Tag: disability

Five or So Questions on Critical Core

I have an interview today with AdamD from Game to Grow about Critical Core, which is currently in preorder! It sounded like such a fascinating project focused on helping autistic gamers! Check out Adam’s responses below!

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The Critical Core box with a black cover that features a hexagon filled with beautiful art of characters and settings.

Tell me about Critical Core. What excites you about it?

Critical Core is a starter set for therapeutic tabletop role-playing games. We’ve been using games to help kids and teens build social skills for around 8 years now, and have always wanted to reach a larger audience of people than we can reach directly in the greater Seattle Area. At Game to Grow we’ve been saying for years that we think the world would be a better place if everyone played more games together. This is our opportunity to get a game into more homes, hospitals, schools, clinics and libraries around the world.

A warrior who appears Japanese stands with a young child in braids on a backdrop of a large tower and castle and mountains. The text reads Critical Core: Better reality through fantasy.

What are the backgrounds like for the various people working on Game To Grow? What motivated you to apply it to games?

Adam Johns is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I (Adam Davis) have a masters in education with a specialization in Drama Therapy. We met in grad school at Antioch University Seattle and started working together running drop in groups using Dungeons and Dragons with socially isolated youth. As we ran the groups we realized the potential that the game has as an intentional intervention for building social competence. We created Wheelhouse Workshop, a for-profit company, in 2013 dedicated to using RPGs to build social skills. After several years of running groups and serving the local community, they formed Game to Grow in 2017 to continue to expand on the use of games to help people learn, grow, and change.

Game to Grow was formed as a nonprofit to reach a larger audience to help with a wider range of challenges.  Another member of the development team is Virginia Spielmann, who is a British-trained Occupational Therapist with more than 20 years experience working in pediatrics. Virginia is a specialist in the DIR Floortime™ framework of developmental intervention. Virginia approached us with the Critical Core project as a collaboration with the ad agency Mcgarrybowen Hong Kong, who sought to use their creative talent in design and project management to serve the autistic community in Hong Kong with an innovative idea. Critical Core was born from this international collaboration.

The whole Critical Core box and its interior, showing dice, cards, a grid map, character sheets, and setting guides.

How does the starter kit work and what is included in it?

The starter kit contains three main components: the rules and materials for a simplified  and easy-to-play role-playing game, a facilitator’s guide with the best-practices we have developed over the near decade of experience we have running groups and using this method to help clients, and adventure modules in which the in-game scenarios are targeted developmentally to real-world areas of social growth.  

The goal is for new game masters to be able to pick up the starter set and learn a simple game they can use to help and connect with their family, students, clients, or community. They can use the modules and facilitator’s guide to improve the outcomes of their game and provide some support for kids, whether they’re on the autism spectrum or not.  Experienced game masters will be able to apply the wisdom in the facilitator’s guide and adventure modules to other game systems and use the games they already know and love to help their community. Trained therapists, educators, and other community support will have a new tool in their repertoire to help their community in a way that is, fun, safe, and enriching.

A man waves blue clouds with his hand while dressed in green fantasy-style clothing and grey hair with pointy ears stands behind a young boy in a green tracksuit in a forest with glowing spheres on the ground and other figures in the background. The text reads Critical Core: Better reality through fantasy.

How do you approach accessibility for those with disabilities like blindness, or who have mobility issues?

Our approach to accessibility is that, as our colleague Mike Fields said during a presentation: ”An impairment is only a disability when there is no accommodation.”

We also recognize that every individual is different and may need a different level of modification or accommodation for them to fully participate. The key element  to accessibility is open dialogue around what a participant needs and how we can help.  There are obvious ways we can improve accessibility, i.e., by making sure paths are clear for wheelchairs and walkers, or by providing braille dice, though it is impossible to be 100% prepared for everything so we must be open to conversation about how we can make sure our table has a place for everyone. 

The cards from the Critical Core box featuring the Orcs.

How do these starter kits work for people who aren’t experienced professionals, based on your testing?

We’re still developing the kit to make it the best it can be to professionals with less experience using RPGs to help.  Our “official” beta-testing with Critical Core kits hasn’t begun, though in the trainings we’ve conducted over the years using the wisdom and best practices that will go into the facilitators guide, we’ve seen the largest area of growth is making sure that the professionals new to facilitating RPGs for growth remember that they are also a player, and that SO MUCH of the power in the work comes from relationships and play.   So we’ll make sure that the kits have a clear outline of the game structure, but also explain in depth how to use the game to maximum impact.  Not just the what, but the why and the how.  Much of that will be in the facilitator’s guide included in the Critical Core box. 

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Thank you so much to Adam for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Critical Core and consider preordering if it is a good suit for you!

PTSD, access to role-playing games, and the Luxton technique by P.H. Lee

This post was originally posted on G+ by P.H. Lee on August 28, 2017. It was a significant influence on updates to the Script Change RPG toolbox, and is an essential read in regards to addressing safety in the game community and at every game table. Lee has authorized me to post the text here in full since G+ is dying, which I greatly appreciate – it’s super valuable!

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Preamble

I have PTSD. About 6-7 years ago, more or less, various pan-RPG techniques to control triggering[1] content — The Veil and the X-Card, to name two of a vast diversity — became commonplace in the RPG circles that I played in. Around the same time, I stopped participating in role-playing games at meet-ups and conventions, or anywhere else that these techniques were promulgated. These three things (PTSD, X-Card, and my withdrawal from play) are related. I’m writing this essay to discuss the ways that these techniques cut off my access to role-playing games, and introduce know techniques that, I hope, will point to a way forward in terms of accessibility.

Conflicting Access Needs
Before I go further, I’d like to reference a term from the disability rights movement: conflicting access needs. Disabled people are extremely diverse and our disabilities are also extremely diverse. While an ideal world would have everyone’s access needs met at all times and in all circumstances, in many circumstances, with many disabilities, that is practically or fundamentally impossible.

