Expressionism in Practice: A Case Study of Triangle Agency
Recently Jay Dragon released an essay outlining her vision for an artistic movement oriented at a specific set of goals that she refers to as expressionist games. If you havenât already, go read that essay! Itâs a fantastic articulation of a set of goals and qualities that Jay is really passionate about, and that are incredibly compelling to me as well (also this piece will make less sense outside of the context of hers.) Reading drafts and the early release of the essay, her ideas were fascinating to me- but not entirely novel! As the manifesto itself alludes to, expressionism is both a lens that can be applied retrospectively to previous works and a set of goals for designers creating new games in the same tradition.
Despite that, some of the discourse Iâve seen around expressionist games has expressed concern about what such a game would look like. The qualities outlined here are being taken to imply a game that is unplayably hostile, impossible to navigate, and fraught to interpret. Thereâs uncertainty over whether such a game could exist within this framework or succeed at achieving these goals without falling apart and failing to live up its aspirations. And, to be clear, this is a fair question! With such artistically ambitious goals, can the vision outlined here be more than a lofty dream?
Unfortunately, while we can see elements of expressionism in previous games, seeing these qualities fully outlined in practice is a different matter. If only we had a published example of what expressionism as Jay outlines it would look like, we could use that game as a case study of expressionism-
"Some particular design choices in various current games (which might or might not consider themselves expressionist) that work towards the goals Iâm laying out here include:
- Basically everything going on with Triangle Agency by Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland, but especially the way the text demands to not be interpreted and rules which can only be accessed by breaking the rules of the game."
Huh. Well, I guess thereâs only one thing to do.
A Case Study of Expressionism, via Triangle Agency
Triangle Agency is a game published in 2024 by Haunted Table Games and designed by Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland. On their online shop, itâs described as âa tabletop role-playing game about wielding enormous, reality-warping power while navigating bureaucratic red tape and juggling your everyday responsibilities.â Iâve been reading, rereading, discussing, and playing this game since the Delta Test all the way through today, with various groups and in various contexts- conventions, one-shots, and an ongoing campaign. Itâs a game that has brought me a lot of joy, expanded my vision of the possibilities in modern game design, and made me excited for what its designers and others working in parallel ways will make next. Itâs not a perfect game, but itâs something better. Itâs a game that is trying to be unapologetically itself, and nothing less, and in doing so calling out to other designers to rethink whatâs possible in the medium.
But this isnât a review! My praise (and criticism) for the game on its own merits can come another day. What Iâd like to do in this analysis is take what Jay lists as the critical and secondary qualities of an expressionist game, and talk through in what form I do (or donât) see them in Triangle Agency, and how they might contribute to the unique nature of reading and playing that game.
(Note: While I will try to avoid spoilers for Triangle Agency, some will be inevitable as a part of this broader analysis- read at your own discretion, and if you are playing an Agent, notify your General Manager that you should receive demerits as appropriate.)
These are the elements that the manifesto finds necessary for a game to fit within the framework of expressionist games.
Every character possesses a rich and complex inner world.
In Triangle Agency, you play as Resonants, regular people who have somehow bonded with paranormal entities called Anomalies and gained inexplicable abilities. They have been hired by the titular Agency as Field Agents to capture or kill other Anomalies, and to contain knowledge of the anomalous from becoming widespread. Inner worlds are implied and suggested by the nature of your work. Your existence is torn between your work and your personal life, what you would want to do and what your job demands of you.
But the game also takes steps to ensure other characters who arenât grappling with these external worlds. Your character defines three Relationships, people in their lives who exist outside of their jobs or anomalies. These Relationships are not given to the GM (General Manager) to play, but instead are played by everyone else at the table. This enables each Relationship to get more dedicated focus than if one person was responsible for all of them. Not only are these people given their own assigned representatives among the layers, they also get scenes between missions during downtime or in Morning Meetings, and any mechanical association comes only after we sit with the character in a scene- we have to see who they are as a person first.
Other characters get this treatment as well. The GM sections talk about the different traits people will have, how they might react to the anomalous, and how they always have their own wants and needs. In this game, everyone is a fully fledged person, even if they arenât the main or side characters.
