Any good award is always going to be a terrible exercise. If the judging is any good at all, then the nominees are going to be all incredibly deserving and even then they’ll exclude by sheer bad luck people equally talented. This goes double for the winner. That said, after five years of not winning a Freeplay award, I sure as hell am not giving back mine. But I will say that I accept my latest award, The Mate Award, with enormous humility. The Mate Award…

… recognises an individual that has contributed to the Australian Tabletop Industry. The winner will have shown leadership through collaboration and sharing of knowledge and skills to others. The purpose of this award is to promote open and honest dialogue, community spirit and good relationships.

And I have a lot to say about this.

But first, a quick story. About seven or eight years ago I was at a convention and a very lovely local company mentioned to me that they would be happy to do a deal on producing materials for games. I immediately ran to every other Aussie designer at the con and told them about this amazing offer, and also threw it up on the web. I was then very embarrassed when the company contacted me to say “no, Steve, we only meant that offer to be for you, because we like you and what you do.” I like that story because it amuses me a bit that I often feel like I’m not at all special (thanks to my parents having extremely high standards of me and being disappointed if I did not reach them), but also because my first instinct was to bring everyone along. This to me has always been the core of appreicating “nerdy” things – not to shut people out, but to bring people in, to have a wonderful source of enjoyment that you are ready to show to others. And so I want to teach everyone else everything I know and bring them along into playing games and making games. What I can do is special, but not in the sense that it is shut off to others. As an underated Pixar film argues: “greatness can come from anywhere”

So in this sense, I have done a lot to help the local tabletop community. Since I moved to Sydney a decade ago, we’ve seen a slow but now massive shift towards supporting and connecting that community, and it keeps growing with each passing year. I’m proud to have played a significant part in that. I’m proud that people have seen this change and come to be a part of it.

BUT

Everything I do is impossible.

I have enormous chronic health and disability issues, and have, over the last decade, slowly been pulling myself out of desperate poverty and low income. I don’t have access to anything like the physical or financial capacities of the average game designer, amateur or otherwise, and that of course effects my emotional capacity as well. And this remains true even as things have been greatly improving in these areas over the last decade. Now I can, sometimes, afford my own accomodation when I go down to PAX, but this is very new. I can afford to print off a prototype myself, but this is very new. The first time I purchased a $40 guillotine, I didn’t eat lunch that week to cover the cost. Getting to PAX until very recently was done by being lent money for the trip and staying with friends (and of course, running panels because that’s the only way I could afford to go).

But people have been generous. In some cases, even strangers have been generous. In one case, due to a weird mix-up, I stayed at the house of the parents of a stranger, who only knew we were fellow game designers. (Thank you, Stefan, and thank you to Stefan’s parents!) My first booth was a free offer from an amazing designer who was happy to let me sell my games in return for working to sell his, though we didn’t know each other well. My first design teaching work was set up and promoted by someone who first helped me see my own skills twenty years ago, when I was also a stranger to him. Jamie Stegmeier was nice to me in a brief email discussion about kickstarters. The moment I went to my first PAX, I met the TGDA people and saw the work they were doing and that gave me the hope that I could actually publish in Australia, and set me on my course to put Relics out.

And all of this assistance is echoed in all the smaller costs of everything else. I have borrowed lifts and borrowed print outs. Borrowed booth time and borrowed warehouse space. Traded labour to get into events for free. Traded work in kind to get editors or proofreaders or artists. And most of all, I have borrowed courage, and traded strength. Yes, every time I see people with fancy prototypes and impressive booths and amazing designs and somehow magically attracted audience I feel like a terrible failure and wracked by professional jealousy…but I also am inspired. I see people fighting the incredible odds stacked against them, and sharing the wins and the losses. I see old hands not giving up despite it getting harder every year, and new arrivals daring to strive even though they know the same. I see the untrained pushing themselves to learn and the old guard keeping their skills fresh. I see genius flash across design ideas like white lightning, pure and perfect. And I get to tell people that I see it, which to me might be the thing that fuels me most of all.

I would not go so far as to call them my tribe or my family. I’m not someone who easily feels at home anywhere. But even though I always dread putting my work out into exposure, I always get restored and lifted up by being amongst my fellow artists. We are all doing the impossible, facing the impossible, and the one thing we have, the one superpower we can rely on, is we can share that battle. And when I began in tabletop, that was barely the case in this country, and now that has changed.

Did I help that happen? Sure. But every day I walk into the fire of the impossibility of being a game designer, and the only thing that keeps me going is other people’s support. Nothing I have done in the last ten years could have happened without all of these people who didn’t just show me that things were possible, they gave me the help and power to do them. There is no Tin Star Games, and no Steve making things at all, without the TGDA and the ARC, without the amazing help of people at PAX and Freeplay, without the industry fellowship, without the Sydney design community, without a million strangers.

I humbly accept this award, but it is backwards. It takes a village: give them the award.