Design Diary — Thinking About Metaphor

This is hardly a blog post. It's really more of a series of rambles from an overworked girl trying to get some thoughts she's been carrying around on paper. This isn't really explicitly about Seven-Part Pact, but I think the eagle-eyed amongst you can deduce why my work on Seven-Part Pact is prompting me to write it.

So here’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about. It’s not really an article yet but it’s a sketch of one, perhaps? An advantage of being on the Patreon is that you get an exclusive look into my brain trying to put some pieces together. 

To start, remember that the map is not the territory. Every map is composed of countless decisions to erase and elide, because a map must by its nature be imprecise. Similarly, metaphors are not the object. Metaphors function because they’re not the object, actually. If I tell you that “I longed for her the way the mold grew behind my walls,” obviously there are ways in which these two comparisons don’t line up. The only metaphor that is 100% apt is a tautology. 

So game rules are metaphors, artistically. There’s some kind of fictional reality they articulate, but always imprecisely. This is by design — the only 100% accurate game rule is the action itself. In LARP, this can be quantified through “degrees of abstraction.” If I chase after you during a LARP, there is no game mechanic at play: I am literally chasing after you. If, instead of me physically chasing after you, we played a game of rock-paper-scissors to see who won the chase, we’ve now introduced a metaphor to obscure the action. 

Playing rock-paper-scissors has very little in common tactilely with chasing after someone. But we can use the areas of similarity and dissonance to produce artistic sensations. 

Maybe a better example of play. What if, instead of a wizard duel, we had a rap battle? The mechanic is highlighting one aspect of the fictional reality while disregarding others. By creating this abstraction, we can experiment with the parts of this dissonance that compel us.

Board games and TTRPGs have very different relationships with the fictional reality. Board games swaddle the fictional layer in a thick coat, preventing its ability to feed back into the game. Most TTRPGs (although not all) allow the fictional reality to work itself back into the mechanics. When playing a TTRPG, I can make fictional justifications for mechanical bonuses. This would be absurd in a board game. 

Quickly, to discuss a different matter. Poetry and prose are both compelling art forms that make heavy use of a variety of techniques, including metaphor. One possible difference that could be described between the two of them is the relationship this metaphor has to the reality it presents. Poetry exists in a rhythmic and experiential space, where metaphor lies implicit, and the fictional reality is subservient to the broader sensation. Prose mechanizes this metaphor in order to grasp at the fictional reality, whose comprehension is considered more critical than it is in poetry. 

There are exceptions to all of this, to be clear. Writers have done fantastic work over the past century to challenge and prod at these definitions. The function of this description is not to lock down poetry or prose, but rather to illuminate their similarity to the artform that I work in. A metaphor, maybe?

Now that we understand poetry and prose, let’s return to board games and TTRPGs. Board games, in this description, have more in common with poetry than prose. As a TTRPG designer, entering the world of board games feels like entering a world of raw poetics. The TTRPG market makes more room for artistic or creative TTRPGs, but between the two of them, the way board games relate to their mechanics feels more like a poetic function than a prosaic one. 

The goal is not necessarily a clear description, but rather a compelling evocation. 

This is not a strict taxonomy, but rather a hastily-articulated taxonomy prepared to be blown up. I’m drawing these lines in the sand because I think some very artistically imaginative things can emerge from trying to cross them. There’s another step to this, and I’m excited to make that step.