When do you let theme out weigh mechanics? For years, game designers have debated the relationship between theme and mechanics in making a game, and most discussions conclude that you have to have a balance between both of them. However, this balance is not always equal, and today I want to talk about when we let the theme outweigh the mechanics in making a game.

I have personally found that there are 3 scenarios in which the theme needs to take center stage, and they are: first, when designing around an existing intellectual property, second, when creating a specific emotional experience, and third, when representing a real-world event or experience. While they may seem different, at their core, the theme creates requirements that the mechanics must fit to best support the theme. For each of these three cases, I will go into when you are likely to encounter it as a designer, where the requirements of the theme come from, and provide examples of the theme outweighing the mechanics.

The first place where theme outweighs mechancs is when you work with an existing intellectual property, or IP for short, and this could be any existing game, cinematic universe, book, or story. Some examples would be Sesame Street, Game of Thrones, Catan, or Warhammer 40K. For working in any existing IP, the theme has established expectations about what belongs and what doesn't. Some of these theme-driven requirements would be legal from the IP owner, and some of them will be cultural expectations from the IP that inform the mechanics that are used in the game. If we look at the Villainous series of games, it is clear that Disney wanted to ensure that all of the characters and locations that would be used would be relevant to the villains using the relevant art from the movies, keeping the IP’s integrity intact. This is paired with also informing the mechanics of how to win are also uniquely tied to the villain themselves; for example, King John was greedy in the Robin Hood movie and thus wins by collecting 20 coins, while Hades wins by moving titans to Olympus. Here, the idea is to have the mechanics work with the player and legal expectations.

The second scenario is when you are building a game around a specific emotional experience. How often you will encounter this is based on who you are as a designer and if you want to design with emotion as part of the theme. This could be designing a horror game where you want to evoke dread as your main emotion, or in my case, making a game that was sweet and adorable with Affectionate Cats and Cuddles. I designed Affectionate around the personality of one of my cats, and so wanted the emotions to be silly, friendly, and about being cuddly. Now, unlike the requirements set by working with an IP, the emotional requirements are set by you, the designer, internally and need to be filtered through that intended emotion. For example, in Affectionate, you win by getting the most cuddle tokens, which was a deliberate choice to evoke sweetness, while dice were used to help bring a silly feel to the game. In the end, making your game fit an emotional theme will require specific filtering and playtesting to determine if the mechanics will evoke the desired emotion, instead of asking if it will be the cleanest mechanical design.

The final scenario is when you are representing something that is specific to the real world. Now, this scenario shares some characteristics with the other scenarios. First, you will encounter this if you want to make a historical/real-life inspired game, making it a potentially frequent scenario if you want to design these types of games. Second, the theme’s requirements are external to the game, similar to designing for an IP. Now the differences lie in how we address the requirements the theme has since we would have to make them based off of understanding the historical/real-world scenario and then filter the mechanics through that. For example, if you were designing a game about the Vietnam War, you would have to make the sides of the conflict asymmetrical. Making both sides play identically would create a mechanically balanced game, but it would fail to represent the reality of the conflict. This illustrates that it needs to be used when making a game that is based on historical/real-world scenarios, where the game must still be enjoyable to play while the mechanics support the subject being depicted. The goal is not to create a perfect simulation, but to ensure that the decisions players make and the pressures they experience reflect the historical realities that inspired the game.

Overall, in each scenario where the theme outweighs the mechanics, the theme is at the center of the game’s design. The mechanics then in each scenario are picked to best support the requirements that the theme lays out, regardless if those are external requirements or internal wants. Whether it is fitting into a known universe, sharing emotion through games, or some form of reenactment, one of the main reasons to play the game is the theme, and then it rightfully takes center stage in the design process.