Terms of Art

I am writing game material now that I like. I have signed up for a few game jams and the work there all feels like it is going in the right direction. The work rests on concepts and images near and dear to me. The projects themselves have all led to concrete adjustments in mechanics I have been thinking about. You can see the results of that over on my itch page (pwyw; nothing is fine, but this woman does love a snack from time to time if you are feeling flush).

So I am also thinking about possible larger projects that these might be elements of. And I stumble over the idea of producing a proper "game." The term gets all tangled up with the idea of a commercial product. While I want to produce a substantive text with creative vision and scope, the idea of producing a commercial product for sale alienates me from the work. It also alienates from the sort of project I want to share, a project that is also a point in a process that the people using take up when they read it and use it to play with their friends.

I like all the talk around the OSR about old-school gaming as a folk practice, but it is just a little too abstract for me to latch onto and is entangled with a kind of play that doesn't serve my creative needs. On the May 18, 2025, episode of Dice Exploder, Moyra Turkington talks about the LARPers she is involved with having practical lineages, specific tools they can trace back through the LARPs that used them to an originator. That feels a good bit closer—practical tools linked to specific ways of doing LARP.

I keep coming back to huffa's Between the Skies, too, in large part because she spends so much time emphasizing all of the mechanical elements in the book as a collection of good tools you might want at some point and from which you can develop others. It's less of a "game" than a workbook for a certain kind of play.

Workbook. Yes, that's exactly the term and concept I need to shape my work. That is precisely the model for the largest works I hope to produce. Books that pull together process as process into a form from which a multi-session game could be run. That's one thing I want to make available for others.

What have I been doing so far, then?

Well, I have worked on fragments that are polished elements that lack the context for ready play. Some of this could be transferred into a game that provides that context, while others require more elements to be playable in any fashion.

Then there are circuits, a bundle of elements that provide a coherent unit for play. These could be small games that operate well as one shots or subsystems for a longer running game.

This is so much more useful to me than anything else I have ready to hand for this kind of design work. Fragments can definitely circulate between different circuits and workbooks, circuits between different workbooks, but a workbook speaks to a certain sort of multi-session game but whose elements can nonetheless be transferred independently.

So there we are, some new entries in my personal glossary of terms of art.