An example, which I’m paraphrasing from Autistic blogger Mel Baggs: A group home for Autistic people have some occupants who constantly verbalize, and others who are hypersensitive to noise. The verbalizers have a reasonable access need to be allowed to verbalize. The hypersensitive have a reasonable access need for quiet. Both of these access needs are reasonable, but it is impossible to meet both of them in the same space.

For this essay, the point is that, while I’m describing ways that my (and others) access to role-playing games has been cut off, I want to acknowledge that the techniques in question were developed and promulgated — often by people with similar disabilities to mine — to meet a legitimate access need. That they cut off my (and others) access to role-playing games does not mean that they are inherently wrong, bad, or ableist.

I do not want this to turn into “X-Card (or The Veil, etc, etc) is bad” and, even more so, I do not want it to turn into “the people who propagate these techniques are bad.” That’s not my opinion and, also, it’s wrong. I am hoping that by writing this essay I can move the discussion of accessibility of RPGs for PTSD sufferers from “use this technique” to a conversation which can account for different players, different goals, different communities, and different access needs.

A Note on Personal Narrative

I’m going to use a personal narrative throughout this essay, because it is based on my own experiences of both role-playing games and PTSD. But I want to be clear: I am not speaking solely for myself in this. Simply from personal circumstances, I can attest that the problems I have are problems that are shared by a number of other people with triggered mental illnesses.

Likewise, there are people with triggered mental illnesses who have a very different experience — most importantly, there are people with triggered mental illnesses who find the X-Card, The Veil, etc. to be vital techniques for their access to role-playing games. I do not want to erase these people — they exist, and their experiences also matter.

Please do not take my use of personal narrative as evidence that I speak only for myself. I don’t. Likewise, please don’t take my speaking on this topic as someone with PTSD to assume that I speak for all people with triggered mental illness. I don’t.

The X-Card, the Veil, and all that

The X-Card, the Veil, and similar techniques have their roots in a section of Sex and Sorcery, a supplement for Sorcerer by Ron Edwards, where he (roughly paraphrasing) suggests a technique dealing with difficult sexual content in the game by “drawing a veil over it,” basically, describing it in loose terms and then moving on with play, rather than playing it out. This is included together with several other techniques, including actually playing it out and fading to black. From there, like many things from the Sorcerer supplements, it developed on the Forge forums as a more generalized technique that could be applicable to all games.

I first encountered The Veil as a universally applicable technique in the context of public play in the Pacific Northwest — I believe it comes out of the Go Play NW convention, but I could be mistaken. By the time it reached this form, it had mutated considerably — it was something that was invoked by a particular player, rather than a general technique for play, and it generally had the effect of erasing the content of play [2], rather than playing it out in a vague sense and then moving on. It became a widespread meta-technique[3], adopted at a lot of public play events.

Simultaneously [4], in the New York City play scene, John Stavropoulos developed the X-Card as a meta-technique. With the X-Card, the system is formalized. By “throwing the X-Card” (either a physical card marked with an X or just an invocation), a player stops play, and the offending material is erased, and play continues as if it had never happened.

The X-Card grew in popularity and was adopted throughout the indie-games public play culture. By the time that I had largely retreated from public play (~2013), it was fairly universal. Although I have not been in touch with public play culture since, it does not seem (from my outsider perspective) to have become any less widespread.

My Experience

My first reaction to The Veil as a meta-technique was simply “well, I don’t want to do that.” At the time, it was not generally regarded as a universal meta-rule, so that was the end of my encounter with it. However, as it grew in popularity, I began to be increasingly averse to it. I remember a particular event — I think it was at Indie Hurricane, although I could not guess at the year — where it was introduced as a generic rule for all pick-up games. I got a horrified, sinking feeling, my eyes started to flutter and my stomach twisted — familiar signs of a triggering [1] event. I cannot remember whether I then said to my players “I’d like not to use that for our game” or not — I cannot even remember if I ran my planned game or left the scene immediately. Poor memory often accompanies being exposed to triggers.

I tried playing a few games with the rule in place, thinking I could maybe get used to it. Even though, to my recollection, it was never invoked, those games left me an anxious wreck afterward.

I stopped going to convention events as often. I started going to local public play groups, but shortly thereafter the meta-rule spread there as well, and I stopped attending those as well.

I did not at the time understand why this was triggering to me. I’m not entirely sure I was conscious that I was being triggered — it seems obvious in retrospect but I think that at the time I was not able to recognize exactly what was going on.

I made several attempts to communicate my distress — I remember talking on separate occasions with John Stavropoulos and Avery Alder about it — but because I didn’t understand what was going on, I could not clearly explain my problems, let alone propose solutions. Obviously, my attempts at communication were unsuccessful [5].

The Veil was replaced by the X-Card, and the technique continued to spread. I continued to retreat from Indie RPG circles, although I continued to play with personal groups and in non Indie RPG spaces such as AmberCon NW.

As an aside, I should say that this inaccessibility was far from the sole reason I retreated from Indie RPG circles and that, also, I do not regret having done so. My retreat has allowed me to spend more time on fiction writing, on personal friends, and on campaign play of RPGs. All of these have benefitted me both personally and professionally.

The problem

Both the X-Card and The Veil (as practiced in the PNW at that time) have as their core concept that the correct default way to handle triggering material in a role-playing game is to excise the material from the fictional timeline and thereafter to continue play. This is a commonplace understanding of how triggers work — remove the trigger, problem now solved.

This is, for me, a disaster, because it replicates the environment of denial and powerlessness that caused my PTSD in the first place.

Fundamentally, any approach to triggering material that contains any element of “pretend it never happened” is emotionally disastrous for me, because it recapitulates the environment of denial and dismissal around my traumatic experiences. This is not limited to excising the material from play — it also includes attempts to dismiss, deny, or minimize it.

No technique that centers this approach can possibly be functional as an accommodation; furthermore, any game or community that uses a technique that centers this approach is necessarily inaccessible to me, because an environment that centers denial as a coping strategy for triggering material, is in and of itself, a traumatic trigger.

