Category: Archive

Archive of all posts prior to October 2021, including the interviews, reviews, and theory posts about tabletop roleplaying games.

Love, Joy, Empathy, and Why I I’m Not Giving Up

Last night I had the awesome experience of going to see Mikey Neumann’s Movies with Mikey Live, courtesy of my friend Anders as a 30th birthday gift. Mikey reviews films and is a video game writer, and he is one of my favorite people. It was amazing – I laughed, I cried, and it hit some nerves in important ways.
There are a few things Mikey said that made an impact more than all the rest, and some of them weren’t just a few words. I’m gonna go through the hard ones first then roll it back to good. This will relate to games, I swear.
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Mikey at one point asked, “how many of you have been alone with your thoughts for two months?”
I raised my hand (I think there were two or three of us). When he said it, my mind rubberbanded – shot backwards and snapped forward. When my husband John was deployed in Iraq, I lived alone for over a year in an unfamiliar neighborhood. I shut myself inside, I tried to vent it out in journals or on places like LiveJournal that was mostly screaming into a void, but I couldn’t escape my own mind.
My mental health deteriorated rapidly, and my physical health didn’t do well – I’d lock myself in the house for days. I saw people, but it wasn’t broken until I sat on the floor of my mom’s house, completely delusional and fully in belief that the world was ending. I sobbed for hours and sat in terror of what would come and my biggest fear, the scariest thing about an apocalypse, was that I might live and be alone with myself forever.
That fear hasn’t faded. It’s still scary to me, and I worry that my being a trash fire to be around will make that a reality – my behavior and incompetence will lead to my partners and friends deserting me, because I know I would desert me.
So there was that.
Then Mikey talked about his experiences in the hospital when he had his frankly terrifying event last year. I have not been hospitalized long term, but the facts of physically deteriorating, not having diagnoses, and sudden onset symptoms are familiar – and the experience he described is one I desperately fear. Every time I have a twinge in my back, a cold, a night where waking up seems like the worst option. So it shook me up, just like listening to him talk about things close to this before. I cried a lot.
I’m struggling right now because every thing that goes wrong just wrecks me. I made one mistake at work the other day and just destroyed myself over it for hours. I’m still thinking about it. I struggled with design work and almost bailed out on a contract because I can’t look at my own work and see value. I told myself I wasn’t allowed a birthday because I don’t deserve it.
So that also happened.
Mikey also, earlier, had talked about altering perspectives, helping people see movies in different ways that might change how they feel about them. He talked about Deep Dive, and it reminded me how I wished he would do a do-over of the Jupiter Ascending episode because John said it wasn’t nice and that I would get upset. See, I love Jupiter Ascending, and it’s often hard to get people to see the good in it. But it made me think about how our first tries are often not our best ones. That gave me a little shiver of hope. Over the past few years I’ve nearly shut down this blog and quit games multiple times, after my work continued to be inadequate and the blog floundered. I don’t want to end things, but my self-loathing and lack of success has been heavy. But maybe if I keep trying?
Then he talked about the important part – love, joy, empathy.
I honestly can’t remember everything he said. I was so overwhelmed. A lot of people might know that I’ve been struggling with my mental and physical health for a long time, and one of the ways I’ve tried to do that is to try to be kinder.
I’m an angry person. I always have been, angry, ready to fight, every day. I’m bitter and fiery and it’s exhausting. But ever since the Dark Years, I’ve been trying so hard to be better.
I worked on not calling people names and swearing at them. I disengaged from relationships that allowed my anger to grow and fester. I preached to be kinder, to love people, and I asked people to stop hurting people.
But lately, I have not done this. I have been exhausted, surrounded by everyone else’s anger, boiling in hurt every day by the words of my friends, colleagues, and the people who control my life. My work makes me angry. School makes me angry. I am so angry all of the time, and it turns into this cycle of self loathing because I don’t want to be angry, but it often feels like my only alternative is sadness.
My doctors have told me that a happy medium will always be a challenge for me, and that experiencing joy will be fraught because it’ll be hard to find and the crash can often be very brutal. I’m glad they told me, but it’s something I struggle with because it’s true.
I need to change that. I may never normalize to happy, and I might not be able to be joyful without a crash. But that has to be okay. It must be. With that in mind, I’m reflecting on how I pursue games and create them, and how I engage with the community.
Love
– I will give my love freely in all ways, even if it’s just a general love of humanity.
– I will try to ensure that love is a part of my games, encouraged and recognized.
– I will remember that hate is less effective than love.
Joy
– I will have more fun! I want to find at least one fun thing a week to enjoy, in games or out.
– I will support joyful games, bring attention, and encourage more joyful games to be made.
– I will put joy out, too, by trying to post more about good in my life, including the positive work I’m doing in design.
Empathy
– I will support those in my community who struggle in the ways I can.
– I will continue to fight against injustice, and against harassment, and try to find opportunities to change our landscape to support those in need.
– I will let go of bitterness against those who have wronged me.
—
The last of those is one I have already started pursuing, with my apology weekend where I asked people to apologize to me freely, without any given reason, and I forgave everyone who did. It was revolutionary for me.
I have realized, just while thinking on this, that my recent deep struggles might not be solved by these efforts, but that it doesn’t actually matter. This isn’t about fixing me, or anyone else.
It’s about living.
<3

Five or So Questions on Faerie Fire

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Shannon Campbell from Astrolago Press about the new bestiary currently on Kickstarter, Faerie Fire, which is compatible with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Shannon is the creator alongside Dillon MacPherson and Malcolm Wilson. The Kickstarter runs until the morning of February 7, 2018. Check out Shannon’s answers below!

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The Conglomadog by Kory Bing
Tell me a little about Faerie Fire. What excites you about it?
Faerie Fire is a collaboration between myself and two of my gamemasters: Dillon MacPherson and Malcolm Wilson. The three of us are friends and colleagues and we’re all very passionate about tabletop gaming–we’re active homebrewers, Dillon and Malcolm especially. 
There’s loads of things that excite me tremendously about Faerie Fire: the fact that it’s full of items and creatures that the three of us have enjoyed so much in our own campaigns, and now we get to share them with everyone; the list of incredible illustrators that I’m so grateful to have had the chance to work with; and the fact that it’s entirely up to our own creative vision what goes in the book. AND THE AESTHETIC IS KEY. I’m super stoked to get to work on such a vibrant, colourful project. We wanted to make a really wild book that felt a little bit sexy, a little bit dangerous–but at the same time super inclusive.

What was the inspiration for Faerie Fire, and how did you start compiling and creating all of this content together?

