I am very lucky to have been able to interview Brandon O’Brien, fighting past the pandemic delays, about his amazing writing and game design work! While I am a few days delayed past his birthday, here’s the interview below talking about Brandon’s cool creations!
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Hi Brandon and thank you for the interview! Tell me a little about yourself and your experience. What is your work like and where did you start your journey into games and writing?
Hi! I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk about my work!
My journey into games started fairly recently, when one of my writing colleagues mentioned Avery Alder’s Emerging Designers Mentorship to me in early 2018. At that point, I didn’t even really think that I wanted to make a game. It was just that I saw the link, and it made me think of a thing that I could make, and I was prepared to just put it in the back of my mind. But as time passed, the idea started looking more and more like a really interesting game, so at that point I wanted to make it, so I signed up. Since then, the tabletop game design community just kind of opened up a little bit. I started getting to know other creators, reading and playing their games and getting to know them, and it started to feel more welcoming, and that made me want to experiment more.
As for my writing, that’s a far longer story. I’ve been writing in some form since I was much younger, especially poetry, which eventually led me to performance poetry, and then I met other Caribbean science fiction and fantasy writers, like Karen Lord and Tobias Buckell, and I realised that this was something I could actually do, and other people wanted to read it. And since that point, I’ve been committed to creating all of these things, and I’ve found that they complement each other very well–good verse becomes a good game, a good science fiction or fantasy premise becomes a good game, a good mode of play can potentially become an interesting way to hold an audience’s attention. So experimenting with them all has been a lot of fun!
Tell me about a couple of your favorite works, both games and writing, and about your process for making those works into fully realized projects. What were the exciting parts of those processes? What was more challenging? Did your level of experience or background at the time help or hinder?
In terms of games, I’ve been eagerly working on a project called Soundclash, a Forged in the Dark game about making music in a world where music has been touched by magic and the music industry has changed as a result. I’m still on my way to finishing it, but the work is always really inspiring. I’ve enjoyed retooling parts of the system to fit music and musical performance, and the idea of a world where singing is your ‘combat’. I don’t think it’s perfect so far, and I have so much more to learn and ask, I think, but the process of learning and asking has been refreshing. That’s what excites me, to be honest. Funnily enough, I feel like it’s a small part of why I haven’t finished yet, combined with whatever level of fear is still there about making a whole big game. I’m intrigued to get closer to a sense of making the stakes of just performing a song the same as breaking into a stronghold or winning a fight.
I’m in a similar experiment with How To Unmake It In Anglia, a weird mystery story about finding a missing person in a world where every word you say or write instantly comes true. Narratively, a lot of it is a big experiment, asking a question about the world that changes the way that people speak in it and respond to words in it, and that has an effect on how I write their relationship to those words, too. But it’s also serial, so I’m trying to tell a long story but also make each part accessible and interesting and engaging, which is a slightly different state of mind than a whole novel.
I consider myself lucky, though. When you’re writing a story or a novel, you have an editor, someone who looks at your work and wants to help you get better at it. In my mentorship, Avery has been instrumental in a very similar role, helping me recalibrate how I even think about play. I consider that editing, in a way, and I’m really thankful to have people I can trust to see me through those stumbling blocks, especially on the gaming front.
Both with your writing and your design, what are some themes and ideas you have been exploring that you don’t see as much in the standard American fare? What are the things that you bring from your unique experience that you most love to share through these mediums?
If I’m being honest, I don’t think I’m doing much that isn’t in the space already. From my experience, science fiction writers and indie designers are asking some of the most interesting questions, and so many of them are important to the present. I think my work is really focused on the question of what people use to create the context in their world, especially when it’s art. In my writing, I’ve been confronting a lot of very specific things that seem distinct, but I feel like they fit really well. I only recently noticed that Soundclash has a lot in common with some of my stories, when it comes to asking the question of what art does and who it serves. Sometimes it’s also music, or sometimes it’s a robot, or sometimes it’s the very bodies and identities of a community’s artists, but my characters ask a lot what it means to make something in a world where the thing you make, or the person who makes it, can become a commodity, and that’s what Soundclash is trying to ask as well: when you just wanted to make music, how do you navigate a world where you have become a tool, a weapon, for the industry to exploit?
I’m also really interested in how we make things to heal within each other, which is also in that same idea-space. I wrote a small game last year called The Refraction, which is played by writing poetry to each other. You can’t move from one stage of play to another unless you’ve shared your work and been shared with in turn. It’s also what influenced some of my Belonging Outside Belonging games, like Evokers’ Pact, where there are new moves that specifically emphasise how conflict and reconciliation between two or three people can impact entire groups, because at the time when I wrote them I was really thinking about how conflict isn’t often about one person making trouble, but about how two or three people misunderstand each other or talk over each other’s desires, and I wanted to find a way to ask players to think about what those misunderstandings are as part of play, and possibly challenge them to think about those things as they leave play, too.
