Satirical Game Design - The Case of the Boardgame Construction BOOM!

To recognize satire, the audience must be aware of the context and the satirical intent of the work in question. Academic research on the possibilities and effects of satire in games is minimal, if compared with other rhetorical uses of playful interaction. This paper contributes to our understanding of satire in games by discussing and annotating design decisions that were meant to be taken satirically. More specifically, the focus of this paper is Construction BOOM!, a tile-laying boardgame designed by the some of the authors of the paper (Gualeni and Schellekens) themselves with the overt intention of satirizing the current situation of real-estate development in Malta. Part of our contribution consists in leveraging the notion of the ’implied designer’ as articulated by Van de Mosselaer and Gualeni to show how game elements participate in the player’s inferring a satiric implied designer for the game. The paper highlights the opportunities available for designers to implement satire into the various elements of a game and opens the door to further research into exploring how much these elements influence the perception of satire by players.