It has been said that autistic people are drawn to games because games have clear, fixed rules, that are written down so everyone knows them, and that way, nobody can get mad.

Not a single part of that is true.

This is not a post about autistic people, not least because autistic people are extremely difficult to generalize about. If you’ve met one person with autism (like me), you’ve met one person with autism. This is a post about games, and gaming literacy. We know that increasingly as a culture we are lacking in any kind of cinematic literacy, but that might be okay because cinema as a cultural touchstone might be dying. Games, on the other hand, are the medium of the 21st century. This is Generation Game and we’re all playing them and we desperately need to understand them. And the most important thing we need to understand about them is we are all playing them differently, for different reasons, with different goals, and with different rules.

The other night we were watching Taskmaster, a British panel show where comedians are asked to do a variety of strange and difficult tasks. Some of them have built-in loopholes or tricks to solving them. Some of them are oddly worded enough so one can FIND loopholes. Some of them are deliberately deceptive to make them “harder”. In this particular episode, a comedian had found that they were skillful at dragging a cup of water along the floor on toilet paper, without the toilet paper breaking, but when they thought they had won they were disqualified because of a minor error they’d committed in picking up the cup. In a split second, they ran off stage, deeply upset and the footage cut sharply. Taskmaster, as a show, is about arguing over rules and being a stickler (except when the host decides differently) and mostly that is in good fun.

Except when it isn’t.

The comedian wasn’t overly distressed but in that moment, they felt incredibly attacked. They felt things were unfair. They thought people were being mean. And all of that is perfectly normal and perfectly understandable. In any game, but particularly one where you’re allowed to think outside the box…except not TOO far outside the box. (That will ALSO be punished.) But all games are unclear. All games rely on hidden assumptions. All games run differently in different people’s heads. And all games are potentially unsafe. And we absolutely must start from that position, and stop pretending they aren’t.

What’s more, we need to stop pretending that the rules are some kind of saviour to prevent confusion, some kind of shield against safety. They aren’t. At best, they can be technically correct, which is not the best kind of correct. It is the WORST kind of correct (that’s why the Futurama bit was a joke). Technically correct is the most intellectually bereft. The least interrogated. The most cruel stance. The most blind option.

Don’t get me wrong though: it is a perfectly viable way to play a game though. It’s just not the only way to play a game and not usually the safest or kindest way. It is valid though, and it is also isn’t fair to people who get their fun from this kind of play to say they are necessarily bad-fun or spoilsports. The problem is that these people often think their way of playing games is not only the only way to play, but the point of games in the first place.

Another myth about autistic people (like me) is we have strong opinions about things. Just as often, when we realize things are completely arbitrary, we back away and let the people who think rules exist decide. This is my approach to games: I ask people what they think the rules should be, because I know they probably have a strong emotional answer (just think about how angry people go about Hasbro explaining that in Uno you can’t stack Draw cards). And again: that’s good. Games should be things we care about! But we also need to realize there ISNT AN ANSWER. And it’s not just me that says so: the legendary David Parlett remarked that the only rule that matters is that everyone at the table is playing by the same ones, and the most authoritative rulebook is the one “closest to hand”. In other words, what matters is agreeing on something quickly, because the play is the thing. Of course, this is also a “style” of play. A value of gaming.

(If you don’t believe me and David about their being no right answer to the rules of games, remember how people decided to ignore Hasbro about the official rules of Uno. Rules are what we think they are. There is no authority to appeal to except our own ego. And we need to stop pretending otherwise.)

We’re starting to learn this, slowly. We are pushing back against the idea that everyone should like every game, out of sheer necessity of being more mainstream. But of course if someone puts a game on the table, our old social cues suggest we should just suck it up and play, no matter what our preferences or styles or values. And that kind of philosophy (along with “it’s just a game”) is another value of gaming, and one we just assume and don’t interrogate and ends up causing harm.

