DESIGNING THE NARRATIVE: TELLING COLONIALISM THROUGH RULES, ILLUSTRATIONS AND COMPONENTS

This article explores how rules and mechanics in board games, in conjunction with their setting – illustrations and components – form the narrative that the game transmits to the player. Rules, even abstract ones, represent elements of the board games’ setting and it’s in their relationship with the game as an object that we can find the message that a board game transmits. While board game themes have not always been defined by designers, and rules have not always been designed with themes in mind, they are still vehicles for transmitting hegemonic societal values and narratives, even when not consciously intended by the designers or publishers. With the development of board games as authorial art objects, and the increased focus of designers on their games’ narratives, the study of how rules contribute to, or even contradict, the intended narrative becomes increasingly relevant. In this study, we develop a comparative documentary analysis of the rules, artwork and components of three board games: Catan, Spirit Island and Pax Pamir second edition. All these games have settings relating to the topic of colonialization, central in the history of board games. We analyze how the rulebooks and artwork of these three games construct different narratives all relating to the same topic, and, at the same time, the way that the narrative intent of the designer may be reinforced or undermined by the ways that the colonialization processes are represented in the rules.