View from the Mountaintop – Gamex 2024
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve probably seen me retweet a thread from an Australian game designer and all-round rad person, Ash McAllan. If you’re into games enough to be here, you’re into Ash’s work. Go check out her stuff.
This is the thread here, it’s a short read. I recommend starting there.
Ash is responding to an idea referred to as Con Crash or Con Drop: the feelings of distress (or “depression”) that people can feel after a significantly enjoyable experience. A few things about a convention experience can make this happen: an extended duration over a couple of days, a place away from home, a sense of inclusion in something bigger than oneself, and the “magic circle” of a special event are all contributing factors. Ash’s thread has, for a long time, been part of my coping strategy (a few other parts can be found in great resources like this one).
Earlier this year I moved to North America, which has increased my capacity to attend some North American Cons. Prior to attending Breakout earlier this year in Toronto, my first and only American Con experience was the fabled Big Bad Con 2019 in the sparkling before-times. Truly a transformative experience, if only due to the friends I made. While I’ll recommend such an event to anyone, I wouldn’t do so without a plan in place for how to “come down the mountain” after being transformed in some way. Ash’s advice, which has long become my north-start in “coming down”, is to “reflect and focus on the lessons we learned, the relationships we built, and the experiences we had.” An order that I've taken to heart.
On my right wrist, I have a tattoo of a match in flame. It’s a cute tattoo, thick black lines, done by an apprentice on ANZAC Day. For those who know me and my military history, ANZAC Day (Australia’s day of remembrance for military service) is a…complex time for me. So many complex emotions are tied in with this little sulphur-headed wristwarmer. One the messages for me is that value and permancy are not the same thing: A match is valuable because it burns and changes. Things don’t have to last forever to be important. But, one thing we can ask of a match is to share that moment of flame, to transfer it to something more long-lived. Not to burn longer, but to use its own change of state to support other changes which may have broader impacts. Light the match, light the candle, light the room.
That philosophy has been the lynchpin in how I manage myself coming out of conventions, and this time I would like to invite you into my process.
For weekend in Late May, I was hosted by Story Games LA who run the Games on Demand section for Gamex 2024. Gamex is one of the three conventions run under the Strategicon umbrella each year, and it’s a phenomenal place to spend a weekend. Amazing crew, fantastic games.
Here’s my convention by the numbers:
The Event
3-ish days, including
55 hours, including
8 games, including
7 new-to-me games, including
4 playtests, including
1 of mine, a 1.0.
The Games
Psi*Run
Starscape
The Most Dangerous Game
Bandaids and Bulletholes
Northfield
Extra Ordinary
CBR+PNK
Wanderhome
The Additions
Also Stephanie Bryant's seminar on player engagement,
Design Coffee Hour,
Happy Jacks Live, and
two game design chat parties in my hosts’ hotel room.
The Drinks
3 old fashioneds,
2 beers,
7 coffees,
2 giant fuck-off American fast food cokes,
1 can of oolong tea,
The People
4 decaying orbit fans,
4 signings of game bits or books,
3 by me, 1 for me.
2 new twitter friends,
1 new Facebook friend,
4 new discord friends,
1 new phone number friend,
2 reunions with an old mate,
3 new crushes (iykyk),
2 design collab ideas,
5 agreements to meet at another con this year.
Coming Down the Mountain
Productively return from Gamex means identifying the fundamental lessons that mean I’ve come home with something new. These are my candles.
One – The Conversations Are Good, But The Play Is The Thing
I love talking about game design with people. Adore it. Sam Dunnewold (of the brilliant Dice Exploder Podcast) and I would have loved spending our time together talking about games, idly. In fact, every second we spend talking about games was a joy. But the discussions were backed up and given context by playing Sam’s Bandaids and Bulletholes and Northfield. In both cases, we were able to anchor our conversations in shared experiences, rather than anchoring in them in the authority that we gave each other. Here’s an example, I hope Sam won’t mind me sharing it.
I’ve been talking for about a year now about “the gamefeel” of how many dice we roll and how those dice slip across our hands. My theory is nested somewhere in the fact that the d20 just feels better in the hands than a d6, until you get 5-6 d6s in that hand, and then the d20 seems mediocre. That small dice pools (for example, PbtA’s 2d6) actually feel worse than a single die in the hand. This is why I tend to use Doublesix Dice—d12s with 1-6 painted twice. I (in agreement with Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall) believe the d12 has a great feel in the hand.
Now, game feel as a concept refers to a lot more than just the literal feel of dice in the hand (I heartily recommend this video game-focused book for ANY designer, digital or analogue), but for now we’re going to keep the focus tight.
But sitting there with Sam, I could physically show him the difference between where his game asked me to shuffle four cards, and where I was shuffling 16. The difference in game feel was indescribable, but through play it became unmissable. The play made the theory into something we could interact with. And what theory isn’t interacted with through play is perhaps not worth interacting with at all.
This is not exclusive to playtesting. I was able to articulate some things to the great Kodi Gonzaga about their upcoming success Extra Ordinary because we played Wanderhome and Psi*Run together. Kodi and I are both well spoken and well read designers, but the act of playing creates a shared experience that makes connecting the dots in design discussion absolutely trivial (Please keep an eye out for Extra Ordinary on kickstarter if you like Monsterhearts, Masks, teen drama type games. It hits the brief so well!).