But we are making progress. I have a dear friend who, when he plays a game, he is as cut-throat as the rules apply, and looks for every single possible edge he can find. If it isn’t specifically prevented, he will lunge for it and use it, and he also plays to crush his opponents hard. Even in shared storytelling games, he plays games to DESTROY. I don’t like that. But I also get WHY he likes that. And we’re able to talk about it. I’m not going to play many games with him unless we figure out how to balance my needs and his. But I’m also not going to force him to play a cooperative game and have no fun. I understand why that’s no fun for him. A cooperative game actually frightens him and frustrates him because his victory is in the hands of someone he cannot control. A cut-throat game or a bluffing game frightens me and frustrates me because I am terrified of being hurt or hurting others with in game actions. And while some mechanics can make these things better, they can’t change our inherent tastes and values. We’re able to admit this without being seen as party poopers, and talk about it without being ashamed of being lacking in some way. But too many people aren’t. They’re not aware of their gaming tastes and values. They don’t feel able to explain them. They don’t realize there are options that let them control what they play and find games that don’t effect them in those ways. This is what we need.

This is gaming literacy, the thing we lack. What we have instead is an endless, mostly incorrect, list of mechanics and guesses about “heaviness” on BGG. And people insisting their view of the game and their gaming values are the correct ones. And no ability to interrupt the problem this causes. And sometimes, worst of all, we take PRIDE in “losing friends” from anti-social play!

One thing I know is dogs, and dogs have incredibly complex and complicated rituals around games too. They also have games that turn into fights all the time. Not every dog likes the same games or thinks about games the same way. And there are also dogs who are often called “the fun police” or “party poopers”, who will see games happening that are making them anxious and try to shut those games down. Sometimes those games aren’t quite getting out of control, but a lot of time they are – the dogs are tending towards a fight. So the fun-police-dog does what is called splitting – they will run between the two dogs, splitting up the game. Or they’ll bark and be agitated, or go seek out a human, or do something else that INTERRUPTS the game. Because they know that the next step is a fight.

Slowly, we are getting language and being able to talk about these things. The next step is learning what dogs know: not all people should be playing all games, and we need to stop pretending otherwise, and break things up before there’s hurt feelings. We need to figure out our gaming values and then wear them on our sleeves, loud and clear, and be proud of them, not ashamed. And we need to understand that games are never safe, rules are never clear, the magic circle is always bleeding, and so we have to be careful. And we have to be kind.

Long ago, before the generation gap, geeks weren’t mainstream or cool. And geeks were annoying, in many different ways. So much so, that twenty years ago (god I’m so old) someone wrote an internet article called The Five Geek Social Fallacies, about things geeks believed to be true but were absolutely not the case. They provided a summary of the basic view that geeks had of themselves. They saw themselves defined not at all by the media they liked, but that they were not judgmental. They were not ostracizers. Those who were outside the subculture were mainstream types who judged things harshly simply because of an acquired stigma. Those INSIDE did not judge. They accepted. They saw PAST stigmas and prejudices, to the true value of things.

You can see in that social fallacies how that caused problems: geeks inside the group ended up being permitted to be anything, even things that were cruel or disgusting. It also coloured everyone outside as a monster, and blind. The theory went that the only reason people didn’t like geek things – typically things like science fiction, fantasy, superheroes, comics, board games, roleplaying games – was because of the stigma attached. If only the world could see past this stigma, to not be blinded by their mainstream jock brains, they would see that these things were actually high quality. And there was actually something to this. I remember the Australian attorney general explaining that Star Trek The Next Generation was a smart show for smart people, and a nice relief from the depressing world of politics. I also remember telling someone that Buffy the Vampire Show was a show for geeks, and he, lover of Buffy, almost punched me in the face. That guy was a community stage actor and a low-key goth, who walked with a skull cane, but he did not like being called a geek or a nerd. He was crazy, but not unrepresentative. The word had a barb to it, and it attached to things.

