What Video Games Can Learn From Board Games

Video games already owe a lot to board games and tabletop RPGs. Most of the language we associate with digital entertainment – hit points and health potions, perks and buffs, special moves and levelling systems – can be traced back to Dungeons & Dragons or its kin. The classic pen and paper role playing game created a vernacular not just for fantastical settings, but for the way players interact with those settings.Video games took that language and ran, building systems based on the D20 mechanic that D&D popularised. But moving away from the table inherently changed the nature of gaming; choices narrowed, stories became less fluid and experiences became lonelier.While there are still obvious connections, board and video games are now two disparate entities, linked by a common ancestor but built on fundamentally different foundations. In a time when some claim the video game industry is beset by a malaise, trapped in a cycle of unimaginative iterations, perhaps board games can once again step up and offer some solutions?' says James Ernest, designer for Cheapass Games - a company specialising in downloadable, print your own board games.This in turn, has lead video games to the cul-de-sac it finds itself in today. Tabletop games have categories like board game, card game, dice game, and so on; but computer games have much stricter definitions of their categories - an FPS is defined by its style, as much as its format.' says Ernest. 'For Ernest, this is the most important point. The video game industry has difficulty discerning the difference between designers and developers. In the board game world, these are two separate jobs; a designer creates an original game mechanic from nothing, then a developer hones that game and makes it into something playable, explains Ernest.Board games don't need programmers; the engine that powers the game is a rule set based not on the mathematical limitations and possibilities of a machine, but on abstractions from a central theme.In video games you press the button to swing your sword and the game calculates your success, in board games you perform the maths yourself, and what the game provides is an imaginative link between you rolling your dice and a creature's head falling off.