Accueil > Non-Fiction > Créativité > Rules Are A Ship
So someone wrote the expressionist games manifesto, citing her own previous article rules are a cage (and I’m a puppygirl). Someone else wrote a case study of it, another one answered games are systems in motion, yet another one wanted relationship games, proclaiming “rules are a corral (and I’m a cowgirl)”, yet-yet another one answered with thus cried the caged bird… And this is all I’ve read until I can finally sit down with my keyboard.
So many trans people are talking about it right now, I cannot let my queer, autistic ass out of this. So here I am, adding my humble voice to the choir, yes-and’ing it all, clamoring:
“Rules are a ship (and I’m a pirate (girl))”.
Adelphes, I hear your cages and corals and walls and all the things rules can be. I’m known for havin’ broken a few of ’em rules, even for havin’ brought duress upon myself on some intimate occasions, and I won’t deny how play can take the many forms of building and breaking, of pain and relief, of freedom and controlled abandon of this very same freedom. But I must confess: my humble creations are too kind. My rules are a ship, because I love nothing more than freedom, nothing more than this limitless landscape we each have in ourselves, this boundless game we can play as two friends and the shapeless tale we can weave as we go, as a willing slave and a mischievous master. This thing I believed we agreed to call “free-form”.
However, growing up, I found myself hesitant, stuck between a rock (rules-heavy games, tyrannical masters, already-written plots, so devoid of that core promise of our beloved hobby: the freedom that knows only the limits of our imagination) and a hard place (the blank page, the zero-word-game that nobody can write upon, the dull void of the free-form, where nothing and everything are so alike). And thus I began hacking. I started ignoring heavy rules to ease my less obsessive PC friends, mimicking systems of rules for my own settings, and when I had no more crew to be the benevolent captain of, when Apocalypse came knocking at my door, I truly became a ship-maker.
I started making rules that not contained, but empowered exploration. I was ashamed of having made a generic system for an interesting universe. As a game designer, I now want to give my players (MC and PC alike) the tools to voyage toward that inner horizon, to give them the smallest and fastest vessel to allow them to discover their own islands. Metaphors briefly aside, I started making rules that were as little onerous as possible, and as evocative as possible. My first apocalyptic lesson was that PC actions are verbs, and that too many games’ vocabulary are limited to “fight”. I wanted to give my players open verbs for rules, prompts for plots and lists of words for settings, the minimalist set of tools to let them tell their own story (packaged in a way that resembled TTRPGs to not scare them). I wanted my games to be sketchy charts of freeform space, and my rules to be a lightweight ship, not a heavy galleon set to plunder some known land. I want to write games for unruly pirates, avid of freedom and horizon.
Someone once called one of my games “kind”, and I thought I could die happy. Then a girl said “rules are a cage”, and my post-Apocalypse worldview tumbled into yet another transition (all puns intended).
I must confess yet another sin. I’m afraid. I’m afraid my games the games I make (my poor, defenseless babies I do not own) would be misunderstood, misused, unfun. I know they’re fun, because they were when I playtested them with my friends, and if in writing them I could be articulate enough, clear and precise yet concise enough, they will still be fun when I’m not around. I feel like a young parent so afraid of letting their child go, because I know too well that cold and brutal world.
But I must banish that fear from my heart and remember: I’m a pirate, and I too have been so unkind to others’ games, hacking and breaking them apart to better suit my needs. I must banish that fear from my heart and remember: I’m building ships for fellow pirates, and I must trust them to hack and break what I give freely, for their islands are not mine, and they need only planks and fabric and a sketchy chart to set sail toward them. I must banish that fear from my heart and remember: I’m a dead author, and my games don’t belong to me, because I give them freely, and they won’t be whole, all hacked and repaired, when they’ll wash ashore to lands I’ll never be able to foresee.
I must only write “here be dragons”, and trust you to be bold enough to find them.
This plank-and-fabric approach can only lead to minimalist games. I must desire more than freedom. I must give you more than freedom. When I count how many games I’ve read and played and loved that have been written by trans women, how am I still afraid of being misunderstood? When I’ve been given submarines and benthic maps, sometimes even only a scuba and flippers, once even an unkind shove in the back towards some terrifying yet alluring depths (don’t click this link!), how am I still making ships? When I too am a creature from the depths, why am I still making them rules to explore islands? We’re already between peers. This is already intimate. Why am I still writing with the fear of being read by cis dudes, when I’m sharing my bed with my queer adelphes? (Yes, I do consider roleplaying games more intimate than sex, but that’s a topic for a different article.) I must stop writing in fear of them, but out of love for you. We hacked gender and monogamy and so many other rules; I must trust you’ll hack the rules of my games the games I make for you just as easily. I must trust you’ll “get it” because you’re my family. I mustn’t pull my punches and trust you’ll dodge them and kick back.
But still, I want to make ships. Maybe my next ship will be more a claustrophobic cage of a submarine set to dive in some dark trench, but I still want to give you that ship-rules and sketchy map.
This is yes-and’ing: this rules-are-a-ship are perpendicular to the rules-are-a-cage or corral or whatever. You can have both, or none, or more. The rules of a game can be both an expressionist cage for us to rattle against and a corral that will herd us towards relationship play, and I humbly believe they can also, at the same time, be a ship to explore islands and depths, a crude map of horizons we would never have thought of venturing to by ourselves.
But how? How can a game be both a cage and a ship? When rules tell us what we can’t do, they dare us to put those chains upon ourselves and keep playing. When rules tell us where to explore, they dare us to venture outside of our known realm. When rules tell us “burden yourself with that heavy cross and climb that uncharted mountain”, they’re both a cage and a ship. When a game both gives and takes, both constrains and empowers, both divides and herds… it makes us desire freedom. I must stop making games that give freedom. I must start making games that give the painful desire for freedom.
What remains to be said? Beside the games we’ll write from there…