A game doesn’t need zombies, astronauts or Russian gnome submariners to tell a story. Even the most abstract games are story builders, as can be seen with chess. A game of chess has no setting, it’s not really a representation of war, but it has a beginning and an end, it has suspense and reversals, and it can be dramatically retold—so every game is a different story. Of course, this is even more true of a game of Zombicide.
Quotes by Bruno Faidutti
There is, however, an important difference between games on the one hand, and movies, or novels, or even music on the other. The game itself is not a story, it’s a story generator.
Gaming is both about freedom and constraints—it’s about making free decisions under strictly constraining rules, while real life is about making decisions of which we don’t know if they are really free, under extremely mysterious rules.
I like games that tell compelling stories, and that tell stories in both senses. It’s probably why I like to design games in which players cannot hide themselves behind the rules, behind the cards, behind their pawns—games that are actually played with and against the other players and not with and against cardboard components.
Games are simple and self-contained worlds built on metaphors, the three most frequent competitive ones being race, war and management.