Of course, this idea wasn’t as true as we all believed. It was much the same as the ideas of the myth of social transitivity. Since geeks were all wise and accepting and all liked the same things, then all geeks were all friends, and we all hung out together – and by extension, we were all good, smart people. This wasn’t true, and similarly all geek media wasn’t magically for everyone or always good. This may sound crazy these days! It boggles the mind that an average person knows who Thanos is or can list of the code of the Sith; this is a new world and it certainly suggests that everyone does like genre media. Anime has also grown to meet wide popularity and of course, games have surged into popular consciousness. Even Dungeons and goddamn Dragons is becoming a household name.

On the other hand, adults buying comics is still rare. Apart from a few exceptions, the Harry Potter power of fantasy is slowing down and also not extending beyond young adult books. There hasn’t been a new Game of Thrones book series on the best seller list, or winning the Booker Prize. Marvel fatigue is drawing in and Top Gun and Mission Impossible are back on top of box-office behemoths. Maybe this isn’t as big a shift as we think it is, or as lasting a one.

What’s happening is perhaps not the growing of these things into a larger, popular acceptance, but the growing of them into just larger, more acceptable fanbases.

Back in the day, geek transitivity of media was pretty much absolute. If you liked fantasy books, you liked sf books, you watched trek, you liked star wars, you played video games, you owned a DnD rulebook, you joined the anime club at school. It was all the same. I remember when Charmed first came out and nerds loyally watched it until they realized it wasn’t really for 14 year old boys. It was about magic, so it was nerd TV. We watched it. We catalogued it. We wrote down how the powers worked. But as shows like Buffy and Charmed proved that these stories had much wider audiences, geek began to fragment. If you didn’t have an anime club, you didn’t get all those references. If you thought Buffy was for girls, you went off and played DnD. And under the surface was this geek idea that always underlined everything: that WE were the clever one and those OUTSIDE were the foolish one. So if they didn’t get anime, then they weren’t anime nerds. They were otaku, normies.

And at the same time, the markets were making this worse by feeding more and more into deep, walled-off near-cult like followings. You either cared that the X Men were at war with the Avengers and bought every single holographic comic cover, or you weren’t a True Comic Nerd. Star Trek didn’t prove intellectuals could dream of a future where humanity expressed the best of themselves, or enjoy a show with rich drama and deep political and philosophical themes even if there were ray guns, it proved that you could make a certain demographic tie their identity to a piece of cheap plastic in the shape of a thing from the show. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and many others had already rewritten the lives of children around toys in the 80s – something we celebrate instead of being horrified about, something that only occurred because Reagan and friends lifted the rules against advertising to children – the 90s and early noughties proved they could do this to adults as well.

And so this modern fandom became not at all what geekiness used to be. It instead became a series of deep wells, or walled cities, designed to pull you in and make you one of them. Once inside, you talk about your gateway drug that showed you the hobby. You show off not your experiences but your collections. You store your hobby under glass, whatever it is. And even though superheroes are mainstream now, the point is to be obsessed by them. Instead of being happy that people can find something interesting in stories despite the stigma of having funny men in mask and capes, we’ve decided that the masks and capes are the important thing. Star Wars and Trek know this which is why you have Star Wars Rebels for kids and Andor for the dads; lock them into their brand whatever their tastes.

And this means though that you can’t suggest people might enjoy Star Wars, because Star Wars is barely a thing any more. As much as aesthetics can help, the vast gulf between the deconstruction of how fascism consumes us faster than we can adapt to it (Andor) is not going to entertain someone looking for a fantasy adventure.

Once upon a time, I could say “Hey, if you like world war two films, or classic Westerns, you might like Star Wars, it’s a bit of both, and it’s a rollocking great adventure. Don’t be put off by the weirdos dressed as wookies. That’s not what matters. This is for everyone. It’s got things that appeal to anyone who likes a good adventure film.” Yes, I can say that yes, Andor is good if you like a poetic treatise on political sacrifice and the impossibility of trust in a world at war, but I’m not really saying “it’s for everyone”. In fact, if you don’t really like Star Wars, it might be hard to pull those themes out. You might want to watch a war film instead. Or I might say, just ignore the star wars stuff, it’s just there to get Tony Gilroy’s story on TV. I’m not inviting you into a larger world without prejudice. In fact, I don’t want you in that world because it’s creepy. It’s designed entirely to get you to go to theme parks, and not see story any more.

