Maybe today is your day to see what I think is the greatest image in game design. Jim Holloway passed away in 2020; his art in games ranks along the greats, particularly in the establishing era – think Gary Chalk, Iain McCraig, Jeff Easely, Jonathan Green…and he was especially influential on me as a young boy. Especially his work in Paranoia.

I bring this up because to me, comedy and silliness has always been part of why I come to the table, and to the media I ingest. There’s a video where Matt Colville (I think it is this one) is talking about how fantasy is part of his DNA; he doesn’t even have to think to be connected to fantasy tropes, and it’s why he always chooses fantasy. I remember listening to that and realizing that I’ve never really connected to fantasy that way at all. For me, it is comedy and to a lesser extent mystery that flows in my veins. It is comedy that I naturally default to. That may end up being an aside to what follows because what I really want to talk about is what does it mean to play a game.

During COVID lockdown in 2020 I set myself a task to acquire new skills and try new experiences. One idea I had was to figure out what was this whole deal with Twilight Imperium. The world seemed fun and interesting even though I didn’t know much about Dune. I borrowed a copy, learn the rules, listened to podcasts, studied tactical guides, and also reached out to friends. I just found a post on facebook today that goes like this:

I actually do think that fairness and balance are key elements of fun, unlike some of my colleagues in game theory(!). I actually think they are VITAL. I’ve also been that guy who is like “well I can’t just let this go, I’m clearly disadvantaged or can’t win from this position, so what’s the point.” But I also think it was obvious within a few minutes of that game that I was alone among the players in how I was approaching the game, despite my attempt to try to explain my vibe. I had gone in intending to lose and be silly and really didn’t care that much about what we call the orthogame. The orthogame is a term I think developed by Knizia to help describe one kind of game, the kind of game that often appears in game theory (although game theory, despite its name typically has nothing to do with any games at all, which I think people seem to forget!). An orthogame has rules that cannot be broken, a fixed outcome or goal, and the players must act as if they wish to achieve that goal. That definition might seem silly at first; you might think that all games are orthogames. Certainly there is a popular sense that they all are. But if you spend enough time around games you’ll realise that orthogames are far from common and are often less in play than we might think.

I didn’t end up having any fun with Twilight Imperium. That game was friendly and okay but nobody else was playing like me, and there’s only so much you can enjoy being crushed over and over again at an activity you can’t understand and constantly fail at, in a system (as most games are) where the more you fail, the less you get to do and experience. I tried tournament games after that, they were much worse. There was nothing for me in TI, but it also felt very isolating to hit that wall where lacking an ability meant people just acted like I didn’t belong.

Theoretically, I should hate games. I certainly did growing up. I was a sensitive lad and still am; I hated to lose and I generally hated to compete. It didn’t feel natural to me to always be wanting to dominate my friends, let alone trying to find their weaknesses and crush them. I played chess because I was supposed to, but I hated the idea that it was about winning and losing. Losing made me feel stupid. Wining made me feel mean. In fact, I’m going to say that again, because it’s something I found is actually way more universal than you might imagine:

In fact, I got into tabletop roleplaying precisely because it wasn’t about winning and losing. I was so relieved to be able to step away from all that competition and brutality, especially as a young boy who was always told it was the only way to do anything, ever. I also don’t like scoring! As a gifted kid, nothing makes me more anxious than my status being measured and on show. A score track is an abomination to someone afraid of being measured and rated: not only does it show how much you suck, it shows off how people are better than you. So when the collaborative games began to appear on the market in 2008 (Arkham Horror 2e, Pandemic and Lord of the Rings being the big early three) or so, I rushed to them with open arms. Here was what I always wanted: games without competition. Games with story and character where we shared experiences. Using these kinds of games I sought out to convert others, because as I said above, everyone had experiences like this. People also have stories about learning games from their parents that made them feel bad, too. All they remembered was they or a sibling doing something “wrong” and being punished. This is also why most people grow up hating Monopoly, too: it’s broken for lots of reasons and one is it teaches cruelty. Nish Kumar has even argued that all games are effectively right-wing, and should be so, because they’re about competition and cruelty. Comedy should of course be left-wing because it’s about inclusion and artistry. It’s not true but because of the popularity of the orthogame, a lot of people think it is true.