To start, a lot of it was homebrew we had developed for our own campaig
ns. Dillon and Malcolm have known each other for a decade and as they were both game designers and avid game masters, they were constantly developing and exchanging new content. They’d always wanted to make a tabletop compendium of their own, and the success in recent years of similar projects spurred them on. I’m a writer and narrative designer in video games but I’ve also had experience as an editor on various print publications–including Bones of the Coast, a Kickstarter-funded comics anthology I helmed in 2016, and The Underground: A Sam & Fuzzy RPG, a tabletop system & setting I edited a couple of years ago.

Right away it seemed clear to me that we should do something aggressive and bold–that it wasn’t enough to just produce content that was the same flavour as the vanilla stuff already widely available. We were spending a lot of time in the fairy realm in a campaign that Malcolm was GMing and it seemed like there was a lot of content there to explore and develop–and it quickly became clear that anything we made for the Wilds would be anything but vanilla.

Pox and Pilfer by Amy T. Falcone
Why did you choose to use 5e as your base? Is any of the material flexible to use in other systems, even just the flavor?

Dillon and Malcolm have been playing for 10 years but I only came onto tabletop games with D&D 4th edition, which I played for about a year before 5e came out. After that I went through a handful of systems–but I kept coming back to 5e. I like long-form storytelling and character-driven stories, and 5e is just the right combination of intuitive and versatile–and it’s so, so homebrew friendly. Pretty much every 5e campaign I played ended up having homebrew added before too long: custom player races and classes, new magic items, weird hybrid monsters–and everyone I played with was always happy to go off book. 5e feels like a robust and elegant toolset.

One of the things we’d really like to do with Faerie Fire is make it Fate-compliant as well (I’m a huge fan of Fate Accelerated)–whether this is done as a stretch goal, or as a side hobby over the next year, is hard to say. We think that the style and aesthetic of Faerie Fire would readily fit into a lot of systems and worlds–though the mechanics would obviously need to be adapted a little. And, of course, the fast-paced, glamorous, brilliant setting of Faerie Fire would make it a perfect fit for one of my favourite impromptu systems: All Outta Bubblegum.

How did you choose artists for the project to capture the aesthetic you were looking for? What was your search like?
I come from a comics background, and for five years I ran a curated comics festival called VanCAF that put me in touch with a large network of artists, so I quickly compiled a shortlist of talent that I thought would be a great fit for the project. We had an open submissions process, as well, where artists could pitch monster ideas for us to collaborate on–but in the end we only selected a handful of artists that way.

The vision was for Faerie Fire to be vivid and stylish and bold and glamourous, but I also wanted it to be non-binary and queer. It seemed to me that if we approached it as an art book as well as a supplemental, then it might provide an opportunity for people who have otherwise felt excluded from gaming to discover how incredible these worlds could be. To that end, we wanted to collaborate with diverse creators. My own connections were very LGTBQ+ representative, and feeds like @sffpocartists on Twitter and the #drawingwhileblack and #latinxartists hashtags provided a bounty of skill & talent that made it incredibly easy to discover new names I might not have been introduced to otherwise.

Tell me a little about the design process. How did you flesh out the creatures? What did you do to make sure everything was consistent thematically and mechanically?

The design process was a little bit different from artist to artist–some artists preferred to be assigned a creature, in which case they’d give us some requests (flowers! or feathers!) and tell us what they hated to draw, and we’d build them a custom creature that played to their strengths. Other artists had their own idea for a creature, so we’d get them to run it by us and then cross-reference it to all the other monsters going into the book to make sure that it was unique. We’d send back design notes, if necessary, but otherwise we wanted to give the artists as much autonomy as possible.

Making sure that each monster is unique involves, basically, a lot of spreadsheets. We have cross-references for creature type, whether they’re humanoid or not, sentient or not–whether they have damage resistances or vulnerabilities, whether they can be used as a familiar or a mount. The book runs the whole gamut. Dillon and Malcolm design the stat blocks between the two of them and each of them reviews the other’s work–I come in at the last to give the final review, whip up the lore, and make sure everything looks hunky dory from there. As the art comes in we review it and, if there’s anything that doesn’t quite sync up with the lore & stats we’ve developed, or if the artist has surprised us with something we weren’t quite expecting, we’ll tweak the written content one last time to make sure it gets the most out of the art and doesn’t introduce any confusing inconsistencies.

The book is designed around the a chaotic Fairy plane, home of the fey. While not all the creatures originated there, they’ve all been affected by it, and that shapes their powers and design. We’ve also introduced the Plane of the Living Light, a neon-inspired plane that kind of bumps up against the Wilds–those with special sensitivities can see into it, and certain creatures can channel its living energy through them. Everything in the book, therefore, has been touched by one of these two things: either chaotic fey magics, or the pulsing, energizing Living Light.

Because the aesthetic ranges from the cyberpunky Neon Noir to the fun colours and friendly animals of certain beloved 90s stationery, there’s a wide range of creatures: some are monstrous, some are sexy, some are friendly–some are just plain weird. Each and every one of them is an original creation.

To finish off, what are a few of your favorite items and creatures in the text, and why?

My favourite probably comes down to two or three different creatures: there’s the Kapny (which is going to be drawn by Jemma Salume), dryad-like creatures that live in the husks of trees burned by wildfire; I’m also a huge fan of the Cawillopard (drawn by Desirae Salmark), a tall, giraffe-like creature whose head can’t be seen for the weeping willow branches that trail down its neck; it has a symbiotic relationship with glittering spiders that live in its branches. When you’re under its expansive canopy, the spiders make it look like the night sky shining above you. Pretty! But also creepy, depending on your particular phobia. And, lastly, I’m a big fan of our “cover girl”, Sepal: she’s the warden of the fey prison, where all the prisoners are transformed into flowers and shrubs for the duration of their imprisonment. She keeps a disciplined, well-manicured garden, and she’s a fierce and cunning member of the fairy nobility; though she mostly prefers to stay out of the various squabbles and underhanded politics of the court, it’d be pretty stupid to underestimate her–she literally grows her own army. Yuko Ota drew Sepal for the cover of the book and the interior illustration of her, as well.

Jesse Turner is drawing all our items as we speak and each time he turns in a new one, it’s even more fantastic than the last. I’m most looking forward to seeing the finished art for the Comet’s Tail: a magical flail that looks something like a glowing comet, and allows the wielder to cast Minute Meteor. 

The Wayfarer by Jesse Turner
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Thanks so much to Shannon for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and will check out Faerie Fire, a 5e supplemental on Kickstarter – don’t miss out, the Kickstarter ends February 7!

