Welcome to Bludology the first proper instalment, where we analyze the lessons in Bluey about gaming, game design and ludic intelligence, and we do it episode by episode.

1.1 Magic Xylophone 

Bluey and Bingo find their magic xylophone that can freeze Bandit. Bluey doesn’t share the xylophone because if Bingo is using it Bandit will catch her when he is unfrozen. Bingo freezes Bluey to explain how this hurts her feelings and Bluey relents.

It’s very common to see adult gamers argue from tactical advantage: “why would I make a pro-social move if it hurts the goal?”. Of course this kind of value ranking is not difficult to understand, but not everyone ranks their values this way and too many gamers can’t comprehend other rankings. Often itis actually about ego or anxiety: why pass the ball when I know I’m able to score because I’m that good? And others perhaps may not score? It is frustrating to watch others lose the game if your value is about winning at any costs. And there is no real way to resolve this: one value must come out ahead. It’s no fun for players to sacrifice their value for another (although Ted Lasso series one shows how ego can be tempered). But let’s assume it isn’t ego: players should take a moment to discuss their values in team or collaborative games.

Bingo can’t express her feelings outside of the game. Games can provide us with a safe space to talk about things, including games. We’ll talk about masks – a kind of positive bleed – more below.

1.2 Hospital 

Dad pretends to be a hospital patient. The only lesson here for gamers is good improv skills: Bluey takes a great suggestion on from Bingo as to how to get the cat out of her patient. Imagination play is still play though – as we will see in Daddy Robot (see below).

1.3 Keepy Uppy

This is the first big episode all about game design, and it’s only going to continue from here. Bluey and Bingo have a solvable game: as long as they stand close to each other and pass slowly they can easily stop the balloon from hitting the ground. So they ask their dad to increase the difficulty. But when the balloon goes outside it will pop when it hit the ground and there are no spare balloons. The imagined stakes (if the balloon hits the ground we lose) acquire matching real world stakes (if the balloon hits the ground it causes the loss of the balloon), causing bleed. Bandit doesn’t understand this bleed has occurred so keeps the difficulty high. 

Of course it is rare that a game’s structure would map over like this. More commonly bleed occurs through what the game represents. However one can easily imagine a fear of public speaking popping up in an rpg session where the GM asks the player to stand up and present to the group or act something out. A GM using darkness to create mood could run into an actual fear of the dark. We need to check for bleed in both mechanics and theme. This is of course more common with kids because for them all play is rehearsal and testing boundaries – they may be stopping the ball going on the road with the knowledge the ball could be lost, and so on. But as we grow we still need to practice losing things – including losing games. And often people who are experiencing a lot of loss in their life are less keen for it to happen in a game.

1.4 Daddy Robot 

Much like Hospital this is mostly about imaginary play. Daddy Robot is a role Bandit can put on which allows him to attack the children in a way they can half-pretend half-experience being frightened of, and fight back. Play fighting is common across lots of species and almost always involves wearing a mask. For humans these masks are not just physical symbols like laughing and exaggerated expressions but adopting complex fictional identities. Or simple ones; many a dad will yell “I’m a shark” before knocking a child into the pool or similar. But we also instinctively know we don’t need these masks when the children are older – we can roughhouse as ourselves because the emotional maturity of the child now can more easily understand it is not “real”. 

As grown ups though, we can get shy, and particularly with strangers, we want to again compete and attack, and the mask we most often use is games. Even masculine physical attacks like pulling down someone’s pants or “punch buggy” have rules. Not so much to keep it safe directly, rather the existence of the rules is the mask that says “this is a game”. Often dogs will bring a ball or a toy to another dog then ask to wrestle or chase instead. The mask matters. 

1.5 Shadowlands 

Coco, Snickers and Bluey are playing a game where they die if they stand in sunlight. As it gets harder, Coco suggests breaking the rules. Bluey is adamant they cannot. Who is right and why? 

“Why do rules exist?” Is a hell of a thing for a kids show to ask. The answer in this episode is being hard – and not knowing if you will win or lose – is what makes it fun. At the start of the episode, they are playing “what’s the time, Mrs Wolf” and Coco uses the rules to remove uncertainty, so she can always win. This then is balanced against the rest of the episode where Coco argues to break the rules, in order to let everyone win and be “safe”. Her instincts make sense to us (which is why it’s such a great episode) – we value social goals like everyone winning. Coco also wants to break the rules to help Snickers because he can’t run as fast, and when real life intrudes and they could just go and get the rapidly vanishing cupcakes. Coco’s lesson, that the fun exists in the drama of will they won’t they, is put against some heavy competition! Indeed, this is almost the opposite of the message in Magic Xylophone. Or rather, we return to different values – at different times, in different circumstances, in different people. Here, we champion the other value1

Some of us would instantly break the rules to help a lesser player or when real life intrudes, and that’s okay. But I also remember playing a coop game once where we lost near the end and another player was like “ah I’m just going to reroll that” because he thought it was dumb we’d come through two hours of shared social play only to lose. For that player, this was the only sensible choice, and he made it without thinking. But I felt a little cheated. It made it slightly less fun, because it made it all seem arbitrary. We could have done that at any time. Coco tries to suggest short term solutions in the episode but Bluey stands firm – any fudging can make the whole thing collapse for some folks. 

For kids these stakes are much higher because losing feels so bad – and also kids often see things as black and white. In games they get to experience two conflicting values: the thrill and challenge of facing a fair loss versus wanting to be happy. The truth is, most adults don’t know which one they believe and change their minds often. And there is no right answer!

The reason I think all of this matters is because we play more and more as adults but we don’t have play awareness. We don’t understand that this is a complicated question that others view differently. So games just end up in arguments and nobody wants to play anymore. Shadowlands, especially when linked to Magic Xylophone is a window into this issue of what I’m calling ludic intelligence. The ability to play well by understanding that play is complicated, and requires proper care and interrogation. 

At the end of the episode Coco gives everyone lots of room to run away, accepting a very high chance of failure. The final shot is Bluey perhaps about to be caught, or perhaps not and she is overjoyed by not knowing. It is a perfect encapsulation of the joy of not fudging the rules, of how that creates jeopardy and the unknown, and how vital that part of gaming is. This was also part of Keepy Uppy and it recurs as a theme in the show and a metaphor for childhood. It is scary being a kid and they must constantly trade between safety and excitement. Thats why games matter so much to the young. 

But games also connect us to the child within us, and so understanding all of this matters for all of us, and all our gaming.

Bluey, created by Joe Brumm, first aired in October 2018. This animated children’s show tells the story of the titular six year old anthropomorphic dog, her little sister Bingo and their two parents, Bandit (dad) and Chilli (mum), and a growing cast of supporting characters. Viewers were quick to realise that on top of being beautifully drawn, the show is sharply written in a way beyond even most ‘clever’ children’s shows. Bluey is an incredible artistic work that talks to children deeply about complex topics, while also talking to adults because good writing isn’t about an age group. Combined with the incredible performances of the child actors, free from any artifice, it manages to be innocent yet unflinching. As a result of both critical and popular appeal, it has become a national institution, a beloved cultural landmark and now an international hit and marketing juggernaut, being sold to Disney and the BBC.