But there are players who don’t think the way I do. Or at least, come to it less directly. Kingmaking situations are controversial in games because it is perceived to break the assumptions of the orthogame: since you cannot win you may be choosing who should win based on things outside the game itself, like personal charisma (Nerds, who felt growing up that they had intelligence but not charisma, are of course enraged by this idea; they came to games because they could dominate without this perceived skill!). Their rage may also be engaged if people do things because they look fun or sound interesting or because they want the lions and the turtles to kiss. This doesn’t mean that they are tight-asses or sticklers. They can even be fun to play with, and can often play easily with other game styles. However, it is always the case that everyone at the table has a different idea about what counts as the rules, what counts as fair play and what counts as appropriate play, and often they don’t even know they have those rules in their head until they get angry when people break those rules. I’m going to say that again, because it’s really important.

As someone with autism, nothing is so common and so triggering to me than people telling me I’m Doing Something Wrong. And as soon as you start playing with people who love orthogames, they can often rush to tell you you absolutely are doing something wrong. And they don’t do it as a teacher because sometimes they don’t even understand that they are teaching. They think you’ve made a mistake, or failed to understand how the game works. So they can feel very…corrective. And judgemental. They’ve decided you’re an idiot but they haven’t even considered your motivations.

The result of all this is I grew up and remain terrified of playing games with strangers. And even with friends. Because you can never tell what they think is the right way to play a game. You don’t know how much they consider the orthogame to be supreme, and how much they will bend it to suit social issues, or even bend social issues to fit the game. Games are often sought out by autistic people because – for once! – the rules are written down and you know what is going on, but in fact games are the opposite. The rules are completely undefined and people will get angry with you without explaining why. And even seasoned gamers and game designers will insist that there’s some clear obvious rules in play in a game when there absolutely isn’t; or be corrective without kindness, as if everyone sees what they see. (And I’ve definitely done the latter – it’s easy for me to see some things that I know others cannot! I play with people of all sorts of skill levels, so I get that, for example, it’s easy for me to see that it’s easier to get two brown properties than three blue properties, but to some people that’s as obvious as quantum physics.)

Computer games, with their popularity, realized this ahead of much of tabletop games. They have pushed player styles to the fore. And yet they still talk about flow being the holy grail, while they focus flow almost entirely around difficulty levels, challenge and failure. Flow was coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as:

Anyone would read that and realize that playfulness and immersion are things that provide flow but have nothing to do with difficulty or measurement or challenge. Yet you barely have to scroll down that page a few centimetres to find this…

I’m not actually angry at that piece by Helfant. It’s very good, everyone go read it. But it jumps straight to challenge and complexity. It says all these things about standard computer game play which I tolerated as a child and then left computer games because of (like no, I don’t want to die all the time). And yes, challenge and complexity and depth is a wonderful way that games and puzzles can provide flow, in a very different (and equally lovely) way to the way playfulness can. But I don’t solely play games for that kind of flow, and we’ve forgotten all the other kinds. Is it just out of habit? A Chinese poet remarked:

But I don’t want board games to be just that. And I never design them with just that in mind. Because I know that’s not all they are.

Next blog I want to talk more about the other reasons to play games. The point for now is we need to stop defining games so narrowly, because it should be blindingly obvious to anyone that games aren’t just about challenge and complexity, and people play them for so many reasons, and if you don’t get that, what are you even doing? (Matt Colville has a great video about this too!) And why do I feel like I keep having to point this out? Why can’t people get that the orthogame isn’t the only thing? Why are nerds so unable to read the room and consider things beyond the rules, or understand that others don’t see things the way they do? Why do all these things keep making me feel unsafe playing games?