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Play with Purpose

Dice by John W. Sheldon

I’m going to try to make this brief, but I wanted to express something that has been sitting with me a while, and that’s about what games we play and why we play them. This stemmed from discussion of Dungeons & Dragons, but it applies to many, many games and all types of players and GMs.

Why do you play RPGs?

I want you to ask yourself this question, dig down. Ask harder. Listen to your first response and dig deeper and ask harder.

Why do you play RPGs?

Now you have an answer, I would hope, that feels right. Now look at the games you play right now. 

How do those games meet your reason?

How do they question your answer – are you sure you want to do that? Can you even do that?

Do all of the mechanics support your type of play?

Do any of the mechanics reject your type of play?

Do you play around any mechanics to enjoy play?

Do you ignore sections of the rulebook to play?

What mechanics do support your play, your reason for playing?

Are the games intended to play one way, while you play the other?

What about this game makes it valuable to you?

Is that valuable thing mechanically in the game, or is it something you’ve introduced?

From here, ask yourself about the awareness you have of games around you that you aren’t playing.

Do you know about other RPGs?

Do you know how to play them?

What games allow you to play comfortably without ignoring rules, if any?

Do any of them meet your reason?

Have you tried playing other games that meet your reason, if there are any?

I ask these questions because I want to see us play with purpose, and that purpose is play, an activity that is enjoyable and entertaining (even if that enjoyment is not gathered through “fun”). There are so many RPGs that it is just super unfortunate for people to be stuck playing a game that they aren’t enjoying, that isn’t meeting their needs, that doesn’t fit their reason, that questions them in an unproductive way. I want to see people play games that hit the right spot for them.

This comes to mind because people play around rules so much, and that shouldn’t be necessary! If you play a game and it feels like work, or it feels boring, or you feel exhausted afterwards in a bad way, ask yourself these questions. Take a deep breath, and consider your options. There are hundreds of RPGs out there! Some of them are free, and plenty of them can be learned easily if you look for simplicity, while others are crunchy and mechanics-heavy in ways that some people find delicious.

If the fiction doesn’t work, ask the world for more options. If the mechanics don’t work or seem extraneous or seem too minimal, ask the world for more options. The options are there. Don’t suffer in play. It isn’t fair to you, it isn’t fair to those you play with.

Why do you play RPGs?

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Five or So Questions on Let Me Take a Selfie

This interview turns Five Or So Questions upside-down, with the usual interviewer as the guest! Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games talks to Daedalum Analog Productions’ Brie Sheldon about their new collection of games, Let Me Take a Selfie.
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Cover by John W. Sheldon, 2017

Can you tell me about the genesis of this collection? What prompted you to make a series of games focused around this particular tool, and what was your process for discovery and creation?

I take a lot of selfies, like a really lot. They mean a lot to me! Cell cameras are a vital advance in modern communication and our ability to share our identities and emotions with people around the world, even if we don’t speak the same language. Part of it is also just that I like trying new ways of telling stories and exploring game experiences.

I love dice but it’s fun to take different mechanics from weird things we do. In Literally, I Can’t, one of the games in the collection, you use the MASH (mansion, apartment, shack, house) game that I played as a kid to build characters. That is the kind of thing I want to explore in games!

I also design in response to things. I saw a few games using phone cameras that I felt didn’t do what I wanted. I have had to learn a lot about selfies and myself to use this technology, and needed to apply it to games to get the experiences I wanted.

To make games, I honestly just took selfies. A lot. And I remembered how selfies have been relevant to my life. They are instrumental in my long distance relationships, and a part of how I feel connected to others, but also are ways that I know I can appear to not measure up to expectations or fade into the background if I’m not interesting enough. All of that came through in the collection! Every game has my heart in it, somehow, just with some “how to break it” instructions included!

Using mobile technology as a play aid and intermediary is such an interesting area to explore. Obviously this offered enormous design inspiration, but I’m wondering what challenges it also presented. Does it complicate aspects of design or play?

It certainly does! There are a lot of elements that are challenging. The first, one I’m very aware of, is that not everyone can afford a cell phone with a camera. I hated this, because it’s a reality I wish I could fight, but to make games with this element I had to accept that loss. I am trying to figure out a way to make up for it, but my own financial status isn’t awesome either.

Second, not everyone likes to take selfies, and not everyone even really knows how to take them (there’s not really a wrong way, though, honestly). When I playtested Who Made Me Smile? at Big Bad Con this year, most of my table was people who either didn’t take selfies, or didn’t take them often, and most people approached it with some anxiety. Thankfully, we talked about it and I encouraged them and it went great! I don’t know how it’ll go with others, though.

Third and final so I don’t write ten paragraphs, privacy and safety are huge concerns. For some of the games you’ll pass your phone to other players or share your phone number, for others you’re alone outside, and for some games you’re dealing with emotionally trying things. All of these have their own measures. For sharing contact information and phones I tried to give strong reminders about respecting safety and deleting the other players’ numbers unless they permit otherwise, and I also require that people hide NSFW pictures and content to avoid any consent violation. Being alone during game is risky, so I ask that people have an emergency check-in contact – and I also ask that for the emotionally intense games to help people get support. I also recommend Script Change for all of the games.

It’s all complicated, I think, but it is worth it, I think.

I love the way this collection blends analog and digital and subverts expectations. The four group games imply that the participants will be together physically rather than distributed, and I wonder if you could talk about this choice.

One of the most troubling things I’ve seen with selfies, and one of my secret goals to target with the games, is the negative perception of taking selfies in front of other people. People regularly shame young people for taking selfies in public, and mock tourists who get selfie sticks to take pictures in front of huge landmarks. We don’t mock people who have strangers take their pictures, or people who take pictures of other things or other people. Only people who dare recognize their own existence in public. I struggle, personally, with embarrassment over this – and I wanted to poke at it and prod it to see if I could fix that a little. In the games, you have to take selfies in front of people – sometimes making weird expressions or while feeling complicated feelings. I want to normalize that.

I want to normalize being in an airport crying before you head home after leaving a loved one and taking a selfie to say goodbye to them, or to let the person you’re coming home to see that you’re struggling, but okay. I want to normalize sharing your joy publicly by taking a picture of your smiling face to send to faraway friends. And I want to let that start with an environment that pretends you’re far away from each other, which is where the games make it possible. In Literally, I Can’t you have to take “competent”-looking selfies while all together for play – it’s a challenge against the anxiety and stigma.

