Thread by @FSohns

ON #DUNGEON23

I had already written about this before but now that's 2023 and I see talk of it I'll do so again. I've been working in TTRPGs full time since 2017 so you can consider me someone who has a habit and a long time relationship with the act of design.

1/15

I could start saying that #dungeon23 is just another marketing ploy meant to boost trendsetters under the veneer of late 2010s hype culture type bs. Instead, I'll tell you why for MOST people, this sort of thing is outright detrimental to achieving any sense of fulfillment.

2/15

The first problem with #dungeon23 is that it is yet another productivist trend: propagating the myth that the process of art creation is more about "making things" rather than, say, creating moments in time that are worth living, reproducing people we wanna be with, etc.

3/15

This is the same line of thought that leads people to believe that, say, images rendered via IA are art, or that one can measure an artist's sense of fulfillment based on quantifiable output, or that all of this can be simplified to productive processes. It can't.

4/15

IMO it's fair to think that most people partaking in #dungeon23 look up to the work that us long term designers have done and be like "I wanna do something like that", but they would misunderstand the real meaning of what we do by seeing only the output and not the process.

5/15

Which goes back to the core of the bish: creative ideas - the ones that shake you to your very core - happen when you are relaxing, taking a long bath, going for a walk, at a cafe with friends, napping. As Byung Chul Han would say, you need to allow yourself to be bored.

6/15

When you allow yourself to res, thats where the ideas that are really worth it come. And when they come, you don't treat the execution of those ideas like homework, doing some wackshit 2000 words a day thing you read on King's book. You work at your pace.

7/15

Maybe you are very excited about this idea and spend 9 hours writing. Maybe then you stop writing for like 4 weeks. Creativity doesn't clock in at 8 fam. Ideas mature over time; you'll come back to an idea months after and give it a new spin.

8/15

This is one of the environmental, chronological reasons why indie games, made outside of corporate 1st draft/2nd draft/final frameworks of production, tend be better. Regimented, homeworkesque frameworks do not give breathing space to ideas: they cannot mature.

9/15

Respecting the creative process means giving space so that an idea I wrote down in January can, after an inspiring biking trip in November, be reworked into something truly marvelous - an idea that's an amalgam of past-me and present-me.

10/15

Those are the only ideas around which one can build a real sense of community. Not a hashtag, not the latest TTRPG product marketing trend, but games that inspire people to continue to meet each other. #dungeon23 and the like create a false sense of community.

11/15

False community in #dungeon23 is easy to reckon because its built inherently as some sort of accountability construct, in which all endstates (yes, all) are most likely to produce disappointment. If you don't make it to the end, you'll feel bad. If you do, you'll end up...

12/15

...with a bunch of uninspired stuff *because* uninspired stuff is the logical product of productivist approaches to art. Not only that, but "the market" will duly be, at the same time, flooded with this stuff. The only winners are the trendsetters who started the #

13/15

The TLDR is that y'all need to stop thinking about "creating games" and more about creating spaces in which you have fun and you can relax while making games, in making of games a place you go to when you want to express something and not when you are coerced to.

14/15

Nap. Walk in the beach. Go to the local art exhibit. Get together with friends. Read a cool book. Ride a bike or whatever. Therein lies the way to blissfully making RPGs.

15/15

ADDENDUM: A lot of y'all who wanna make anticapitalist games and art and shit, y'all should start seeing the obvious fact that these are tools for capitalist oppression of the self (psychopolitics) and refuse to partake in them. Oppose work. Sleep under the sun. Self actualize.