Cardboard Code

I think I write this blog post every few years and I’m not particularly wild about it. It’s still something that I think I need to revisit, because every Pride Month, the same thing feels like it’s happening.

I plan well ahead for my blog at this stage. Typically speaking, at the end of each month, the bulk or whole of the next month’s posts are written, and maybe even made; the only articles that are made ‘near’ to their posting are Dev Pile articles (meant to represent ongoing work) and the video posts at this point. At the start of the year, I had a few videos already lined up – and I’ve definitely considered ‘belting some out’ for that category.

Lemme talk about ‘Queer Games’ as a category to talk about in Pride Month.

First of all, The Game Pile is an exercise in both playing games critically and about engaging with games in a way that I find interesting. It encourages me to play things, and it discourages me from just playing the same old things in a loop like my Dad who has sunk probably a full year of time into DOOM. Not that DOOM is a bad game or anything, but I want more. I want to have a full reasonable and interesting variety of work to look at. I want to understand the world of games with a great and wonderful variety. Right now there are some people who consider themselves really interested and informed of games because they’ve played all the Resident Evils and all the Dark Souls, while I’m doing weird stuff like playing flash games and board games and games that came out a few years ago.

I also want to be playing games that I find interesting and fun. This means that I commonly want to play things that feel good to play, with an interface I can engage with readily, and with reasonable pace and playtime options. I don’t have the time to sink into large JRPGs these days and I find visual novels an immense slog – just check out how my predominant feeling about Secret Little Haven was ‘dear god let me please speed up a little.’ I was honest about it, which is frustrating in hindsight because the game seems really good! Reading the text out of context, it’s really charming and made me smile a lot even when it was sad, but the thing that stuck out to me as a game was that it was the friction, not the fiction, that stood out to me.

And then there’s the way that “Queer Games” is a term that with almost no effort, can be used to justify talking about almost anything. Any videogame of any size was made with the work of queer people; I know for a fact, for example, that Guild Wars 1 was made in part with the work of a wonderful trans woman, and I know that that work was then part of Guild Wars 2. I could use this narrative as a reason to talk about Guild Wars 2 in Pride Month, which is a cute trick but come on.

Come onnnnnnn.

I know a large body of games are made including a piece of middleware that I know a trans woman worked on, that doesn’t serve as a transitory property! The idea of ‘look at this famous well-known beloved piece of work, surprise, you support trans leftist queer commies!’ is a cool trick but it’s not really worth doing twice. It is literally, a trick, and what’s more, it’s a waste of space.

I have, typically, fifty two Game Pile articles a year. Of those, four or five are going to land in June. I am a bisexual boy who is happy to write about queer stuff all year round, which means anything that lands in June with the theme of Pride, should be putting something more specific, more intense, more clear up for consideration. I try to make sure it’s something that pushes against my own limits a bit, too; for example, Gay Sauna: The Board Game was not a game I’d normally talk about, especially since I never had the option to play it directly.

That means that it’s not enough to have a game that’s made by queer people, and if I wanted to talk about some cool or great game and then go ‘surprise, you’re now an ally or else!’ I could do that any time. I’ve done that before!

Here’s parameters for what I think I want when I want to talk about Queer Games.

I want a game that is made by and with the involvement directly of queer people, and for those queer people to be open and publicly clear about being queer.

I want these queer people to be directive of the art and expressing something they want to, even if within constraints.

I want something I can meaningfully play and engage with in a way I find interesting.

These parameters are going to introduce some biases. For example:

If the game is to be made by publicly out queer people, it’s going to discourage me from any non-English game source. It’s going to encourage me towards smaller indie projects being made by queer people who have access to an existing network that could get the game in front of me. I’m going to be biased towards games that are made by my friends, for example.

If the game is being fundamentally directed by queer outlooks, it’s going to be biased towards games that are already favoured to queer folk and some of those game types may be ones made to be easier to play with, like Twine, Ren’Py or RPGmaker. Ren’Py and RPGmaker are both games good at making games whose genres don’t appeal to me, which makes the search harder.

The desire to play games that I find for lack of a better term, engaging means that I’m going to miss the deep, well populated category of queer art games, such as (for example) Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia.

