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I love character building that ties characters to particular social or familial structures. Tell me who expects something of you. Tell me who you feel indebted to. Tell me who you’d drop everything for if they asked you to. Who has power over you. Who dominates your subconscious.
Tell me your attachments, not so that I, as GM or designer, can take them from you, but so that I can deepen them. Let me ask you for more and more. Let me pull you deeper and deeper into the social. Let me tell you what you must do for me.
When the world constantly wants something from you, you have to know what you want. I like to play games where people hit a breaking point. Where they come to recognize their own agency. When they come to develop a way of being in the world that prioritizes their own desires.
There is something so powerful about the dance of subverting expectations, returning to them, moving away again. Never a clean break. I want games that do this, that renegotiate boundaries and attachments almost as a baseline of play. That center this renegotiation.
I think I’ve been focusing a lot on representing the ways in which oppression operates as an external force, but it is often the ways in which oppressive structures are adopted within our own familial and community structures that they become the most harmful.
I want games that center this harm, acknowledging that this is complex, about particular characters making particular decisions under particular circumstances, but ultimately knowing that it is possible to heal harm, to restore boundaries, and craft a different relation.
I am excited for @BabblegumSam’s Capitlalites, because I feel the game does this work. The playbooks themselves live in a space of expecting and being expected to act in a particular way, in part because of particular gender and class positions.
The playbooks live almost entirely within this mode of expectations, and the relationships you form with others very much operate in this mode of social expectations. I also really love @MariaMison’s Rich Kid Problems, because they similarly are built upon expectations.
In Rich Kid Problems, you are always part of a family, and that family is central to your identity. Your identity, in fact, emerges in reaction to, or in the adoption of, a great familial identity, and much of the drama of the game exists in positioning yourself in this way.
But still, at the heart of this, we are still wanting characters. Who want our families and peers to love us. We cannot simply throw off expectations. We must do the dance. We must create space. This dance is so important to me. This dance is learning how to survive.
Games that teach us lessons. Where we teach ourselves something about our relationships to those who we love and also who control us. To redefine each of these things. And to have fun doing it. This is a genre I would love to see more of. And I hope to be able to do this too.