The exception to this standard is Anomalies. Anomalies are explicitly stated by the Agency (through the bookâs diegetic voice) to not be people, to not have complex internality. They are âuncaring, unconcerned, and at best obliviousâ according to the Agency.
The Agency also considers you and your Field Team to be Anomalies, by the way. That might come up again later.
The rules cannot dictate the inner worlds of these characters.
Where other games mechanize internal worlds robustly (such as Conditions that reflect emotions in games like Masks), Triangle Agency does not (mostly.) Your stats in this game are explicitly aspects of personality the Agency wants to encourage, not measurements of your private nature. Your abilities and features are supernatural powers granted by an external source, either the Agency or your Anomaly or the Urgency or whoever that yellow voice is. The exception here are some of the Reality features- the mechanical effects of your life outside of your job and your powers. But even here, these effects are external intrusions such as the result of Chaos being spent, or your relationships with others imposing responsibilities and expectations on them.
Instead, the rules abstractly simulate the social reality of the characters.
Every rule of Triangle Agency is, explicitly, a rule imposed by Agency itself within the fiction. They are all assertions of the way the Agency expects you to behave. Your character is made up of three mechanical parts; what category your anomaly has been sorted into (Anomaly), what your life outside of the Agency looks like (Reality), and your role at the company (Competency). Some of these are transparently subjectively determined- your Competency is literally a set of expectations youâre supposed to meet- but even the others are socially imposed.
Take your Anomaly- whether it falls under Dream or Timepiece or Gun, the categories ârepresent Abilities we can reliably expect from Anomalies with similar Focuses.â Already thereâs an implication that there are other possibilities the Agency doesnât communicate directly in favor of flattening the infinite range of possibility into a clear taxonomy- echoed elsewhere in the text, where it is mentioned that âWhile each Anomaly is theoretically capable of a wide array of abilities, only three are approved for use in the field.â This implies a lot of possibilities, such as the existence of abilities that are unexpected or unapproved, or the potential to use your Anomaly in another way, breaking or bending the expectations socially imposed on you. To be clear- your Anomaly is not an objective definition of the capabilities you have access to as a Resonant, but a subjective category that determines what abilities you are approved to use by the Agency.
Your Reality follows suit. It might seem at first glance seem like fairly neutral descriptions of the histories and circumstances of an Agent before and outside of the Agency and becoming a Resonant, bonded to an Anomaly- but the book mentions the infinite variety has been âcompartmentalizedâ here, with a focus on how these Realities might motivate Agents to work harder. One wonders if the Agency specifically looks for Resonants who have obligations that can be used to motivate them when recruiting new Agents. But importantly, while some Realities do seem to prescribe internal life (Romantic in particular with how it asserts your flighty romantic interest in others), they are still clearly descriptive rather than prescriptive. This is evidenced by how easy it is for Reality to change- simply show a few times that it doesnât accurately describe you, and your Reality Track fills up and you pick a new one. Realities function, primarily, to determine how the Agency and the world view your character, and how the society around your character intrudes on their life and creates obligations for them.
The rules are mediated through friction between the text and the players.
This book does not respect you. This book doesnât even like you. It speaks to you with the voice of the Agency, a multinational conglomerate with profit and growth as its priorities. Every bit of authorized player facing rules text has the voice of that corporation, as it tells you not to interpret the rules, as it calls your behavior selfish or embarrassing, as it asserts that it knows you will fail. This voice doesnât even really hate you- it doesnât care enough about you to hate you. It dismisses, demeans, and manipulates, using coercive threats and transparent bribery to convince you to cooperate with the demands it makes of you, and the structures it asserts as reality.
Trying to distinguish between mechanics and flavor here is an impossible proposition. Anomalies are asserted to be composed of a Focus and a Domain. But that definition is the product of âresearch in the Vaultâ, and is qualified throughout with âtypicallyâ or ârarely.â Maybe we look instead to Anomaly abilities- but we already know those are what the Agency âapprovesâ the use of Anomaly powers for. Are these limitations diegetic or hypodiegetic, rules of reality or of corporate policy? If itâs a matter of permission rather than capability, who is withholding that permission- the designers of the game, or the designers of the rules? Is there a difference?