Centering status quo vs centering healing

Fundamentally, these meta-techniques center the status quo — the goal is to “deal with” the triggering event, or the triggered person, and then return to regular play as if the interruption had never happened. I submit that, due the nature of PTSD, this approach is fundamentally flawed.

Once I have been triggered, I am in a traumatic experience. No amount of care or concern or comfort or accommodation can untrigger me. The question is not “how do we return Lee to the status quo?” or “how can we stop Lee from having a traumatic experience?” because those goals are impossible. The question is “what kind of traumatic experience is Lee going to have?” It can either be a damaging experience — one that reinforces the trigger and my PTSD — or it can be a healing experience — one that lets me recontextualize the trigger and its part of the trauma into my normal psyche.

Denial and social pressure to “return to normal” are damaging experiences.

Acknowledgement, empowerment, and story-building are healing experiences.

I believe that, in principle, good techniques for dealing with PTSD in role-playing games will avoid damaging experiences and center healing experiences.

The Luxton Technique

I didn’t post about my problems with X-Card, The Veil, etc for a long time because, among other factors, I did not have a proposed solution or alternative technique. All I could do was say “I’d rather have nothing than this,” but “no technique” is not particularly good rallying cry and it was not really a meaningful solution, just an attempt to get back to the somewhat-more-accessible-but-not-great status quo.

Until last year, I truly believed that there was no technique that would improve access to RPGs for some PTSD sufferers without also excluding PTSD sufferers like myself. But, last year, I played in a role-playing game at AmberCon NW that was specifically focused on traumatic experience and, particularly, centering the trauma of the players in the story we made. In that game, we used a particular technique — which I’d like to call the Luxton Technique after the GM of the game — which I found to be empowering, healing, and accessible to me.

It’s difficult for me to summarize all the parts of this that worked, but, roughly, the Luxton Technique includes:

* An honest discussion of potential traumatic triggers prior to play, in a supportive environment, with the understanding that there is no possible way to identify or discuss every conceivable trigger or trauma, and with no social pressure to disclose particulars of individual trauma.

* When, in play, a player encounters triggering material, they can, if they choose, talk about that to the other players. When they do this, the other players listen.

* As part of talking about it — and possibly the only thing that they need say — the player is given absolute fiat power over that material, expressed as a want or a need. For instance “I’d like to play [character name] for this scene” or “I need this to have a happy ending” or “I want this character to not be hurt right now” or “I need this character to not get away with this” or “By the end of play, this should not be a secret” or “I need to stop play and get a drink of water” or “I don’t have a specific request, I just wanted you to know.”

* A player does not need to use their traumatic experience to justify any requests or demands. We just do it.

* A player does not need to be the one to speak first. We keep an eye on each other and we are watchful for people who seem withdrawn or unfocused or upset. If we are worried about someone, we ask.

* We play towards accommodating that player’s requests.

It’s hard to overstate how much the Luxton Technique (or, really, set of techniques) helped us approach extremely difficult, extremely person material, both for the trauma survivors at the table and for the non-survivors. Rather than having our traumatic experiences — already a disjoint with reality — cause a disjoint in play, we were able to integrate them into play and tell a story about or, at least, at an angle to, our traumatic experiences, real and pretend.

Healing and RPGs

I am well aware that it sounds both pretentious and terrifying to talk about RPG play as a process by which one might legitimately heal from trauma. But I’d like to elaborate on that a little, because I think it’s important.

Fundamentally, a traumatic experience is an experience that is at a disjoint with the narrative of one’s life. Having PTSD means that your trauma exists out of time, out of place, and always in the present tense. A big part of recovering from PTSD, inasmuch as it is possible, is not about excising the trauma or your continued experience of it. Rather, it’s about integrating the trauma into normal memory and a normal narrative of your life.

A big part of that is story-telling, because a story is about incorporating disparate elements into a coherent narrative. And, for me, a big part of that story-telling has been role-playing games. In this essay, I present the choice as a binary — either a game can harm, or it can heal. That’s a lot of pressure to put on something as casual as a role-playing game! But, also, story-telling helps, and the story itself doesn’t need to be traumatic. Any story-telling experience can contribute, constructively, to healing, because PTSD sufferers need to be able to tell our own stories to the world and, more importantly, to ourselves. As an accessible storytelling medium, RPGs can’t be beat. They have been, and continue to be, a great help to me. In introducing these techniques, I am hoping that they can continue to be a help to others as well.

This is not limited to “heavy intense” sorts of stories that directly reference trauma. Ordinary RPGs can be stories about friends sticking together, or triumphing over evil, or just being clever and solving traps and puzzles, all of which have the potential to be healing narratives. Don’t think that I’m limiting the healing potential of RPGs to “serious” games or “serious” stories. I’m not.

It’s a reasonable reaction to say “I don’t want to do anything that heavy in my RPG!” or “I can’t be responsible for this!” And, obviously, don’t play in circumstances that you’re uncomfortable. But RPGs, and the people I’ve played them with, have given me so much healing. It’s wrong for me to dismiss, deny, or belittle that simply because games are a recreational activity. I hope that, in looking at problems of accessibility of RPGs, we can look to their potential to heal as much, if not more, than their potential to harm.

My hope (edited addition)

My hope is that this essay will start / continue a conversation where we look critically at our tools and techniques for RPG play. I hope that we can get to a place, as a community, where we understand that they are not one-size-fits-all and that we are able to take a look at what that means in terms of accessibility. I’d like for us to be able to make better-informed choices about accessibility and our RPG play, and the trade-offs that entails.

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[1] Because I have no alternative vocabulary, I’m going to use “triggering” in this essay to describe images, words, or ideas that trigger traumatic flashbacks, panic attacks, or other PTSD symptoms. I’m aware of the popular usage of “triggering” as a derisive term for an emotional reaction. I am not using it in that respect. Please, also, refrain from doing so in responses. Thanks.

