Thread by @lackingceremony

When I was first getting into roleplaying games, @PaulCzege's My Life with Master (released 2003) was the first game to truly ignite my imagination. Its text was both atmospheric and conversational. Its design was spare and built upon emotional landscapes. It had an endgame!

Next, I discovered Shock: Social Science Fiction, released 2006 by @JoshuaACNewman. At first, I found the writing alien! I'd never seen neo-pronouns before! But Shock's setting matrix was fascinating - it enlisted the players in defining both the themes and verbs of their story.

My Life with Master invited players to think about, take ownership of, and extend its aesthetics. Shock invited the players to do the same with its material analysis of how technologies inevitably transform human relations. Those invitations both strike me as profound even today.

I'm outlining my own personal pantheon of inspiring games here, and the third was @P_H_Lee's Polaris (released 2005). Polaris broke my understanding of what a mechanic could even be - lighting candles, ritual phrases, bargains over the fate of a dying people, negotiated poetry.

Although it was also released in 2005, it was a few years later when I discovered @emilycare's Breaking the Ice. An intimate game for two, a game about romance, a game where the only obstacle is figuring out your own desires and compatibilities. I loved its collaborative design.

In the period of 2005-2009, it was overwhelmingly fashionable (wherever I played, at conventions around the continent) to design and play games that were conflict-oriented, that got to the conflict as fast as possible, and ratcheted way up. Breaking the Ice was a counter-current.

In 2009, @shreyas released Mist-Robed Gate. The field was saturated with conflict mechanics, but this game actually said interesting things about the subject! The separation of wirework from escalating knife etiquette challenged me to think about what violence MEANT in stories.

Mist-Robed Gate taught me more about the ritual and aesthetic elements of game design, building on what I had learned from Polaris. It was the first RPG I ever saw that spoke considerably about how to host a gathering, what to serve, and the desired mood and social atmosphere.

Mist-Robed Gate was also significant because it deviated away from a trend that had taken hold in the indie design circles I belonged to, that of fiction-inconsequential design. Mechanics that functioned the same no matter what the fiction was. Apocalypse World wasn't here yet!

Trends are never absolute, and there were always counter-trends, movements in orthogonal directions, contradictions. I'm just speaking to the patterns I noticed, that we spoke of, and the games that stood out in my mind as (if you'll pardon the pun) game-changers.

I'm mostly just positioning myself in this thread as someone who plays games and is impacted by them, but here I'll say one thing about my own design career: much of my creative work in the past ten years is a response to Apocalypse World, exploring the edges of its design space.

While Powered by the Apocalypse games have been popular ever since, we do ourselves a disservice by overlooking the rest of the field!

2011 saw the release of @lamemage's Microscope, which told stories in a radical new way! Play was curiosity-driven rather than linear & causal.

Microscope used the actual game table differently than I had ever seen. It asked players to inhabit a new kind of role (curatorial and archeological, maybe?). Stories unfolded in a surprising new way, they moved in a different direction: not forward, but deeper.

And to step backwards slightly in the chronology (how fitting), 2010 was the year that @JacksonTegu designed Silver & White, still in development. Silver & White built on @ptevis's technology of game-book-as-script, but used it to start an evocative story that the players finish.

2012 saw @liamlburke's Dog Eat Dog, a brilliant game about colonization. Dog Eat Dog's mechanics reveal how structural power dynamics work in the real world, and demonstrate the complexity embedded in minute everyday choices. It taught me that mechanics are always political.

2012 also saw the release of @bullypulpit_hq's Durance, which also featured explicit demarcations of hierarchy and imbalanced power. Durance managed to meaningfully explore these themes even with a GMless system and set in a collaboratively-generated world. I played it lots.

In 2014 I had the immense privilege of sitting down to a playtest of Bluebeard's Bride, by @scorchadoom, @Mariscka, and @the_strix. This game changed how I think about agency in games, and what I understand as meaningful action. You all play a single character's inner turmoil.

I started this thread with an atmospheric game of gothic horror, whose mechanics challenged my thinking about agency and character ownership. And now we've come full circle. I dropped out of games shortly after that point, and returned a few years later in a bit of a stumble.

I honestly haven't been able to play as wide a spectrum of games since returning, in part because I'm now a mother. But I'd like to name two others that have inspired me since then.

Blades in the Dark (released 2017 by @john_harper) was the first mission-based action game that I have truly loved. It did interesting things with the granularity and manipulation of conflict resolution, to an extent I hadn't seen since @theburningwheel was released.

I somehow forgot, along the way, 2009's Lady Blackbird (also by @john_harper). Lady Blackbird remains the gold standard in my mind for a number of things: pre-generated scenarios, free games, pick up & play design, and action-adventure writing.

And finally, @muscularpikachu's Star Crossed. This game echoes several others that I love: like Dread, it uses a Jenga power to create visceral tension; like Breaking the Ice, it is two-player & intimate; like Hot Guys Making Out, it has explicit assertive/passive roles.

But despite all these echoes, Star Crossed feels wholly original and unique. It is a new experience. And its text is transcendent! It is accessible, inviting, flirtatious, and fun.

I haven't played For the Queen yet, but I already trust Alex's design voice absolutely.

Oh, oh wait, I am remiss. I'm also captivated by Dialect, published 2017 by @chicalashaw and @HSeya. The library is closing and so I have to go, but let me just say this game is beautiful, rich, and like Microscope did for me it changes what I imagine stories can even be about.

Those are the games (as best I can recollect) that have transformed my perspective on what game design entails, what roleplaying games can look like, how stories work, what purpose art has in our lives, and what our responsibilities are as designers. Thanks for reading.

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