Matching Metaphor and Mechanics

As I discussed previously, the metaphor and mechanics of a game combine in various parts to produce a theme. The point of metaphor, you will recall, is to relate the mechanics to players in a more familiar manner. What happens to the theme of a game, then, when the metaphor and the mechanics are contradictory? At the minimum, it would be misleading - one might imagine a game about pirates in which sharing is a better strategy than plundering - whereas at worst it makes the game difficult to learn, because there are no shortcuts or mnemonics for remembering the rules. Soren Johnson recently remarked on a board game series which suffers from this problem.

It is a fairly simple thing to find congruence between metaphor and mechanics in a broad sense - simply find a real-world scenario that works according to rules similar to those which govern the game, or, if no such scenario exists, or it is unusable for any reason, invent one (which goes a long way to explain the proliferation of science fiction and fantasy in games, in comparison to other media). However, there may still be problems. Even a slight discrepancy between metaphor and mechanics can be jarring, at times - but, at other times, for different players, the discrepancy can be written off as a necessary concession to the mechanics. If you include a scenario which functions exactly like the game, then you more than likely have something so far removed from reality that it might as well be a decontextualized description of the mechanics.

Finding a scenario to relate your rules to the player is a difficult balance. In some situations, the scenario will be too much of a stretch. In others, the mechanics will too closely follow from the scenario, including the boring or tedious parts from which people play games to escape. Your scenario may be so outlandish that it fails to capture players' imaginations, or it may be so mundane that it does not excite them. But before all of this, the most important thing is making sure that metaphor and mechanics match.