[2] I’m not sure exactly when the pivot from “veil as not playing out blow-by-blow” to “veil as erasing the content from play” occurred. It might have been after this.

[3] I use the term “meta-technique” to mean “a role-playing game rule intended to be used with any game.” In some cases, it is “a role-playing game rule intended to be used with every game.”

[4] I am not sure about the historical relationship between the X-Card and the Veil. It’s possible that there was some inspiration. It’s also possible it was a parallel development.

[5] I do not want to cast any aspersions on John or Avery for our failure to communicate. Both of them listened as well as they could have to my concerns, even though I was unable to communicate them clearly. The failure was definitely on my end, and I want to thank both of them for their patience in waiting this long to hear my thoughts more clearly expressed.

Designer & Devourer Episode 7: When Love is Not Enough

Designer & Devourer Episode 7 link here!

Lots has happened since our last episode of Designer & Devourer… too much to list. Here are a few important things:

Script Change has some changes!

I talked about Keep the Lights On pay!

I talked about projects that end!

Turn funded at $20,708!

There’s also been tons of interviews, and more to come, plus some articles about design, projects, and games. I’m getting a new website soon at briebeau.com, which currently redirects to the Blogger site y’all know. The Google+ exodus has begun and in a couple months it’ll be no more!

The last of these recordings didn’t properly upload to Google Play because I messed up my SoundCloud upload, but working on fixing that. I’m not great at tech stuff!

This recording is mostly an update on what I’ve been doing, and some thoughts about love. Specifically, loving your work and doing it without burning yourself out, and what to do when all is not enough.

Our recipe this week is what I call scratch cake, found here, even though it’s a family recipe too!

The music for this episode is by Yakov Golman, Reflection, and was found here.

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.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, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

New Year Plans 2019

Photo credits to Brie Beau Sheldon 2018.
a pale blue coffee mug on a cofee table in front of a TV and a window, steam pouring from the top, a teabag sitting in it.

Well, y’all, I’m busy and tired.

I’m supposed to start this post with a fired up enthusiasm about all the projects I’m working on and how I’m gonna be awesome and do a great job! But today? Today I do not have that for you.

Here’s what I have for you, in the immediate.

I’m working on interviews with Epidiah Ravachol on Wolfspell and Becky Annison on Bite Me! so once those are finished up we’ll have something to howl about. I don’t actually have further interviews on the docket, but I’ll work on it. I always do.

(As a reminder, the best way to get interviews here is to encourage your favorite creators to go to my contact page and send me an email with the info! That cuts out like three emails worth of information exchange and shows me they’re excited to be interviewed. Plus, it makes sure that you – my readers – see what you want to see. You can also help me do more interviews and posts of all kinds by supporting via Patreon and sending tips via PayPal or ko-fi! Note: I don’t think I’m charging for this post, even though it took a while.)

I have some other posts in mind, like one talking in detail about the updates I’ve done to Script Change, reviews of a product or two, and so on. It would be cool to know if you have interest in anything, as a lot of the time I’m running on my own ideas here and I don’t even know if you’re enjoying the posts sometimes! With the ending of G+, this will get even harder for me to gauge. Please comment, share and tag me, and so on!

Speaking of comments, I’m looking at a move to WordPress since G+ is dying and I have no idea what will happen with comments here, plus the site has been kind of wonky. It’s gonna cost money and time, like a lot of it, so it may be a while.

On the games front, I’m currently working on a number of projects. Some of them are personal, some are professional, and all of them have unique challenges. The issue is, few are having successes, at least by my count.

A small group of red berries against a dark grey sky and branches.
First and foremost is Turn, my game I Kickstarted in October, which I’m in the production phase for. Now that the Kickstarter is done and we’re into production, aside from a few blips on the radar, all positive feedback has ceased. I’ve also had to deal with a ton of financial stuff that’s very hard for me, our beast artist had to step down so we had to replace them, and my own experience going through the editing process has been rough. Some of this was expected, some of it was not! 
This is hard! It’s also exhausting. Especially when I have to dig into my work each day and I find myself questioning all of my decisions, my ability to do my job, and my ability to make this work. 
Second, I’m working on Leading with Class. It’s not a game, but it’s about games, and we have a ton of work to do on it. We can always use more support over on Patreon to help us reach our goals, and some enthusiasm for the project would be something nice to see. I want to do more with it! Or, at least meet our base goals!
Third, I’m also working carefully or not-working-right-now on a number of other games of varying sizes:
Posers – This is currently at a halt as I can’t figure out the right form factor, which has locked up my design. It’s a game about performing masculinity, and has a weird knot-tying/untying resolution mechanic. No idea when I’ll be working on this in earnest.
At the Lake by Morning – This is a game inspired loosely by Annihilation and is supposed to use water and a mirror in the mechanics, which is going to take some fiddling. I want to explore some feelings I got from the film, significantly looking at self-forgiveness and change. It’s new.
The Unhurried Pursuit of Sloth – This I have all the ideas for, just gotta start digging into the mechanics. It won’t start in earnest until Turn’s finished. It’s a game about taking it slow and self-communion.
Laser Kittens Octopus Hack – I’ve been signed on with Glittercats Fine Amusements to write an octopus themed Laser Kittens hack, which involves the octopus being brought into a marine science lab and (perhaps!) escaping. I’m putting down the first bits of it soon. Glittercats awesomely chose to keep the lights on, so my energy can be more easily directed at this. I’m gonna do my best.
Eldrich Inkling – This is a two-player investigation game where one player sets a cosmic horror story for another, played by mail. It mostly requires research, which takes time, especially with my brain.


Tribute – I recently decided to withdraw Tribute from the Gauntlet Codex as the game is based largely in processing loss of love, and my grief (related to my grandmother’s death) won’t allow me to publish it through someone else, and won’t let me finish it until I resolve some things. It’s strong, but there is something missing. It may have to wait until spring – if it does happen at all. I hope it does.

A bird's nest nestled in trees in front of an overcast sky.