It’s also important with Don’t Look at Me, a two-player selfie game in the collection about my personal experiences in a long-term relationship with my husband while he was deployed in Iraq. The purpose of being together, but not facing each other and only able to see each other through selfies, is to create the emotional tension of knowing the person is there, feeling them just out of touch, and not being able to see them except through these constrained circumstances. John and I were, and are, very close, and I always felt like he was with me, but I couldn’t touch him, I couldn’t look at him face to face – everything was through lenses and bytes. I cry every time I think about the game because I know that tension, and it was important to me to make sure that the people playing it could experience it too. In Now You Don’t, it’s important to be around other people to create that experience of physical closeness and emotional ignorance. Surrounded by a crowd, but invisible – almost palpable.

Your games push back against a popular narrative that selfies are trivial narcissism. I feel like these games make selfies tools of meaningful expression, communication, and inquiry. What would you say to someone hostile to, or uncomfortable with, selfies?

Well, honestly, first I’d ask them how they feel about Van Gogh’s self portraits. Maybe those are narcissistic, too, I guess, but I don’t think that would be the majority opinion. I could direct them to the interview I did alongside a professional fine artist where I talk about the use of selfies as a grounding element in life, and where the artist (Robert Daley) says that selfies are simply modern portraiture. 

Video by John W. Sheldon
For me, there’s the first aspect of selfies as being about identity and recognizing your own existence, validating who you are, making you feel whole. Then, there’s the second part: it’s just art. Photography is art, most people agree, and so are the oil painting portraits of people throughout history, including those like Van Gogh’s that are self-portraits. 
I don’t see what is different about using a modern camera to take a self portrait, aside from it being more accessible to people of all backgrounds (excepting those of very low income who have trouble accessing this tech). It removes the boundary of needing an extensive education in technique to paint yourself! Instead you take pictures in a moment, and learn with every photo how to change the angle, how to adjust lighting, how to open your eyes wider or raise your eyebrow to convey emotion, and how to show you, who you are or even who you want to be. It’s magical, to me. I would just have to tell them that much: selfies are about showing who you are to whoever you want, and they are an artistic expression that’s more easily accessible than many of those before.

You write in your introduction how important selfies are to you as a way to present yourself to the world in images you control. Do you see ways to incorporate either selfies as artifacts or mobile phones and their liberating ability to document a person’s personal vision more generally in other games, old or new?

I would love to see some larger scale larps use selfies for storytelling – specifically, in larps where there are mystery elements or similar things that they could use a selfie to identify a character not in a scene, and distribute it to players. This would be excellent for games where there’s reason to be suspicious of specific individuals. Using selfies that you either take in costume or alter to represent your character in game would, I think, bring a level of personal identification with the character that isn’t often had. It also lets you record the experience of a game from the viewpoint you choose – you frame the moment, not anyone else. 

Doing selfie diaries for very emotional or intense games could be exciting – much like The Story of My Face in the collection, combining your words with a visual representation can make experiences feel more vivid. When I did test plays of The Story of My Face for the photos in the book, I really had fun in part because when I looked back at the pictures, I could remember the spooky story I was telling myself. Mid-game selfie logging, much like taking pictures of character sheets or game materials, can help keep memories rich and more easily recoverable. And that latter part, with taking pictures of game material – using phones to document game materials is really awesome because you can refer back to it easily. I also like using texting for “secret” communication in game or for sharing codes – the day someone makes an Unknown Armies-style horror game that uses text messages, selfies, and cell pictures to tell the story and guide players is the day I am pretty sure we win at games.
(by Brie)
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Thanks for your time, Brie!

I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll share this interview and the DriveThruRPG link with all your friends!
[From Brie: Thank you to Jason so much for this, it was a really fun experience and I’m so glad to talk more about LMTAS!]


Note: All images except the cover are by Brie Sheldon and excerpted from the collection used to write and layout LMTAS, and the cover is a compilation of Brie’s photos with a super nice layout by John W. Sheldon.

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Reminder: Turn Playtest Available

In case you’re interested in what I’m working on or looking for something to playtest!

Turn is a slice-of-life supernatural roleplaying game set in the modern era.

Players in Turn are shapeshifters in small, rural towns who must balance their human lives and habits with their beast needs and instincts. Their baser natures will challenge them as they strive towards goals from everyday tasks to life-changing experiences, and they will need to find comfort in one another to make it through without becoming stressed out. The system uses player discussion and a set of d6 rolls for resolution.

Turn is slated to be a complete draft by the end of 2018, potentially pursuing crowdfunding.

EDIT: The Turn Beta is no longer available but you can find the game at any of these links:

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Turn.html

https://briebeau.itch.io/Turn

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/281964/Turn?manufacturers_id=10592

 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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Five or So Questions on WINTERHORN

Today I have a great interview with Jason Morningstar about his fascinating new project, WINTERHORN, which has information on the Bully Pulpit site and is also on DriveThruRPG. This game sounds really cool and also really important. I hope you enjoy what Jason says below!

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Really nice layout and design for the materials!

Tell me a little about WINTERHORN. What excites you about it?

WINTERHORN is a live action game for 5-8 players about how governments degrade and destroy activist groups. The thing that excites me most about WINTERHORN is that it might actually be useful. I’m an American and I feel like my country is in genuine danger right now. WINTERHORN arose from a pretty intense internal conversation about what I could do about it. What skills could I bring to bear? How could I amplify my voice and offer tools to resist a worst case that is pretty fucking bad? I looked to history as a guide – what happens when authoritarians come to power? 
The playbook is well worn and it is being methodically repeated. I thought about how important resistance and dissent are, and the many tools governments have to suppress them. I read further on the Stasi, on COINTELPRO, on the Soviet Union and its successor states, and from that came the germ of the game – play the “bad guys” to learn how to be a better “good guy” in real life. Of course it isn’t that simple, but through the game you’ll absorb a dozen different ways activists get interfered with, and maybe that will spur some conversations about encryption, operational security, or hardening groups you care about against disinformation or worse. The game itself is fun and interesting, and it isn’t at all didactic, but I feel like you really have a chance to embody these government operatives, which gives you both perspective and maybe even empathy. And you come away with these awful techniques on your mind. Every time I see the game hit the radar of some little Reddit anarchist cell or humanities academic I get excited. 

What were elements of your research that stood out most regarding the emotional factors of power, control, and resistance that had the most influence on WINTERHORN?

I’ve read pretty deeply on the Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst, the security apparatus of the former East Germany) in the last few years, which was influential (The agencies you work for in WINTERHORN are mirrors of the organizational hierarchy of the Stasi). But I’d say the most influential elements were pulled from American history. FBI and Chicago police collusion leading to the death of Fred Hampton made a powerful impression, for example. If you are familiar with his killing and pursue a violent path in WINTERHORN you will see its unsubtle echoes.


