have been reinvented many times, having a different framing will render slightly different rules and give it a whole other flavour.
Another is, of course, why is the game in the world, and what real world game are you trying to replace? My card game for the Raixher, or, well, deck, was to replace poker, as I wanted something scifi for it, and we kinda went overboard from there. Lot’s of fun! I hope one day to be able to publish it 🙂
So my recommendation is, take the culture of the people you are making it for into account and sprinkle in some randomness, like, why 13 cards? Why is it we count 15-30-40 in Tennis? No one knows for sure!
(Anne:) Ah, tennis, where love always loses…
I think fitting the world and culture is vital, and if you want to incorporate it into a story, it can do all sorts of things! Try to make it play double, triple, quadruple duty in terms of what it’s accomplishing! And remember to show, don’t tell.
But above all, games are meant to be fun, and that means you should have fun, too. Go figure out what your world needs and how it fits your story and characters! Last one there is a rotten egg!
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Copyright ©️ 2024 Vivian Sayan and Anne Winchell. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as definitions and types of games are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. We’d love for you to use our definitions! However, specific ideas such as the Raixher and associated card deck, Heart of the Guardian and the Imperial Saga plus associated card game and descriptions, and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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