Elegance in game design is said to be achieving the most amount of depth and impact with the least amount of rules. It is an echo of the idea that design is about simplicity, and that art is not about simply adding paint or lines, but adding, as Charles Schulz said, only what is necessary, and no more. As an artist, this guides my hand but as a game designer even more so, because game design is a user interface. As such it must be blindingly, unambiguously clear. It can leave nothing questioned, nothing opague, nothing difficult. But it also must be as light as possible, because explanations clutter, and control, and contrive. Indeed, if a mechanic or rule cannot be well explained, then the mechanic itself is worthless.

Into this steps the lyric RPG, the one page RPG, and indeed the nano-game, of which I have posted nearly a hundred on Twitter. There is even a one-word RPG, and I think it is a decent effort, given that restraint. I think also having a title might be cheating but I also think that’s not the point, maybe. But generally, what’s been missing is actual discussion of these works. The TTRPG industry has always, always been ridiculously low on critical voices (as opposed to angry assholes), and the indie scene much more so. The world has too many RPGs, far too many indie RPGs and probably infinitely too many nano-rpgs, and in each case infinitesimally few critiques of any of them. For a moment Dennis Detwiller came out swinging on twitter, and the dragging was – because twitter – undeserved in its perversity, although he took no care in differentiating his opinion from empty assholery. In the end, the discourse on twitter and such like is always hollow, always useless and leaves us worse off than no discourse. So I did love getting a review of my one-pager Dog Bites The Man that put critique right into play not just of my one-pager, but ALL OF THEM.

I’m a little torn on this issue. On the one hand, I love that games in general and TTRPGs in particular are having this moment exploring games as art and art as games, and that TTRPGs are going full dadaist and refusing to make sense. On the other hand, I think for a game to be a game, it needs to be playable if only in your head. Otherwise, it’s just an art piece with writing about a game. So when I publish a game I always intend for it to be playable, and to be played, except in very rare situations. I don’t know what other GMs do with one page games but I play mine and I expect them to be played.

In fact, Dog Bites The Man was designed to put the one page medium to the test: the game is designed to be played by printing the game at A2 size and hung on a wall, because I was curious what happens when a game is actually a poster, complete with art, that draws the eye away from the table. Obviously I can’t make everyone engage with the game like that! It’s on my wall, in a frame, which is enough. When I tested it, it wasn’t framed, which didn’t really work. It is an experimental game; I am still experimenting with it. But as I say, that doesn’t free me from having the game examined as per its rules of play.

And with that understanding, the one page RPG presents a unique challenge in terms of economy. Much of the reviewer’s complaints are simply due to not having enough space; to not using the right word at the right time. I meant to say you only get one super power, because…well, I assumed that’s how superpowers worked. The reviewer missed that. I meant to say that of course you are a dog, and you act like a dog, but that wasn’t clear. I also thought it was obvious that killing fascists was a great way to defeat fascism, but again, it’s super tough to actually lay out your intentions in a poster. I chose dogs because dogs are seen as inherently innocent and good, and I want to cast revolutionary violence as innocent and good. Not to undermine the importance of the struggle but to actually get people involved in it. I’ve run lots of revolutionary games as a GM and the players always want to stop the revolution and get off fast. I thought maybe, if they were dogs, it would discharge that instinct because being a dog ties into our sense of absolute goodness. We know that dogs are good. So of course it is okay for them to bite cops and smash windows and set fire to buildings. Good dog!

The nice thing about treating games as art is I get to do the most indulgent thing of all: I get to make an artist’s statement, explaining myself. But if a game is to be played, it doesn’t get an artist’s statement. It doesn’t have that luxury. It is of course the artist’s curse to be minsunderstood; art, like all communication, always fails on some level, and there is no wrong way to play a game. More than once I’ve had players say “we don’t use those rules, we think they are dumb” and it HURTS MY BRAIN but the only correct response is to say “well done! Good choice!”. As Humpty Dumpty observed in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, of who is master….

Humpty Dumpty is right: the audience is the master, and doubly so for the player. Words and rules go to audiences, and they get it all wrong by reading them and interpreting them, which is a horrible trick, really. (I also have a bad habit of not explaining myself as much as I should, even when I explain more than I should like. My mind moves barely slow enough for me to put it into words; let alone deal with others having to understand it.)