These biases are not any kind of deal breaker. But they are biases, and it’s worth being mindful of them. I’m just not interested in talking about visual novels or lengthy JRPGs. I’m sure that some of the newer Atelier games may have some really cool queer potential, but I can’t speak to the representation being derived from queer creatives, and that’s got to be okay. You don’t want me talking to you about queerness from Japanese media as if I’m any kind of expert.

For All Mankind is a Show That Exists.

I watched a season and thought I’d do a whole Story Pile on it. Put it in the hopper, had some plans, at least kind of, thinking about how I’d address this show I was watching. I try to keep a pretty broad media diet, and quite frankly, I think NASApunk is a really cool aesthetic. Figured that there might be something to be said about alternate histories, and the very legitimate example of how America, a country obsessed with never being humiliated, might respond to not being the most special boys in the world. It’s a pretty strong series and definitely worth talking about!

The problem is it’s boring.

For All Mankind is a series set in an alternate 1960s America, in NASA, which means, even with the work the story does to try and fight the homogenised White Guy With Buzzcut cultural milieu of the era, it’s still predominantly looking at a bunch of guys who my dad would think look like ‘proper’ TV stars. In the story, in order to try and get ahead of Women’s Liberation movement politics, NASA takes up the task of training women astronauts, which involves the introduction into the story of the incredible Molly Cobb.

Oh and spoilers kind of for the first season of For All Mankind.

Molly Cobb is an arsehole. Just a real abrasive, hard-nosed, no-nonsense, tough-titties-cupcake kind of character of the era. There’s a lot of misogyny floating around in the passive environment of 1960s America, and Molly Cobb is a woman pilot who has succeeded in those spaces and in the process, become flinty and hard. She’s not without any thoughts to her appearance – I mean look at that blowback, she’s obviously a very specific kind of gorgeous.

She’s cagey about her homelife, too, which is pretty significant in this time. It’s not uncommon for the people in these spaces to talk about their homelives, which makes sense when part of the job of NASA astronauts is to self-isolate for a month or so at a time. It’s pretty reasonable to want to make sure someone is mentally stable and being aware of their situation and home life is part of that, after all.

This caginess about her homelife did build in me the curiosity, then nary, the expectation that Molly was private about her homelife because she had something specific to hide. This is the 1960s, after all, there’s a lot of homophobic legislation around things like whether or not you can fire someone ‘for being gay,’ and NASA are a public part of the government that does have problems with trying to be responsive to the public. The women astronauts after all, were being selected by Nixon (at first) to make sure they’d be good for PR.

(Which in this case, I’m pretty sure is that Nixon picked the hottest ones he could find in the dossiers. That’s just my impression of the kind of guy Nixon was, though. That guy seemed like a bit of a weirdo.)

Anyway, with this slow evasiveness about Molly’s home life, her privacy and her containment of that whole situation, I did kind of expect that we were getting a pretty stereotypical story. Butch lesbian, gets as far as she can in a misogynistic, homophobic environment, then she gets outed, we see her leave the story, maybe they play a sad song over her collecting her things from her desk because we know she’s being treated unfairly but there was no other way the story can go.

Anyway, then the show really abruptly shows Molly, in the bath, with her husband, Wayne. It is night and day with Molly; she’s laughing, she’s smoking, she’s chilling out and he’s washing her back. Then, like she’s reading my mind as a viewer, Molly says ‘They think I’m a lesbian at work.’

Now, that, on its own, is only so much to comment on. It’s the response that surprised me. Wayne, taking the cigarette (so they’re getting stoned, right?) leans back and contemplatively says ‘I do identify as a lesbian, politically, somewhat.’

Now, if that conversation comes up on Tumblr, this year, it wouldn’t be totally out of place. But in the 1960s, that particular line of conversation coming from Wayne who we’re kind of meeting for the first time, it’s not just a surprise, it brings in a vocabulary type I genuinely wasn’t expecting from this world of extremely tedious ordinary dudes. Dont’ get me wrong, it’s a speculative line of reasoning from the 1960s, but the actual conversations gender radicals and queer liberationists were having back then were denser than we in a post-MOGAI world may expect or even appreciate.