The game doesnât want to give you easy answers to these questions. Instead, it places you in the same conceptual space your character inhabits, wrestling with the arbitrary rules of a system that is not oriented towards making your life easier, but instead towards consolidating and maintaining its own power. And as your character will be, youâre put in a position to consider how youâll engage with these rules, and what the consequences might be for breaking them.
The players alternate between experiencing bleed, alienation, and tension.
Working to stay alive sucks. Itâs even worse when youâre working for a corporation that cares about profit and power more than human lives, and when that corporation has expectations for your behavior and cooperation and support of its goals over your own values and passions. Having your heart and spirit corralled and forced to turn the wheels of industry while your individuality is crushed under a stack of incentives and performance improvement plans, while you are told there is no better way for the world to be- it can drive you to consider burning the whole system down.
But enough about that, back to talking about games.
Bleed is a complicated concept in practice, but at its core is well understood as the phenomena where emotions cross over from outside of the fiction of a game into it, or vice versa. It can occur at many different intensities, but is most commonly described when it disrupts play. It is easy to consider bleed something to avoid, as we place smooth, simple, uninterrupted play without friction on a pedestal. Expressionist games, and Triangle Agency in particular, ask their players to embrace friction, and open their hearts to the ups and downs of complex emotional experiences.
The Agency rewards you for policing the human behavior of your friends. See someone talk about their feelings when theyâre supposed to be a goofball? Demerit for them, Commendation for you. A player disobeys an order, when theyâre supposed to be a cooperative Intern? Your General Manager will thank you for catching that, as the person who saved your life is placed in danger of receiving Probation at the end of the mission.
The Agency outlines what parts of your life matter. Theyâve defined all time outside of Missions as being spent either advancing your Competency or your Reality (donât mind that third blue track, itâs probably a glitch) and they are very clear where that time is best focused. If you want to advance your career, you canât spend downtime with your loved ones. You might want to coordinate with your allies, to align your priorities- but what space can there be for that when thereâs always another mission demanding your attention?Â
If youâre the General Manager, balancing these desires doesnât get simpler. You want your friends to have a good time and succeed, but youâre tasked with punishing them for minor infractions. Your Agents express care and compassion for the regular people caught in the crossfire- thatâs great and all, but your responsibility as a GM is to remind them that those people are Loose Ends (mundane minds with knowledge of the existence of the anomalous), and the greater good of reality comes first, so they should really find a way to take care of those pesky mundane folks.
And then there are the missions themselves. Capturing Anomalies in a research lab to be studied for profit, or eliminating them to prevent public knowledge of the anomalous- the Agency wants you to be comfortable doing these things, and so they tell you that Anomalies cannot be sentient. Itâs so much easier to do your job without conflict when your targets arenât people. Dehumanization makes these actions amoral, or even heroic when the alternative is alluded to be dangerous and a threat to your way of life. But you and the other Agents are explicitly not mundane yourselves anymore- you are also anomalous beings. What would the Agency do with you, if you werenât useful anymore?
Your group is full of good people, Iâm sure. People who want to do good in the world, who care for each other, and who value the lives of human beings over the priorities of corporations. Your friends love and trust each other, which makes it all the more heartbreaking and frustrating that you and they are stuck in a system that considers them inconvenient necessities to keep the profits flowing, that is determined to turn you all against each other, and that is most benefited when you are all isolated from your communities and each other, prevented from mobilizing together.
But enough about that, back to talking about games.
These are the elements that the expressionist games manifesto outlines as interesting and relevant in a game aiming at the previous goals, but not strictly required.
"An inability to resolve the tension within the rules of the game, requiring players to break the rules to have any chance to achieve their player goals."
- The rules of Triangle Agency do give you some options for achieving their goals without breaking the game, but only in limited ways- you get to pick who wins in a battle between the Agency and The Urgency, but not who survives. If you want to write your own ending, decide what you care about, youâll have to go beyond the confines of what the voice of the Agency or its enemies tells you is possible.