It is also, almost constantly, about games and play.

As we will see, this is natural for any show that talks properly about childhood, but because Bluey is so smart and so well written it provides lessons in ludology that are amazing for everyone: for anyone who plays games, thinks about games or designs games. The world has begun to talk in hushed, reverent tones about Bluey, but nobody is talking about Bluey from a game design perspective. Hence: BLUDOLOGY, this new series on my blog. We’ll go through the episodes one by one (all 150+ of them, over three series) and talk about the gaming lessons within them, from the point of view of the player and the designer. There will be some moments where I’m speaking to the latter, but I intend this to be for a general audience, because I think all of us need to get better at what I shall called ludic intelligence – the ability to understand what we play, how we play, why we play, and how to negotiate our play experiences with people who have different answers to those questions.

The truth is, as I observed recently, that there are actually no rules about how to play games, and each time we play them we renegotiate our boundaries and processes. And often we stop playing games because of experiences where this lack of rules made us feel unsatisfied. Kids, however, have no choice: they need to play. It is primarily how they live and interact with the world. The stakes are higher for them. And often, as a result, they are much better at all of this. By necessity and practice, they have inherent ludic intelligence. Kids know when and why games don’t work, and talk about it often. That’s why it comes up so much in Bluey.

And yet we forget: I play games as often as I am able and see over and over again everyone struggling with ludic intelligence, and that’s as true for seasoned gaming nerds as it is for the new generation of board game fans, and as true for old hands playing Bridge or people who just want to play Uno with their kids. Living things, all of them, seem to love to play, and of course we don’t just use games to do so. Games are rapidly shedding some of their stigma as being child play and becoming both the new popular pastime and a respected art form. We may be heading into “Generation Game” or the gaming century. It therefore seems to be a good idea to get better at this stuff.

What a lovely bonus then, that we can do so just by watching Bluey.

In approximately 1010, a Japanese woman called Murasaki Shikibu wrote a collection of over 800 poems on courtly life as well as a fantasy world she created, and then she wove those poems into a complicated origami presentation piece, hiding meaning and creating meaning by which pages were shown and which were showing through the thin rice paper. This was called The Tale of Genji, and literary historians have generally decided that, due to its length and complexity and that it was written down as its first method of delivery, not transliterated from an oral story, that it is the world’s first novel.

The novel as we know it today is a relatively new invention, appearing in the late 17th century with works like Don Quixote which is still very close to an epic poem. By contrast, poetry is thousands of years old. Of course, we are living in an age of new media: the TV show, the radio program, the computer game and the roleplaying game have all appeared in the last century. The board game, of course, probably predates the poem and likely even the first painting. The point, though, is that as much as are getting used to living in an age of hyper-fast social change, art forms take time to coalesce into accepted forms, and those forms are shaped by the cultures that do the shaping. After 150 years we’ve come to a fairly solid idea of what a movie is, but we certainly didn’t have an agreement on that 100 years ago. By all accounts RPGs were invented around 1974 with the publishing of the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, although things like it were being played a decade or more earlier, and it we go back to Floor Games by HG Wells it could be 1911. But it is reasonable to say, I think, that if it took us several centuries to figure out what a novel is, as a basic working definition, that a century and change isn’t enough to really pin down what a roleplaying game is.

(One time, I told James Wallis he was wrong to call his competitive storytelling game Pantheon a roleplaying game, and he was right and correct to scorn me for doing so. I was young and I had definitions and needed to draw lines. I still do, but I try not to be such an ass about it.)

One idea I run into a lot, however, is that there are right and wrong ways to design RPGs. I one hundred percent agree that there are good and bad ways to design RPGs, but the right and wrong seem to be much more prescriptive. One of the quote unquote wrong ways to design an RPG is, according to many, to try to emulate fiction. This would come as a surprise to, for example, Gary Gygax, who wrote the hit points system in his games to emulate the sword fights in the classic films of his youth. Like a lot of what passes for THE DISCOURSE in titterpigs, the question is much more interesting than choosing a side and being a dick about it. And it’s interesting because it asks the question we still haven’t answered yet: what are rpgs, and more importantly, what are they for. What are they supposed to do, and why?

Obviously since we haven’t decided what they are yet, we can’t know what they’re for, but they’re not the same question. The latter gets into why do they exist at all? What do they provide and do that other media does not? What makes them special and apart from other media? And it’s this question I think that people are trying to point at when they say that rpgs should not emulate pre-existing fiction, whether specific works or whole genres. They feel like that suggests that all titterpigs can do is try to copy something that already exists, and copy it in an inferior way, or in trying to copy it, make bad design choices. RPGs, for them, should not attempt to create something that feels like a movie, because that wouldn’t feel like an RPG.

Now I mostly agree with this, in two ways. Firstly, obviously, on the surface level an interactive storytelling experience where we create a story that feels like a movie won’t in itself feel exactly like watching a movie, because there are no images coming up on a screen. It may feel a lot more like writing a movie, in some ways, only way faster and cooler. But I think the story we produce can feel exactly like the idea of watching a movie, in the sense of feeling caught up in a story where the storytelling works precisely the same way. But I also agree that many RPGs – and many RPGers – have little interest in doing this. They don’t want things to feel anything like watching a movie. They want it to feel much more like “playing an RPG”.

One of the reasons I stopped making traditional RPGs is because I couldn’t really figure out exactly what playing an RPG was, and what it felt like, but I knew that a) it usually wasn’t something I enjoyed, and b) it got in the way of creating something that did feel like a movie. So my solution was to stop trying to make RPGs and make things that feel like watching a movie. To be as emulative as possible. For this crime, I am judged often. Which doesn’t bug me much but it DOES bug me when people post online (usually on twitter) that the thing I do is WRONG. Because I’m sure someone else out there is wanting to make games like me, and nobody gets to tell them to shut up. Not young Steve and not anyone else.

So my games mostly exist to spit out stories that feel as close as possible to the stories they advertise as being akin to. They don’t do that the way most RPGs do that. And as a result they often lack a lot of what people want in RPGs. Likewise, though, I think there are a huge chunk of people who either want what I make – storytlelling games that create incredible stories that feel just like movies and TV shows, except you get to live them and be the character, audience and author all at once – or they want a bit of column A and a bit column B. The combination, in fact, of improvised writing exercise and acted out radio show with weird skirmish level tactical game is part of the appeal. The former makes the latter wonderfully unpredictable; the latter grounds the former to stop it turning into children playing Let’s Pretend.

(I would argue that my takes also stop it from becoming that, but in a different way, because I’m not sure the marriage of those two things works all that well in the long run. But I am, at least so far, in the minority. But this isn’t my chief point.)