How do you, in this game specifically, represent the “bad guys” in the game without making them into soulless monsters? 

In the full-on larp version of WINTERHORN the characters are tangled in bureaucracy and divided into two factions that roundly dislike each other (The Ministry of State Security and the People’s Police). Each character has a professional and emotional attachment to a partner, and each has some affinity or soft spot that might color their choices. One likes the deeply stupid but brave, for example, and another likes the elderly. So there’s enough meat on those bones to slightly humanize them, even if they are doing fundamentally inhuman things. In the more edu-game version of WINTERHORN, you are making the same decisions ina much more abstracted way, and there’s none of this nuance but many more inputs from participants.

Why did you choose to present WINTERHORN in the format you have, a live action game with a card deck, as opposed to any other, and what value do you think it brings to the experience?

I wanted the game to be flexible and accessible, because I wanted it to be used outside of “normal” roleplaying contexts – in other words, outside of the living rooms and convention hideaways of super intense gamers. I also wanted the game’s information to be smoothly and organically transmitted in play rather than through a didactic lesson. In my experience live action play is great for this – you embody a character, and that’s a dial I, as the designer, can set low or high – and being physically engaged really aids in retention. WINTERHORN is dead simple and that was also a design goal. From the beginning I wanted to make sure that you could sit down and play it, even if you weren’t a huge nerd who knew what a larp was. Cards are a great way to share and transmit information. To be honest the game grew a little bit and now requires printed material as well, but I’m totally OK with that. I’m really proud of the handouts and what they communicate.

WINTERHORN sounds like the kind of game that could use workshopping, debriefing, support mechanics, or other methods to help players engage with the material safely and deal with the harsh realities that they may uncover. Which of these do you use? If none, why?

You begin with some light workshopping, and the game guides you through it. There are six player-level roles in the game – Orientation, Time, Case Board, Dynamics, Paperwork and Debrief. Orientation presents the game world and your goals, as well as introducing you to the game’s safety tools and touch boundaries. Dynamics’ sole responsibility is to make sure all the players are engaged and having a good, productive time. Debrief leads a directed post-game discussion where you check in as players and segue into talking about how the game’s content reflects real life, if you want. Time, Case Board and Paperwork all have in-game responsibilities. For larp nerds, the safety tools are Cut, Largo/Brake, and The Door Is Always Open. In play it is surprisingly chill – essentially WINTERHORN is a committee larp played around a table staring at a case board covered in photos, which makes it pretty accessible if you’ve ever seen a detective show.
—
Thanks so much to Jason for this great interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll share this interview, the WINTERHORN link, and the DriveThruRPG link with all your friends!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

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On “Boys”

This is a diversion from games but related to my typical work and my current look into masculinity with Posers, and is as-of-now an unpaid post.

Mike Rugnetta wrote two posts on the subject of the McElroy Brothers and the use of the term “boy.” I found it by a shared Twitter thread by @RowanGayle who I don’t know but said some cool stuff. And reading these things brought me to tears, because I want to talk about why I, personally, consider myself a boy…and why I don’t agree that boy must be or necessarily is gender neutral.

My coming out story is freely available on the internet so I’ll just say simply: for technical terms I use genderfluid nonbinary-masculine to define myself, but casually I refer to myself as a boy. It started jokingly, but then I felt it more significantly that the word fit me better than anything else, and it ties into these things that Mike and RowanGayle are saying. It is not necessarily about gender, but it is about identity, and it interweaves with gender for me.

When I first became a viewer of the various McElroy properties, Griffin’s voice really stuck with me (as a synesthete, to me it is the exact color and feeling of slipping on a banana peel, which makes me giggle). I liked how he talked about the characters they made on Monster Factory, and his enthusiasm. I also appreciated the not-entirely-but-pretty-damn-wholesome vibe the McElroys have thus far been some of the least problematic internet entities I’ve seen (along with Rugnetta and Mikey Neumann), and fuck if I didn’t feel the positivity and enthusiasm pouring out into the world from their media. Even when things were at the point where they could be problematic, they didn’t go there, or if they did, they apologized. That is important to me, so much, and that’s part of what “boy” is to me because of how it reflects in both the speakers and the subjects who are just trying their damn best – not necessarily good, but trying to be, always trying to be.

I see boy as inherently trying. Trying to be better, which is a common refrain for me, be better, and to be what you want to be. Hopeful is not something I am, but something I think translates well to boy-ness, and I don’t talk about how much I want to be hopeful, but I do want that, and I know that’s part of why I cling to boy. In the times Griffin used it in Monster Factory, it stuck in my head as this loving “our boy can do anything!” vibe and I loved that these boys, these no-middle-sliders boys who fumbled were still seemingly loved even though they’re characters in a damn video game. I have struggled so much with feeling okay with who I am, but every time I heard “boy” it poked a little at me, and I finally just let it in. Griffin doesn’t know me and neither do any of these other internet people but boy, boy stuck with me.

There is a playful, loving, hopeful, enthusiastic vibe in the idea of these boys that try so fuckin’ hard to just do the thing and to just be boys. That’s what I love about it, I think.

I’m not a man and have no desire to be, but the soft masculinity that sits in boy suits me. It’s not about men or women, and I think here is the flaw. Not everyone has to be a boy, and it is evident to me by the McElroy use of it that it is not necessarily gendered man or woman, but instead likely an androgynous space where some boys could be – it feels that it could be a soft masculine, but it doesn’t have to be.

My complication with the analysis thus far is more that we are only considering man, woman, and agender identities. It isn’t destroying the gender binary to take gender away entirely – expanding gender and understanding the complexities and variances of gender identity is what destroying the gender binary is.

What is a person who has a gender that is not necessarily binary but it does exist?

I dunno, I guess what I’m trying to say is, when Griffin used boy, it gave me a simple word for what I am. And that’s pretty cool, whatever people end up saying it is later.

This post isn’t presently supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs, but you can support me there – I know Patreon is presently sketchy, so feel free to just tip below if you want. Tell your friends!

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Harassment in Indie Games: Part 4 (Conclusion) – How

Content warning: sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual violence, threats, online harassment, threats of violence, harassment and assault of minors, statutory rape, rape, mental illness, anxiety, social ostracizing

Harassment in Indie Games: Part 4 (Conclusion) – How

 

This is the fourth and final post (posts one, two, & three) in a series about sexual harassment and assault in indie RPGs, larps, and spaces. I put out a survey to ask people about their experiences. This post is going to cover How (how do we fix this).

