Sometime in early 20-teens, I was home from college while a family friend was visiting. He pulled out a sample printing of a card-driven party game he’d designed. As we played, I asked him some questions about his design goals relative to other (very popular) games that were similar, but I quickly got the impression that he had no familiarity with most of them. The game he made was…fine. It was fine. It was built on relatively little context or experience within the space he was wading into, and it frankly felt bland and unfocused compared to other contemporary work. My impression was that he was drawing from his stereotypical straight white man confidence in the novelty of his own ideas. And also, that he was making a game primarily as a fun business endeavor that happened to leverage those ideas. He was designing a product for a market, not creating a work of art within a lively and evolving artistic scene. And knowing neither the scene nor the market, it made for an underwhelming and inelegant work.
In the last year and a half, I’ve put a lot of time into exploring analog game design, including writing on this blog about my experiences with tabletop RPGs. I’ve kept my blogging scoped to a niche that I’m most comfortable and experienced with (“story games”, or whichever insufficient term you prefer). Beyond my writing, though, I’ve tried to explore games outside my familiarity, to play widely and curiously and voraciously.
During these efforts, I’ve intermittently delved into Magic: The Gathering, I’ve played social deduction games, I’ve spent time with older RPGs (a.k.a. ”trad games”, another insufficient term), I’ve dipped a toe into board games, I’ve read and written lyric games, and I’ve explored blogs and actual play shows and game design podcasts. I’ve attended conventions and meetups, followed conversations on discord and bluesky, joined playtests, and so forth. In the back of my mind, I think I must have intended to become a sort of “expert”, a person with sufficient knowledge to confidently participate in both TTRPG criticism and design.
So far, by any metric that I earnestly believe, I have failed at becoming this kind of person. I’m writing this post partly to convince myself otherwise, but mostly to attempt to reframe the goal itself and resist burnout.
Games are an enormous space that demands an impossible amount of time, attention, and energy to know them both widely and well. This is in some ways a very good thing; it means there are games out there for every sort of person imaginable. In my efforts to avoid carelessly butting into spaces that are filled with history and preexisting artistic interplay, I’ve prioritized an adventurousness that drives me into new spaces without acknowledging how it’s chilled my sense of critical conviction.
Participation is core to what defines games as a medium. While it’s obviously possible to write games “for yourself” and cast them out into the world untested, it’s not how I personally want to operate. For me, art is communication: I want the things I make to speak to someone and to connect with them, even if it’s only one person. I want to hone and improve them to be stronger and more insightful messages for those willing to receive them. To do so, I need to playtest them. To make art in this space, I rely on contributing to and getting things back from relevant social spaces. And even as I work on managing my own habits better, there will always be an ongoing emotional tug-of-war that comes from existing with social anxiety in TTRPG community spaces. Overcoming social hurdles like soliciting playtesters or attending conventions can be gratifying, but exhausting. Unraveling that exhaustion is becoming an increasingly important part of my ability to stay inspired.
So while I do feel a need to be present in these spaces in order to access the joy and mutual uplift of community, I find that my vigilance against privilege-borne confidence pulls me in the opposite direction. Lurking in servers as a wallflower and trying to keep up can be hard enough, and chiming in is often additionally unnerving. Siloing my opinions into this blog is one way to make my thoughts public, but still obscured behind the effort of clicking through links, reading long posts. As of yet, though, it hasn’t been the way I make strong connections with my peers; it isn’t conversation.
As an example, game designer Aaron Lim recently mentioned an eternally-ongoing debate around whether game systems “matter” (whether they meaningfully change the play experience at a given table). His comments acknowledged that it’s an ever-evolving conversation, but also that it’s constantly being joined by new voices who have varying levels of context on what has and hasn’t been said. Even in this light, and even seeing various other folks weigh in, it was weird to share even a couple of stray thoughts about my own design experience. I’ve been sitting with this discomfort since, trying to figure out if these spaces just feel hostile to my loose and reactive thoughts, or if I don’t quite have the emotional constitution to be online in this way at all.
Ultimately, I want my art to be in conversation with other work that excites me, and I want to share my thoughts and experiences about that work. I don’t necessarily need to participate in capital-d Discourse to do that, but engaging with games multivariously is core to how I enjoy the hobby and how I improve my art. Not only that, but my opinions ought to shine through into what I make; otherwise my work is going to come across as diluted and underbaked regardless of its breadth of influences. I don’t know if I need to measure my critical voice by whether or not I'm willing to dig my heels in and produce A Take On The Internet, but it’s important to me for that kind of conviction to be present in my work if not in my online presence.
Honestly, I can’t figure out how to end this. It’s helpful to talk through doubts and to acknowledge that my vague pursuit of “TTRPG worldliness” is probably unhelpful to me as a person and as an artist and critic. Maybe the resolution here is to follow my intrinsic curiosity more earnestly. At the end of the day, I probably prefer self-doubt over unearned confidence. But writing and revising these thoughts every couple of weeks at least feels like putting in the work and putting something out there, and that’s worth doing.