So the question then becomes, what does it mean to reflect genre in column A and what does it mean to do so in column B? What doesn’t it mean? I know what it means for the first group: you’re allowed to say this is the world of Conan, or Sherlock Holmes, and it runs on the rules of those worlds but more as those worlds as a simulation. For those who demand things be a tactical exercise or a simulation they can explore like a sandbox, things must have a physical representation in the world. A spell cannot recharge once per scene, but definitely can once per day (although of course a day isn’t really a thing even astronomically). Even though Conan is a book and a movie and a comic, we cannot use the constructs of those things, but we can of course use hit points and dice.

I don’t really play games that way, but I do get that stance. It’s artificial, of course, and it’s weird to insist it’s the only way to play, but I understand it. What I don’t understand is what people who want their games to involve improvised storytelling exercises and operate to produce narrative…I don’t understand why they don’t want to use the tools of other media. I don’t have a good sense of what they mean when they say “this game is poorly designed because it thinks RPGs are books or movies”. Is it to do with adventures? Are they running into scenarios written like scripts, or that are too scripted? Or do they mean we shouldn’t use words like CUT or BEAT in how we write our rules or talk to their players?

I only ask because every six months or so I’ll see someone loudly opining that to treat RPGs as emulations of other media is somehow to not only do bad design but to insult and demean the very art of roleplaying, and I feel like if they are saying that, they should be able to describe what that looks like. Do they mean me, who builds machines that perfectly mirror real world TV shows and movies? So much so people call me up to tell me they can’t believe how much like those media their games become? That my players start unconsciously thinking like TV writers because I’ve hacked their brains? Is this bad? Have I committed some cardinal sin of RPG design?

I’m going to keep doing all those things, but please, do take a moment and explain to me why I’ve ruined everything. I honestly have no idea. Or maybe you’re not talking about me at all, and it was all a misunderstanding. Comments appreciated.

Now reading: Misspent Youth by Robert Bohl. I skipped this one until now because my adolescence was literal torture so anything about being a teen is a trigger for me. But the mechanics of this game are also about bringing down authority and are also interesting in their own right. It’s the genre of rpg I like most and tend to write: the setting content is not specified but the themes and structure ARE.

You start by building the Authority that’s got the boot on your PCs neck, which basically builds the world around it by implication. Authorities are defined by such things as their chief Vice, their particular Victims, and the Visage they wear and the systems of control they use. Wisely, it is strongly suggested you add a dollop of SF to keep it from being too real and work in metaphor, but the first Authority I built was the Mass Media Consensus. ts Vice is Utopianism, because it believes that showing both sides of everything is a virtue. Its Victim is Progress. Its Visage (im such a sucker for alliterative stat names) is Systemic. Not a person or body but a way of thinking. And it’s Need is to get access to power. If people stop thinking journalism is super awesome then they don’t get to go to parties with powerbrokers any more.

Each teen player makes a Systems of Control which they can break down or attack through play…which is where the SF matters. We can more easily imagine how to break a fantasy system than one we suffer under. Letting the players not the GM design their own enemy and target is good buy in. If they decide everyone has a chip in their brain they can’t complain if the gm uses it to hurt them. In turn the GM gives them one exploit they have over that system and again it helps that the gm gives them this power. This game can get pretty confrontational so built-in safety matters.

Coming up with systems of control might not be easy and certainly this game requires some heavy heavy lifting my all, but the rules use examples as a way to help this. We will come back to the heavy lifting later. There is great help when it comes to making your teens – they get a Means (in what style they fight authority) a Motive (why), an Opportunity (an edge they have that lets them get away with it and a MO (the method they prefer to attack with). This is just a very strong list. Ridiculously strong. As are the options ON the list. Monte Cook did they thing where you’re an adjective noun who verbs, but this is yiure an adjective who verbs in an adverb way because of a gerund. Why and how are actually important to help you decide what you do in an rpg, which is for some folks the hard part. Unlike the first three, the MO is freeform, so can be tailored to the setting. Graffiti tagging isn’t going to bring down a regency dowager although I’d play that game …

The other three stats are taken from lists and in the best mechanic of the game, everyone of them has a dark opposite. A smart teen can grow up to be pedantic, a rebel to being just perverse, an altruistic type ends up being transactional, sneaky types end up being untrustworthy. Having spent a lot of time in revolutions, these lists hit my heart. Everyone in a movement have seen these things happen. Players can and will sell out to these versions, permanently, to try to defeat the enemy.

The last stay is your Disorder which is the part of your life that helps or drives you to rebel but also hurts you. For me, that’s my disabilities. Now I skipped over the bits in chargen where, as in Prime Time Adventures you all agree on the tone and brainstorm a whole roster of character ideas so everyone is on the same page. And the examples of play are all pretty light hearted. this could be as dark and gritty as Captain Planet. Actually it’s a perfect example BUT…I live in this world and this game bleeds like crazy. I know this is mostly me – my games are always incredibly dark because my mind is a nightmare palace and my past is a war crime, but I’m not sure you can make a game about fighting authority without anticipating real life bleed. It’s not that the game is cavalier. But I don’t think I could play it. There would not be a way to make it safe for me. I don’t know if the author thought of this. Either way, bring your x cards.

Unlike the amazing Starchildreh by Rich Ranallo et al the game isn’t really about chipping away too much at the authority over an arc. This can happen and many sessions end with a system of control broken or a new exploit but you’re almost as likely to lose an exploit or just have a new system replace the old. The game is more about the characters: when they sell out and how their friendships evolve. Every scene is either about a “friendship question” or an authority npc – not both. This split models the procedural vs character model of Hillfolk. But it rings the bell of heavy lifting again. Every scene must address either a face of the enemy or a friendship question between two PCs. But there aren’t any real mechanics or guidelines to make these. It’s not like Hillfolk where you build these tension lines to start. You could build a group where this is hard to conceive. And then on top of it, on the fly, build a scene that asks the question? That’s non trivial. For gm and players alike. Again, there are examples. The game is very good with examples. And like good examples, they show you how to think in a way to think of more good examples. But examples only go so far.

You do work out all the key authority figures and questions of interest at the start of a session though, so you have time to think. You won’t have to do it when the pacing is high. And I appreciate making the game actually about narrative themes, structure and subtext, and forcing them in. The second scene will always introduce a central question the episode is asking. Scene 2 and 5 always introduce a dramatic twist, which must be either catastrophe, complication, reveal or reversal. That’s just good solid writing advice. That would also make a good d4 result…but I digress.

Scenes then can have “free roleplaying” until the struggle starts, which plays out like a game of craps – the players as a whole announce vague intents (not what they’re doing, this is action after the roll which I like) and try to hit numbers from 2-12 that their side has already rolled in that Struggle. If they hit a number the authority rolled before one of their own, they lose, hard. The best part of this mechanic is if you hit another players number then you win because of them, which is great spotlight sharing and narrative sharing.