"Use of unexpected or unfamiliar game components, such as candles, spare game boards, or plungers."
- Mostly not applicable here, but the use of d4s here is somewhat novel, and I think that serves to break expectations about what the game is trying to do. More than that, it points to a willingness to go beyond conventional wisdom about game design and experiment, exploring what mechanisms best serve the metaphor.
"Encouraging players to pro-socially argue with each other, ârules lawyerâ the text constructively, and engage in interpretive conflict without disrupting the game."
- The game outlines that âbending or breaking the rules for narrative purposesâ incurs demerits- but that implies itâs simply another game action. Never mind that you arenât allowed to interpret the text- the nature of the player toys here as natural language reality bending means play continuously consists of questions like, âDoes giving a press conference count as a finer thing in life?â, âFor the purposes of Borrow, are their memories of the last year a feature?â, âIs someoneâs life a trophy of Eliminating them from reality?â, and âIs a surveillance tape video art?â
"Cunning use of formatting, layout, art, and visuals to enable the friction to operate throughout the text."
- Large sections of the text are gated behind the Playwall, where players are only allowed to reference when explicitly authorized to look at a document. This section is a masterpiece of layout- abilities made easy to reference by a code, yet difficult to easily skim through with any cohesion if you donât know where to look. This only grows as new voices emerge, which use different fonts and formatting to further erode the idea of the Agency voice as true and elevated in any meaningful way.
"Ambivalence towards intended player actions, with rules that might or might not get broken or multiple presented player goals."
- Anomaly Missions can generally be done by killing, capturing, or letting them get away. Loose Ends can be convinced they didnât see anything, prevented from sharing what they saw with others, or left to roam the streets. Character advancement along the Work/Life Balance tracks can be focused on one of the three parts of your character, or divided among them. The choice about how to engage with the systems at play enables players to express their priorities and the priorities of their characters through how they engage or refuse to engage with those choices. Even as the Agency may express a preference here, the mechanical structures of the game donât necessarily- the game doesnât rely on knowing what choice the players might make here.
"Irreverence towards established mediums, combining tools from RPGs, board games, LARPs, and videogames freely to achieve particular mechanical effects."
- Adoption here of legacy mechanics from board games both for advancement within a campaign and enduring ramifications on future campaigns breaks the mold on how designs can impact play over a longer engagement in fresh and exciting ways.
"(in an RPG context) player characters who are no different from anyone else, or a diegetic explanation for why theyâre different from everyone else."
- Agents are distinctly differentiated by their Anomalous abilities, but those are clearly a result of their diegetic status as Resonants. Outside of those, Agents are just mundane people, explicitly! No protagonist plot armor here, no mechanics that work differently based on whether youâre a PC or not- this serves to keep one foot on the ground even as the rest of the game is pie-in-the-sky bonkers.
"(in a board game context) distance between the immediate actions possible for players to take and the ultimate goals of the game, or even a complete disinterest in âwinningâ and âlosing.â"
- Less directly relevant here, but the immediate actions of Triangle Agency are framed to be about capturing Anomalies and avoiding Loose Ends. Is that aligned with what the Agents will view as âwinningâ the campaign? Maybe? Maybe just doing your job is enough to succeed in life. Wouldnât that be nice.
"The neurodivergent, the disabled, the erotic, the queer, the transfeminized, the racialized, the subaltern."
- This is actually somewhere the game stumbles a little for me: the inclusion of a hypodiegetic safety tool that avoids ableism and discrimination (the game tells you that you can always Ask the Agency to remove instances of those things, with no chance of failure, or you can just ask your GM to never bring them up in the first place) makes it too easy to defang these themes for what Iâd personally want my table to focus on. But despite that, itâs clear how thereâs space here for rife commentary on the experience of being marginalized and trying to function within a corporate setting, and on the way the powerful establishment tries to control and eliminate outsider thought and how that reflects the realities of being queer. Itâs just not a reading that the game requires.