Basically, in the moment and the context, my reaction was: Wait, is this guy cooking?

We get to know Wayne after this point, even as a minor character who’s kind of subordinate to Molly, a character whose importance slowly recedes over the course of the story. I like Molly a lot, but part of what I like about her is the way all her recontextualisation works to take her away from a stereotypical lesbian story and instead show that this character has a sort of extra layer of depth, and that she’s connected to, or at least aware of, a defiance to a heteronorm. She’s not an honourary lesbian or anything by any means, I’m not trying to present her as any kind of icon, nor Wayne, but it means that the story doesn’t do it the way I was expecting.

Instead, Molly is an intense, driven, hard-nosed woman with an incredible technical skill, who loves and is married to and has a wholly emotionally resonant relationship with a sweet doughy guy whose primary income is from his work doing concert posters for bands in the 1960s.

The show does wind up introducing lesbians in space, clearly following the lead of The Locked Tomb. I understand it kind of winds up doing the same thing with the sad lady being forced to quit because she’s, again, a lesbian, and maybe we get a track play across her collecting her boxes.

Or they blow her up in a terrorist attack, I don’t know. I didn’t watch that far.

Still, For All Mankind has Molly in it, and I kind of hope that if Molly as a character got to stick around, she and Wayne would wind up being those cool older couples that when kids in the 90s started to get really weird with genders and sexualities, would go ‘that’s cool, y’all.’

Crisis is a tabletop role-playing game of superheroes and their limitations. The system is designed to run without any kind of gamemaster or storyteller steering the overall plot, and I’ve seen some describe it as a ‘diceless’ role-playing game. Building on Avery Alder’s Belonging Without Belonging tabletop roleplaying game system, Crisis is a game which seeks to take that system’s perspective of the marginalised building communities outside of an existing power structure, and employs it in telling stories of superheroes protecting a city in a time of, well, crisis.

It’s an indie TTRPG available on itch using an established system to present a bunch of tables, and it wants to talk about superhero characters as marginalised identities. Of course I was going to talk about this once I found it.

Mitch Schiwal’s itch.io creator page says they’re actively interested in reviews. Well, Mitch, I hope this is what you wanted!

You might not be overly familiar with the Belonging Without Belonging system. I’m not fantastically familiar with it, despite having talked about Balikbayan and Sleepaway in the past, so if there’s anything I describe in this ‘how the system works’ part that’s wrong, that’s on me, not on the system.

Belonging Without Belonging is a system where players have access to specific ‘moves’ that do things in the story. Moves are divided into two basic categories; there are ‘easy’ moves, which provide you with points, and there are ‘hard’ moves, which cost points. Easy moves often are things that make your life more complicated, and hard moves are often things that let you prevent or protect problems. The simplest version of this system is a sort of improvisational narrative where every cool thing is balanced with a painful thing. However, sometimes there are times when a player can’t do a hard move (no points) and they don’t have any easy moves that would work (because they’re hardly universal) which means players have to turn to the universal easy move, the all-purpose release-valve and story-progressor, ‘invite the Crisis to advance.’

This is one of the places where the game escapes the need for a storyteller. Inviting the Crisis to advance means taking the top card of a deck of playing cards, looking at it, and then incorporating that into the story. This is a whole deck of narrative prompts, broken up by genre into expanding setting information, creating tension and dread, indirect damage, and direct suffering. Basically, you have a one-in-three chance pulling a card from this deck to get a prompt that says ‘and then, things get worse.’

Where Sleepaway used its index cards to create a sort of conspiracy board (that I liked), Crisis has players making index cards that symbolise things that are places, people or things around the city. There’s also a setup for the overall story, which involves rolling some dice and using that with other players to come up with the surrounding material, which in turn, is maintained through the use of those cards that make up the tableau.

That’s the basics; moves-based action, prompts from a deck when you’re out of ideas, and some setup prompts. It is a system that works and, I think, for a particular kind of improvisational group, really strong. The game has a natural pull towards an end-game state, a specific genre it wants to express, and a clear idea of how it wants to do that. It is, as with many such games derived from a functional engine, a very functional unit of game.