This is a dynamic interesting system where there’s a visual representation of danger closing in. The downside is the old Wushu issue of where the scene is only over when the dice say so. This means players and gm must keep finding things to do that advance a scene but don’t for sure end it. Again, that’s not always easy! Even without other game habits creeping in. There’s an old saw that some rpgs feel like they need the designer to come play them to work, but I think it’s more accurate that some only work for players like the ones the author knows and plays with. And this isn’t necessarily bad. It’s good to recognise that there’s a huge variety of play styles and not make games that are a mishmash for everyone. But also some games cannot be everyone. A classic example is chargen. Some players come to chargen with the view that the sheet is their canvas and their mind contains a masterpiece ready to be captured. They don’t need prompts beyond the setting itself and their character is mostly complete before the first rules choice is made. The systems job is to reflect the truth in their head as best it can. And some people don’t do this at all. In maybe five other ways of not doing that.

Players who naturally want to dig down and tear apart the relationship between their characters and make that the heart of every game they play will gobble up friendship questions like candy. And probably instantly see how to spotlight them in a scene. Players used to systems where you constantly just edge vaguely towards winning a scene until it ends will have no trouble making these kind of offers and threats. I think I would struggle to do both on either side. Yes, I’m curious as to whether Jack’s nitpicking of Madboy has crossed over into being actually mean, but we’re trying to set fire to a police car. It might feel forced if I stop the flow to try to think of something I can nitpick about Madboy’s arson techniques. On the other hand, that’s what roleplaying games are about – trying to make sense of random collections of things. Maybe we can just put the authority figure in instead. But I still feel like this needed either more flexibility or more help from the system for those of us not able to write character subtext at high speeds.

What I do love though is roll before you act and the system forcing actions to be what the system says. It’s great to find out what you just did by rolling the dice. I wish the system took it further, like attaching the numbers 2-12 to general ideas too, like say 4 and 8 involve your means, 5 and 9 your motive and 6 and 10 your opportunity. Maybe I’d suggest that as a hack, although of course this can make things hard just like above: if you were going to punch the guy but you have to use your motive instead, you have to sit down and think. But you’re already maybe putting square pegs into round holes if you can’t figure out how to add a denouement scene when everything wrapped up so nicely in six scenes – the rules demand seven. Again, the structure is useful but it asks a lot to think of things that fit it. Also, you can only use a stat once per Struggle anyway so you’re always going to have to punch someone with your motive.

And the system doesn’t need more bookkeeping by tying numbers to stats. As nice as it is to know that this scene of the movie is the dark night of the soul, it does require some more table lookup than you might be happy with. Print stuff out if you’re running this. It’s not complicated, but you have to keep looking stuff up.

All this said I don’t think the game is impossible or trying. It’s just going to suit different styles more than others. And between the drama of the craps rolls and the brilliant character design and the pointed execution of theme and the over abundance of examples, it does a lot to help where it can. And those things will also ensure that even if you go from running the handmaids tale to the smurfs your games of misspent youth will feel pretty distinct and interesting. Baking in points of loss and character destruction means the game isn’t so much about rebellion but loss of self as we grow. The youth is SPENT, and misspent, in tragedy and compromise. Which is weird if your setting is more like the Biker Grove than Stand By Me. But just like the scenes headlining success or failure up front giving you freedom to lose, you know going in your character is going to lose part or all of themselves, and most games end with one character betraying everything. That sense of doom frees up play choices immediately. And is the nature of childhood: nobody survives it. You always end up growing up.

And the nature of that inescapable apocalypse is why kids are the way they are. Doubly so if an authority system tells them they’re only growing up to die. Which for the first time since maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis feels like really the case again. So these days this might be too close to comfort for Gen Z. Then again catharsis helps, and metamodernism is keen for big feels. But watch out: the bleed might kill you, because this is the real life right now. And these kids aren’t alright. God help them all.

As we all know, beach lesbians are the most dangerous and exciting lesbians, and this cover promises them. It does come through with that promise: this is a “queernorm” setting, based on a real kind of place. In 1979, Roseville Beach is the kind of small holiday town that popped up along the eastern seaboard of the USA where being queer was so much the default that the town became a safe place. Much like San Francisco or parts of New York, if you can get there, you can be yourself. In this game, you are by default some kind of queer even if only as a supernatural metaphor. You are also mystery solvers, as the cover promises. This is maybe my favourite part of the whole design: your PCs are always in charge of dealing with the problem because there is nobody else. All rpgs have to answer “why you?” And here the answer is the historically correct: “because if you call the cops they will just beat your queer ass to death”

But this is a meta modern work very much of the zeitgeist so there is only queer joy in its pages not queer trauma. People can be open and out as they walk the streets of Roseville Beach. The art and fiction bring this to the fore, with the former making the brilliant decision to use art from queer pulp fiction. However, as far as I can tell this art is mostly from the 60s, more beatnik than disco. A small discordant note but there’s not much disco anywhere, and yet it is listed on the cover. There also isn’t really any cosmic horror. That would be too bleak probably! Instead the horror is much more gothic m, drawing room and cosy. There are strange obelisks and some of the inhabitants of Night Vale would fit in here, but the evil is mostly rogue sorcerers and creepy cults that can be found and destroyed, not inscrutable glow clouds that punish the good and spare the wicked. Scooby Doo villains live on Roseville Beach, except they’re actually ghosts and Fred is as gay as his ascot.

The art isn’t the only thing not quite right. I grew up in this era and some of the history is just wrong. Not a lot though, it’s just it’s my first time reading a historical work from my lifetime. I think if they’d rolled it back to say 1973 it would have worked perfectly. And I can forgive 6 years between friends. You will need to get used to no internet, very few phones and no cars on the island. Also no hospital, no supermarket, no newspaper except what the ferry brings some days. I think this is just as big a part of what makes the setting feel different as the queernorming. Roseville Beach is a holiday town and there’s not much to do but walk around all day and party all night. Much of the backgrounds, skills, occupations and locations are focused on bars, nightclubs and theatres. It’s subtle but it forces you into specific scenes and characters. The queer isn’t just in who you kiss, it’s in the accurate depiction of how queer and theatre were anchored together.

I like the subtlety and slow burn of all that. In a similar style, the six core “classes” are predominantly supernatural. You can be a shapechanger, a witch, a familiar, a shapechanging alien or two straight humans if you’ll forgive the phrasing (one newcomer, to queerness and the beach, one celebrity who was outed). Overall I think one witch will play much like another; the characters will differ by their Trouble: the people in their life they owe or who owe them. I’m ok with low mechanical difference here: I don’t think you’ll play a lot of games of Roseville Beach. I think it’s a game that wants you to set up a game of maybe a year long that changes the players hearts forever and then put this on a shelf to grow dusty for the next generation. And I think that’s good. It makes you go “I want to build the right group for this” and also “I want to be the player that fits that group”. And that’s in the game. The text asks you to take it seriously, even in its light tones. This matters. You matter.

And Roseville Beach matters. The authors’ love for the place runs deep and cannot help to infect the reader. This is a place of safety. We’ve answered why you are called; the why should my character care is equally potent. Anything that threatens Roseville Bay threatens the queer people who find their true selves there – threatens that self. Who cares if the history is wrong: this makes you understand queer havens from the inside, the way only TTRPGS can teach. “Safety is a gift we give each other,” says one of the pieces of fiction, but the game will make you understand that properly.