So weâve gone point by point and discussed how Triangle Agency aligns with almost every quality of expressionist games- Triangle Agency is clearly a good example of what an expressionist game can look like, even as it doesnât fully embody some of the secondary qualities. But thatâs just the descriptive part- we also need to consider how those qualities affect the engagement in practice. Triangle Agency is one of the first games that feels wholly dedicated to the same vision Jayâs manifesto lays out, and with that groundbreaking experimentation comes uncharted design territory.
Iâve been running my current campaign of Triangle Agency for a little while now, and weâve had a lot of fun, but weâve also had moments of frustration. A huge part of the fun has been this kayfabe of opposition between the GM and Agents, and between Agents themselves. That kayfabe has also brought with it bleed that needed to be addressed, as we realized we needed to commit to checking in out of character more frequently to keep play fruitful. Interpreting the rules is a delightful challenge, but the ambiguity around how capturing Anomalies actually happens meant my group felt lost at times and uncertain what to do next. These were direct results of the gameâs expressionist focus, and they did make satisfying play more challenging.
While I have a clear bias in that I am the exact kind of sicko that this game was made for, I do recognize these pain points. As Iâve seen the game in play at my table, discussed how itâs played at other tables, and analyzed the text, there are points of friction that are not fruitful for all audiences. Since the game relies in part on players bringing character complexity to it, thereâs the potential to play it as a group of cliches instead, and bounce off the efforts the game makes to present them with conflict. A focus on external worlds over inner ones means players looking for character drama may not get the play experience they expected without putting in additional work or focus. The social realities Triangle Agency endeavors to simulate are intentionally prickly and restrictive, working against efforts to depart from them. And the friction that confusing and contradictory rules bring when paired with a focus on player vs player conflict can turn into real, bad feelings above the table, feelings that need to be wrestled with. I will never claim that Triangle Agency is a game for everyone.
But Triangle Agency isnât trying to be for everyone. I donât want it to be for everyone. I want it to keep the promises it makes about playing with wielding power on behalf of a bureaucratic corporation while juggling everyday responsibilities, and enabling play with the paradoxical lack of power such a position brings. I want catharsis, but not the catharsis of a power fantasy, where my anger at the machines of capitalism Iâm trapped within is released by imagining a world where I have the power to ignore those restrictions. I want the catharsis that comes with exertion, the way accomplishments have weight because I know the effort they required. I need a system that will push back against me and that I can struggle to bear the pressures of. I need an enemy that I can lose to, because thatâs a feeling I need to process and release too. I need a game that, when I do manage to express myself in the face of its frictions, feels like something I can draw hope from, because I see the connection it has to the very real and powerful challenges Iâm faced with in real life.
Triangle Agency is fun. Itâs a delight to play with the toys it gives you, in part because it also gives you some of the tools you need to navigate the way it resists easy engagement. It trusts you to navigate the friction it challenges you with. When my table struggles with a rule, weâre able to talk it out and figure out where to go. When the game makes us frustrated, we can process those feelings and discuss what to do next. And when the game feels real, too real, we can step out of the fiction and talk through what we have been through, as friends, that brought this need for catharsis out in us. And in between these moments of friction, itâs an exciting, strange, hysterical, mysterious adventure, providing the tools you need at the table both to struggle against a system and lose, and to beat the odds and win back some joy and pride from a system that wants to deny your humanity.
Triangle Agency is at the forefront of modern game design, and it will be an inspiration for designers looking to build upon its successes and refine the approach to expressionist design. Expressionism as a lens recognizes why it resonates so strongly with me. It makes me stumble at times, but art that moves me doesnât need to avoid giving me a burden to carry. If you were to strip all the friction away, it would probably be an easier walk, a stroll through the park or a ride on a rollercoaster.Â
But I love climbing mountains.
Many thanks to my friends who read this piece as I was working on it, but also to Jay, Caleb, Audrey, Sam, Marina, and Quinn specifically for their invaluable feedback. If you want to see more from me in the future, you can follow me on Bluesky at @seraphimseraphina.bsky.social, you can keep an eye on this blog, or you can come find me in the Dice Exploder discord server, where I'm one of the moderators for the space.
