The construction of the implied designer

Abstract

The main objective of this thesis was to test whether the newly developed concept of the implied designer (Van De Mosselaer & Gualeni, 2020) could be leveraged for game design and analysis. It set out to test if a design approach reliant on the implied designer would afford designers with more control and awareness of the possible messages that players could interpret whilst playing their games. While this thrust towards greater awareness is partly ideologically motivated, it was also driven by literature which supports the notion that designers aware of how players could interpret their games tend to produce works of greater diversity, sensibility, and nuance. The overarching theoretical framework of this thesis was the implied designer. In order to anchor this concept within the theoretical background of game studies, this thesis first introduced its analogon (and predecessor) from the field of literature, the implied author. The thesis then focussed on game studies and discussed procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007), ‘free play’ (Sicart, 2011), and the relation of values to meaning (Flanagan & Nissenbaum, 2014), then outlined its understanding of meaning going forward. It summarised the concept of the implied designer, its potential uses, and how it relates to the research questions of this thesis. Finally, it introduced its understanding of satire and the board game Construction BOOM! (Gualeni & Schellekens, 2020), which had been chosen for the experiment because the implied designer was integrated into its design process. Crucially, the designers had also documented their reasoning in a paper of their own (Schellekens et al., 2020), affording this thesis a unique opportunity to contrast and compare designer intentions to player interpretations. In order to analyse the game and how its players construct the implied designer, the thesis chose thematic analysis as its methodology. The study was composed of a quantitative questionnaire, a game session between two players, and a subsequent semi-structured interview. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, several limitations were imposed on the study, chief among them the fact that the board game had to be adapted into a digital environment. The discussion described the process by which the participants interacted with the game, their observations, and the patterns that emerged. This included the (mostly negative) effects of the digital environment, the participants’ complex attitude towards the player manual, and their tendency to adopt the vocabulary and perspective of the player roles. While many of the satirical strategies were successfully interpreted by the participants as the designers had intended, there were some issues with the visual layer and the themes of the game. While the former was largely due to the digital environment, the latter carried implications about the importance of the player’s culture, background, and transludic knowledge. The thesis then presented a framework for the construction of the implied designer in satirical board games; a process it posited as constant, iterative, and recursive. It explained how crucial interpreted values were in this process, their effects on the construction of the implied designer, and how this construct ultimately affected their interpretation of the game’s message. Finally, the thesis presented several avenues for further research that could broaden our understanding of the implied designer.