Clickbait title: The SECRET connection between boardgames and theatre that videogames and cinema will never achieve.

There’s a lot to be said about how easily we can now find entertainment at the press of a button on our phones. The economics of digital media are truly staggering to the point we can have a somewhat sustainable system of low-cost subscriptions that give us everything we could ever watch/do etc.

Digital screens are also incredibly powerful in their ability to render basically anything we want, as long as we can tell a computer which colours the pixels should be. This has given us anything from the concept of editing to CGI.

So all of that being said, why does anyone play boardgames anymore? You know boardgames, the things made out of cardboard and wood with no graphics better than whatever you put on the custom dice. Boardgames where you have to schedule with friends and all have to meet up physically, where there is no matchmaking and no battlepass.

I don’t have exact statistics for this beyond viewer numbers on Shut Up and Sit Down videos, but boardgames seem to have gone through a bit of a boom in the last few years. Part of that was certainly due to extraordinary circumstances in the world. Still, they seem like such an antiquated medium compared to the trillion dollar video game industry?

Here’s the thesis of this blogpost: External factors like graphics, visual pizzazz and easy accessibility from your home are not necessary for enjoyment. Something that “looks good” tends to mainly be a very rough estimator of quality made for people who don’t know any better. It’s about as important as the image on the box of a piece of food.

In the specific case of boardgames vs. videogames, the actual enjoyment tends to come from the true core of game design of the thing. Now notice that I mean enjoyment here, which is not the same as “how much people actually play it”. Really videogames that cost too much as to allow themselves to offend anyone with difficulty have made an art out of stringing you along with psychological tricks. And this is why I like the nakedness of boardgames. Boardgames have much fewer strings to pull to dazzle you into thinking you enjoy yourself when actually you’re just waiting for the next dopamine hit. (Now the human mind is very easily fooled as such traditional gambling illogic can still string you along.)

Now there is of course some hitch in my own logic. Which is that I do not play boardgames alone. This has boardgame specific logic (AI done without a computer is basically always disappointing), but really the true reason is that doing a thing with other people is the whole point. Boardgames draw most of their interesting design from your interactions with other people who are sitting right across you. I cannot describe how different this is from a faceless mannequin in a first-person shooter match which is theoretically moved by another person.

I think the best way to play videogames is with other people, because of similar benefits. I think one of the most wonderful things about videogames is that they are an engaging activity with heavy interaction that you can play when geographically separated. But because videogames are in the extremely competitive market of competing with basically everything else you could be doing on your computer, they need to be dazzling. And videogames have taken this so far that I think I hear the criticism of “visual noise” about once a week. And boardgames, even their online implementations, just kind of don’t participate in that rat race. And that makes them better for focusing on your friends.

I think the brain is incredibly good at Kayfabe. We can read words on a page and imagine an entire universe. So in some way, it does not matter how abstract things get, how wooden the cubes are to represent dying soldiers in a war. I think what we do struggle with is “not being overwhelmed by all the fancy colours on our screen” or “not developing a gambling addiction”.