One question I keep coming back to is how criticism can engage board games. As designs become more ambitious and imaginative, players are given access to a richer, more diverse and creative range of games. We’re steadily moving past this idea of games as toys and meaningless pastimes. They are creative endeavors that can result in deeply felt experiences at the table. They tap into our collective imagination to draw us into this act of play. More often than not, when we have a great experience with a game, its theme becomes this vivid fantasy that feels almost life-like, because “we were there and did things”. So naturally, these themes draw a lot of critical attention. They are carefully examined, questioned and interpreted. They get analyzed from different perspectives, and occasionally influenced by some academic traditions. But ultimately, I come away with the impression, that themes are mischaracterised.

In board games, themes are cultural affectation. This isn’t some kind of damning criticism. It’s a matter-of-fact description of what a board game theme is: an affectation of culture.

Themes are a knowing pretense of culture and history, added to a game in order to enhance players’ experience with it. That is how themes function in board games. At worst, they are kitsch: phony, incoherent or just plain arbitrary. They might provide a layer of visual aesthetics to the game, but little else. If they reference something outside of the game (like a place, time or group of people), they do so for pragmatic reasons. It helps players grasp how mechanisms relate to each other (e.g. you trade ‘money’ for ‘buildings’ to ‘buy’ additional options during play). Themes can quickly express the value of in-game points (e.g. prestige is something you want to have more of, while pollution is something you want to avoid). Some parts of a theme might simply evoke a sense of recognition with players. Whether it’s a place or character they might know, an event they’ve heard of or simply experiences they’re familiar with. All those uses enhance player experience. Themes ease players into the game, and provide a shared imaginative space for the group.

At their best, themes elevate abstract player interaction into something that feels substantial. They allow us to imagine us working together to cure diseases, or that we are commanding a planet-spanning galactic empire or that we are deeply invested in political negotiations trying to figure out who among us is trustworthy and who is a double agent. Themes allow our imagination to create memorable, vivid and engaging moments out of a simple act like playing a card or rolling some dice. Flipping a card over might reveal us as a cunning traitor to the group. The dice we roll may decide if we succeed in repelling an invading force. A theme helps us merge our real-life actions with colorful imagery and expressive language to create a shared narrative out of our experience of playing together. Not just through our retelling of it, but through us experiencing and imagining it together with friends.

Crucially, themes in board games are in service of the game’s design. They are a conduit to a more engaging and enthralling experience. They are an important thread to the tapestry of design work that goes into creating a game, and by extension facilitate a worthwhile experience. Because of this, themes are only as nuanced as is necessary to serve the overall experience of playing the game. They are only as deep as they need to be to enhance play.

Consequently, game themes come with their own set of issues. As themes are secondary to the overall design of the game, they run the risk of reducing the histories, cultures and peoples they reference to symbols, icons and stereotypes. Board game themes are by their nature reductive simplifications. They are in a way practiced essentialism. They have to be, in order to become part of the game’s overall design and to be useful tools for players to enrich their game. This becomes an issue when we approach games without sufficient media* literacy to engage them.

Media literacy, in particular (board) game literacy, describes the ability to recognize and understand the techniques, functions and inner workings of a medium in order to identify how to use it, but also how it affects the people playing it. Our ability to critically engage with games requires us to understand how games actually function, what they provides us with and how the various parts fit together to be used by us.

But if we ignore the function themes fulfill within board games, we might make the mistake of seeing them primarily or predominantly as a form of cultural expression and representation. When we look at themes not as part of a game’s overall design, but treat them as its central conceit or even artistic statement, we’ve flipped the medium upside down. Instead of understanding games as a medium for the cultural practice of play, we reframe them as a medium for cultural expression. Which is not to say that games can’t be used to that end. They absolutely can, but doing so is a departure from the concept, function and application of board games. It sets up a different relation between theme, mechanisms, experience, player and designer. Instead of theme as a tool to refine a game’s design and enrich player experience; it becomes the game’s core subject. Play is redefined as an exploration of the game’s subject by means of its mechanisms. The game’s design becomes subservient to a designer’s artistic expression or goal in engaging that subject. Players, instead of actively shaping their own experience playing the game, take on the role of an audience interacting with it. Simply put, it changes games from a participatory medium to an interactive one.

Recognizing this difference is as essential to game literacy, as the ability to tell the difference between a novel and a non-fiction book, between an episode of a prestige TV drama and a video essay, or between a portrait painting and a piece of street art. Not only does it require us – as players – to adopt a different role playing the game; it also changes the contexts in which we can reasonably place a game to offer meaningful and valid cultural criticism.

Because, make no mistake, board games need and deserve meaningful and valid cultural criticism. They deserve to be critically interrogated as to the values they normalize and the personal interactions they encourage. But in order for this to happen, we need to understand what it is we’re looking at. We need to understand how it functions, how we relate to it and ultimately how we use it.

* I am using the term “media” with some reservations, because there are assumptions buried within that word, that I don’t consider applicable to games. Namely that a medium is a kind of container which is used to communicate some sort of message/content. I don’t think this is a good or useful way to describe games, but it is a significant step up from “toy”. Until I can find a more accurate and still comprehensible word for it, I’ve settled for “media”.