The White Castle
April 3, 2024 | ≈ 914 words | The White Castle theme
Thoughts on The White Castle and theme in board games
ok so let’s talk about theme. I had this thing planned for a long time. like 2 years long, but I finally have something to attach it to. I played The White Castle this past Monday and I could not believe how much of an issue I had simply understanding what the purpose of any of my actions were. Not in the mechanics, or the result, or the rules of the actions, but simply why. And not just why. Who, what, when, where, and why were all things that were left unexplained and I didn’t care about a single thing that I was doing in the game. I never thought that having that context or that motivation was a bad thing, and in fact I never really cared about getting it (and neither did the person teaching me the game). I’ve thought a lot about learning games, I’ve thought a lot about playing games, and I’ve thought a lot about what I think theme in games mean, but I didn’t realize until White Castle how crucially linked theme is to simply giving a thing meaning. As atomically-bonded as 100 being higher than 90 and the knight moving in an L-shape, theme gives the nuclear level subconscious understanding of the game letting players intuit the motions and changes in them. Separate from understanding rules, theme gives the underlying context that targets our human understanding, the thing that lets us use our human heuristics to be able to play. It’s the buffer that prevents us from having to do actual counting or math, like catching a ball coming at us without having to do projectile motion calculations in real time consciously. The White Castle is a board game played on bare-metal. We etch each move onto the open processing unit of the game, manually plugging and unplugging switches to change the path of electricity, unlocking the clutch from the gears one gear at a time until we get to the correct gear to move along as if the designers decided not to give me a simple button to click to give me some fucking food.
I always thought theme was immersion and evocation. Immersion defined as the sense of being in the game and evocation defined as feeling like you’re doing what someone in the game would feel. But now I understand, theme is also abstraction. Theme does the heavy lifting of the core understanding, binding color and object to names. Putting a card on the table becomes summoning a monster, rolling a die becomes pulling the trigger and hitting a target, racing cars means wanting to move your piece of plastic faster than everyone else around color coded spaces. White Castle is none of these things. I can’t even call the game dry. The game is textureless.
And I can’t stop thinking about it. After playing, I said “this is the epitome of the modern cube pushing euro. If this is what board games become, I am done playing board games”. I understood why people loved the game. I could see the puzzle and imagine the enjoyment people could have mulling over the vast decisions and the planning and the tactics and the tension. But I hated every second of thinking whether red was better than white, and if 6 and 1 was better than 4 and 3. I hated that the most fun part of the game was realizing that right-side 3 black allows you to activate right-side 3 black again which allows you do once again activate right-side 1 black and fuck that entire sentence. I had found the most fun and addicting thing I could do in the infinitely variable game and found it unsatisfying and joyless.
And yet, my mind lingers on every action I took that game. All 9 actions were countable, almost memorizable, like they were etched directly onto the metal machinery that is my brain. The game has no immersion: the edo period samurai bullshit slipped off the glassy exterior of the mechanics. The game had no evocation: no amount of hiring gardeners made me feel like I was improving the state of my castle, or did they evoke any feeling besides feeling like I need to plan for the conversions they give me at the end of the round.
And yet again, those 9 turns. The 9 dice I have to place, I remember them all. Left or right, 1 through 6, left-side, middle, right-side, meaningless mechanics, they all attach to my mind. Yes, I have to take left this round because left sets me up for the other 2 turns, but right lets me avoid the cost on right-side. These stupid fucking sentences stick in my head, even three days later. Red, white, and black become process_1, process_2, and process_3. proc_1 gives me nothing but blocks their next move, proc_2, and proc_3 give nothing this game, need to wait until the numbers change for those processes. The lack of theme wears down on me and the actions feel like stringing the raw text together out of these processes and objects trying to force my mind to hook onto any meaning behind these combination of letters. A value becomes a variable, and mechanics become functions, and proc_17 is a game winning move when alternating with white_6. I can see the narrow path. I just need to iterate a few times through the second loop…
Or whatever.