Playing a Picture
The last year has brought me face to face with how essential role play writing and role play are to my critical and creative being while simultaneously underscoring how poorly the discussions of game design, game theory, and game play have served me in realizing creative work in line with my vision and values.
I have backtracked through the classical and traditional moments of my autobiography, tried to tread forward along the lines of the OSR and NSR models. I have revisited the influence of the Forge and its legacy in Burning Wheel games, Fate, PbtA, Forged in the Dark, Belonging outside Belonging, and more. And all of it belongs to a broadly mainstream postmodern turn (in the Jamesonian, late-stage capital sense of the term) out of alignment with the minor turns (see Becoming Human in that listing) within that turn upon which I have staked my creativity.
I recently listened to Snow's "the future of ttrpgs is here and it's trans" (I don't know why that link opens mid-video, but just scroll back if it happens to you, too) because, well, I never quite give up hope for a creative solidarity with other trans women that exceeds our common social struggles; that is probably a sort of cruel optimism on my part, but disillusionment isn't so hard to reach these days and perhaps that is a sign of rude health.
All this machinery and monstrosity and no animals, no plants, no crossing of the line in the direction of the world that already is on the other side of the category of the human. Just the machine shadow of racial capital and the trans body collapsed into it. Like Colleen McCullough's thorn birds, but they impale themselves on the logic of Antiblackness to sing the most beautiful song to the White Mother God who will never love them. The very frame of abjection upon which the work depends preserves the oppressive idea of the human I want to turn away from.
After all that, I have also started to find a way of working that inspires me.
I noticed how much painting and sculpture influenced me as a creator and began looking through a few classical painters whose work I might draw on to illustrate a few game elements I was working on. Then some research I was doing around early modern grimoires landed me in the middle of Francisco Goya's Los caprichos. Then I was looking at his Black Paintings. Then I joined a game jam using nothing but a painting as a prompt and found myself unfurling a game from within the feeling, the affect, of the painting.
Then I started to diagram affects suggested by dreams along El perro's affective landscape and exploring the way that could be translated into playable text. Then I was listening to the Game Studies Study Buddies podcast on Anna Nardo's The Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century Literature with delight as her argument circled into a discussion of Sigmund Freud's account of the Fort-da game. And the Fort-da game itself became another diagram en route to playable text that began to encompass the internal dynamisms of Los caprichos. More dreams, more affects gathered to that. More ways to make those into playable text.
All of this is so much more full than previous efforts. They interweave with so much more of my life and world. I don't have a programme for carrying this out, but I don't think I need one. The work sustains itself and invites me to be genuinely playful in my design work. I feel delight in ways I haven't in a while!