Aiden Pinuelas, Cabinets of Curiosities, P1: Reflection
Going into P1, I knew a key interest of mine was to design a game which told a historical narrative. That is something I personally desire in all games I enjoy. However, lately, all the past few games I have designed for my own personal self have all used the same CDG system to do this (CDG is a game system for telling historical narratives initially developed in 1993’s We the People). I worried I was getting into a rut, unable to devise for myself new ideas on how to use game mechanics to provide emergent narrative. When the opportunity arose to work on creating a game about how museums source their artifacts with a group, I was grateful both for the opportunity to try and figure out how to infuse history into the game and to have other people to help come up with mechanical ideas.
The most obvious way we had the game create historical narrative was by having event cards. Each game round took place in a different period of time, advancing forward, and the events players drew would help shape the world players interacted with. However, the far stronger historical narrative comes from the game’s inherent tension between stolen artifacts and repatriation. Mechanically, purchasing stolen artifacts makes museums the most money given their cheap price, however, since the museum with the most stolen artifacts is punished at the end of the game, the natural result is that players will buy stolen artifacts early in the game and potentially repatriate them near the end. In doing so, players instinctively follow the same historical developments of real museums, in the past participating in colonialism and today reckoning with those prior actions.
Later, when we split artifacts into three decks, this allowed a nice opportunity to show a little bit of art history. The warfare cards, which players most usually purchase early game, tend to be older artworks, meanwhile the commission cards, which players most usually purchase near the end, tend to be modern artworks. As such, the game has this nice subtle emergent subnarrative of art history, which I think adds to the historical experience and makes the feeling of being a museum more reality. When creating the artwork for the game board, I also utilized the same idea to show progress of time. The warfare section uses an old painting, the market section a black-and-white photo, and the commission section a modern day color photo.
Ultimately, these elements of historical narrative combined, I believe, subconsciously helped players in grounding them within the world and history of these museums, which in turn allowed the game to better educate about the colonial legacy museums have than if the game was missing this historical dimension. As for myself personally, I do feel as though I have successfully learned new ways to incorporate historical narratives via mechanics, which I hope to carry into my future games.