And that doesn’t touch my home projects – specifically, the be-a-better-person & be-healthier projects. Which, you know what, are just as important as my deadlines! I’m currently doing physical & speech therapy for my concussion recovery, plus diving back into psych therapy to help treat my bipolar disorder, PTSD, anxiety, and various related troubles. The PT+speech takes up a minimum of 10 hours of appointments, home work, and recovery from those appointments and home work each week – that’s not counting the normal days I have symptoms from my concussion, or dealing with insurance. With my existing disabilities on top… yeah.

Psych therapy is going slower, but is a lot of emotional work. When you go through cognitive type therapy, you can find you get stronger while simultaneously becoming more sensitive and delicate. Those aren’t words I like for myself, but there they are. I’m working on myself as much as I can, while trying to avoid the daggers that are the world – and they are such sharp daggers, and so many! I wish they were something softer.

A tightly framed picture of a fox red colored dog on a white blanket.

I guess where I’m at right now is like, yeah, 2019, lots of plans. Loads of things I have to do, things I want to do, things I’m struggling to do. And hopefully more on the way. I want to be more successful, to help provide for John and me to have a happy life. I just feel like I keep hitting setbacks, and Thoughty can be a casualty of that – it is hard to do this and do everything else and survive. You can bet your bottom I’m trying to reinvest all of this struggle and pain into games and Thoughty – just gotta filter it, refine it, and find a place for it.

I hope that you’ll stick with me as I keep making things and keep asking questions. I also hope you’ll do those things, too!

And hey, take care of yourselves. It helps me believe that I can make it when we aren’t all falling apart together! Let’s build each other up, and build a better year.

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.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, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

What is the future?

Turn is currently doing wonderfully, just short of funding and 21 days to go! We just announced international shipping, and I’m very excited for what is yet to come in stretch goals and work I do after the game is live!

But I need to talk about the future, because mine is uncertain.

Brie in a leather jacket, looking out the window.

As many people know, in November of 2018 I had a car accident. I fell asleep while driving my car in a parking garage and hit my head and wrenched my shoulder. When I went to the hospital, they said I had a mild concussion and shoulder sprain, and advised me to follow up with a doctor if I had any significant symptoms.

I was in grad school, so most of the symptoms of bad concussion issues were able to be dismissed as burnout, for me. I didn’t mean to do it, but I was cramming hard and desperate to get through school, while struggling with one challenging job and another job that really challenged my now-addled brain. By the time I was nearing finals in the next semester, I had been struggling with concussion symptoms – genuine brain injury symptoms – for months.

I found tons of typos in work I was reviewing – my own work, where typos were normally rare at worst. I was getting carsick while driving, and had gotten dizzy after seeing Black Panther, slipped and bumped my head in two places on my car door. The dizziness, nausea, and unfocused confusion were too much, so I went to the concussion clinic. They confirmed my fears, that it was worse than expected, and also that my delaying it had made recovery longer – and possibly less likely.

I did physical therapy from May to September, before I ran out of car insurance funds. I still do the exercises at home. I thought I was improving, and I have at least somewhat. But…

When preparing the Kickstarter for Turn, I let John take a look at the draft, and he pointed out many errors. The kind of thing that shouldn’t really be an issue for a functioning brain that’s working well, you know, like swapped words, nonsense sentence structure, and so on. Some of it seemed like gibberish. I didn’t even notice! He had to review it for me.

Reflecting on it, I reviewed a variety of my work. I read my recent submission to Return to the Stars, and how many confusing edits there had been, because I didn’t even recall the disorganized things I had written.  I read my work on thatlittleitch, which is unedited, and how my sentence structure is even more confusing and inelegant than before the accident. Many things I have written, I have forgotten, or don’t recall clearly, and if they aren’t edited, they’re often confusing, especially if they are longer.

Brie covering their face with their hands, in a maroon shirt.

I had an appointment coming up with my concussion clinic doctor, who expressed that like we had known, my delayed treatment combined with comorbidity of a variety of my illnesses (fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, PTSD, bipolar) will make recovery harder. But, if I’m still having issues with confusion and language, it could be a greater concern. So, I was assigned speech therapy (alongside physical therapy for my shoulder, which hasn’t healed). I can’t have that appointment until December, because they don’t have space for me.

My doctor basically explained that this could continue to be a grueling process. They don’t know if I will ever be back to what I was before. They want to ensure I can continue working, but if speech therapy isn’t effective, we will run out of options pretty quickly. And even if it works, it’s a long process, with unreliable results.

What does this mean?

Turn may be my last large project. I can still fulfill the work, absolutely, but we baked in extra time for what is to be done. I have a freelance project to fulfill for Orun, which I’m going to be advising them may involve a little more editing than planned (but I hope not). But going forward, I may max out at 1000 words for a given project, or just take a lot more time, and I can only ask editors to do so much work.

Pretty much everything I’ve been working on is going to be more limited, require more oversight. It’s exhausting to imagine, and I feel broken. This is part of why Turn has felt so desperate to me – what if I never make something amazing again? What if this it? And while I do my best to ensure I have good editing, the process will be harder. I don’t know if I can put myself through a super hard process every time I want to make something. And I don’t know if I’ll ever get better.

So, this is basically just a post to explain the situation. It’s me trying to find a way to say “hey, my brain is damaged, and I may never be the same again, so I hope you don’t desert me, and I hope you understand that I am doing the best I can.”

I’m trying. But, after this Kickstarter, things may be different. Er, well, they will be different – I just don’t know how. I hope you’ll stick with me.

Love to you all <3

A pigeon hopping across pavement.

Thoughty is supported by the community on patreon.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, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes, or, What to Do When You’re Living the Dream…But?

Today, I am 30 years old, I work in my dream job teaching leadership using games, and I make $0.85/hour.*

Leading with Class, in case you don’t know (most people don’t!), is my YouTube show where I teach about leadership using roleplaying games. It’s the dream job I made real for myself through a lot of hard work and the support of my loving, and incredibly talented, partner John. It also still doesn’t feel much like a dream come true, because it comes with some overwhelming “but”‘s.

