Struggling to balance or integrate creative flow with academic rigour will probably continue to be the #1 challenge to tackle during this project.
Some time ago, I began to scout for some good literature to inform the creation of my board game on several layers:
- reflecting main themes in game mechanics
- forest ecology/restoration and climate – a selection of academic articles from the nature journal
- human-nature relationality – Braiding Sweetgrass by R. W. Kimmerer (?)
- community empowerment – the UN’s Generation Restoration handbook and related nature articles (?)
- (serious/educational) board game making – still identifying a selection of books
- narrative structure – no luck yet
I am getting comfortable with the fact, though, that I won’t find a good source for everything. For many things, game-making as a creative process will have to suffice as rationale. And if the commentary piece requires more justification, I will simply retrospectively cherry-pick some bits of literature to support those choices which I made without engaging with academic sources.
Surely, for a creative project like this, this is inevitable, and a lot of creativity cannot be explained or tracked to an origin source of inspiration. I just need to find the right kind of language to describe this approach and justify it – to myself as much as to others.
Great example of this is the game’s narrative structure.
For a long time, I was hoping to find some sort of an academically rigorous overview of different kinds of narrative structures, going beyond the rinse-and-repeat Hero’s Journey, ideally detailing which structures work best for which kind of stories, what kind of impact they leave audiences with, and what medium they suit best – including structures ideal for games.
I didn’t find any source like this to date. And to be honest, I hate the process of searching – digitally opening book after book, skimming through contents lists, closing tabs after tabs as I find the literature not meet my expectations.
But then last week, I went into the cinema.
I saw Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.
As this vampire-full, bluesy, genre-mixing gem taking place in post-abolitionist American south ended, I was suddenly hit with inspiration: This is how I want my ecosystem restoration board game to be!
(spoiler alert for Sinners below)
Gradually building up towards a brutal climax, the movie saw a diverse range of characters come together to restore something they had lost – freedom. But then, when a sharp-toothed threat starts banging on the door, threatening to destroy their dream once again, they have to put their personal goals aside and team up for a fight. Putting together their unique skills and knowledge, they figure out a key to keep the growing horde of KKK vampires in check until they finally defeat it.
It worked like magic, and I felt that if I can mimic the same structure with my game (despite being on an entirely different topic), it could work like magic too.
Thanks to this, I realised, for example that:
- every player should start the game associated with a separate town on a shared map and begins by restoring their own separate bit of degraded forest
- as their forests grow, they join up and players start working together to share resources
- by joining up, both their strengths and weaknesses become shared in face of the incoming waves of climate impacts
- when a climax climate catastrophe hits, the players’ cooperation and human-nature harmony gets tested one last time to determine the winners
Where Sinners had blues music, I have nature, where it had the immortal vampires, I have the climate crisis.
Maybe it only makes sense to me, but it feels right and I cannot help thinking that, for me, sourcing inspiration this way can never be overshadowed by the scientific method of going about things. That can always be complementary and justify retrospectively – and I will definitely end up looking up some literature about team-up narrative structures and why/how they work.
So to embrace this, I will make both:
- an academic bibliography “advisory board” of key texts to inform my game creation
- a non-academic “mood board” of works that, just like Sinners, feel like what I want my game to be
And I think this is my last blog post. Let’s make a game!