Of course we have ready solutions for misunderstanding in games: the errata and the FAQ, the second edition and the downloadable patch. We might pity then Monet, who cannot add an asterisk to indicate the lily was not QUITE the right colour after all. More than one painter has also suffered from their work being hung upside down in the gallery, or other failure of instructions. But perhaps this is, if we wanted one, why games are not art. There are no instructions on a Monet. One can eat it or set fire to it. The players on the stage command the audience with their voice to pay attention; being savvy of media tropes is a luxury most art forms just cannot afford. But instructions are by their very nature open to questions, and even answer. The saying goes that the designer doesn’t come in the box, but even so the question and answer happens with the players. Every regular game player knows that every game, no matter how simple or how well known, has areas of disagreement, and every game player of any social skill has a plan to deal with the problem. Even a solo gamer interrogates himself if this time he will cheat or not.

The Monet offers no dialogue. It commands you, body and soul, or dares you to ignore it if it moves you not. If games aren’t art, then this is why: because they are interactive to their core. If art is what is created inside us when we interact with something, the game is simply the list of instructions to create the something. If games aren’t art, they are art-producing recipes. If one page is not enough to make the recipes clear and purposeful and playable, then they have definitely failed. We can only hope to do better next time – or provide an errata.

Of course, all of this becomes far more difficult when it comes to political messaging. It is one thing to have mechanics misunderstood on how to move a piece; quite another when the goal is to communicate via that mechanic a political agenda. In my game The Day They Came that simulates having to leave your country with nothing but the things you can carry, the first player is determined by the person most likely to get on a refugee boat: the strongest male over twelve. I’ve been accused of being sexist for writing this rule. Political work is always going to be more criticized, certainly: Dog Bites The Man was criticized by this reviewer for not providing comprehensive solutions to racial oppression because it focusses on violence and civil disobedience but I made it more directly violent because early comments suggested it wasn’t violent enough and didn’t sufficiently reflect the protests that it referenced as a result. Politics, indeed, is always to be never enough. But that’s not the same thing as being totally misunderstood. Both Dog Bites The Man and The Day They Came are one page RPGs dealing with big topics and both have failed to attest to players the fact that they are taking their subject seriously. Ditto Princess Die, now I think about it. The argument has been made that one page RPGs probably always fail; it may be more strongly that political one page RPGs definitely always fail.

And that’s where I turn to you, dear reader. I think some of my one page RPGs work just fine, but I also note that for say, After Action Report I had to go to two pages, and Two Faces, despite winning an ENnie nomination, is much better with the additional second page. But despite being made in just an hour, I think some of our one page one hour RPGs work really well. What one pages have you actually played, or player more than once? How well did they actually work? Were any of them political, or all silly? Were the only ones you used ones that were roll-to-see-what-happened ones where you bounced across tables, or actually allowed more avatar-style play? Or should we just realise this was all for comedy and give up pretending the form is actually playable? Send your answers in.

Let’s be clear: I can’t help you get over your social anxiety. I have that too a little, but not at cons. Nor can I help with agoraphobia or sensory overload, nor can I magically give you a Charisma boost and the dapper manner of a television personality. But there is a science and a technique to presenting your games to humans and if you start there, you’ll probably do fine.

1. Figure Out Where You and Your Game Are

Early on, this stuff isn’t easy. If you don’t know what it is to be a game designer and if you want to do that, you might not know where you’re up to or how good your game is. For your game, broadly speaking, stages of design tend to fall into one of the following categories – Alpha, when you just have a rough idea and are trying all sorts of things to make something work, Beta, where you have the shape of the game locked down and are trying to see if it is fun and interesting, Gamma when you have most of the design done but are looking to balance and enhance, Preproduction where you have the game mostly finished but want to check for the last niggling elements where players find edge cases or pinch points and finally Demo, where the game is finished and you’re either showing it off to hopefully build attention for you selling it yourself, or to practice demoing it for companies. Where you are is basically how many times you’ve been through that process, and how many cons you’ve been to. Then you’re going to take all that info and…