 

Previous posts have said this has not been an easy task for me or, especially, for the people who shared their stories. It has certainly been that. This has been really hard, and exhausting, for me. I can’t imagine how hard it was for people to relive their own experiences and trust me, to some a stranger, to talk about them with respect. Whether they chose to be anonymous or to share their personal information, I think it takes a lot of fortitude to talk about our experiences.

 

This last post’s Patreon proceeds will go to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest Network) and I ask you to join me in supporting RAINN to promote the safety and wellbeing of survivors and at-risk individuals as much as we can. Donate here. Thank you!

HOW

How do we fix this?

Change. We need to change, and we need to do it as soon as possible. A few suggestions from the respondents really are valuable in how we can look at this:

 

– I think the community needs to learn effective ways to self-police. Maybe it should be included in first sessions, but I know not every one of the men I encountered in my early years was a sexual predator but they were complicit and probably egged some of that behavior on without realizing. Creating an environment where those predators are afraid and terrified of the reaction should they behave that way is paramount and an active contract the community and the game runners should participate in.

 

– A clear consent/anti-harassment policy would have helped. The convention has that today, and they have panels on sexual harassment and how to identify and help stop it. People also need to feel stronger about calling out bad actors’ behavior.

 

– Making it clear that these spaces (and really any spaces) don’t work without consent, and the adults in a space need to make sure that if there are minors in a community older members aren’t making advances towards them.

 

– They should have listened and made it clear that this behavior was not acceptable and worked with [the bad actor] to adjust his behavior into something not deeply harmful to members of the community. If it came to it, I think people should have asked him to leave the space/community.

 

All of the things we can do are such concrete, understandable actions. Most of them involve acknowledging the risks within our own communities. They also can often mean excluding people, sometimes even people we don’t know if we want to exclude. The reality is, some of the time we have to exclude people to include people. For every bad actor you include, you are excluding at least one other person or group, and that is a choice you should be conscious of every time, and you have to ask yourself whether the wellbeing of people at risk is less valuable than letting a well-known game designer speak on a panel at your convention.

 

Is it worth hurting people to be able to play with a GM who constantly runs over people’s consent? Is it worth losing the participation and contributions of tons of women to let the senior manager for D&D say women aren’t “real” developers? I ask anyone with power, with anxiety in my heart, with fear inside me: are we worth anything to you? Do you care? Will you read this and just turn away? If you decide we don’t matter now, I hope someday you change.

 

If instead you think it’s time to make a difference, my suggestions are here:

 

  • Create guidelines and standards for all levels of community (table, region, convention) whether it’s online or offline and ensure they meet the needs of all of the individuals in the community with consideration of their identities and their needs. (Examples at GeekFeminism Wiki and Big Big Bad Con.)
  • Educate people about consent and boundaries with the assumption that if we don’t teach them, no one will, so that we move forward with comprehensive information.
  • Learn signs of bad actors and their habits, like being unwilling to respect consent or not asking for it, lying about their behaviors, invading others’ space, suggesting content or actions that are inappropriate for the audience or that make people feel unsafe, and similar issues.
  • Call out bad actors when they do something wrong. Do it publicly or privately, but make sure it won’t hurt the survivors when you do it. Respect their safety and wishes, but don’t let people keep doing bad things when you witness them, when you’re made aware of them otherwise, or when you’ve been called upon to speak on behalf of those harmed.
  • Believe the people who speak up and support them. Don’t leave them hanging and alone when something bad happens. Support them through the whole process, and do what they ask (even if that means keeping quiet).
  • Remove repeat offenders from the community, even if it means banning them from conventions, events, and even your game table. Don’t let them continue to act badly in spaces you control or that you have influence over. If they apologize and demonstrate meaningful change, work with the survivors to see what is possible.
  • Protect minors and marginalized people from bad actors. Make spaces where those people can feel safe and where they can easily get assistance. If someone breaks the rules of consent and respect, get them away from underange and marginalized people as soon as possible.
  • Learn signs of abuse and harassment and find out if someone needs help if they seem in trouble.
  • Start using safety tools (link) and encouraging consent-based play in your games.

 

These don’t sound so hard, but they will take effort and time. If you want more complex efforts, hire a diversity consultant for your convention, for your project, and anything else you want to do. Ask people for their perspectives. Trust people who ask for help. This section is so brief because the reality is, the work isn’t complicated – it’s just going to be challenging. We need to change our culture and our ways of responding to the needs of survivors, and help protect people from being harmed in the first place.

 

Let’s start now.




US Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673
– Chat https://hotline.rainn.org/online/terms-of-service.jsp

 

US Domestic Abuse Hotline: 1-800-799-7233
– Worldwide chat: http://www.thehotline.org/about-us/contact/

 

US Suicide Hotline 1-800-273-8255
– Chat http://chat.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/GetHelp/LifelineChat.aspx

 

I apologize for not having non-US numbers at this time. The chats should be accessible for anyone, and if you still need help, please contact me directly via contactbriecs@gmail.com. I’m sending good vibes to you as well as I can. Thank you!

 

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

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Harassment in Indie Games: Part 3 – Where and Why

Content warning: sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual violence, threats, online harassment, threats of violence, harassment and assault of minors, statutory rape, rape, mental illness, anxiety, social ostracizing, perspective of offender

Harassment in Indie Games: Part 3 – Where and Why

This is the third post (posts one & two) in a series about sexual harassment and assault in indie RPGs, larps, and spaces. I put out a survey to ask people about their experiences. This post is going to cover Where (where the events are happening, where are people making efforts) and Why (why do people do these things, why is this happening right now, why is it happening in these spaces).
As I said before, this has not been an easy task for me or, especially, for the people who shared their stories. I am incredibly grateful to the people who responded. Whether they chose to be anonymous or to share their personal information, I think it takes a lot of fortitude to talk about our experiences.
 
Find the post after the cut.
 

WHERE

Where are these events happening?

The primary locations for these events are: conventions, game tables/larp spaces, and online or face-to-face communities (so either local gatherings/social groups offline or online social groups/gamer collective spaces).
 
— Content note for discussion of online harassment in detail —
 
In the responses and in my own general awareness, online harassment is a huge issue. One example:
 
– I responded to someone discussing abuse from [an individual] with “Oh yeah, are people not all aware of that guy yet?” and had porn and hate speech sent to me by 200 or so disposable twitter accounts.
 
Harassment online – including rape and death threats – is extensive. I’ve experienced it personally, though not nearly to the extent of some respondents or those who are well-known who have experienced it. Online harassment is no blip. It can be targeted to force people out of work, or even just to get them out of the hobby. It is known and acknowledged that many people in indie games have left indie games entirely because of the harassment and extensive verbal assault, as well as doxxing and spamming.
 
