While many video games exist today where the themes and rhetorics can be easily found in its narrative, the mechanics of games can also be a key factor in deriving rhetoric. In class, we played a variety of board and card games where themes can be derived from the mechanics. For example, my group and I played a Bob Ross game where it emphasized completing paintings quickly and having possession of a variety of art supplies as vehicles towards gaining victory. Thus, it is easy to derive from the game themes emphasizing the importance of speed and resource control. 

In addition, while most analogue games lack an active story with fleshed out characters to derive emotional stakes from, players will still find themselves invested emotionally during playtime. Players will experience both positive and negative emotions from events that happen in the game, usually events that set them back or put them ahead. These emotions are triggered by the mechanics of the games.

Games exhibit structures where each component of its structure is interrelated to other components (Fullerton, 42). As such, while video games can have more fleshed out narratives, I believe that more effort can be put into a lot of these video games where the mechanics are more interrelated to the narrative. The mechanics of a video game should be able to express the themes of the game’s premise as well as the narrative that surrounds it. In some games, I feel that narrative acts more like icing on the top rather than something that is baked into the structure of the game, such as games where the majority of storytelling is relayed through cutscenes. There also seems to be a lot of games where having the narrative take center-place means having simplified gameplay. This can be seen in games dubbed “walking simulators.” 

While I don’t think every game needs complex mechanics, I think it could still be exciting to see a game where the gameplay mechanics also express elements of the narrative and vice-versa. In board and card games, I feel that, while the narrative that surrounds them are more simplistic, the narrative is baked into the mechanics of the games themselves, while I think the opposite is more common in video games. 

Sources:Fullerton, Tracy. “The Structure of Games.” Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, 4th ed.