Over on the Dice Exploder discord, someone was asking about the canon of Game Design, and we all agreed it was pretty fruitless an exercise. So, Sam D suggested we do it personally as a personal canon is more meaningful, I suggested a Blog Carnival, and I proceeded to forget about it until Sam posted his summary with only a few submissions (of course! It wasn’t advertised or anything!).

Now, I feel spurred into action. The suggestion was: 3 posts/podcasts/episodes/pieces of media to consume; 1 game to play; a paragraph or so of your own advice. I’m also not going to repeat anything written in the other posts, there’s enough (very good) Vincent & Meg and Jay Dragon recommendations in there to last you a lifetime. My greatest challenge, to be entirely honest, is that the blogosphere has an incredibly rich and varied background of game design writing, that it’s hard to choose and I want to choose some things outside of game design. But, I probably won’t, and I’ll talk about that in the “Let me talk section”.

1. Abstraction & Elision in Trophy by Marcia B

This post is, as most conversations that occur in the DIY elfgame blogosphere, simply part of the conversation, and I’d encourage you to also read the inciting post by Jared Sinclair and the post that Marcia is responding to by Noora Rose. I think it summarises and critiques a quite clearly very important but heavily misused notion that floats about in DIY elfgame circles, regarding what role rules should play in games, and whether they consistently achieve what we often assume they achieve. As a game design moderate, I’ve long railed against Rules Elide extremists who have trouble accounting for Pathfinder 2e at all, but also stand strongly by Rules Elide as my favoured approach to analysing game rules.

2. Blorb Principles by Sandra Snan

Blorb Principles is a description of a playstyle, not a post of theory. It’s a Manifesto, as much as it is anything else, and to be entirely honest I strongly suspect that this article is not the entirety of the concept that I’m referring to, but rather, it is the entirety of Sandra’s output that refers back to this, elucidates her approaches to playing her complex and multifaceted DIY fifth edition. The recognition that there are unique playstyles and elucidation about the depth and complexity of those playstyles is important, because much of the railing and argument I see in TTRPG spaces seems predicated on the misunderstanding that people engage with TTRPGs in different ways. While Blorbiness is one axis on the spectrum, another approach to considering playstyles is John B’s Six Cultures of Play, also quite formative.

3. The Monomyth Thread by Hy Libre

Another piece of text that is inseparable in my mind from the conversations that surrounded it, sprung from it, and caused it to come into being, and which because of that my own interpretation of both the essay and game is unique. This is one perspective on a conversation that was had from two other perspectives. For me, though, it’s a very important principle in, again, understanding and not judging the choices other people make in game design and in their choices in play. I’ll summarise that as: Having a story on rails is, in effect, one kind of safety tool, or at least, a support mechanism that allows people to occupy their characters with a sense of confidence. Understanding that opens up a breadth of design opportunities that simply sticking to the most open and minimalist play does not allow.

4. Lorn Song of the Bachelor by Zedeck Siew

Truth be told, this was my second choice, but my first, by the same author, is not available. It was my first because I believe (despite what you’d believe from my writing) that brevity is the soul of wit, but this beauty comes at a close second. I will talk about Lorn Song of the Bachelor at length in an upcoming episode of Song Exploder (and at around the same time, I’ll publish a Bathtub Review of it), so I won’t expound at length here, but, while the definition of mechanics can be broad, this is a masterclass in writing a game with mechanics minimised and often backhandedly referred to by tradition and societal momentum, while innovating on poeticisms and beauty in a way that few other games have achieved.

5. My Advice for Game Design

My advice is to find the most absurd concept you could conceptualise writing that excites you, and write that. Lean into that. Don’t write something that anyone else could write. Write the innermost aspects of your psyche. Write in your grandparents and your home soil and what you miss about your childhood. Write your greatest fears and the things you take most joy out of. Our hobby is besieged by dry homages and regurgitated nostaliga, and that may be where you might make money (although I doubt it), but nobody will love you for that. Make art that makes you cry to read and play it.

My start to game design was hacking fifth edition, but it wasn’t until I started writing lyric games to process a cancer diagnosis that I started to understand what game design could do. And it wasn’t until I started writing DIY-elfgame bestiaries in haiku that I realised what direction I wanted to take. And it wasn’t until I read the Isle and A Thousand Thousand Islands that I realised that someone might read something patently absurd and prone to interpretation and actually want to play it and be interested in consuming it as art.

And so, in this way, the long list of what I’d recommend is my extended appendix N, and it’s not Jack Vance but My Words to Víctor Frankenstein Above The Village of Chamounix and Kobayashi Isso and the Crane in the Clouds and it’s the Maltese Bestiary by Stephan Misfud and it’s Cultist Simulator and it’s Planescape: Torment and it’s the Tale of Princess Kaguya and it’s DL1-8 despite the fact that it’s terrible, and it’s that Matthew Colville video where he suggested I run Against the Cult of the Reptile God which opened my eyes to exactly what a module could be, and that we’re 41 years on from that release so why aren’t we creating things that challenge us the way that 41 years of development should have? It’s everything that isn’t TTRPGs and isn’t about TTRPGs, because if it’s not, you’re just JJ Abrams making trash movies with “Star” in the title.

Ignore my list. Make off-the-wall games.

Idle Cartulary