— End content note for discussion of online harassment in detail —
 
My last note here is that online harassment has left some respondents in therapy, with panic attacks and PTSD, from the extent of this trauma. It is painful and terrifying to not know whether you will be safe from online harassers because they could and often do take the time to find your personal information and use it to harm you. We can’t forget that online harassment is significant, and that it is extensive. Respondents even reported the trauma from this being worse than their face-to-face experiences with harassment and assault.
 
I want to place a huge emphasis on the fact that a large number of the responses for all genders involved at-table (or in-larp) behavior that was disrespectful, violating, and/or simply inappropriate. People getting overtly hit on, people having their characters raped or assaulted, physically forcing people to touch each other or share space, etc. A lot of people talked about how no one seemed to try to stop things, or how they felt helpless. This isn’t how game experiences should be.
 
Some things, such as domestic violence, primarily happen in private, but the associated behaviors to domestic violence often spill over into public social interactions. This is the same with people who harass others in private – their behaviors aren’t exclusive to behind-closed-doors. Additionally, some people harm others in public – and as noted in previous posts, with no regard for others, and at times with no one stopping or condemning them.
 
Some of the locations mentioned were:
 
  • Convention rooms
  • Online (Twitter, G+, Tumblr, etc.)
  • Convention floors
  • Game tables
  • Larp spaces
  • Parties at cons
  • Private emails
  • Con events
That is a hell of a lot of places to feel afraid in, or afraid of going into. It makes me wonder how many people have left games because someone groped them, assaulted them, harassed them, and one of the most frustrating to me, used the social group’s culture and their social or political influence to make sure that the person had to suffer through long-term harassment or leave. That was in at least ⅓ of my responses. A third. When people mock safe spaces, I don’t think they realize how unsafe the world is.

Where are efforts being made?

There are some people making efforts, and they should be commended. Of the conventions I’ve attended, all of the conventions run by Double Exposure (www.dexposure.com) have comprehensive harassment policies, and Big Bad con has a great one as well. Both cons encourage the use of safety tools at tables (like Script Change, the X-Card, Lines and Veils, etc., which I’ve seen Big Bad Con includes in their program and on their site). A number of other cons, including smaller cons, seem to be taking action in this regard, too, which is great! This should be across the board, not just by a few cons.
 
There are also a fair number of people are including or building safety mechanics into their roleplaying games (Kids on Bikes by John Gilmore and Doug Levandowski; The Hour Between Dog and Wolf by Matt Gwinn; Lovecraftesque by Becky Annison and Josh Fox; Bluebeard’s Bride by Sarah Richardson, Marissa Kelly, and Whitney “Strix” Beltrán & others) and speaking about content and consent in them. This is awesome, but it doesn’t solve everything. Table culture is something that we all need to work towards improving, and looking for methods of change are being done mostly by those who have already been hurt or those most at risk. We’re working hard, and we need more people to work hard alongside us.

WHY

Why do people do these things?

The respondents didn’t provide much in this regard because I didn’t want to put them in the place of having to interpret the actions of someone who hurt them. However, a lot of the thread of the responses were things like social power, lack of respect of people’s consent or autonomy, promoting the “fun” of GMs or other players over the safety and comfort of the harmed players, and environments contributing to people having control over others.

While it’s impossible, I think, to know the whole of the mentality behind someone deciding they’re going to hurt someone else or the reasons why someone would be careless enough to do so accidentally, I want to offer a perspective.

— Content warning for descriptions of groping & predatory behavior including motivations from the perspective of an offender —

I have, twice that I know of, harmed someone in a sexual context. During the times I was in a manic fugue, I don’t know if I did then. It’s obviously not something I’m proud of and I have changed since then (the ones I remember were a long time ago). I’ve made steady efforts to not be that person anymore, but I know the things I was thinking.
 
[Note: I am not sharing these stories to make anyone feel bad for me, or to focus on the bad actors so much, I am just offering perspective of the bad reasoning for bad acts. I am sharing this so that those who are unfamiliar with or ignorant of sexual harassment and assault can see that people who they know can be bad actors and so they can realize how shitty this is.]

The two situations I recall were both while I was intoxicated, so my memories are blurry. However, the first time I was kissing someone and just took it too far because I was excited and thought they were into it. Eventually I realized they were uncomfortable, but it was too late. I groped them and it was awful that I did. This was me being selfish and ignorant and it was wrong. I wasn’t thinking anything except about what I wanted, and assuming they would be into it, without seeking consent.

In the other instance I grabbed someone’s ass (a stranger) while I was drunk. That might sound mild to someone, but it was wrong and harmful. I didn’t have their consent, and I was just trying to prove that I could do what I want. It was about power.

— End content warning for mild descriptions of groping & predatory behavior from the perspective of an offender —

Two reasons: ignoring someone’s consent (or lack thereof) because of selfishness, and power. These are pretty common. The second is more common than the first. The second needs to be fought constantly with education and by removing people from the situations where they can be harmed, and by condemning their actions. They need to know they can’t do it and that it won’t be tolerated, and that they need to change and never do those things again.

While there are people who are ignorant, drunk idiots, they are often that way because our culture encourages it and teaches it, and those people should be educated. We are responsible for that, and by “we” I mean “all humans, especially those who have social or political influence.” There needs to be active movement to discourage this kind of ignorance, and we should create spaces safe from the drunken behavior of people who don’t understand or respect consent.

If you have sexually assaulted or harassed someone and want to know how to move forward and make it right if you can, check out this link. It is unfortunately extremely biased towards men being the perpetrators, but aside from that, pretty useful.

Why is this happening right now?

It’s not new, for one. It’s just becoming more well-reported because of the access to communication and media that is allowed by modern technology, even though some of the problem is that technology can make it easier (harassment via IM or email or phone, doxxing, etc.).

However, there are a hell of a lot of reasons why our culture overall is allowing this, most of which involve power. You can look at the US President and see that sexual harassment and assault is accepted at the highest levels of our society, and the recent outings of many, many men who have assaulted people are overwhelming. You hear regularly about police abusing the people they arrest, or those they are just using, and many police are domestic abusers, too. Sexual harassment and assault is a regular part of our lives, and the current climate – one where so many bad actors are in power, in our government, many people have defended a pedophile. Either people want power or they just don’t give a shit about anyone else.

Members of government and various “elites” (rich people, celebrities, etc.) constantly abuse the power they already have, while people who feel they don’t have power – many geeks, those who are insecure, and so on – can hurt people in search of power. Our culture allows for people to more easily hurt women (trans and cis), queer people, and even men because we don’t criticize bad behavior even when we’re considering who among us should be a just enough person to police us, to be in respected, or to be considered a leader.

