The vast majority of games are shallow and forgettable experiences.

There's no authorial vision, no interesting meanings for the player; they are just games for the sake of being games. You can invert this detrimental trend by making game ideas generate from a Theme and not out of thin air. Doing this makes your design process focused, your experience becomes meaningful, and you won't treat players like hamsters mindlessly running on a wheel.

This week I'll show you how you can find the perfect Theme for your next meaningful game by practicing Themeography.

To design interesting games, we need interested Game Designers.

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We’re going to discover:

• The Raw Material Of Meaningful Games
• How To See The World In Themes

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

The Raw Material Of Meaningful Games

Practicing Themeography means gaining knowledge about a Theme to inform your design.

First and foremost, let’s define what we’re talking about. Themeography is the process of exploring and describing Themes by extracting meaning from the world around us.

If you find yourself a bit confused, don’t worry. By the end of this piece, you’ll know what I mean. Making a game about a Theme (meaningful game) means understanding that Theme pretty well to represent it in the game properly. Gaining knowledge about a Theme involves researching and understanding. And this is the core of what Themeography is about.

You need to build up as much knowledge as possible about the Theme you want to talk about to leverage it in your game.

But there’s a caveat that can make your design process going like crazy.

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Themeography is not a just-in-time activity.

Imagine choosing to design a game about “Death”. Yet, you know nothing about Death besides the basic and trivial fact that we all need to die.

To fill this gap, the only thing you can do is research hard. And that’s a good practice, but it’s too late since you also need to iterate on the game and fill all other development needs. Making everything all at once it’s tough.

Especially if you consider that Theme and game must be coherent. This means that if you suddenly discover something new about Death, you need to adapt the rest of the game.

This will quickly lead to a mess and slow your design process.

So how to solve this?

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Explore a Theme before you want to make a game about it.

The core of Themeography is curiosity. The same curiosity drives every creative (Game Designer included) to pursue the craft.

So the focus must be on the Theme and not the game. You need to explore a Theme to make a game about it, not the other way around. The type of game doesn’t matter since, once you choose to make a game about a Theme, you’ll have enough knowledge to select the best one.

By doing this upfront work, your design process for exploring your game idea will be much more focused and efficient. A bit of just-in-time research will always be helpful, but the main concepts must already be crystal clear.

No more crazy changes to your design for no reason.

If done well, Themeography is so powerful that it deletes one of the most discussed issues of our industry: Ludonarrative Dissonance.

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Generating ideas from Themeography 100% secure coherence.

Gaining knowledge about a Theme you want to design a game about is the best way to create your inspiration bank. You leverage the hard work of your whole life (Themeography) to have a powerful source to generate game and feature ideas.

As you can see, the creative process doesn’t have to be random. In fact, it shouldn’t be since you’ll have no control over the outcome and end up with incoherent elements. As we’ve said in a previous episode, coherence is the core of aesthetic value, and Themeography guarantees it.

If all feature ideas come from your Theme (or it’s linked to it), your game can’t suffer from Ludonarrative Dissonance. Everything will be in harmony with everything else because the Theme keeps everything balanced.

Let’s now take a look at Themeography in practice.

How To See The World In Themes

Pay attention to what happens around you.

You’ll never reach a moment where you know everything about a topic. And, as any veteran Game Designer knows, the world always has something new to discover and create a game about.

So Themeography is a long-life process, and the sooner you start, the better. It means keeping your mind open to everything and being triggered by something that interests you. And when I say “everything”, I mean anything you could interpret meaningfully. Particular events, interesting chats, movies, songs, books, video games, theater plays, web articles, gastronomic experiences, etc.

In practice, it’s a note-taking process to record everything that instinctively triggers your interest in a meaningful way.

But what do you need to write?

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Focus on the meaning, not the content.

Just reporting the content of what happened is not very useful. You also need to add a meaningful interpretation of it. Ask yourself: “What is this experience teaching/trying to tell me?”.

If you’re reading or watching some educational content about a Theme, it will be easier since you already have the meaning. But for some events (life experience, movies, fiction books, etc.), you need to extract the meaning from them through interpretation. Your personal takeaways about a concept are key.

If you engage in Themeography intentionally and for a long enough time, you’ll build your Creative Engine.

I’ll show you a practical example in future episodes, but let’s understand why it’s useful.

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A Creative Engine exponentially fulfills your creative potential.

Keeping everything about a Theme in your head is physically impossible. So a Creative Engine is not abstract (I use Obsidian, for example) but a powerful tool to structure your Creative Process.

Inside the Creative Engine, every note you make is grouped by Theme, so it’s easy to find. And when you need inspiration, you have your personal Google search engine for all the Themes that interest you.

By filling up your Creative Engine with Themeography, you’ll gain 2 main benefits:

• You get used to reasoning about meaning and sharpen your interpretations.
• You build a pile of knowledge about your favorite Themes.

The more you train your Themeography muscle, the more interesting the world will be for you.

This is why famous creatives seem to think from another planet for us.

It’s not magic, but just a structured Creative Process.

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A Creative Process built on Themeography is an unfair advantage.

To design meaningful games, the Creative Process is one of the most crucial aspects for a Game Designer. It makes you generate high-quality ideas and develop your own Game Design style on how you express yourself. Also, your Game Direction will be more solid and easy to define.

Very few people master this practice, so you’ll have an unfair advantage that will make you stand out from the noise.

Creativity is a “brain muscle”, and Themeography is how you weightlift.

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Key Takeaways:

• Practicing Themeography means gaining knowledge about a Theme to inform your design.
• Explore a Theme before you want to make a game about it.
• Pay attention to what happens around you.
• Focus on the meaning, not the content.