I get to teach leadership…but it’s not in a respected role.
I get to teach using games…but it’s not seen as “fun.”
I get to work from home…but I can’t pay my bills.
I get to work with my partner…but he doesn’t get paid any better than I do.
I get to share my vision with the world…but almost no one watches my channel.

In 2014, I made the decision to continue my pursuit of an education and get my degree in organizational leadership. From there, I continued on to graduate school and got a degree in leadership – and over that two year period, experienced continued health and career setbacks that left me unemployed at graduation. My job became Thoughty – and Thoughty is still my actual primary income. All $300-ish a month, maybe. I have ten years of career experience that the lessons learned can apply to my work in leadership, but no one wants someone who was mostly an admin in a position of leadership, and my health disallows a full time job.

So, whatever, fine, I said. I’ll make my job. With John’s encouragement (and from my other partner, Dillon), I started working on scripts for Leading with Class. Even now, it feels endlessly selfish, and working on Leading with Class instead of trying to dig through thousands of jobs to find at least one that pays $15/hr. and only requires 25 hours a week felt irresponsible. But I did it while still doing freelance work (as I am now) and Thoughty, and it was so wonderful to make something that meant so much to me!

What was less wonderful was the lack of feedback and viewership. I am incredibly grateful for the Leading with Class patrons on Patreon – honestly, it means the world to me that anyone would support this work. But it’s still extremely quiet. On all of our videos combined – all of them – we have fewer than 350 views. I’ve shared on LinkedIn, Facebook, G+, Twitter, Mastadon, and Instagram, and of course, they’re on YouTube. I’ve done streams on Twitch to garner interest, answering questions and writing the script live to engage viewers.

We have three comments on all of our YouTube videos combined.

Now, we’re lucky enough to have followers and subscribers on our various media accounts! There’s just really low engagement. I know we’re kind of a niche interest, but I’ve only ever seen (personally) fewer than 5 total shares of Leading with Class content outside of my own personal shares, John’s shares, and the dedicated shares of some of my close friends on G+. Most shares aren’t accompanied by any positive recommendation, either.

And you know, yes, this does sound like whining. But as a creator, as a person who struggles with impostor syndrome and serious anxiety and depression, and as a person, I think it’s essential that my viewers and readers know me as a real person, and that they know the truth. The truth is, creating the thing that means the world to me, living the “dream” like I am, is heavily dented by struggling to make it through financially every day and hearing basically silence when it comes to my work.

I am used to silence when it comes to my work. People don’t link and share my site(s) or my work very often, and this has been notoriously challenging for me. I struggle with professional envy, seeing others get praised while I can barely get a retweet at times. But I thought, with Leading with Class it will be different! Even if it makes no money, even if it gets no press, I’ll be making something meaningful. I’ll be using my degree to do what I wanted the most!

But if a YouTuber makes an amazing video and no one watches it, does it functionally exist at all?

When one of my key purposes with Leading with Class is to educate, and there are no new viewers, who is really learning? If one of the necessary aspects of so-called “edutainment” is that it is spread broadly and enjoyed by an audience, have I created anything really at all? Did I get hit on the head by a backdrop while recovering from a brain injury and struggle to put words together to make episodes and even my best friends, people I respect and admire, haven’t watched a single episode?

This is the episode where we stopped using the backdrop because it fell on my head. Such a headache!

And I suppose it does often just burn me that John puts in so much work to make these episodes look beautiful, to make me look and sound competent, even through brain injury problems, and yet as of this writing, only 22 people saw our latest video? The lovely work he did? That makes me so sad! I feel I’m wasting his time. This thing that is meaningful to both of us feels injured by the quiet, by the feeling that we are working so hard, this is so good, it means so much, it should go far and silence.

I do try to bolster with every like our videos and posts get, and absolutely I could be posting more often. But the hype machine only does so much when no one else turns the gears.

And I don’t want people to think I hate making the videos or I don’t think they matter. I do think they matter, and I love them, and love creating them! I had to take a hiatus in July because my recovery from my brain injury (sustained last November) was taking a long time and writing and filming while trying to also do freelance work and get through recovery was just not working. I struggled so much, and I cried so hard about taking a hiatus! It would doom the show, I knew it, and what if we could never start back to it?

But we did, even though I’m still in recovery. Even though the cats insist on interrupting our shoots.

And I’m spurred, truly, to keep working on the project. I want to take it further – I mapped out a second series, and a mini-episode series. I’m even getting the chance to do my first workshop at Big Bad Con – one huge part of Leading with Class that hasn’t progressed far yet, but would mean the world to me to make bigger and broader. This is my dream.

I am a game designer, and love designing games – I want to keep doing that. And Thoughty is still important to me! But Leading with Class is a dream that I feel could make a difference! If it could just… grow. I know I need to work harder, I always do, but I have always worked best with the enthusiasm of others encouraging my progress, and John cannot carry all of that weight. He isn’t my audience.

I suppose, what I’m trying to say is, it is very hard to do the thing you love and feel unfulfilled by it. The perils of relying on others! But we are, as they say, a community, so I think a lot of people could understand what I’m feeling here, so I felt like I needed to finally speak these words clearly, so you don’t feel alone and so you don’t feel like your work is meaningless. Leading with Class isn’t meaningless, and your work that feels like it’s floundering has meaning, too.

So what the heck am I gonna do about this?

First, I’m going to keep writing scripts, filming, hopefully streaming, and doing workshops. I’m going to finish the first season of the show with the full twelve episodes, no matter what.

Second, I’m going to try to do better about promoting the show and increase my social media presence, as hard as that can be.

Third, I’m going to continue to be honest in how I approach this work and my purposes with Leading with Class. I’m never going to bullshit you about the work I’m doing, and I will continue to be transparent.

