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i love this thread, and i have so many thoughts but theyre all a fuzzy mess at the moment https://twitter.com/tomandmary/status/1351633934455611394
if were going to make games that are *about* systems, and not merely ones that *include* systems, we have to keep in mind that systems are not separate human involvement. theyre *enacted* by *people*
a board game might say "youre a train baron at the turn of the century, trading fractional ownership of rail companies &c &c" and thus give us a feeling for the kinds of embodied actions that might produce some real-world historical systems, but it is very rarely *us* doing so
theres a distance, for me, between myself as the player and the actions that the game-pawn takes to collect win-points on my behalf. this can be an asset: personally, i would not like to step fully embodied into the axis side of a ww2 game, for instance (or even the allies tbh)
in other cases, that distance dulls the power of embodiment. a great game of this kind must pull the abstraction of real-world system down to mud and blood and hands and feet--not in its *consequences,* but in its *enaction.* the system is object already but let Me be the subject
in ttrpgs, the problems are different. the embodiment is there for the taking, its effortless. the hard part is making Real the systems the game is about. not abstraction of object into system, but reification of system into object of the player's subjectivity
and this is where we come back around to my old saw "Rules Elide" and maybe glimpse how we can move beyond that. because we have the ultimate cheat in rpgs: we have diegesis. we can have diegetic systems, diegetic rules, and Those Rules Do Not Elide, theyre objects in the world
so when i downplay the importance of system, understand: im only talking about Game Systems. game systems are largely arbitrary (which you know because you revised it 50 times). but real-world systems, those are the sticky ones, the ones that warrant commenting on and dismantling
and as a final point, i encourage you designers not to always do the commenting and dismantling for the players. ethics disappears in the absence of agency. if players could never have done otherwise, what could they possibly have learned?
how much more powerful that they do it themselves, as themselves, choosing Right and Difficult in the face of Wrong and Easy. what could prepare us more for the realities of our lived lives? what could be more familiar, and more important?
forgive me, this thread is unintelligible but i did warn you
anyway tom (quoted above) makes some of the only board games i know dealing directly and compassionately and humanly with the systems that shaped and continue to shape the hellscape of our modernity, and she warrants your attention imo
