Hey it's been a while since I've chosted. I had some rambling thoughts on Twitter about playing with games, so I thought I'd archive them on here as well in case I ever want to revisit them.
The most interesting part about tabletop RPG design to me has been engaging with playing play more obviously, since it's always on the forefront and it's so easy to hop between:
- Playing games vs playing with games.
- Designing games to be played vs designing games to be played with.
I think playing play is also really easy in videogames and boardgames, but it’s a bit different in feeling and in approach/consideration from the design side of things.
I'll define "playing" as engaging with a game on its terms (which is close to but not exactly the same as engaging on the designer's terms), that is you engage as the game assumes you would, as expected by the game's context/culture.
So you "play to win by the game's defined conditions" and you "play fairly within the expected context of what fairly means". On the other hand, you can refuse to play, and squarely oppose or ignore the game's premises and goals. You cheat, you grief, you troll, you "break the game", you "powergame", you "metagame", you probably cause some people to have a bad time because they've bought into playing the game and you haven't.
Somewhere in between is playing with the game. You bend, but you don't really break. You change the rules a bit, but it still kinda fits with the general ethos of the game. You play games within the games, adding your own challenges and ways to engage with the game. You add house rules to boardgames, you take on challenge runs in videogames, you try out new formats in trading card games. In some way you still acknowledge the premise and rules of the game, and your play is performed in conversation with them - playing playfully. Approaching a game not as a rigid system or a set of rules and instructions, but as an agreed upon space of performing play - and seeing how far that space can be pushed while still being recognizably "the game". Playing with what makes up the game, rather than "playing the game".
Trickily, there's no rigid delineation between when playing with the game becomes playing against the game. Every person/context will draw and re-draw that line constantly. A tournament isn't the time to argue that "eating my opponent's pieces isn't explicitly against the rules".
With definitions roughly in place, I've been enjoying designing tabletop RPGs as their context/culture/norms and mechanisms of deploying the play space allow you to more easily cross into playing with games to the point that designers are expected to account for the act.
In videogames, the rules of the game are specifically expressed, so allowing for speedruns/mods can be a very exacting process, requiring a bunch of binary yes/no decisions on how to approach things. In boardgames, the rules of the game are communally accepted, just like in tabletop RPGs, but they're usually a lot more precise in their components, so pushing against the "as designed" usually requires more effort. Also, cultural acceptance is pretty low.
Both those spaces have high inertia to really play with their structures and systems, but they're still there! So it's been fun playing with designing tabletop RPGs since the inertia is low enough to allow for much faster engagement with playing with the games. The dialogue between "designer" and "player" happens much faster, and the distinction between the two collapses much more readily, which gives a feeling of treating people who play your games less like "players" and more like "co-conspirators".
It's made me more aware of how games aren't ever complete until the moment of meeting or how systems aren't games until players engage with them. Which has been super fun and useful to approaching other sorts of design work as well. As is usual with my off-the-cuff rambling threads, I don't have a conclusion here except, hey this is neat. Maybe go play with some games some more. It's fun.