There are ideas I like in Crisis. Some ideas I think I’d like better if they were handled differently, mind you, but the idea of it is by no means bad. It seems a good system for a campaign-based playspace, where the city can be built up, over time, and different heroes come to play in the same space the players built over time, to create a kind of universe or continuity that the players can learn to love. That is something I think is really cool, though I, again, have problems with it. When building up locations with cards laid out in front of players, it’s very easy for me to see that as the creation of an actual city, an aesthetically representative relationship of places in a bigger place. It is a city. When people and items are treated the same way, it dissolves that sense of relationship between them, and feel like that dilutes it. Could there be ways around this? Of course. I think I’d just cut any index card that’s meant to represent a person in half, so that it can be moved around, can rest on top of index cards that represent places, similar to objects or landmarks.

The idea of using a system for marginalised spaces in storytelling about a trope commonly discarded as a thoughtless power fantasy is, I think, cooking. I think very highly of the superhero as a character storytelling trope not because of its relationship to the significance of myth but because of its much more important relationship to creativity. Every superhero is expressing an identity, and if they’re not, then they really lose the identity of being a superhero. Just Some Guy In A Jacket is the worst superhero type, but a mask, a cape, a design, an aesthetic choice, that’s the person being creative.

The book has a sidebar on the superhero as a marginalised identity, and I want to argue with this panel for hours. I think it’s genuinely correct in that superheroes are a marginalised identity, and I think it’s completely wrong in how it explains the superhero as a marginalised identity. The idea of them being ‘not like us’ is part of the problem: Superheroes that aren’t ‘like us’ aren’t superheroes, they are the mythic heroes, the uncreative sorts. They all eventually become Homelander or Apollo or The Plutonian because being able to maintain and have a normal life that makes you ‘like us’ is what keeps these powerful characters from just eventually becoming gods.

Look, the superhero is, in its heart, the fantasy of a really powerful person who can do things that obviously need doing in an immediate sense that isn’t limited by the systemic rules of ‘you can’t.’ It’s the leftist fantasy that when given immense power, we wouldn’t abuse it, and we would find ways to confer it on people around us, ‘giving it away.’ When Superman stands in the way of a bullet, he’s not doing that so you think him stopping a bullet is dope, he’s doing it because he wants the person behind the bullet to not be hurt by the bullet.

Batman dresses up like a bat and tries to scare people because he thinks that would work on him if he wasn’t Batman. His idea of ways to change and guide people is through fear, and that fear is exerted by looking like a bat, because Batman responds to fear and is afraid of bats. It’s a simple example of a character whose identity explains ideas about his character. Bruce Wayne, the identity he normally has, is the most privileged person in the world; typically, a white affluent old-money and entrenched beneficiary of the systems of Gotham. Batman is not Bruce Wayne, which means he does not have those systems and is not allowed them – he’s Batman, he’s a guy the police shoot at on sight. To play the created identity, to do what the identity is meant to do, he has to take on an identity divorced from the ‘proper’ way for him to do things and exert power.

And then the only common point superheroes have – by default – is that they’re united in secrecy. They can’t know one another and don’t know one another – or at least have to say that. The identity is put on to engage with the community, which has a lot of parallels to other forms of marginalisation. It’s really interesting!

This is a good choice!

Now, I’m going to complain about Crisis a bit but any reader should bear in mind that:

I haven’t played it.

This is obviously a project made by maybe, like, three people, and the scope of what they can do is very different to a larger team.

First of all, Crisis is not a searchable pdf. Instead, all the text is embedded in images. I think this also makes it unreadable by screen readers, which is pretty annoying. I know I did a lot of stuff with embedded images turned to pdfs, I know I’m not blameless here, but this isn’t good and there are better ways to format a page.

This book is difficult to read. Not because it’s a challenging text, it’s not full of concepts that present a struggle to answer but rather the book is itself materially, difficult to read. It structures its information in a series of blocks, with a dense, heavy font that makes me feel like it’s the boldface of another, more readable font, and just left on. The result is that paragraphs sort of form spiderwebby blocks, undifferentiated from one another making it easy to lose place on the page, especially since all the pages are structured in very similar ways.