2. Set A Few Modest Goals.

Now that you know where your game is, you have some idea of what you want from this event. And that’s both what you want to do with your game and what you want to do for yourself. Your game will have goals like “I want to test this mechanic” or “I just want to see if people can enjoy it” or maybe you want to find out who it appeals to or why. For you, this might be personal, like you want to try it out! Or you want to get some confidence, or network. Maybe you want to sell one copy, or ten copies, or a hundred copies. Don’t go crazy: it’s easy for lots to go wrong especially at a new con to you or a new con to come into existence. I usually go with the goal of selling one game, or something like that. Sometimes I go just to make sure I get organized to order signs or some promotional material. Or to make sure I finish a game to a decent state! Sometimes you might hit your goal just by turning up, and that’s cool! Then it doesn’t matter if you don’t talk to any humans. But if you need humans to do a thing, figure out exactly what that thing is. and write it down. Now you know exactly what you hope the people will help you with.

3. Start By Asking Questions

Now you know what you want people to do, the next thing is to ask them to do it. But you can’t do that until you get their attention. You can do that visually – with a poster or banner showing off your art, or a cool looking booth, or something interesting on the table, or just your smiling face. You can do with fun things to pick up and touch, maybe take home, like stickers, snacks, bookmarks, badges, freebies, etc. Once you catch their eye, you have to see if they’re interested in your game at all. There’s a lot of really dumb sales advice that suggests every person is a potential sale and you should convince them or control them somehow. That’s nonsense. What you want to do is find out who they are though. They might be in the wrong place. They might be exhausted. They might not want to be bothered. If they’re interested, you’ll get positive feedback and you can go further. There’s am ALERT mnemonic I use here that I’m going to put in a call-out.

4. Hone A Clear Pitch That’s Ten Words Or Less

Somewhere between that first visual connection and building Rapport, you’re going to have to explain your game and what you are doing at the con. You want to be able to sum that up super quickly. That might be the pitch for your game. Or it might be explaining what this part of the convention is like “these are all local Australian designers” or “this section is new prototypes being developed”. Keep it general, and absolutely keep it short. Try to have a question in there if you haven’t asked one yet as it encourages them to share, or follow it up with a question. If you want them to do something besides just “find out about your game”, let them know what the other options are and what that requires of them. What’s the smallest thing they can do for you? Take a card? Start there. If you need more, ask from that point on. Have they got a few minutes to learn more? Okay cool, let me explain the rules. Want to play a few rounds? That will mean sitting down for THIS AMOUNT OF TIME. Don’t like about that time length either. They are very busy. The last T is for trust and if you lie, they’ll remember. You can hype the hell out of how fun it will be but be honest. And be honest about what you need and what stage your game is at – thats why you did steps one and two. You’re giving your context so they understand you. You asked questions so you understood them.

5. Be Nice.

Remember that you’re asking these people to HELP you. Even if they get a cool game out of it or game session out of it, you’re getting so much more. Every person who comes even close to your booth should be treated like someone who showed up to help you move house. They are not just saints, they are HEROES. So be nice. Be grateful. Be accommodating. And part of being nice is figuring out what kind of experience they have and what kind of games they like, and if it isn’t your game or they don’t have time for your game right now, then help them with whatever else they need. Likely that’s going to be one of the other games around you designed by your colleagues, and yes, you will Be Nice to them too. You will offer to watch their booth and help them do a coffee run. But most of all you will help customers find thei games, because those designers are not your enemies. And because people hate too much choice in anything, but particularly in spending their time. They have very limited time at a convention and they paid at the door so every second counts. The tiny thing you can give them back for being interested in your game is some clear advice of what to do next. You can present what you have and if it isn’t for them, you can recommend something else. Your job, really, is to make sure they have a great time.

Does that sound like some self-sacrificing hippy nonsense? Well, it’s also good salesmanship. People never, ever forget how you make them feel. You have about two seconds to make an impression on every person walking by, and try to get them to stay longer. The absolute best way to impress them in that time frame is to help them out. And I find this makes the socializing easier. That might not work for you, of course, but I can only do so much.