You won't design a meaningful game experience without a clear target meaning in your head.

The result will be a shallow and trivial experience with incoherent elements and the risk of sounding like a boring lecture. To solve this, you need a Thematic Structure for your game. It's a simple way to develop and deepen the structure of what you want to communicate and make your meaningful experience clear to you and powerful to the player.

This week I'll show you what a Thematic Structure is and a simple way to create one. If you need a refresher about the difference between Themes & Messages, you can read this.

Game meaning is your goal, so make it clear from the start.

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We’re going to discover:

• What Does A Thematic Structure Looks Like
• How To Create A Thematic Structure

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

What Does A Thematic Structure Looks Like

The Thematic Structure is part of your Game Direction.

It’s what meaning you want to communicate with your game. It’s not the only piece of the Game Direction but 100% the most important. A clear Thematic Structure in your Game Direction makes your game go beyond “mere fun” by showing your unique world perspective.

So it’s something you need to put attention and effort into if you want to create a deep, meaningful game experience.

Let’s see what does it look like.

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The Thematic Structure has 4 components.

• The Primary Theme: It’s the main Theme the whole game revolves around.
• The Secondary Themes: They all should support the Primary Theme.
• The Main Message: It’s the central statement you want to communicate and is always linked to the Primary Theme.
• The Secondary Messages: They are less visible than the Main one and are linked to one or more Secondary Themes.

Depending on the game’s size and scope, the Thematic Structure can be more or less complex.

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The Primary Theme and the Main Message are your lighting guide.

They are the 2 mandatory elements for a Thematic Structure. Secondary Themes and Messages are optional.

The primary Theme and Main Message are the game's foundation and give your the base layer of depth. If you delete them, your game collapses by losing coherence and meaning (if it doesn't, you've structured them poorly). They guide your decision-making and hold the reason why the game exists in the first place.

They also are a powerful constraint to your creative focus so that you can generate interesting ideas from them. Ideas arising from the game Theme and Message are 100% guaranteed to be coherent.

Adding Themes and Messages to the party can be pretty easy and satisfying.

But let me give you a word of caution.

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Be careful of your Thematic Structure complexity.

The more Themes and Messages you add, the more complex your game will become. Most of the time, this results in an overly complex Thematic Structure and an unnecessarily bloated game experience.

That's why many games (especially in the indie market) get away with one Primary Theme and one Main Message. And that's not a problem at all! They do it exceptionally well, resulting in a deep, meaningful experience.

It's better to have one Message done right than many done mediocre.

Now let's see some tips for creating a Thematic Structure.

How To Create A Thematic Structure

The Thematic Structure is a design tool, not an analysis one.

It’s a guiding tool for the Game Designer, not the player. You can and should, analyze the meaning of other games and develop your interpretation of their Themes and Messages. But using the Thematic Structure is not so helpful since you’ll never know what the Author thought about.

As for the meaning analysis and how to use it in Game Design, we’ll talk about it in the future.

Now I’ll give you some simple guidelines to define your Thematic Structure.

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Start building the Thematic Structure in the Concept Phase.

Since it’s part of the Game Direction, you should define your Themes and Messages as early as possible in the development. You can start expanding your game idea from what you want (gameplay, art style, theme and message, etc.) but keep everything coherent. Don’t leave the Thematic Structure aside for too long. Otherwise, you’ll feel lost and could end up with inconsistent game elements or forced contextualizations.

But what’s your first step to properly creating a Thematic Structure?

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Set your Primary Theme and Main Message.

As we’ve said, they both set the baseline of your Game Target Experience. Start by being clear and explicit about the Theme you want to discuss in your game. Then choose one of its Messages as the main one you want to communicate to the player.

Be specific about the Message, don’t just write it in a document corner as a side note. Describe it in detail (research if you lack knowledge) until you can fully explain it to someone else.

The sharper it’s in your mind, the better you’ll manage it.

If you’re not working on a big production game, I suggest you stop here; otherwise, you can…

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Add Secondary Themes and Messages without overdoing it.

Adding Secondary elements to your Thematic Structure has 2 main purposes. First, it makes your game deeper by giving the player more thinking material. Second, it makes your Main Message stronger. Despite your game being a big production, you need to focus on creating a few things of high quality and not more things for the sake of it. To make Secondary Themes and Messages effective, they must support the Primary Theme.

A simple example could be having “Death” (Primary Theme) and “Love” (Secondary Theme). You can choose a Message for the “Love” theme that links to “Death” to make it relevant (for example, “We love because we need to die”).

Of course, this is just planning; making it visible and interesting in the game is another story we’ll see in detail in further episodes.

Building a Thematic Structure is the baseline for a meaningful experience.

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Key Takeaways:

• The Thematic Structure is part of the Game Direction and has 4 components.
• The Primary Theme and Main Message are your lighting guide.
• Start building your Thematic Structure as soon as possible.
• Most games get away exceptionally with one Theme and one Message.