When you get an idea, how do you decide whether to make it into a piece of fiction or poetry, or a game?
Very rarely, things materialise one way in my brain, and I will get fixated on the notion that it has to exist in the medium I imagined it. A few games are like that. The Refraction was always going to be a game, because I wanted to make a poetry game, and once I knew what this one was, I didn’t want to give up on that. And that happens a little more often with fiction or poetry, too. I’ve spoken to other writers who agree that sometimes, when we decide to write a story, it’s actually because the idea in our head is something we would really like to read. That it’s kind of a craving for something, that we’re hungry for a certain kind of story, and we get fixated on finding it and consuming it because that’s what we’re in the mood for. And then a part of our brain goes, “well, you’ll have to write it yourself”. Like it’s a literal craving, but you can’t order it from a fast food place, so you make up your mind that you have to cook. That’s what a story feels like sometimes–It’s in this medium because I made up my mind that I want to read this, and want other people to find it like this.
But more often I have notes about a thing and have no idea what I want it to be. I have loads of notes on things that could be stories, but they could also be comic books, and the only reason they aren’t yet is because I can’t draw! Or there are nuggets of things that would make fascinating game mechanics, but I don’t have something meaningful to do with them yet, so they’re just waiting in a notepad app for me to find a way to make it important. Ideas are free. I have too many of them to use. So I try to be less rigid about them whenever possible, and consider how they can find value in another format if I’m struggling.
A lot of the RPG world can seem dominated by homogenous cultures and perspectives. What are some projects of yours where you’ve really had the opportunity to express your own culture and perspective, and how did you work through that creative process?
Culture is a difficult thing to try to parse in any medium, especially when you’re a Black diaspora creator working with cultural objects that may seem foreign to many other people. But I like exploring the cultural objects that I know because they’re the lens through which I make sense of the world and my place in it.
For instance, I’ve been really focused on a particular character in Trinidad and Tobago folklore called a lagahoo–a creature cursed to transform into a monstrous shape, but also to have a coffin chained to them, to drag it with them wherever they go. I’ve been fascinated by that image for a while now: why is this person so cursed? What could be in the coffin? And as I was processing certain parts of my work, my relationship to my culture, and even some of my own personal experiences, I began reevaluating the lagahoo, viewing it as an image of rage, of frustration, of righteous anger, someone for whom this curse is actually a kind of dark mission. That understanding shows up in my fiction and my poetry, but I struggled for a while to put that in game form.
So I put out a game, coincidentally called Lagahoo, which is a slight adaptation of the party game Werewolf with that added flavour, because that felt more interesting and more real to me. It (hopefully!) turns the game into a world where you know there are monsters lurking in the dark, preying on your community, but they’re not the things that turn into beasts with fangs and claws, they’re the ordinary people who hide their cruelty and their viciousness under cover of night. And the game doesn’t really care if you can tell. You just have to keep your community safe.
I want to experiment more with those perspectives. Folklore opens a really interesting window for us to reevaluate the modern world, not always through the mechanics of most fantasy stuff–like, it doesn’t always have to be violence or conflict, or the threat of loss. It can also be an opportunity to reconnect with history, or ask questions about what we think we know or trust. And Caribbean folklore is rich like that, so I want to play more with those characters and what they could teach us, while also using that opportunity to share that part of my culture with others.
With The Refraction, how did you integrate games and poetry to make a synthesis of the two? How have players responded, and what makes the game exciting to you?
I just really wanted to tinker with a game where playing was writing. I wanted to use play to hopefully make a safe space for folks who probably don’t write as often, or have never attempted writing a poem or may think that it’s hard or needs to exist a certain way, to be free to share among themselves and not feel like they need to do any one thing to write a poem. But I also wanted to use those fantasy tropes, of the downtrodden villagers who obviously have a lot to say and no force of power to speak out, as a prompt for those poems. I actually want to do much more with The Refraction, to create more of those play-spaces soon and give people more worlds and characters to inhabit and write from.
I believe people really like it! It’s one of my Itch games that people ask about and talk about the most. I wish folks would be willing to share their poems with me! But I won’t force it! I’m just grateful to make space for folks to write, and I hope it helps people discover something through writing the way poetry does for me. I really like poetry’s capacity to use space and brevity to tell a story, and how we communally attach personal depth to it because of its format. I can only hope that it’s encouraging people to tinker more with the form and maybe write their own things. And I want to make more opportunities just like it–where telling the story is not just making the world, but is about discovering how you feel and what you want to do about it, and gaining power from telling people. I mean, at its core, what is a roleplaying game but telling people that you’ve been moved to do something? And I’m beyond hype that I get to make room to do that, but they get to toy with writing among friends, without feeling judged.
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Thank you so much to Brandon for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed this interview and that you’ll check out Brandon’s website and itchio!