The Dog Blog

I’ve been in a bunch of fiction workshops over the last six months. They’re really rewarding, but they’re tough as hell. It’s not a natural impulse for me to separate myself from the writing. It’s something I made. It reflects who I am.

There’s some degree to which I can tell myself, yeah, but that guy’s a tool when I hear something like “I found these few pages kind of boring,” but that defeats the purpose. I need to hear credible people saying the same thing.

Back to my point: it’s hard, but it’s important. I learn from it, even from the tools. Listening is good.

Anyone who wants to become a great writer, even a fair writer, has to endure that kind of feedback. Writing and literacy are not finite subjects. You either keep learning, or you decide you know as much as you want to. Considering the rate at which game design has changed over the last six or seven years, I don’t want for examples of how someone can easily get left behind. If you’re not challenging assumptions, you’re really just producing stuff that’s status quo. “Coasting,” as a fellow games maker put it.

Likewise, anyone who cares about issues of equality has to make a similar decision. It’s easy to say I mean well. It’s a nice comforting thought, but it’s like saying of your RPG, well, I wanted the rules to be good.

For me, the well meaning stuff is even harder to challenge than the writing. If I’m thinking about how cool and progressive I am, how empowering and stuff, only to hear, “what you said/wrote makes me feel excluded,” it’s like red hot knives dipped in salsa. Me? Excluding? Khaaan, etc.

When I do that, though, I become my own worst enemy. Am I doing this so that I can be cool and have statues named after me? No. I do other things for the statues. This is supposed to be about my moral compass, a personal sense of justice, power, fighting supremacy, and so on. If I decide that I know as much as I want to, will I make a difference, or will I just support the status quo?

I mean well. Check. I mean, that’s a given, right? So what am I going to do about it? As tools for social interaction, I think RPGs carry a lot of weight in challenging or reinforcing various assumptions. Therefore as part of the design process I want my game critiqued along those lines just as much as I want it critiqued for rules clarity and playability.

Here’s what I’m gonna do: I’m gonna find people to critique my game along those lines.