Finally, those times where we didn’t play a game (talking with people about Blades in the Dark, for example) made it difficult to get some concepts on the ground. It would’ve been a thousand times easier to have those discussions after a play session, where we could be demonstrative about what we’re seeing.
Two - I Am Not Making Enough
The Most Dangerous Game was a joy to write and a joy to play. It’s overwritten, its…a 1.0. We can forgive a 1.0 here and there, right? Including some page numbers just not being right. I look forward to sending it out with that glaring error on it, so that people can see that a 1.0 need not be anywhere close to perfect.
But in the same way that The Play Is The Thing, being surrounded by very clever designers making very cool shit…I just felt a little like I didn’t get to say the things I needed to say through my games.
I’ll admit too, the amount of people that came up to me and said “Oh I love Decaying Orbit” vastly outnumbered the people who liked The Daily Blade or who liked my tweets or whatever. There’s a reach and an impact to play that I’m just not getting through theory. And that’s great! It just means it’s time to make more. More tests, more explorations, more curiosity. Speaking of curiosity…
Three - My Primary Game Design Drive Is Curiosity, And That Limits My Audience
When landing at the event, I was still a little shaken up by one of the stranger critical responses to my theory that I have ever had: Someone called my work “mystifying” because “Sidney’s work is great, I presume/accept the theory informs the work […] they are obviously using these ideas in a productive way, but their theories are just not good […] not good in the senses of being wrong.” And this is….kind of a reality of theoretical discussions: they tend to be pointed at the people already engaged with theory. As a description of this person (though by no means a dismissal of their criticism), after we spoke about some theory-related concepts, I found them so profoundly incurious about any theory that wasn’t clearly fed to them. They wanted to be shown, not to explore (to the point that when I mentioned a very present author in games-impact discussions, they preferred to tell me that referencing someone they didn’t know was patronising and exclusionary, instead of…you know, googling the name?). That kind of person will never gel with my theoretical approach because they’re more interested in exhaustive answers than in provocative questions.
I had dinner with some clever RPG people, including 5e-trad-focused players. We were talking about the capacity of PbtA to engage with tactical decision-making, and I was just so enthralled by a very 5e-focused player exploring the possibility of PbtA reinforcing their playspace (instead of dismissing it, out of hand, as indie nonce). That was one of my favourite conversations that I’d ever had. I missed some special event shit just to have it, and I enjoyed every second. Four or five people being overwhelmingly curious with each other. You know those conversations where people are actively listening, rather than just waiting for their turn to speak? It was foundational to some really great conversations and game suggestions over the course of that weekend.
Some people wish to “live the questions” (as anyone who’s received the Letters To A Young Poet gift from me will understand). Some people want to be given answers. My exploration of the Daily Blade was inherently me living the questions I had (or have) about Blades in the Dark. It was joyous, it was curious, it was fine to be wrong. It wasn’t trying to be prescriptive about how Blades is or should be, it was trying to describe my interface with it. But because it wasn’t “accurate where it purports to describe specific games” or “exhaustive in its approaches to dice rolling”, it was unusable to someone who didn’t want to do the curious bits themselves. And that’s okay, generally. Not everyone has to come along on this ride with me, and not everyone who does is going to enjoy it. But it does set me apart from other RPG theorists who are more willing to say that things ARE a certain way.
As a side note, this is also why I really enjoy talking about where debunked or deprecated RPG theories might still hold some value. I love a good chat about Rules Elide or The Big Model in a way that I see a lot of people refusing to engage with them (often as a joke: “and we’ve mentioned the Big Model which means it’s time to change subject” from, I think an episode of the Splatbook Podcast. Forgive me if that citation is incorrect. But do listen to Splatbook anyway!). Again, super cool. People who are looking for answers: Big Model is NOT IT. Rules Elide: NOT IT. People who are looking for questions…there’s some gold to be found in there.
Four - Playtesting Well Is A Skillset That I Have Put Time Into. Not Everyone Has.
I got to do a LOT of playtesting over Gamex. Not just my own, but Kimi Hughes’ Starscape (kickstarting soon, follow here), Kodi’s aforementioned Extra Ordinary, and Sam’s aforementioned Bandaids and Bulletholes. My capacity to give feedback is one of my favourite things about how I approach playtests, and I received some grateful responses from those designers. I’ve worked hard to keep a focus on meeting the designer where they are, engaging the piece and not my vision for the piece, and starting with questions. In each case, those games have come away with changes that I think make them fundamentally better games as a result of my feedback. If I were to have done that playtest design-fixing bad habit (“what you should do is”) they would be fundamentally worse games. Perverted by my design and my opinion. I made a lot of impact on two moves in Starscape, but it still represents Kimi’s beliefs about the world, not mine, and it is a better game for it. Playtesting is a very difficult skill because “when you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all”.
When playtesting, if you aim to assert what you believe to be true, you will only corrupt the process. As my dad told me when I was a kid, “while you’re talking, you can only ever hear things you already know”. Instead, we can ask, listen (again, be curious), and contribute to a process.
Five - I Need More Focus.
Between a 9-5 to that I adore, a love of Serious Games, a desire to write new games, and a fierce need to play more. I need to reduce my project scope. Those who follow my newsletter will soon be receiving a version that lays out this fact, and a roadmap for my next few projects. If you are interested in being a part of that, if you are also profoundly curious, there is a link on the main page to join that Newsletter and hear more.
I am grateful to the organisers of Gamex, and specifically Tomes, for making this happen. Thanks for lighting the match, friends, I’ll look after the candles for a bit.