It may be a geek fallacy that our wonderful hobbies and interests can be for everyone but as a teacher, this is something I believe. I mean, I will never be able to like horror films. I will never be able to play Go. But I’m interested in how horror works and how Go strategies can be beautiful. I don’t get a lot of opera, but I think it is beautiful. I adore musicals. I play music myself and love to unpick it. I understand maths, poetry, prose, painting, history, geography, and more. I don’t consider myself a theatre nerd though. That’s partly my inherent rejection of groups, yes. But I also don’t see the need to make everything a subculture.

My parents didn’t show me The Sound of Music as a kid because they were musical nerds. It’s a great movie and a great musical. There absolutely are opera nerds who go to every show but the Sydney Opera company’s audience is everyone who might want to see it. Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan don’t make movies for cineastes and film experts: they tell great stories they think anyone can enjoy. These things might have a style, but they don’t have a market. They don’t pick an audience. They don’t WANT an audience, in the sense of a niche. They want to entertain the world. To invite the world in to see all the beauty there is. Museums do this too, although not always well when it comes to art, but in theory they belong to the world to see what is great.

When the golden age of board games arrived, I thought this was a great moment where I could finally show people that games, on boards or on videos, are wonderful things, and they don’t all have to be Monopoly or Risk. Games can be for everyone, and be almost anything. Not just exercises in crushing your opponents and proving you were smart. I spent a long time asking hundreds of people who didn’t like playing games why not, and their answers were always the same: winning over others made them feel mean, and losing to others made them feel stupid. Along came co-op games and story games and so much more, finding new ways to bring people into the hobby. New ways to play. But when I shared that thought on social media the other day – about people who don’t like games – a few people said “why do you make games for people who aren’t your audience?”

Listen to me: your audience is whoever you want it to be, and I want mine to be the whole world, as much as possible. I know not everyone WILL like it, but I want to give everyone a chance.

When I first designed the world’s only real time deck builder Baby Dragon Bedtime, I did it because I wanted to see if I could do it. Deckbuilders had become this huge thing and gamers were mad keen for the next iteration, the next cool way to do deckbuilding. But when I was testing it, I kept asking people if they knew what deckbuilding was, and nobody had heard of it. And they loved the game. And I learnt that gamers are not your audience. Not mine, and not yours. I’m sure that there are people out there who are super into gaming and cannot wait to see this iteration but so far, none of them have driven sales, and even if they had, I’d rather sell to the person who owns ten games than the person who owns a hundred.

I’m not your dad so you can make other financial choices, of course, but selling to the deep-well people to me seems like a dead end and not what this was ever about. It also tends to mean – just as in video games – that games rapidly become the same, and the same things get emphasized in the same lazy ways. That’s true whether its hard core euros, tie-in big board miniature messes or mainstream social deduction. They tend to come back to showing off your big brain and crushing your friends with betrayal. We might conclude that hey, everyone loves those genres, that’s what gaming should be. Or we might look at Marvel movies and wonder if we’re just reselling the same old thing but with the illusion of “nerdiness”.

Don’t get me wrong, Relics is a very “gamers game”. You have to be the kind of nerd who wants to read a giant rulebook and plug into a big setting, but it’s also full of stuff to appeal to people who had never gamed before (like tarot nerds, for example, and fans of The Prophecy). And being aware of what your general customers look like is decent business sense. And nothing is going to be for everyone – a certain level of complexity or competition or mechanics is just not going to be generally appealing. But gamers aren’t your audience. It’s bad for your art to hunt them, and bad for the art form. We should be dreaming bigger than that, always. To do anything else is to cut off the world. And the world needs to see you. That’s what art is.