Battleship

I really love the Battleship game. In Battleship, players place ships on a grid, hidden from their opponent and try to guess where the opponent’s ships are so that they can sink them. The player who sinks all of the other person’s ships wins. This game fits into 3 game aesthetics: competition, discovery, and narrative.

Competitive

The competitive aspect of the game is most obvious: players are asserting dominance over one another by sinking each other’s ships. The fictitious narrative of war that overlays the game makes the game appear more serious and the competition more fierce. 

Discovery

The discovery aspect of the game manifests itself in the act of discovering where your opponents ships are. With each move, players discover more and more about where their opponent’s ships are located, spurring excitement in players to keep making moves. 

Narrative

The narrative aspect of the game depends on players, but often when I played Battleship at a younger age, my brother and I would bake in a narrative about different historical events that could be happening to spur such battles. Interestingly, sources posit that Battleship was invented in 1967, which was following WWII, one of the first major wars involving large ships and bombs. The game itself was likely inspired by the war.