You might have heard of the horrifically academic term ‘Ludonarrative Dissonance’. The concept that games have two narratives being told: things the player does (systemic gameplay) and things the player observes (observational gameplay). When the player’s actions are in tandem with what the player is observing – or feeling – the game seems cohesive and intuitive. Otherwise, the game seems in conflict, it becomes difficult to head-canon your actions and the game’s systems.

Systemic gameplay is how the player interacts with the world and how the world interacts with all the other systems, which ultimately creates a set of incentives and disincentives. Observational gameplay is how the world is presented and contextualised to the player. Game Design is dance between these two aspects. Like in music, a perfect balance isn’t always desired. Music is a dance of tension and release, games can be dance of systems and observation.

Here’s a concrete example borrowed from the classic streamer Day9. Looking at the game Command & Conquer: Generals (released in 2003), I find it interesting that older games tend to weigh their balance more towards observational gameplay than today’s games. There are tanks and units on a battlefield that the player gives orders to. Things levelling up and gaining experience over time and when repeating an action is a classic videogame trope, it works on both the systemic and observational aspects. It systemically creates an incentive to keep your units alive for as long as possible. Through the observational/narrative lens experience is intuitive, people do tend to become more skilled as time goes on and they do the action more and more. However in C&C Day9 is suprised to learn that tanks don’t gain experience. Instead there are units that are ‘pilots’ that can be ordered to enter and drive a tank, the pilot gains experience and when the tank is destroyed the pilot survives and can enter another tank, transferring their experience.

You can see while watching the stream that there’s a conflict of opinion. The observational aspect appeals to your inner child: “This looks so cool! I can put my pilot in my tank and the tank gets better and then I can move the pilot to another tank and now that tank is better, that’s cool!”. It’s cool because it models a narrative from reality, tanks don’t skill up, people do. Systemically there’s an extra step you have to consider and manage, putting pilots onto tanks. If you don’t do this your tanks are weaker. This means the player has to spend more time managing the position of their pilots, which gives them less time to reason about higher level strategies (often called ‘micro’-ing in the real time strategy genre).

In boards games, these two lenses can be seen as the play between the rules and the theme. Even the most abstract games can have observational qualities. Chess is another game that represents a battlefield – two formations of units coming head to head. It’s easy to head-canon some units: the front line is filled with ‘Pawns’ aka fodder, knights can leap farther than other units, the queen can go wherever she wants. While other units are difficult to head-canon: why can bishops can only move diagonally? Is it because God moves in mysterious ways? Why is the King is the slowest unit? The interplay of how each unit moves makes for a compelling ruleset, but you would hardly call Chess a game with an interesting narrative. We forgive Chess because it’s nearly 1500 years old, we grow up with Chess around us. New abstract games have a harder time finding a mass audience and are usually catered towards a niche group.

I hope you can use this line of thinking in your own games. Consider that every rule you introduce creates two narratives: the systemic narrative that the player creates via interaction and the observational narrative that is presented to the player. Perhaps in your next playtest session you will find comments such as “this was unintuitive” and “that didn’t feel quite right” and you’ll be able to pinpoint the mechanisms at play creating that dissonance.