The 6 Emotional Arcs of Stories

What distinguishes Romeo & Juliet from Spartacus? OK, so there are some obvious answers to that but I want to look deeper today. To look at it… emotionally. Romeo & Juliet is, of course, the prototypical Tragedy, from that first meeting it’s an inevitable slide to the grave. Spartacus, meanwhile, has a slightly more complicated emotional story, starting out as a lowly slave, he escapes, leading a slave revolt against the Roman Empire (high!), which is ultimately crushed (very much low!). While both stories end unhappily, they start in very different places, and go through different changes. They have different emotional arcs.

A recent scientific article characterised some 2000 stories by their emotional arcs, demonstrating the presence of 6 core emotional arcs to story telling. You can see them all in the pretty figure below.

You’ve got the classic “rags to riches” story (1), the “tragedy” of Romeo and Juliet (2), and our Spartacus example (4). These show us the broadest strokes of the emotional tone across the story, and ignores the smaller fluctuations in tone from paragraph to paragraph, say.

But what has all this to do with board games? Well, board games tell stories too! We certainly go through our own emotional highs and lows as we play, so these broad emotional arcs from books, should also be found if we go looking in board games. So that is what I’ve tried to do below, and it leads to some interesting observations…

From Rags to Riches: The Engine Builder Story

The easiest arc to apply to board games by far was also one the simplest: the classic “rags to riches” story. To me, this screams engine builder! All of the innumerable euro games that start you out with next to nothing and have you build up an economy, ramping up and up to the end of the game. Even if you foul up and lose, you’ll still be in a better place than you started with and that still gives you a satisfying feeling. I chose Splendor as an example as not only is it a great game (you can see our review here) it is also one of the purest, and most accessible, engine builders out there.

The Tragedy of Co-ops

The Tragedy starts off so well, no missions failed, only a few disease cubes on the board, but the situation is only getting worse from there. In The Resistance, your suspicions only get worse, the tension and confusion greater, as missions fail and accusations of betrayal are thrown around. In Pandemic, more and more cubes come out on the board, the situation getting ever more desperate as you can never keep on top of everything (such is the genius of the design).

But it’s not all doom and gloom is it? You can cure the diseases in Pandemic and win, or figure out who the traitors are in The Resistance. The resistance traitors will also experience a very different emotional arc if they win, the opposite to the good guys.

Lesson – Board games allow us to tell our own stories

A single game, a single play of a game even, can give rise to different emotional arcs. Whether you win or lose a co-op most certainly tells a different story. The “rags to riches” story of an engine builder can quickly turn into a “Spartacus” (4) if your engine breaks down or your opponents employ some aggressive player interaction, shall we say. A good war game can give all kinds of arcs depending on how the battle plays out.

While a co-op might let you win, this is often a sudden change in your emotional state. Pandemic will keep on the pressure until the very end. You might only be a single turn from failure when you manage to cure that last disease. Likewise, discovering you are going to lose might turn your “rags to riches” into a “Spartacus”. Controlling these changes in emotion is a key challenge for designers.

Betrayal at House in the Hole

The third story arc is known as the “man in a hole”. Man falls in hole (low), man is rescued or escapes from hole (high). It can be a bit deeper than that, but that’s the fundamentals. This was already a challenging arc to fit to board games, beyond the end game high of winning a co-op. Yes, that technically follows this arc but only a poor co-op has the emotional up swing at any point before the very end of the game. I think the best game to capture this arc is Betrayal at House on the Hill (a favourite of ours), with the bottom of the hole dead on the mid game reveal of the traitor and the scenario to be played. Before this you have the build up as haunt rolls get harder and harder, after you develop and build a plan for how you’re going to survive or destroy (as appropriate). Regardless of how it ends, that is an emotionally positive experience.

Lewis & Spartacus?

We always build up, but we so rarely see the fall (eg the fall of empires), yet these can be some of the most powerful emotional stories. The only board game example I can think of is when you lose a racing game like Lewis & Clark. Race games sometimes have this issue with being able to see the race leader so far out in the lead that they cannot be caught. What started out hopeful and positive has switched to a very negative feeling for the final part of the game. That’s not great!

