Signal boost for a thing I endorse.

Originally shared by Jason Morningstar

Here’s a thing that happens all the time:

Someone creates a cool game, and it is met with deafening silence. It is hurled into the void and, despite its inherent genius, it is never played by anyone or heard from again. As a game designer this is as essential an experience as the act of creation. It happens to everyone.

But!

If somebody makes an intensely interesting game that speaks to an experience outside the mainstream, or somehow not aligned with a conventional narrative of violence and power, or just plain weird, the chances that nobody will touch it increase dramatically.

However!

The odds of that cool thing getting the slightest shred of attention increase when certain boxes are checked. The biggest boxes are “male” and “white”, and they correlate with things like resources and confidence, which of course correlate with privilege. Many times I have seen similar games enter the world at more or less the same time, with more or less the same built-in genius, and watched one succeed while the other fails. Guess who wrote the one that usually succeeds?

Even more troubling, I’ve seen games by marginalized creators that got zero traction essentially re-written to great acclaim. Sometimes it’s a “hack”. Sometimes it’s a business arrangement. Sometimes it is something else.

Here’s another thing that happens all the time:

People gather at a convention to socialize, and that socialization takes place in a very specific environment – at a bar, where “industry veterans”, genial raconteurs all, hold court among the various strata of friends and admirers. Social connections are forged, and sometimes these turn into business connections. At other times this exact milieu is where actual business is conducted. If you find this environment challenging for any one of a million reasons, hey, that’s on you. Somebody else is going to get the work, down the road. And the people who most easily integrate into this social space check the boxes I mentioned above.

Some friends of mine want to route around these problems a little bit, by putting the work of people for whom the systems in place don’t work super well in front of people who will be interested in them. The ultimate goal here is to connect creators – in this case marginalized creators – with people who buy games. And that’s the important part – sometimes games get praise for their brilliance and become critical darlings, but nobody buys them. And the very best way to thank a creator and encourage more brilliant work is to buy their stuff.

So now there’s More Seats At The Table, which has a newsletter and a Patreon. Subscribe to the newsletter and you are going to be exposed to weird, wonderful games by equally weird and wonderful people, many of whom are friends of mine and all of whom I resoundingly endorse. Support them on Patreon if you’d like to see clever end runs around a dysfunctional status quo succeed.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreseatsrpg

Newsletter: https://patreon.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=c71a6dc90e8b0c6728a9e2dcb&id=6eadbc8c82

Via The Fussy Librarian’s newsletter, an interview with some facepalm-worthy revelations from a romance author who doesn’t fit the industry’s prejudices.

Thought-provoking and well written.

I’ve speculated before about a difference between stories where the characters mainly act upon the world and stories where the world mainly acts on the characters being, in part, about how much agency the authors and readers perceive themselves as having.