Putting a design on the shelf
Something exciting happened to me recently. I was talking to a friend about game design who expressed an interest in seeing the thing I was currently working on. A while later they let me know that they’d read through it and played a solo game, they showed me the cards they made and it was exciting to see something I’d thought about so hard being interpreted by someone else. Lexeme1 sets out a thesis of play which emphasises note taking, the core conceit of the original design was to have an RPG that remembered what you’d done and could use a clear statement of the past to help inform the future. I’ve decided to put the text of it as it stands up on this site2, so that I can reference it without having to do layout and release it. It isn’t ready for that. As I wrote last time its primary influence is the Zettlekasten method of note taking rather than any game design in particular. The extrapolation is that one could use Zettlekasten cards as game components and the mechanics are derived from that. That remains central to the way I think about the design but I’m not sure that it remains central to the design itself. In the work that I’m doing I’m not referencing the practice of play anymore I’ve begun to reference the works that influence me directly instead1.
I don’t have much free time at the moment and I’ve taken on additional responsibilities which have stretched me even thinner. In Autumn last year I realised that I needed to do something about my priorities if I wanted to live a life I aspire to lead. In December I did a lot of thinking about what that means in practice, but before that I decided that I would move my RPG prep exclusively into physical notebooks. What that meant in practice was that the friction was too high, I didn’t prep, and I relied on The Land of Eem and its marvellous Mucklands Sandbox to do the heavy lifting for me. I think it’s great that the game was able to support zero prep play, but it’s not what I want to do in my gaming practice. I felt that the game was becoming rambling and aimless, it wasn’t reflecting how I want to play. Working on Lexeme became a way to try to think about how I wanted to play these games but the reality was that the design was becoming self referential. I wasn’t even bringing in new ideas from the books I was reading because I wasn’t making time to read, I was busy engaging with discussion about games and more importantly what the next game would be. What Lexeme needs now is playtesting3 before it moves into a content creation phase. It was never intended to be setting agnostic but rather I would develop a world deck as the core expression of it as a product. In all this I’ve realised that I don’t want to playtest it yet, I have too much to play on my shelves. The design was becoming an extension of the imbalance of collecting and play and I think putting it up somewhere will help me set it aside for the time being4. Right now I need to find balance in my practice of play and focus on making the next session the best it can be.