The system is simple and clever. Roll one d6 plus more if you have an appropriate skill, background or magical edge. Generally you want a 4 to succeed but annoyingly, sometimes it’s a 5 or a 6 and I think it would have just worked fine at 4. Unified mechanics are simpler, people!! The clever part is after rolling one to four dice you must assign them to the goal, injury, and spookiness. If the action is scary or unsafe you need 4s not be to hurt or scared. But you need 4s to get what you want. I like this because most of the choice comes after the roll and it also means the gm doesn’t have to constantly come up with yes but consequences on their own. Players get to choose if and when they take damage, when they think it is worth it. And they’re thinking about that not which stat to use. Got spare dice? You can put them in the clue box to get bonus clues. Need more dice? Add a die but you also must fill the trouble box with a 4 or someone in your life is in peril. this lets players gleefully drive their loved ones into peril to get more dice, driving good drama without asking players to go against themselves, and they get to own those consequences. It’s asking the gm politely to mess you up. It also means that anyone you know is inevitably going to need to get rescued which is exactly right for Scooby Doo romantic fun. Or you can not take a low trouble result because Carlos is here, so you put the low dice into Goal and you forgot to listen in on the villains.

The only thing missing from all this is a way to make things harder in a final showdown with a terrible villain throwing that dark sorcery. There’s no dice penalties just three injuries and you’re out. So GMs need to control tension by controlling tempo – more rolls in big conflicts. NPCs don’t have stats which helps cut down on load and I always say if you failed it means the task was hard so I don’t need difficulty levels but as it stands you could fail a few surfing checks and get messed up. GMs should only add Injury checks in dramatic showdowns, maybe? I think you might need to play this a bit to get a grip on how to match it to your style. (Technically you can not be granted dice if you are injured but there’s no rules or even guidelines for this.) Another weird thing about the system is you get extra dice when you “have a golden opportunity” or you’re protecting someone you care about from “dire consequences”. I sort of get what they mean – at big exciting moments or if you set things up, you’re more likely to succeed but what exactly makes it golden or dire? I think a golden opportunity encourages the GM to have the bad guy stand right next to the big hole in his space station while zapping your dad, giving you a golden opportunity to huck him over the safety rail, but it’d be better to be clearer.

Also: I know characters are just six lines or so but this game has no character sheet. It doesn’t even say there’s one online! (There is, see below.) As powerful as a rulebook can be to set tone and expectations it can only be held by one player at a time. The character sheet is the key driver of how to play the game, probably the single most important mechanic. I’d probably set up a shared sheet (my bugbear is char sheets draw attention away from each other) since everyone lives in the same bungalow. As an aside I’d love to see a mechanic here or elsewhere where your character sheet is your bedroom but as you add to it your life spills out into the shared space, and begins to cramp others. And if your writing crosses theirs you fight. Of course you could write small but you just kissed sweet dusky Carlos and you need to write that shit in all caps glitter pen my bitches, oh I’m sorry did that cramp where you wanted to roll for your yoga class? I’m too fabulous and you resent that …but I digress.

Everyone sharing the same house is again, good design (the party has instant cohesion) and historical (‘twas the way) and also funny. Yeah I live at The Bongo Drum, near the dunes, just little me, Rock Hudson, a sixty year old cigar huffing drag king, a were-tiger and a mermaid who is an illegal immigrant. And the triad who run the shared garden and the sex shop by the library. It’s just us, you know. Don’t ask about the tiger. Just don’t. Ugh, the hairs in the sink.

There is a character sheet online and it is gorgeous. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uy_r1-u8K-ko29Tbz2u3wtWB4DFVrc1p/view?usp=sharing now the only thing I want is a map of the whole island but Rose Island is a state of mind you know? And it’s also about people. Although there are loving and languid descriptions of the landscape and other small towns most of the books setting is business owners and other people. That’s fitting: much like how although the dog park is a place in Night Vale – it’s Hiram McDaniel and the man in the leather jacket and the angels that make night vale work. Plus random weirdness which there are lovely tables for. There are a LOT of sorcerers and drama queens and just too many pre-made PCs/allies but it is where the focus belongs. I also love that there are tables to generate not just random NPCs but also what they know why they might/not help and how they complicate things. Also random clue ideas which are reminiscent of Partners. It’s all very Scooby Doo. If somethings being stolen from a high room at 5pm then there will be a ladder outside Dave’s house and a torn patch of Susie’s coat caught in the door and a crumpled up note on the floor saying “tonight 5pm”. And I love that. It’s a strong genre well communicated that players will quickly get. There’s even a random table for how the villain over-reacts with eaxh wound they take.

And now the acid test: how do they bring all this together in the adventures? The answer is…decently but not great. The vibe is there: strong hooks, interesting mysteries, but mostly that’s all there is. Some of them offer a selection of solutions in terms of both what happened and/or how to fix it, others are more just fragments. The Scooby Doo vibe is strong. Honestly you can pitch this game as Scooby Doo directed by John Waters. There’s a touch of Night Vale but that metamodern cosycore vibe to not kill your queers rules supreme and that’s good. Still no disco.

Ultimately an rpgs job is to make you want to play it. I am a hard sell because I don’t want to play any rpgs. To get me over the line I need elegant design that punches way above its weight by combining things well. I need sharp design in setting and system that’s subtle and cuts deep, that creates the most power for the least effort from all players. And for the most part, Moonlight on Roseville Beach delivers this. That it also is so very much of the times and the mores, an interesting artefact that reflects who we are now and who we were then, painted boldly and beautifully – that is a bonus. I read a bad RPG recently where the author insisted on breaking character to remind us that our games will be good if we take them seriously. This game never needs to tell us this, because it shows that these lives matter. As they should.

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.

EDIT – I get Johnny and Spike the wrong way around in this whole piece. Spike is the efficient winner, Johnny is the “can I win this way” guy.

So I’ve been reading a lot about CCGs this month because hey, they’re back, back in a big way, and it’s a design space I know nothing about. This led me back to the Magic: The Gathering taxonomy of gamers. Many years ago, the folks at Wizards tried to type their main players into three basic groups, and it’s been surprisingly effective and useful and persistent. Their split were called – and you’ll notice the sexism straight away – Timmy, Johnny and Spike. But while I was exploring this I found a lovely video that looked at the component elements of these identities, and it was very useful for getting into how we approach strategies in games, as opposed to just goals.

For goals, we have Bartle’s Taxonomy as a very useful starting point. His 8-point system is really interesting and developed but for our purpose we can start with his simple four, which is enough for most discussions. Richard Bartle proposed these back in 1996 and you can do a test to find out your types, of course. They were more based around computer games but as you’ll see they relate strongly to Timmy, Johnny and Spike.