There’s very little use – I would really say ‘basically none’ – of layout, diagrams or art to break up or characterise the flow of the book. There’s almost no in-book visuals beyond some chapter title pages, and art and diagrams serve great purpose for tabletop roleplaying game books. It’s one of the tricks of game art signifying in rulebooks – they help players leafing through to find things they’re looking for.

I feel like this is a game that was predominantly playtested with the creator in the playtest group. The way the book is structured and written makes me feel like it’s got to be the product of someone who knows how to play it and just isn’t good at clearly or usefully conveying that to me, a mere bozo who has never played it. The prompts are so thin, things I know I could work with, but which I feel would leave someone who say, doesn’t have twenty years of tabletop roleplaying game experience under their belt really struggling to know what to work with.

There’s also a tenuousness the system, where the game system present things that seem like they should be specific, reliable rules, with the same structure as things that seem like they should be vague, aesthetic preferences. The rules encourage players to ignore things they don’t want to do, but I feel like doing that a lot runs the risk of depriving the system of any of the feeling of being present at all. When? How much? Should it perhaps be a pre-decided thing, a systemic way to opt out of things, or is the gentleness of this system that also wants to talk about the defender as a fundamentally suicidal urge just something that a player is expected to deal with?

Crisis is available on itch. I think it’s a really cool idea, and I think it’s got good ideas. I don’t know how playable it is to people of varying skills, to people who aren’t already vibing hard on the idea of a superhero narrative space. For me and my friends who are in a superhero narrative space the unfortunate and immediate follow-up is ‘what does this system get me?’ Do I need it? What about this game encourages me to play it?

There’s a really cool conversation the game implies about the philosophy engine of a superhero story. The archetypes are described by this author’s idea of how these archetypes should work and what that means, and what those characters even should look like, and that’s all interestingly encoded, but with a sort of sighing, trailing gasp of ‘well, if you want to, I guess.’

Oh, and let me be clear, this isn’t about the safety tools. Those are great, and the specific, personal way of describing it as never wanting to hurt a player is I think a good value statement and rules parameter. It’s more the way the rest of the rules are suffixed with ‘or you could not, if you want’ that strikes me as a sort of design fumble. Maybe make the deck design more of an explicit, shared experience? Talk about ways it can be done, or what removing cards could do? After all, many of the prompts are detail-light and nearly consequence-free; players might be trying to pull cards to avoid Easy Moves and have that bite them on the bottom when a crisis card comes out they can’ t fluff away.

I find myself less wanting to play this game than I want to encourage its designer about superheroes, to offer them ideas for the next thing, for ways to improve this thing. I hope it plays as well for the fans of the system as I want it to, for the ideas that it’s trying to deploy.

I think a lot about crossdressing, for a guy who doesn’t do it or go looking for it or interact with it at all.

Let me clarify: Kind of. Not really. I don’t think about it very often, it’s not a thought that occupies me a lot of the time, but it is a thought that when I do try and think about it involves thinking an awful lot, in a way that necessarily involves constructing not just ‘what I think’ but multiple related models about what it even means to do this thing we call ‘crossdressing.’ At a certain point the models break down.

If you’re not here to hear a cis guy talking about crossdressing as a practice with which he has nothing to do, then you might wanna go elsewhere today!

First of all, crossdressing is a term with a simple-sounding definition that I feel opens up a lot of weird doors. Crossdressing, ostensibly, is wearing the clothes of the opposite gender’s. Except, and this is the annoying thing, this doesn’t really mean anything, because there are no opposite genders. Also, people don’t really care about women wearing pants (unless they’re real freaks that I’m related to). As with many of these ‘queer’ discussions, what people really mean is ‘men doing something that isn’t men-appropriate.’

You can find this if you ask people about gay rights, inevitably you find the conversation gravitates towards gay men and then somehow, no matter what you start the topic onto, they want to bring up buttsex and poo and cocks. Now there’s a whole conversation around how that’s fundamentally because homophobia (and antiqueerness in general) is built around disgust responses and that’s why they try to bring up gross stuff.

When I talk about ‘crossdressing,’ bringing up like, Janelle Monae in a suit isn’t in the conversation. Nor should it be, really, because Janelle Monae isn’t a woman in a men’s suit, it’s a nonbinary person in their own suit, but the people who are mad about crossdressing include people who would absolutely see that as ‘probably fine’ because they’re parsing it as a woman wearing a men’s suit in a way that still nonetheless makes them look really hot.

