Dev Take Tuesday - Flavor in Stages

Last week I attended a lovely presentation at the University of Utah about board game design and storytelling. The two presenters, Alf Seegert and Ryan Laukat, shared insights from their experience as board game designers and concluded the presentation with a Q&A session. Both presenters offered their advice on how to build lore and storytelling into a game beyond the traditional“flavor text” some games offer.

Flavor text, for those unfamiliar with the term, refers to narrative- or theme-building snippets of text added to different components of a game. Magic: the Gathering might be the most famous example, but other games like Apples to Apples utilize the technique. Flavor text allows game designers to add a dash of seasoning to their games without needing to meddle with the game’s mechanics too much.

A bit of flavor text really spices up an otherwise bland Magic card (Image source).

But is this the most effective way to add seasoning? Professional cooks say you should add seasoning in stages instead of simply adding them at the end. Salt, for example, will benefit meat, vegetables, and starches in distinct ways if added early in the process. In some ways, flavor text is akin to just giving the salt shaker to the players—they can add it to their gameplay experience if they want, but many players simply ignore it and “eat” what’s in front of them. This isn’t always a bad thing—lock gameplay behind too much narrative and some players might just push the dish away. However, if your goal as a designer is to share a meaningful story or depict a beloved theme alongside your game mechanics, you might want to cook some of that flavor into your game from the start.

The Road to Canterbury's game board, featuring the seven deadly sins (Image source).

Alf Seegert, in his game The Road to Canterbury, showed how the mechanics and even the material components of a game can build a theme by themselves. Playing as a pardoner, everything used to play the game invokes a unique story about the commodification of sins—an effect achieved without requiring players to read non-gameplay material. As video game designers, we need to remember the power of building flavor directly into our game mechanics. One example that always sticks out to me is Bloodborne’s “rally” system. To encourage aggressive gameplay and make the player feel like the hunter they are supposed to be, players can recover recently lost health by attacking enemies. A good deal of character building comes from that mechanic alone—what type of person would act with such fearlessness and ferocity in the face of such horror?

The first-person flavor text of Empires of the Void II (Image source).

Ryan Laukat shared how he “tricked” players into reading flavor text in his game Empires of the Void II. Certain cards have first-person actions written at the top of the card (instead of the bottom, where flavor text is usually located). Because the text uses a first-person perspective, more players would read the text since it seemed to naturally describe what they wanted to do in game. From a video game design standpoint, we could probably put more thought into how we name actions and skills, or how we introduce abilities and mechanics to the player. Describe mechanics clearly, but use those moments to impart a bit of flavor into the game as well.

Overall, I think there’s a lot for video game designers to learn from board game design, despite the vast differences in development and distribution. I look forward to covering more board games on Dev Take Tuesday, as well as adding flavor in stages to our game, Alkanaur.