Tools, Passion; Love, Art

Games and passion are something that has come multiple times in my work here; without it this critical experiment would never exist or keep going, and I went in a bit of a detour in our The Troubleshooters analysis about the nature of design and play passion and its effects on me. But today I’m going a step ahead. I want to share the complex relationship with the games whose relationship can only be called love, its nature and how it can come to be — and die.1

So, what do I mean by "the games we love”?

This has nothing to do with good2 games, great games, fun games, etc. I have fallen in and out of love with pretty atrocious games; love and critical analysis don’t go together3. To me, a game I love is a game that It has become part of myself, that I cherish and groan as I do at me, that I can sleepwalk through the general vibe even I forget the rules, that has shaped how I think and has been integrated in my ongoing transformation as a person.

I cannot really talk much about the process that leads for a game to get to that point; pretty clueless about it4. However, when I think about the games I love, they share two characteristics that stay true no matter how long it has been.

Okay, what the fuck these mean? They two points are ultimately about familiarity, respect and care that allows love to be cultivated. When you have these, you can have an active, “reciprocal”5 relationship with the tools of art.

When I mean I can get the game to do the art I want to do with it, it means that I know what levels to push to get the kind of story we want to create to happen: this does not mean remembering the rules, or Hasbro products the usual litany that you can do whatever in it: it means the game respecting you enough to give you many ways to understand you and you respecting exactly what the game wants to do and find novel ways to do it.

When the game gives me a place for me to insert myself into the game, I also don’t mean that I can just put anything in the game. No, I mean that who I am, is able to pour themselves into the game, to paint themselves in using the limited pallet of the game. That just as I want to welcome the game as part of my growth as a person, the game cares who I am; cares enough that as I change and keep coming back to the game, this still remains true and I find this love still burns.

Exalted, L5R and (most) WoD games fill this place to me. Game I could make into so many different basis for art, and let me paint myself in: games I love. Deeply flawed, messy, frustrating games.

It is no surprise that for at least ten years I have been looking for other games I could love. To my surprise, this has been a fruitless endeavour. I know I don’t know about the courtship period and admitted to not be able to see the signs, but let me try to figure out why this keeps failing to happen, even if I really put my hopes up for so many games.

One obvious assumption may be, well, you need to spend times with games to fall in love. True; if you don’t share a space, if you don’t share time, that cannot happen. But with a decade or so of trying, and with periods of time I was trying 3-4 different games a week and really putting the effort, you would have expected something to click. It is also, as a corollary to that, that it is because I’m no longer a teen and you can only afford to fall in love with this artform like that; nostalgia has little hold on me, growing up poor and trans in a fringe environment — but I concede that may be a major factor for most people’s deep feelings. There is also the aspect of play culture: most people don’t read the games, so their interactions with it is more about the people that create art with these and the environment they cultivate; so is it really the game you fall in love with, or the play culture around a game?

That one gives me pause. That may be true to my experience, actually. Every single one of the games I listed as loving, was also one that I played overwhelming with queer and feminine players. However, this was hardly the one and be all, because guess who I have almost exclusively playing with for the last ten years? Yeah. While play culture alone cannot make you fall in love, it is a requirement; cannot do so in a play culture hostile to you or even just uninterested in spending that much time with the game.

Love is messy, and a bit demanding, and it is all about putting to work to come the other way a better person; this is no different when love is deposited upon the tools we use to make our art — and the art that comes from that. You need to spend time with a game; if the game is too polished and does not have - sometimes quite frustrating - bits to grab into, you gonna smooth over and maybe not spend enough time with it to appreciate and understand it on a deeper level. If the play culture sucks, you are not gonna stick around; but if a game is carried entirely by that momentary passion rather than cultivating a certain type of play culture — and thus easily replaceable with another game. And for all that demands, it has to feel like it is worth it; like it has something to say, that when you go through this, when you integrate it, you will come out the other side a better person6.

This is going quite long and I still don’t know if I was able to work on any insight compared to when I began. Well, but why was this in my mind lately?

Y’all.

I think it happened again? Maybe? I will come back to this if turns out to be true or I process this further.