And fourth, finally, I’m going to be grateful for those of you who are here, who do support me and Leading with Class, and try to keep that in mind when the gremlins come to fight in my mind. I can’t let them win. I’m the winner here!

Thank you for reading, for watching, and for every moment of your being. The world is a better place because of you, even when you think it’s not. And hey. Come join me — in Leading with Class. <3

*For those curious about the time John and I spend on a given episode, here’s a breakdown.

Brie’s time investment per episode
~10 hours research
~5 hours script writing
~1 hours rehearsal
~3 hours filming
= ~19 hours

John’s time investment per episode
~1 hour research support
~1 hour script review
~1 hour rehearsal
~3 hour filming
~5 hour editing
~3 hour graphics and animation
= ~14

Total investment = ~33 hours per episode.

The Patreon currently sits at $28/episode.

We aren’t stopping, though. 🙂

—

Check out Leading with Class on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. For questions about the show, email leadingwithclass@gmail.com.

Thoughty is 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.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, follow the instructions on the Contact page.

Lag

I was very hesitant to write this post but I think I should.
Things have been quite rough here, and John and I are financially strapped. I also started back to grad school and a second job for the semester. We ended up, after two significant financial hits (one of which isn’t resolved), starting a GoFundMe. 
It took all my willpower but we honestly had no choice. We have met our goal but we aren’t  sure how far it will carry us while  we deal with crises at work and home. We’re grateful for all of the support and care everyone has shown for us!
The purpose of this post, though, is to let you all know that I will be super busy over the next few months and my energy is also incredibly low, but I’m doing my damnedest to keep involved and post. It will just likely be rarer. I hate that, but I only have so much of me, and I’ve already been struggling with physical and mental health, so I have to be careful.
If there are things you think are super important that you want me to know about, feel free to tag me into them or email contactbriecs@gmail.com with anything like that. I also am happy to talk to people interested in doing guest posts (paid with the Patreon dollars). If there are smaller ways of contributing I can do, let me know.
If you’re promoting a project and would like to do a Quick Shot (three question) interview, go to the bottom of the Contact page to see how.
I hope that you will all stick around as I muddle through an incredibly challenging time of my life, and continue to support me. I love you all and I want to keep bringing good things into your lives – and I will do my best to keep doing so. I’m sharing the GoFundMe, my PayPal, and other related things below.
I know this is all very personal, but you all know I’m like that. Thank you all so much for being here!
Love,
Brie
https://www.gofundme.com/keep-the-sheldons-afloat
PayPal.me/briecs or PayPal.me/thoughty
cash.me/briecs
Patreon.com/briecs

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.
—
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

Big Bad Con 2017 Saturday & Panels

I attended Big Bad Con 2017 in Walnut Creek, CA on a scholarship from the con. This is post two! Find post one here.
— 

I got room service to make sure I finished my homework. >.<

I woke up after like, real sleep for the first time in a while, and wrote a paper for school before messing about hanging around with people until my next panel. I was brought a handy towel by Dante so I didn’t ruin the hotel towels and, tbh, I couldn’t find the towel before I left Monday morning, so no idea what happened there.

The next panel I was on was Gaming and Emotional Safety, with Mickey and Misha. Everyone knows I’m a pretty woobie heart person so I get emotional a lot, and I also have had some trauma in my life that I struggle with and that can (sometimes nonsensically) come up in game. We reviewed many of the various safety tools (though not all), noting that they’re not one size fits all and that people should use what works for them.

We discussed the importance of pregame discussion of content and tone, debriefs, and emotional safety as a whole. Games might not be everyone’s standard definition of “fun” but we aren’t there for abuse. It’s important to be on the same page, respect each other, and check in. I reminded people that even if they’ve had the same group for decades, they may make their games more fun for everyone by talking to their friends about their preferences. This included discussing racism, sexism, homophobia, mental illness, and so on.

more here>>>>

Games here that have risks in them: Misspent Youth, Lovecraftesque, Night Witches, Dread… that’s just a few. They are awesome games, but we gotta be safe. This is taken when I realized that games I worked on were for sale (Lovecraftesque), but handy for demonstrating games with inherent issues – like the racism and mental illness stigma in Lovecraft.
I also noted the difference between a squick and a trigger. Squicks are things that gross you out, make you a little uncomfortable, etc. They can stick with you, but are unlikely to have long term mental health impact. Treat these with respect – make sure people are okay with them, ensure they’re tonally appropriate, and be willing to alter content if it needs to be done. Triggers are typically tied directly to trauma and can result in panic attacks, nightmares, and activation of things like paranoia and mania (in my case). Don’t approach people’s triggers without checking in and getting their permission! And if you know about common triggers, ask your group before including them, but don’t require details. There’s also phobias, which I suggest treating much like triggers. Always check in.

There are some people comfortable with approaching their triggers and phobias on purpose, which Mickey and Misha discussed a bit. It’s not something I normally venture into, but they talked about how it can be helpful to work in that abstracted environment. Really loved that part of the panel!

Finally, we talked about inclusion, exclusion, and bad actors. The key points were 1) it is always okay to leave a game for any reason and especially if you don’t feel safe; 2) if you include people who hurt others with the content included in their play, you are excluding those who will be hurt, including excluding people of color in favor of racists, excluding women in favor of rapey men, etc.; and 3) you can always eject someone from the group. Always. If someone is hurtful, if they’re unsafe, don’t give them a space to be that way.

I was reminded later in the weekend how vile in-game violation of consent is. If you force a player or a character to do ANYTHING they don’t consent to, including ignoring at-the-moment objections, you are behaving inappropriately and you’re hurting people. Reconsider your role until you learn how to play games without hurting people.

I was lucky enough after the panel to meet up with Brian Vo, who made me a cocktail! It was nice to meet him and the drink was great. 😀

My nerding out in clothes for fandoms I’m not in.
The final panel I participated in was Adult Themes in Gaming: Adult versus “Adult” with Mickey Schulz, Clint “Ogre” Whiteside, and Jason Morningstar. It was a really great panel and I was excited for it because this is a topic that’s meaningful to me, specifically: what content is really mature content, how to present it, the tools we have to manage it, and adult content that isn’t just sex.

