Conflict in Board Game Design
Theme refers to the subject matter or scenario world in which a designer intends to immerse players. For most students, when they think about their game in the beginning of unit, theme is the first, and often only part of game design, that they think about. Even when students have played a wide variety of strategy games, and often they have not, they often think of their theme first. If only it were that easy.
Before we really get into theme selection, we talk about conflict. This is a relatively recent inclusion to the class, but one that I think is critically important.
In their essence, board games model conflict, both large scale in terms of the game's overall concept but small scale on each player's turns. Without thinking about conflict, and how it is present in their theme, isolating the core concept of their game is very difficult. A few years ago, I had a student pick "dolphins," as the theme of her game, but couldn't tell me much more than that about why she wanted it other than she liked dolphins. It took a lot of work for us to pick the task for the dolphins, and I think about how if I had placed a focus on conflict then, I could have helped her find her game sooner.
Here's how I present Conflict.
Warning: some kids (and parents) may not like the alternative Mary Had a Little Lamb poem that I use. I wouldn't use this with kids younger than middle school, so just use your own good taste and don't blame me if you get angry emails. :)
Before we really get into theme selection, we talk about conflict. This is a relatively recent inclusion to the class, but one that I think is critically important.
In their essence, board games model conflict, both large scale in terms of the game's overall concept but small scale on each player's turns. Without thinking about conflict, and how it is present in their theme, isolating the core concept of their game is very difficult. A few years ago, I had a student pick "dolphins," as the theme of her game, but couldn't tell me much more than that about why she wanted it other than she liked dolphins. It took a lot of work for us to pick the task for the dolphins, and I think about how if I had placed a focus on conflict then, I could have helped her find her game sooner.
Here's how I present Conflict.
Warning: some kids (and parents) may not like the alternative Mary Had a Little Lamb poem that I use. I wouldn't use this with kids younger than middle school, so just use your own good taste and don't blame me if you get angry emails. :)
We talk a lot about conflict as students develop their games. Games must have clear conflict, both for the game as a whole as well as on a player's turn, in order to work and for the students to work towards realizing that in the game prototype.
After I discuss conflict with them, I have my students evaluate conflict in game that they played in class, and they fill out the document below. (There are three pages, use the ones you want. #1 and #3 are very similar.)