Bartle’s list is: Achievers, who want to find everything and unlock everything (in a sense dominating the game environment), Killers, who are there to establish domination over other players, Socializers who play to have social fun, and Explorers who want to wander around and see what happens. Timmy is described as a Magic player who wants to play big creatures and have big explosions go off. He’s there for the cool art, and the cool story but also the time his Serra Angel did fourteen damage. Timmy is a Socializer. Johnny doesn’t like Timmy because Johnny doesn’t think Timmy takes the game seriously. Johnny just wants to win, as fast and as efficiently as possible. Johnny is a Killer. Timmy doesn’t like Johnny because Johnny can win on turn one and it’s not fun. Spike is the Magic player who likes to win, but likes the find the craziest way to do it. He doesn’t like Johnny because Johnny has no art to how he plays; Spike wants to win by doing infinite damage or without using any creatures. Spike is an Explorer. Where are the Achievers? That’s easy: they’re collecting the cards and getting the foil versions and the rare printings. They’re Magic “players” but they don’t really play.

As I say, thanks to the tons of market research Wizards did, it should not surprise us that these archetypes proved to be a good summary of how people play the game, and match up to what academics were finding too. But this video I saw then brought up Power, Simplicity and Integrity as kinds of strategy and they also work really well to explain these three player types, while also breaking down game strategies.

A high power strategy involves finding a strong move and you use it to crush folks down. A high simplicity strategy is one that is easy to see, find, and pull off. A high integrity strategy is one that doesn’t fail: it can handle whatever you throw at it and still win through. Note the subtle difference between integrity and power: we’ll come back to this.

Timmy likes POWER and SIMPLICITY. He’s not trying to burn out his brain and he wants those fun creatures and explosions. So he’s looking for something that gives a lot of bang that he can get going without too much work or in a fun way. Johnny on the other hand wants SIMPLICITY and INTEGRITY. Simplicity here doesn’t mean simple, it means accessible, fast, quick to hand, and Johnny needs those “you’ve already lost” pulls, by building mechanics that always, always win. That’s boring to Spike who wants to find more exciting ways to win, but that take a lot of work: Spike wants POWER but INTEGRITY too. Spike’s solutions tend to not always work but when they do, they are both explosive and crushing.

The reason I started with the Magic archetypes is because I know them but I don’t know strategy much. Although compared to most people I play games at a high level, I am not much of a strategy head and I don’t know much about finding strategies. I know even less about putting them into games. But this triangle of Power, Simplicity and Integrity is a great place for me to start learning. Likewise if you are building ANY strategy game you should think about these three pillars AND the three Magic archetypes. They can be sometimes a bit easier to see than Bartle’s taxonomies, especially when you’re looking at strategies. Exploring sounds like wandering the landscape; if you get what Spike is trying to do, you can more easily drill down into what parts of your system are POWER and which parts are INTEGRITY.

Staying with the Magic archetypes though, you’re going to want to have things for Timmy who just picks something and goes for it, but if that always works, the game becomes not-fun for him and others very quickly. Once people SEE something, everyone can see it, and the “meta” can change. For example: Viticulture has an exploit where you should pretty much hold a wine tasting every round for the VPs. It’s simple to do and just cranks out power and it’s boring. Even when I know it’s there I don’t want to do it, because it actually turns quickly into a Johnny move. You’re not making 100 wine bottles and impressing the table, you’re just being a dick. Contrast that to pursuing Science in the game 7 Wonders. It’s well known that Science tends to give the most points, but to get those points, you have to commit. It has Power and Integrity (it produces a big points explosion and is hard to stop without hurting your own game) but it lacks Simplicity, which means people don’t mind losing to it. They even enjoy losing to it!

Generally, you want to support your Timmys and your Spikes in most strategy games: simple, powerful options that work most of the time but can fall apart with bad luck or missing the right combos, and more complex systems that require more commitment. Occasionally Spike needs just the right luck as well (because it’s not Simplistic) but it pays off big enough to be worth it, so press your luck is fun for Spikes and Timmys alike. Indeed that’s why it can be such a great mechanic – it appeals to the bombastic power that they both like, and has a great story for Timmy when it fails and a great sense of mastery for Spike when it pays off.

But in our design of strategic boardgames, wither Johnny? Do we want to appeal to him? Mostly the answer is no, because it can be a sign your game is broken if Johnny can find a move that always works and forces everyone else to go for that move. That’s great for games like Magic; not great for something like Beyond the Sun. A lot of design comes from avoiding Johnny-exploits. You can try to make them boring or unfun, but the Johnnys of the world will still go for them! But there is a Johnny in all of us and there are some things you can do to appeal to it. First of all, it’s okay for a Johnny strategy to become apparent during play, or just for a phase of the game. If it seems like one player will end the game soon, everyone knows to switch to high victory point plays. Likewise, you can have two or three Johnny strategies to choose from, or put them in a position where they have to be raced to reach. If card X tends to be a card that breaks the game, then it can become the game to get that card. It could also be something that takes time to figure out, after many many plays, at which point players can move on (having solved the game) or try expansions or variants. Sometimes it’s a good sign for players to realise they should be playing a variant or a higher difficulty level, because they spotted the exploits others can’t see (and may never see).

Another thing you can do if there’s a Johnny strategy in your game is to remember that it lacks Power, so it might be a win or an advantage that nevertheless doesn’t score very big. It’s not Shooting the Moon. It’s not a win that sweeps the whole board or leaves every opponent devastated. If there is some way to come back in a later phase or build points over time, a few close victories might not add up to much. You can also build in traps for the Johnnys. In most versions of Risk, it is always better to eliminate other players completely (a non-fun Johnny type strategy); in some versions of the game there are hidden objectives where if colour X is eliminated the player holding that goal can win. On a larger scale, in games with negotiation and bluffing, Johnnys can be “tricked” into becoming kingmakers or be taken out by kingmakers. Johnny SHOULD win but it amuses a Timmy or a Spike to act unpredictably to create a weirder outcome. Spikes tend to win those kinds of games every time, because Johnnys are often not interested in that kind of social play – they’re there for the best mathematical play. (But you can get Johnnys who are good at negotiation; I’m generalizing here).

You can also appeal to Johnny players by letting them go head to head against Spikes and not building your game to appeal to Timmys. Now you’re matching simple brutal efficiency with creative exploits. But you probably won’t make anything fun in a game that has only room for Timmys and Johnnys. You can also build your games around just one type of player, too – that will limit its market but make it a really beautiful focused thing. Games with simple powerful exploding strategies are great fun, and so are chaotic things that are difficult or impossible to master for the weird Spikes! And Chess is really just a game for Johnnys.

If you do want variety though, then you’ll want to look at what are the obvious, simple pathways, and what are the hidden ones, what are the reliable ones, and what are the risky ones, what are the flashy and exciting ones and which ones are plodding but rewarding in their own way. Figure out where the Simplicity is and isn’t, where the Integrity is or isn’t, where the Power is or isn’t. As I said, finding these and designing these can be easier than identifying player goals! Got numbers in your game? That’s where the Power lies. Got ways to shut things down and ways to stop that? That’s where Integrity lies. Got open information or obvious pathways? That’s your Simplicity.

