In The Image: Actions and Outcomes
The Art of the Board Game
Welcome to the January installment of In The Image — a bimonthly guest column on the intersection of faith and the arts, written by Matthew J. Andrews. In addition to serving as a previous poetry editor for Solum, Matthew is a private investigator and writer. He is the author of the chapbook I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember and the full-length collection The Hours, which is a forthcoming Solum publication.
Actions and Outcomes: The Art of the Board Game
A few years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to Wingspan, a delightful board game in which you win by attracting a variety of birds to your wildlife preserve. This may not sound like a particularly exciting experience, but there’s a lot to like about it: the components and illustrations are beautiful, the gameplay is strategic while also being calming, and it’s infinitely replayable. I am clearly not alone in this opinion, as Wingspan has proved to be surprisingly popular, selling millions of copies and resulting in several regional expansions.
My experience with Wingspan has kicked off something of a board game renaissance for me. I have always been deeply interested in games of all kinds—as a child I couldn’t get enough of Monopoly and Risk, and these days I have to run through the whole suite of New York Times word games before I can properly start my day—but lately I have been heavily invested in board games, particularly those that, like Wingspan, have something of a nature theme.
Here’s a question I never thought to ask until recently: are board games art? The instinctual answer is “no,” that a game certainly doesn’t belong in the same category as a film or novel, but in his book The Beauty of Games, Frank Lantz makes a compelling argument to the contrary. Art, he explains, is the deliberate engagement with something that we would normally consider utilitarian simply for its own sake. For example, we read all day long—traffic signs, emails from our bosses, IKEA instruction manuals—but when we read a book, we read simply for the enjoyment of reading. It’s what makes a novel art and a flyer under your windshield wiper not. What visual art is to seeing and music is to hearing, he continues, games are to thinking and reasoning:
Games are an art form about choices and consequences, actions and outcomes,
about using our minds and bodies to learn, understand, and accomplish things.
Games are an art form whose raw material is instrumental reason, this thing that
defines us as humans, the creatures who occupy the cognitive niche, this quality
that is invisible to us because it is the stuff out of which we are made.
This makes a lot of sense, and the longer you dwell in it, the more it gives some rhetorical scaffolding to something we probably know innately. A game is an artificial reality, its own sort of fiction, with self-imposed rules and limitations not unlike those found in poetic forms. Further, we have, for a very long time, attached a sort of prestige to people who can master open-ended tests of strategy in games like Chess and Go. And this is clearly not a modern phenomenon; we have evidence of board games dating back 5,000 years, and we know that Backgammon is significantly older than The Odyssey.
The idea that games are a kind of art, an aesthetic form of reasoning and cognition, seems an easy enough position to adopt. But I’m interested in digging further because the games I’m playing these days are, without a doubt, better games, both more fun and more rewarding experiences. If games are an art, they feel more like high art. But what makes them so? We’re familiar with some of the elements that separate excellent films from their more mainstream counterparts, but when it comes to games, we’re on less familiar ground. To help guide us, I will propose that it’s the interplay between a game’s theme and mechanics that make it better and more artistic.
When it comes to board games, theme refers broadly to their setting and framework. They can run the gamut from essentially themeless (think Sorry!, which is set in a sort of ambiguous world that lends no context or explanation to the gameplay) to highly thematic (think Risk, which clearly operates in the realm of warfare in something like a mid-century geopolitical climate). Wingspan and other games like it are thematically tethered to the natural world, and in doing so, it puts up a magnifying glass to something that exists all around us but often goes ignored. In a recent article for Dicebreaker, Sean Weeks notes that Wingspan “enchanted people because it showed affection for the mundane.” He continues:
Most games offer to transport you to a beloved IP, new universes, unfamiliar
eras, an office or a crime scene. Wingspan, like a madrigal, dwelt on a simple,
everyday beauty, and translated it into games language. It was about
observation, not enterprise.1
But an interesting theme alone does not make a game great. Instead, there has to be some notable interplay between the theme and the game’s mechanics, or the actual rules and procedures that govern gameplay. Wingspan accomplishes this by making the diversity of bird species an integral part of the game’s strategy, forcing readers to have to consider everything from bird types and habitats to nest structures and egg capacities. To play the game well, one has to really engage with the birds on an individual and collective level. It’s this relationship between the game’s context and action that makes it a higher form of art.
Elizabeth Hargrave, Wingspan’s designer, has shown this tendency in other games she’s developed. In Mariposas, you control Monarch butterflies making the migration from Mexico to Canada and back, but you’re forced to make difficult decisions between short- and long-term objectives because the migration takes place over three or four generations of butterflies. In her newest release, Undergrove, you are a fir tree trying to grow new trees via a symbiotic relationship with fungi, which often requires you to negotiate, to provide a resource to a fungus in exchange for receiving something else. Both games are rooted in natural processes and integrate them into the decisions you make every turn. As a result, I look with a little more wonder when I see a passing Monarch or a humble mushroom.
Later in his article, Weeks notes that at a recent board game convention, he noticed that kiosks “overflowed with games about animals, nature, worldliness and even religion.” As you might expect, I want to linger over that last one for a moment. If you grew up in the same evangelical subculture I did, you’ll know as well as I do that there is certainly no shortage of Christian-themed games, but few would argue that these games are any good. At best, they are biblical alternatives to secular games; at worst, they are tools for indoctrination, existing only to teach dogmas or fine-tune a moral compass. For most of us, they wouldn’t qualify as high art.
Despite its lackluster history, I think the medium of games represents an interesting space for artists of faith. Can a board game be made to engage honestly and beautifully with issues of belief and religion while also being an excellent board game? As Weeks notes, there are signs that these sorts of games are coming to fruition. He specifically highlights Ierusalem: Anno Domini, a Last Supper-themed game that appears to use its mechanics to enact something like first-century discipleship, but there are also games hitting the market based on the Flood and the post-exilic rebuilding of the temple.
The future of religious-themed games appears bright, and I’m excited to see where this development goes. I look forward to playing games that help me to challenge, examine, and cherish my faith. And I’m looking forward to having fun while I do it.
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If you enjoy the watercolors of Wingspan, I highly recommend the boardgame Meadow, which contains many of the same mechanics as Wingspan, and has its own lovely watercolors throughout. I enjoyed this article. Thanks for sharing. 😊