Point is, step one: Crossdressing is, in one space, an impossible action and instead is just about patrolling the ways men shouldn’t dress.

Let’s assume, though, that crossdressing exists. Let’s assume then that it’s about some kind of simplified gender binary thingy that’s kinda silly, it’s a thing people can do when they wear the ‘wrong’ gender of clothes, or clothes that are ‘wrong’ for their gender. I’ll isolate it down to a specific example: Men wearing women’s clothing, and this is bad. From there I’ll discard the people who are mad about it for the obvious transmisogyny angle.

Instead, what about the trans people who don’t like crossdressing.

Now, for this in this context, I want to make it clear, I am neutral on what the opinions of these people should be and I do not think that anyone should have a particular opinion on this cultural practice. There are these two positions:

Men crossdressing is generally, bad or tasteless, because it enables transmisogynist people who are willing to play with gender enough to dress out of type, but are not actually engaged with the experience of being that gender.

Men crossdressing is generally, good or okay, because it enables people who might want to play with gender a place to do so that does not necessarily require deeper commitment and therefore, present those ideas to people, even those who are not necessarily the crossdresser.

This to me feels as much like an argument about drag specifically, and about drag culture in the specific, high-prominence American Excess. It feels like RuPaul. It feels like a conversation that isn’t about crossdressing, it’s a conversation around specifically some high-profile crossdressers who are probably also transphobes. It isn’t how it was phrased to me, though and I don’t want to speak over the conversation.

It is a challenging conversation to grapple with because I don’t want to act like it’s something anyone should have to put up with. I think that every community slice has bad actors in it, and I think that every single form that can take is going to feature shitheads that suck. I tend to think that any given practice that does enable those people should be addressed in a way that the community can, like, you know, by not tolerating them and kicking them out, and refusing to give them platforms and voice. I don’t think that means the practice of crossdressing is ‘bad’ in any way.

I do understand though that I’m not part of that conversation. I just don’t find myself compelled by the idea that guys wearing skirts creates some kind of greater structural problem that wasn’t already there, and would be there, even if the guy wasn’t wearing a skirt.

I kinda remember someone saying something like ‘femboy aesthetics are appropriating transfemininity’ which is just close enough to a joke silly opinion that I’m not sure it isn’t one. Like, if a guy wants to try transfeminine aesthetics, isn’t that a good thing? Shouldn’t transfeminine aesthetics be more present and more available and more seen as good and desireable things for people to engage with?

And the thing is, in with all this: I have no interest in it! Crossdressing isn’t something I’ve ever found interesting to do at all! I’ve worn a skirt a few times in the vein of ‘well, it’s what’s in this house and I can wear it,’ but I haven’t been left with any feeling of the experience afterwards like I’m delighted that Dress Goes Spinny. It’s just clothes, and I find people who get really mad about what other people are wearing tend to be silly. It’s one of the reasons I find hijab bans or the like a serious sign of someone being untrustworthy, because it’s so unserious to be a person mad about a hat. I know that hat is very significant to the person who wears it, but if I’m not invested in those reasons, it’s just a hat to me, and being mad about someone’s hat seems deeply unserious.

Honestly, this whole line of conversation, with my own complete antipathy towards the promise or threat of gender exploration is one of the reasons I’m nervous about watching I Saw The TV Glow. What if I watch it and I think it’s just fine and don’t have a full-blown gender crisis about it?

Here’s an academic concept, presented in plain language. I think that every game requires stuff to play it with, rules for how it plays, and a fiction for what you’re playing. In the more academic way, I say that all games are the nexus of an abstraction, an entanglement and stuffness, which are each things that create and present limitations and boundaries on one another. Even an attempt to have minimal forms of one or the other creates stressors on the others.

A not-uncommon question that follows from this from people who hear and engage with it, which is largely, people I work with who want me to explain more and are doing me a favour by asking, is ‘what about X? it doesn’t have a fiction, right?’ and the X in question is something like Checkers, Chess, or Tennis. The solution to that question is that these games have fictions, because, and this is important: You can’t avoid it.