Find those three and you might be able to make a proper start on your strategy game.

Roleplaying games were not really invented so much as congealed. The earliest version were skirmish level miniature wargames and Gygax is on record that for him, CRPGs like Diablo and Eye of the Beholder, maybe even things like Skyrim, were how he invisaged the game to be played. They were tactical exercises in I guess commando raids. One person would build a target environment. The other people would drop their characters in and try to survive and come out with loot.

I have a copy of the Prince Valiant RPG by Greg Stafford. Released in 1989 it makes it clear that it is NOT a roleplaying game because Prince Valiant is designed to tell stories. Stafford takes a whole page to try to explain the difference and talk about how characters might do things that are sub-optimal. His word for the game is a storytelling game. This is the same year that the first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade came out. Now I’m not saying that all those years people were playing Call of Cthulhu or even D&D, that they weren’t roleplaying — my point is nobody really knew what roleplaying WAS. (The term wasn’t even in early D&D books — it first appeared in Castles and Crusades and it was nicked wholecloth from psychology, where it doesn’t mean what we do in D&D either.)

Somewhere along the way we congealed into a rough shared definition that it involves: pretending to be someone else, who exists in a fictional world and interacts as if that fictional world is real, sometimes describing their actions sometimes playing parts (as John Tynes observed, like an improvised radio show). Crucially though, this marriage of simulation and improvisation has no audience; or as John Wick observed, the audience, the author and the character are all the same people. That’s a really interesting tension, because one cannot really be author and character at the same time. The author wants his character to encounter conflict, the character would, for the most part, rather not. Much has been written on the terrible burden of authors to making their characters suffer. Meanwhile, part of the pathos of art was achieved differently: not by being an author creating it, not by being an audience watching it, but by simulating the exprience of being within it. Games are really good at this, or at least approximating it, and it is a wonderful experience. I know that my keyboard isn’t a rope but if my character JUST MAKES the jump, I feel EXACTLY what the fictional character might have felt. That simulation is a potent emotional hit. Video games might be better at simulating it though. Just saying. The edge that RPGs have in flexibility helps, but as video games get better at flexibility or just tell better stories, I think it matters less.

The consequence of simulation is if my fingers aren’t fast enough, I can’t make the jump and Lara Croft hops up and down, crouches, and unloads her inventory over and over. Tabletop RPGs have tried to let such feats be handled with RPGs but at some point there is still a meeting of minds. The tactical battle Gygax envisioned RPGs as, where the players — not the characters — have to solve or resolve a situation. Tactical battle skill morphs into system mastery of sorts, to be combined with general exploration; clever use of powers and improvisational skill morphs into the cleverness of our characters. The clever or the good-at-bullshitting win the day. As I have observed, traditional RPGs most resemble pinatas: one person jiggles a target to increase difficulty, the other participants hit things until rewards (plot points, character moments, experience points) fall out. A gentle GM will not jiggle it too much! No fun is had if the pinata isn’t broken, so it’s really not a game of skill at all. Some do play pure tactics, the pre Prince Valiant style, but its increasingly rare.

To me, this hybrid of story and tactics has stopped being of any interest whatsoever. It was playing D&D 4E than 5E that revealed it to me first: in 4e combat was actually an interesting board game finally, and then in 5E it went away. Leaving us with a poorly designed tool for telling stories, that inevitably ended up with very poor stories indeed. As a GM I felt like I was providing speed bumps or guided escape rooms at best, letting them have an illusion of choice between set pieces and never knowing how much to help them. As a player, I felt like I was running a simulation of an activity I knew nothing about. I don’t know how to save the world. And I’m tired of me, the player, being asked to do so.

And then one day I just saw it: I don’t ever want to have to decide what my character does, ever again.

Obviously, the Author stance isn’t normally as strong as this. The Actor stance is the character-simulation stance, acting as an actor or an avatar within the world, born back in Gygax’s basement. Sometime around Prince Valiant the author limped into view and was paid homage with Drama Points and Fate Points. Authorial influence has injected itself more and more, although often by turning the Actor into semi-self-aware characters who know they are fictional or can at least behave like they do, like the wonderfully genre-tuned mechanics of things like Extreme Vengeance where the harder you got hit the tougher you became. (Buffy was always the best RPG setting ever because the characters in that show were semi-aware of their fictional status too, but I digress).

The problem with the author stance though is that it was often incomplete. Even in games where you viewed your character as a fictional tool, still it came down to a question: what do they do next? The Actor stance says “what would make sense for my character to do (and then I’ll ask the GM, or the dice, if I succeed)”. The Author stance says “whatever makes the best story, (and then I’ll ask the GM and the dice how that pans out and what new hooks it reveals)”. At various times in the history of RPGs these have also been referred to as simulationst vs dramatic styles of play, simulationist vs narrativist or karma vs drama.

But to me, I still felt that the author stance wasn’t far enough. I was still doing all the work! Still making all the choices. And what I really wanted was to be surprised. This is what I loved about the author mechanics in Prime Time Adventures, Fiasco and Smallville: you would go into a scene not knowing what your character would do, and you’d find out if they were brave or a coward. All of a sudden, I found a new kind of simulation: simulating the audience. I created these characters and was writing them but at the same time they were alive and could act on their own. It also contained my favourite part of RPGs: character generation, where you get a bunch of random results and have to make them make sense.

So there it was: the death of agency. Remove the ability to choose what your character does and all of a sudden you don’t have to work so damn hard, and you get to be surprised. My games aren’t just author stance, they are anti-agency design. And this isn’t actually so entirely rare. Prompt games like For the Queen and its derivatives do the same thing, although they might give you more choice than I do sometimes. The card will say something like “you’re betraying The Queen, why?”. Weak prompt games will be like “Would you betray your friend? What might drive you to do that?”. Strong prompt games will be like “You’re stabbing your friend now, explain why.”

I don’t know if that’s the new terminology but it might help.

The beauty as I say is you don’t have to work so hard, although sometimes justification can be difficult. In my experience, after thousands of playtests of The Score, is that people find justification way easier than deciding “what my character should do”. Why? Because agency causes pressure. If you’re trying to decide what your character should do, you might GET IT WRONG. You might act out of character, out of genre, or in a way that kills the story or your character. And all you have is your character. You have one playing piece and you don’t want to lose it.

That advantage of surprise is so key though. That’s what helped it come together in my head. When you watch mysteries and when you watch heist movies, there is misdirection. Characters will appear to lose or die or be guilty, but then subvert that evidence. In actor mode, the actor, the author and the audience are all the same person so they all share the same information. In mysteries and heist movies, the characters KNOW MORE THAN THE AUDIENCE. There’s only one way to mimic that in storytelling games and that’s to take away agency from the player. And so I made Partners (mystery) and The Score (heists).