(It’s always funny when I run into Jason because we’re both typically busy, and we have these mini conferences like “what are you doing?” “what are YOU doing?” “I’m doing THIS!” “OMG tell me more about this!” and it sounds silly maybe but running into him like that is always awesome.)

We talked about the content we include in games – Mickey and Ogre include pretty much everything that their table is safe with, which is a lot (sex, romance, violence, and other stuff that needs to be approached with caution); I tend towards having lighter content, emotional interaction, some tougher topics, and I don’t approach sex very much; and while Jason covers a lot of more complicated stuff like grief and war, he doesn’t really touch the subject of sex at all in his games, though he discussed a recent experience playing a happy, healthy married couple and how transgressive it felt. It was so cool to see a variety of experiences at the table.

One note: Mickey commented on this and is making changes for future panels, but everyone at the table was white. This is something that is actually common to happen, but it wasn’t intended and it’s not a good trend, so more effort going forward will happen.

We talked about the difference between having content exist and be played out (which some people might consider more pornographic in regards to sex), and having content that fades to black or is glossed over. This is something I think really needs to be discussed in detail with players and GMs at the table, making sure everyone is comfortable.

Some people might want to push their own boundaries, too, which is dependent on a lot of factors. Specifically, I might be willing to address sexual content at a table full of close friends, but at a table with strangers it might not be okay. Likewise, there are non-sex topics that are challenging and mature. Violence is one of them! We use violence freely, but that’s not necessarily because it’s appropriate. We should be more considerate of this – Jason even said he’d like to explore more ways to resolve conflict without violence (my mini pacifist high fives this idea). Grief is another subject.

Before this con, and before last year’s Metatopia, I had a grandparent pass away (my grandmother first, then grandfather). I still went to the cons, and played in games where grief was relevant. At a lot of tables I might have stepped away or asked not to cover it, but both of these times I had people I trusted (last year was Jason, Amanda Valentine, and Roe Nix playing Storybox and this year was Hakan Seyalioglu, Kristine Hassell, Vera Vartanian, and Vivian Paul playing Dialect), and who I knew wouldn’t treat me badly if I cried a little or if I needed a break.

Honestly, the newest addition to Script Change, frame-by-frame, is here so that when people want to explore topics that are challenging, they can do so. It’s not always easy, but making a safe environment matters. Safety tools, discussion among players, developing a social contract – these things matter.

Useful tool (yes I’m reusing this picture) even at its base mechanics – using more of them can make games better.
One of the things we discussed was about deciding not to play or leaving groups. Just like in previous panels, we talked about ejecting harmful people and bad actors, but we also talked about self-selecting your group. Stepping away if the space isn’t safe, tapping out, or leaving groups: these are all okay. It’s okay to say no. We need to make it normal to leave games, to step away, and to take care of ourselves. That’s part of handling adult content.

After the panel, I had a bit of a breakdown. I was still processing grief (I still am!), I had done three panels without a panic attack which is amazing, and I’d been traveling and surrounded with people and writing a paper… I was exhausted. I burst into tears when I was alone by the elevator, fell to the floor, and just sobbed until Stephanie Bryant found me. Angel that she is, she made sure I was okay, took me up to my room, and reassured me it was okay to be upset. I’m so grateful for that!

I spent some time talking with Tanya and some Twitch and gaming friends of hers, & one of them who had attended the panel said the work I was doing was “so important, so valuable” and it really felt amazing to hear. I don’t often think of anything I do making a difference, but hearing other people say it is super awesome. It matters a lot to me. Thank you to anyone who thinks well of my work – I appreciate it so much.

I’ll have one more post covering Sunday with my games of Who Made Me Smile? and Dialect. Thanks for reading!

SNEAK PREVIEW! Dialect table!

——————————————————

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.

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

Script Change: Official

Hi all!

As of today, you can download a PDF version of Script Change that is formatted and easily printed.

I started writing Script Change, from what I can remember and what Google Drive tells me, in 2013. I had started playing indie games a while before, and earlier that year, I’d written about how I’d used the X-card in a game of Monsterhearts. With the X-card, though, I used a secondary card introduced by Kira Magrann called the O-card, effectively a way to encourage people to do the thing that you were enjoying.

I have a lot of feelings about safety mechanics, trigger warnings, and so on. I really appreciated the X-card. It gave me some new freedoms, I could try things I wasn’t familiar with. And the O-card was great, but I realized that I didn’t need it if people already knew what I was looking forward to, what I wasn’t sure about, and if I had something other than the X-card to show what way I thought the story could go.

Script Change has had many, many updates. Briefly, there was an applause function to encourage people to do things, but I felt it wasn’t genuine enough. Thinking it through, I really thought the core things in it – rewinding to redo scenes for whatever reason, pausing to take a break and get perspective, and fast-forwarding to get over things that are too much or that we just don’t want to bore ourselves with them – are more important than anything else. I’ve added some smaller things in the end, like the Wrap Meeting for debriefs, Instant Replay to reduce confusion, and the Highlight Reel to help keep people excited and enthusiastic for the game.

The biggest thing about Script Change is that it’s supposed to be flexible. It demands a conversation about consent, and about what people want in a game. It reminds people that games are not set in stone. We aren’t chipping into marble, here. We are telling a story as we go, and we can change things to make it more exciting, more fun, more of whatever we want – and less of what we don’t want.

Script Change is not the only content tool out there, and there is a lot to be said about doing what works best for you. But, it has been a labor of love for me, because I want people to play games that they enjoy! I want them to have experiences of a lifetime with the chance to pause and get ready for more, or even just a chill beer and pretzels night where the tonal shift can be easily fixed with a “rewind.”

I hope that you’ll check out Script Change and if nothing else, just see if you can glean something new from it. Most of all, I hope you have a hell of a good time playing some games. <3

Download the PDF here!

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.

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