Why is it happening in these spaces?

Because we don’t do those things, for one. Many conventions lack harassment policies or behavior policies, though some are improving on that. The majority of game tables lack use of safety tools and many avoid the discussion of acceptable behavior in general, and this spills into small gaming communities.

People don’t call out behavior. We don’t stop hiring people when we find out they’re hurting people. We excuse people because of their social, political, or professional roles. We allow community members to continually be predatory towards underage players. We disrespect the autonomy and identities of marginalized community members.

The reality is that we don’t have established boundaries, and we don’t have rules. I imagine a lot of this is in the core of gamer/geekdom – we’re trying to break away from societal rules, we want to have our own worlds, it’s about escapism, etc. and so on. And I get it, right? Doing what you want is fun! Having control of your life and having fun is great. But this kind of culture, the acceptance of ignoring rules that protect people and the use of fiction to abuse people? Not cool, y’all.

This issue is not exclusive to gaming spaces, or even geek spaces. It’s everywhere. But it’s not that this behavior is common that is the issue. It’s that it keeps happening and far too often, no one says a word, even when someone asks for help. We turn away when people are in need because “they’re harmless,” or “they’re socially awkward,” or “they can’t be bad, they’re such a good [designer, gamer, friend, etc.],” or “we can’t kick them out, they’ve always been here.”

We need to step up.

 

US Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673
– Chat https://hotline.rainn.org/online/terms-of-service.jsp

US Domestic Abuse Hotline: 1-800-799-7233
– Worldwide chat: http://www.thehotline.org/about-us/contact/

US Suicide Hotline 1-800-273-8255
– Chat http://chat.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/GetHelp/LifelineChat.aspx

I apologize for not having non-US numbers at this time. The chats should be accessible for anyone, and if you still need help, please contact me directly via contactbriecs@gmail.com. I’m sending good vibes to you as well as I can. Thank you!

This post was supported by the community on ko-fi.com/thoughty. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Potlach

I had a great interview with the creators of Potlach: A Game about East Coast Salish Economics! The researchers and creators of Potlach, The N.D.N. Players, are Jeanette Bushnell, PhD; Jonathan S. Tomhave, PhD; and Tylor Prather. We talked about the origins of the game and the meanings that are held in the cards and language of the game. Check out the interview below!

—

Picture of the Potlach cards on a table – lovely artwork!
Tell me a little about Potlach: A Card Game About Coast Salish Economics. What excites you about it?
Potlach: A Card Game About Coast Salish Economics is a strategic, educational card game based on indigenous philosophies. It is designed to meet K-12 educational standards for teaching about native history, economics, culture, and government. Potlatch was developed as a community effort with local elders and language experts. The game is written in both English and Lushootseed, an indigenous language of the Salish Sea region. Game mechanics are based on sharing resources to
meet other players’ needs for food, materials, technology, and knowledge.

What excites me about our game is that as you play it, you get a shift in your thinking towards valuing sharing within a community rather than accumulating as an individual. Or, as one of our early game testers wrote, “A big change in thinking from other games. I started out thinking about what I was getting and by the end it was more important the way I was sharing.”

Players at a table playing Potlach with great enthusiasm!

What was the impetus for making Potlach into a game?

The impetus to make a game based on indigenous philosophy came after a couple years of analyzing games for our podcasts. For indigenous scholars like ourselves who study systemic oppressions (and live them), analyzing and playing game after game that reproduced these oppression got tedious. One aspect in particular was individual accumulation – a concept often associated with capitalism. So, one night, Tylor said he’d always wanted to develop a board game and we started working on one that used concepts and values from indigenous economic systems rather than those from capitalism. Eventually we decided on looking at the very specific system local to us (Salish Sea region) that redistributed wealth.

The word potlatch comes from Nuu-chah-nulth who live in what is now British Columbia, Canada. The word was altered via the commerce language knows as Chinook Jargon that was used throughout Washington and British Columbia after Europeans settled in the area. Potlach is not a Lushootseed word but has become commonly used to describe events associated with wealth distribution actions.

The “above waterfall” card with the number 3 in a primary color at each corner, and the card name in English and Lushootseed. The style is really easily understood, which I love.

How do the basic mechanics work?

The deck has two types of cards – Resource Cards and House Cards.

Each player has one House Card that indicates the size of their extended family dwelling. Historically, the largest known house was Old Man House at Suquamish, WA. (Link to press release from 2014 about this dwelling.) Our House Cards are sized as having 3, 4, 5, or 6 fires that indicate the amount of resource needs for the people in the house.

Every player is dealt six resource cards of various types and sizes. Players take turns Gifting their Resources to meet the house needs of other players.

With the cards representing resources that are being given gifts, how do players understand the meaning and importance of those concepts – is it through language, symbols, or how the cards can be used, or something else?

Primarily our game is about a sharing-based economic system so what players tend to notice the most is that the play moves them to strategizing ways to insure that every players has all their needs met rather than one player accumulating more of anything.

The game can actually be played without understanding the meaning and concepts of the various cards. The cards are all color-coded and numbered to facilitate play. That said, each card has a picture and the name of the item in both English and Lushootseed (the local indigenous language).

Based on our own experiences of attending potlatches (or giveaways) in Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia we developed four types of giftable resources. Then we talked to some local elders and language experts and finalized the types of resources as: food, gathered materials, crafted technologies, and teachings.

Ideally, players will look at and read the cards while playing. We are working on a Teacher’s Guide to facilitate more teaching about local resources. With the success of the Kickstarter Campaign, we will have some funds to make a podcast with a native Lushootseed speaker so players can hear what the Lushootseed words sound like.

The “clam” card with the number 4 in red at the corner, and the card name in English and Lushootseed.

What are the important parts of the gifting and, to me, ethical caring that are demonstrated in Potlach – to you and from your world perspective?

Our game is about an economic system that very pragmatically assures that all members of society respectfully have their needs met so that they can continue being active and valued participants. From our world perspective, in which all things are interconnected and impact each other in highly complex and nuanced ways, it would be illogical to do anything else. Keeping the system in balance is the ultimate goal.

Gifting is the word we use to represent the reciprocal distribution and redistribution of available resources. The societies that have used this system are highly complex and have many ancillary systems in place.

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Thank you so much to Jeanette, Jonathan, and Tylor for the interview! I hope you all liked the interview and that you’ll check out Potlach: A Card Game About East Salish Economics on Kickstarter today!

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