People use stories to explain sequences of events with related experiences. Naturally speaking, any game creates the structure of a story, with rising action and a conclusion because games necessarily are made out of the structures of play that pull the game towards its conclusion. That means that necessarily any given game is going to have an outcome, a product, that the experience of its play forms a story, a sequence of events, in which, if the game has engaged its players and given them reason to care about what is or is not happening, then they are going to structure as a story.

This fiction is going to be informed by the game experience, and that game experience is going to be shaped, again, by rules and play pieces. The fiction of any given game can be found therefore, in examining the parts that make up the game, and is related and expressed by those two other elements.

First things first, games have representations. There are things that are representations of abstractions in the game rules. An example is the all-purpose tally of ‘score’ – a score is used to represent the skill or difficulty of the things the scorer succeeds at. In basketball, three-pointers and two-pointers and penalty shots are all worth different amounts, and those different amounts create a valuation, in the narrative of the game, as to what commensurate tasks are comparable to one another. For example, two teams with scores of 81 are considered to be as good as each other in the fictional test of the game, even though one of those teams got 40 2-pointers and a penalty, while the other got 27 3-pointers.

Game pieces represent the things in the fiction, and the terms used to represent them are in turn, part of the creation of a fiction. In Checkers, the pieces have one major differentation – that they are one colour, or the other; this creates the fiction that the opposing forces are almost identical, but aren’t quite identical, and they’re placed on a board which is representative of some kind of space of relationship that the checkers pieces are capable of ‘moving’ across. In chess, pieces are representative of army units, and the board represents another space, which is necessary to explain how those pieces move.

These representations can bring with them implied information and values as well. For example, there is one piece on the board of Chess that has a feminine-gendered name (the Queen), and there are three pieces with masculine-gendered names (the King, the Bishop, and the Knight). I know you may think lady knights are cool as hell, and those terms are losing their gendering, but they absolutely were not ungendered when they were first used. The implication is that in Chess, power and authority to act and win is commonly in the hands of men, but sometimes in the hands of women, and also, that women need to be exceptional to be on the battlefield alongside even the lowliest pawns.

Similarly, the relationships between things in rules creates fiction. Say we have a game of pieces that move over a distance. If I have a piece that moves 1 square, and a piece that moves 5 square, the natural assumption of how to express these movements is that the 1-move piece is ‘slow’ and the 5-move piece is ‘fast.’ This is without calling the movement ranges ‘speed’ or anything, but just the natural consequence of how these rules are reasonably expressed.

There’s also something important to how game rules use fiction to both maintain coherence. Describing game pieces in ways that make sense to a fiction makes it easier to explain why pieces work together. Many simpler games don’t bother to try and enforce this; games like Snakes and Ladders or The Game of Life use entirely random pieces that are incoherently connected to the fiction; the dice aren’t something, they’re not doing something, they’re just a game piece that creates a game action that the players enact in the name of the game. The fiction of either is about random options happening to the player, who then has to make the best of the narrative of how they experience those events.

On the other hand, to compare to a game which uses a lot of fictional coherence tools, in Magic: The Gathering, when an attacking card is marked with a quantity of interaction points equal to or in excess of their secondry primary attreibute, the card is put into a discard pile, and cards that check whether that card was put there in this way, then trigger. Except what the game says in its fiction is that if a creature is dealt too much damage, it dies, and it’s too much damage if it’s equal to or higher than its toughness. When it dies, it goes to the graveyard, and getting the card back is then fictionally themed as digging up a grave, or raising the dead.

These ideas make Magic: The Gathering much more easily handled despite its immensely complicated fiction! And that means that by treating the fiction of the game seriously, and enmeshing the rules and structures of those rules with the fiction, and using the stuff of the game to represent that fiction, the game is better and easier to play.

It’s important to understand I’m not saying that your game ‘should have a fiction’, I’m saying you can’t prevent your game from having a fiction. It might be ill-formed and vague, but necessarily, there’s going to be something that the play experience creates that the mind is going to observe like a sequence in a story. It’s not that your game ‘should’ have a story, it’s that it can’t not, and that means that the story is a thing that you need to actively consider when creating the rest of the game.