-
Peter Darby
United Kingdom
Welshpool
Powys
-
It's common to talk of the subject of a game as it's "theme", as in "the theme of Settlers is colonizing an island" or "the theme of Ticket to Ride is building railway routes."
As an humanities graduate, this bugs me.
Let's take an example from literature, what is the theme of "Romeo and Juliet"?
Everyone who said "forbidden love", take ten points.
Everyone who said "Renaissance Verona", congratulations, you too can write board game reviews. Sadly, that's it's setting, not it's theme.
Everyone who said "Ooh, it's about this boy and this girl", well, nearly, Romeo and Juliet are the subject of the play "Romeo and Juliet", but they're not the theme.
Similarly, the setting of "Citizen Kane" is the upper echelons of early 20th century US society, it's subject is the life of Charles Foster Kane and it's theme, gosh, we could debate that all night, but I'd plump for "The emptiness of material success."
So subject and setting are pretty easy to pin down for most subjects of critical analysis, but theme, the meaning of a work, that can be very hard to agree on (or in some cases, find).
So what about board games?
The setting of Settlers of Catan is, well, Catan.
The subject of Settlers of Catan is, well, the settling of Catan.
The theme... well, that gets interesting doesn't it? I'd argue that Settlers theme is a model of basic economic theory, that trading unequally distributed resources can be mutually beneficial (though not equitably beneficial), or in a nutshell "Competitive co-operation."
So, if theme is "What the game is saying about it's setting and subject", that can help to articulate what we feel about a game.
As an example, Arkham Horror and Munchkin Cthulhu share a great deal in terms of setting and subject. Setting, Lovecraft's horror infested new England, subject, investigators confronting horrific entities.
However, the theme of Arkham Horror is "Co-operative struggle to prevent disaster in the face of overwhelming odds", while that of Munchkin Cthulhu is "Kill monsters, take their stuff, stab the other players". I would say.
And to a great extent your enjoyment of each would depend on the thematic treatment of the subject: anyone liking serious interpretations of the Cthulhu mythos may be disappointed to find Munchkin Cthulhu in their stocking come Christmas.
So yes, a lot of this is nitpicking, and you can go through a lot of discussion of theme in boardgames with the mental note "for THEME read SUBJECT" and it will be fine.
But the fact that boardgames can have genuine themes is interesting to me, and not been greatly explored outside of deliberately constructed "art" games.
Bonus question; What's the theme of Ticket to Ride?
|
|
). But I would argue that this is another word that is evolving with the language, and trying to change it from morphing is futile. As our language separates itself more and more from it's roots, people try to fit language into the rules that they understand. i.e. to make something plural, you usually add an "s", so people assume, based on their rules, that the singular of mechanics (which is fallacious, as "mechanics" is singular to begin with), must be mechanic.