I’m not saying this is rock and roll revolution of a new way to play that I think others should do. I’m just explaining what I’m designing and why. The next few games will also be no-agency games. And I’m done playing the other kind of roleplaying game or storytelling game, because I just can’t be bothered trying to figure out what to do, when I could be playing my games that tell me . I’d rather apply the logic of random character generation to the entire game. I’d rather play to find out a story rather than write one. I‘d rather make a story nobody could have imagined beforehand, that can surprise me at every turn, while still feeling like I’m in control.

I killed agency, and it set me free.

We are not standing on the precipice of a world powered by AI technology and LLMs (Large Language Models): we are already falling.

That is why the conversation is so difficult. The air rushing past us makes it hard to think. Some people are trying to talk about what to do after we hit the ground, while others are finding it really hard to ignore just how hard we will hit and how fast it is rushing towards us. Some of us are way closer than others, too, and thus have less luxury to chat. Meanwhile, the technology is also changing like the landscape. The hand-holds that we’re talking about today have already flown past, weeks ago.

We know AI is all around us. It is predicting what our texts should say. It is answering our inquiries on websites and guessing what we want to know, and doing its very best to appear human as it does so. Some of its uses have come so quickly and so unobtrusively we didn’t notice, or by the time we did, we were fine with it. Future shock isn’t always about hitting the floor; sometimes it can be the shock of finding ourselves far inside the earth and already too comfortable to leave. The future doesn’t arrive in one piece: it arrives not just for the rich first, but for different professions and different models at different times and speeds.

This also makes things hard to talk about. Nobody has a problem with AI being used as a kind of inkblot maker, spooling out mathematical mandelbrots to make patterns no human could make. But that is AI art. That same two words can also mean a game publisher not hiring an artist to make their game cover and pieces because of sufficiently developed drawing programs that need nothing more than an easily google-able code entry. Some will say writing this code is hard, but it’s code: once it’s written once we can modify it easily at higher levels. AI art coders are almost already obsolete – because we’re falling, falling so fast. The people claiming to be experts might be out of a job tomorrow, because their expertise might be just as easy to codify – to code-ify – and duplicate.

(A lot of people also insist that this is all AI is, just another thing like Photoshop to help us do our work better, which is true in some circles, but vastly untrue in others as we discuss below. If it is just another tool and not much will change, and it’s nothing but hype, then why is it already taking jobs?)

In a world this fast, where technology is changing the argument before we can keep up, and where words don’t mean the same things, ignorance and confusion reign. It is becoming increasingly difficult to know anything about AI, for even the most educated, for longer than five minutes. In an epistemological crisis, we fall back on fear and paranoia; snap judgements are made. Emotions take over. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Because the ground really is rushing up towards us and not everyone will walk away uninjured.

That, more than anything, seems hard to explain to people: not everything is going to be alright. We know this. That’s why actors are on strike, or rather one reason: studios want to scan bodies and replace actors with CGI and never need to pay the humans again. And it’s not just jobs: it’s become harder and harder to sell books because AI is writing them even faster than the find and replace movement. The novels are bad now, but that’s today. Woosh! Tomorrow they’ll be on the best seller list. Meanwhile, the internet is breaking because search engines care about volume, not accuracy, and AI can lie faster and faster. And all of these things – like so much of our technology – are under the control and design of the worst people on earth, who would pay to watch us die if they couldn’t already do it for free.

In the face of all that, what do we do? What CAN we do?

I have a few suggestions.

1. Admit that we don’t know everything but also admit that things are going to break. People have a bad habit of accusing others of assumptions and ignoring their own, and the idea that everything will be fine is just as crazy as everything is over. The idea that all technology will be used for good is a mad belief in capitalism as a cult. The idea that we have to accept technology as inevitable is the same belief, turned into a weapon against ourselves. We can’t afford to be that stupid. None of us can. We’re falling.
2. Try to know what we CAN know, which means understanding how capitalism works and the economic subsystems. That means learning from capitalists and businessmen how they see the world, and also knowing your Marxism, because Marxism is the only study of capitalism there is. Understand that capitalism operates by separating the creator from the created object, and associating it with a brand, and that mind-magic doesn’t have to work on you. Understand that every product has a person attached to it, which leads to:
3. See all the parts of the system and recognize them. Obviously in times of great change there are a million small struggles; and many of those struggles are lost and that can break our hearts. I don’t mean get attached like that. I mean see that every product and every purchase is about people. If you want something, consider the people who made it. Know how many there are. Know what they do. Find out if they are well paid. If the process was different, who stops getting paid? Who keeps getting paid? And of course…
4. Figure out if you care about these things. Why are you buying things? Do you care who makes them? Do you believe that people matter more than money, that the environment matters more than money, that art matters more than money? Are you a creator to make art, to communicate, to bring people together, to spread joy, to share a story, or are you here to make money? And with that, understand…
5. Not everyone shares your values. They just don’t. They might not even have your values on their radar. But everyone is driven BY values. That’s how we do everything we do. When you’re discussing these things, try to front load your values and probe those of others, because if you don’t, you’ll be talking in circles until eventually you find out that your values just differ. And look, that may be a hard pill to swallow, but it’s good to know. You want to know who cares about things you care about. and on the subject of how we talk about things…
6. If you’re discussing something, try to be specific about what you’re discussing. AI/LLM is too wide a subject, and the fact that it is changing everything means everything is attached, so every emotion is coming in. Of course, it is okay to bring in those subjects too – it doesn’t make sense to pretend AI art can’t take jobs when AI is already taking jobs of actors and screenwriters and authors! But if you’re going to go in, you can be the bigger person and the smarter arguer by establishing your terms.
7. Pick your battles. Social media is all battles, and not all of them are helping right now. A lot of people are bad at reading the room and sign-posting their conversations and even if they were good at communicating they might still just not even have a clue what your values are and would despise them if they knew. You don’t have to talk to those people. But likewise, you probably don’t gain anything by calling them cunts. You just know you don’t want to work with them. Which brings me to:
8. Be aware that you’re on show. The internet remembers everything and shows it off to everyone. Meanwhile the game industry is perishingly small. A lot of very dumb people are showing off that they have terrible values about the industry right now, but you don’t have to join them. Stay calm. Write a blog post instead. And on that note:
9. Consider what’s best for everyone. Obviously this is a value so a lot of your colleagues don’t give a damn. You shouldn’t be that person. Everyone in the game industry is watching you, and your vast disregard for your fellow workers is not something you should advertise. We do keep notes. We do remember. You matter, in every sense, and if you’re hurting the industry, we notice. And you really do matter. and what’s more….
10. Remember you’re an artist. Act like one. Give a damn about your art. Maybe that means using wonderful new tools, yes! But it also means caring about things. Being glib or falling back on cliches makes you look like you don’t care and to be an artist is to care. And it also makes you look thoughtless. Running around assuming everyone who hates technology doesn’t understand it is just as stupid and thoughtless as assuming all change is going to destroy us. We may be falling, we may have no idea what’s going on but we can still be smart about it.

And not be an asshole. Because it’s smart to be nice. That is indeed, Steve’s first law of game design: Be Nice. Same as in Roadhouse. Be nice. We’re all falling and we don’t need you being a dick on the way down.