Lesson – Use negative emotions constructively for more powerful experiences

We typically see games try to avoid this negative emotional outcome. But is there a way we can use this emotional arc positively? After all, books and films with negative story arcs remain perennially popular, even video games have learnt the power inherent in utilising negative emotions in a powerful way that makes people want to consume them. I feel like it is a sign of a medium maturing that it can feel comfortable creating these negative emotional end states. It took video games a long time to reach this point. Do board games need to discover their own capacity for mature subject matter beyond casual fun?

I think we’ve already seen this in games like Freedom: The Underground Railroad, where even if you win you feel dirty for what you sometimes had to do to achieve that victory. It makes the game so much more important and powerful for that. The important thing is to not give players negative emotions without purpose. But if you can do so, and they can appreciate that purpose, then you’re set for something truly great.

Part of the challenge here is board gaming’s focus on competitive, player verses player experiences. This ultimately boils down the emotional state to winners and losers, and it might be difficult to create meaningful narrative arcs within that context. But won’t it be exciting to try?

More complex emotional arcs

The arcs for “Cinderella” (5) and “Oedipus” (6) show a degree of variation that I struggle to connect them with board games. The closest I could think of was Far Space Foundry, in which the game is divided into two distinct phases. In the first you are mining and shipping off raw materials, which are used in the second half of the game to produce goods. I’ve not had chance to play it, but it suggests to me two separate engine builder segments, where you are in some ways emotionally reset between phases. You’ve done the best you can in phase 1, now to try phase 2. This 2 (or more) phase gameplay might be one way of capturing advanced emotional arcs. Another way was demonstrated by Pandemic: Legacy. As you play through the campaign, the game twists and turns and most certainly takes you through a number of emotional peaks and troughs. Of course this was only on the scale of the campaign. I imagine a game that could achieve this would be TIME Stories, with its focus on narrative and the capability to really tell a story.

Then I realised this was more representative of my bias towards Euro game mechanisms. These more complex story arcs were present all along in old American style games: Twilight Imperium, 1830, even modern day Cthulhu Wars. The key element shared by all these is the high degree of player interaction (to put it politely). They often relied on players ganging up on the perceived leader. You often spend time building up and achieving things (positive), only to be knocked back (negative) and need to build up again. This introduced it’s own problems though. Primarily because negative emotions, when not used for some greater purpose are purely that, negative. Euro games did their best to eliminate much of these negative emotions but in so doing lost the more interesting emotional arcs.

Board gaming is starting to turn back to these older style of games, taking what designers have learnt from European games with them. Star Wars: Rebellion by all accounts shows a tremendous ebb and flow as the upper hand shifts between Rebel and Empire players over the course of the game. And it does so without resorting to turn on the leader style mechanics. This level of emotional complexity is yet to be seen in economic-style euro games which is perhaps why so many of these games are accused of being dry and lacking in story.

Lesson – More complex story arcs sell better

One fascinating out come from the research was that stories with the more complex emotional arcs (4,5,6) all showed much higher popularity than the simpler arcs. This has a huge significance for board games. The relative absence (as far as I can tell) of complex emotional arcs in euro games highlights a real design space to explore, and one that if other media is anything to go by, could be hugely successful if done well. The triumphant success of Pandemic: Legacy is in no small part due to this focus on story.

Conclusions

When I started out on writing this article, I didn’t think it would be as difficult as it was to attribute the 6 basic emotional arcs to board games. It appears that Euro games as experiences are still generally focused on the two simplest emotional arcs; the rags to riches story of most engine building type euro games and the tragedy playing out in a co-op. While classic “Ameritrash” games could certainly let you experience some negative emotions (I don’t think I’ve ever been as angry as I have during one game of Twilight Imperium) they did so without a higher purpose. Can we create board games that use negative emotions constructively? If there’s one great challenge for board game design to overcome, I’d say it might be this.

The more I’ve written for this article, and it is quite a lot now, the more it has me thinking about this subject. I hope to return to this subject again in future (and if I do I’ll add links at the bottom here). For now though, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

The 6 Emotional Arcs of Stories