I'd like to cultivate this little patch of internet with some interesting media I've found regarding tabletop RPGs, play culture and game design. This will hopefully come out weekly, mental health willing, and I would be extremely chuffed if people find it useful.
The Magpie's Cube
A few weeks ago, Wanderhome and Yazeba's B&B designer Jay Dragon shared a blog about The Magpie's Cube, an essentially living draft box of Magic: The Gathering cards that player alter with stickers, scissors and glue over the course of multiple sessions. The piece runs through Jay's fundamental design logic, but it got me thinking about MTG less as collectible pieces of cardboard to be squirreled away and admired and more as a collection of fascinating and often silly rules that crash into each other to form stories.
I immediately set to creating my own and am ravenously excited to see it in action. Self-correcting and with a bunch of extra-match gewgaws and rituals that just feel like exploding MTG and creating something beautiful from the wreckage.
Games Studies Study Buddies TRPG Episodes
My day job is spent as a journalist, and that profession has sharpened my awareness of the memory hole phenomenon that happens everywhere but is especially prevalent in hobby spaces, such as video games and tabletop RPGs/board games. Conversations are rehashed, arguments are relitigated and ideas reinvented due to a lack of institutional memory. Worse yet, the bad actors and systems of abuse perpetuate given enough time outside of the limelight.
The trio of tabletop RPG episodes from Cameron and Michael - plus Austin Walker in one - drove home just how part and parcel this cyclical nature of learning is to the space. They cover three academic texts that examine tabletop scenes from the late 70s/early 80s all the way to 2012 and the end of The Forge. It's fascinating and a little troubling to see bold echoes of the shit we discourse about today in that inaugural class of gamers (who were themselves already drawing generational lines in the sand).
Jon Peterson’s The Elusive Shift: How Role Playing Games Forged Their Identity.
William J. White’s Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001-2012.
Gary Alan Fine’s foundational book Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds from 1983.
It's not all bad - the books cover the Star Trek spoof that might've invented D&D's magic system, mention a younger Vincent Baker who posted online much like a 20-something dude would, and only runs into a couple unfortunately hidden racists among the hobby's pioneers. Do yourself a favor and brush up on where this hobby has been, and join me in hoping Cohost becomes the next G+ so we won't have to suffer another social media exodus.
See you next Friday, pards.