DO IT YOURSELF

I went to Games Transformed earlier this month.

Reader: it was the hottest day of the year, and I ventured forth from my idyllic valley in the north of England to brave the wretched pit that is London. I lived in our capital for about a decade, when you add everything up, and I do not enjoy going back there. The damned place is too busy; you cram that many people into one city and charge them nine pounds a pint, something's going to go wrong.

I melted several times. Because I am my father's son, I decided to bring my own desk fan with me on the journey - the very same desk fan that is pumping cigarette smoke out of my office as I write this post - and I carried it around the Tate Modern in a rucksack, sweating gallons into my all-black clothing. (It would pay off, later; we stayed with a friend who is weathering the climate apocalypse with two small USB fans only, so I was happy to plug in my comparatively beefy unit and sporadically rotate my pallid form in front of it in the dark until I reached a temperature where unconsciousness felt possible, if not wholly achievable.)

IS EATING FASCISTS ANTI-FASCIST?

I'll admit I'd not heard of Games Transformed before they asked me to speak at it. It's a videogames convention, primarily, organised in the sort of ad-hoc manner required when you've got anarchists on one side and communists on the other, and since it's been a decade and change since I was involved in any sort of professional games journalism I'm severely out of the loop. It sounded academic. There were a few doctors involved. The organisers asked me to talk about anti-fascist games design, and seeing as I wrote a game about eating as many fascists as physically possible a couple of years ago, I could see why.

I was also a bit worried. I've sat uneasily with academia for a long time; while I appreciate the time I spent wobbling around University back in the mid-2000's, aside from the friends I made I can't think of much I did that helped. That did anything. It was broadly just a sort of pressurised chamber for adulthood. I slip into anti-intellectualism sometimes, laugh at complex terminology, and do whatever I can to not take this shit seriously whilst also, simultaneously, secretly, hypocritically, taking this shit more seriously than half the motherfuckers there. Games design is my job - my passion - the thing I'm good at and the thing I do. It matters to me. I don't have a fall-back. I don't care about much else.

(Worms. I'd probably raise worms, make compost. I'd like that. Sounds peaceful.)

So; mildly hungover and leaking vital fluids out of every available pore, I limped into the hot little rooms of Pelican House - a community centre down in Bethnal Green that hosted the event - and readied myself. Time to hold your own, Howitt, I thought. Time to show these people that you're not some simpleton just cause you don't have a fancy degree.

(I do have a fancy degree.)

Problem is, I don't think Eat the Reich is especially anti-fascist. It's anti-nazi, but even then, not the modern nazis - the kind that you've gotta be worried about. The old kind. It's a haunted house at a funfair but instead of bedsheet ghosts and plastic skeletons it's WW2 Germans and one very racist werewolf. The player characters can't really fail in their mission. The nazis are the butt of the joke and the rest of the joke is absurd violence.

SMOOTH-BRAINED ONE-SHOT BAIT

This admittedly ties back into some old problems for me. I've struggled to take my own work as seriously as I do others' since time immemorial, as I think we all do; it was only a transformative experience in the midnight jungles of Costa Rica at the one and only creative retreat I've ever been on that let me, say, think it was a good idea to put setting in my games.

My patreon, now largely-defunct, used to advertise “quick and dirty games.” I wrote “stupid games for stupid drunk people.” I never describe myself as having a real job, because – shit – I sit at home and write rules about monsters all day. That’s not like I’m going down the coalmine, or stacking shelves, or pulling pints. I do what I’d do anyway, except I get a little money for it.

I just closed a Kickstarter on a game I’ve written with my friend Chris, and we got £34,000 at closing, and that still doesn’t warrant a success in my mind. You know – getting well over thirty grand out of the internet with a game that had no setting, no established IP attached, and no big-name games designers attached to it. That’s not that great. It’s just what I do, now.

And I don’t know how damaging that is to me, overall, how much of a block that’s putting on my work, but I managed to shake it clear for – maybe – five minutes in Costa Rica last week.

(Spoiler: I don't reveal the transformative experience in that blog post. But it involved more marijuana than I knew what to do with and burning hand-written lists on a bonfire.)

I've seen Eat the Reich described as "smooth-brained one-shot bait," and: I agree, sometimes! It's big and daft and uncomplicated and it's not praxis, it's not a worthy game, it's not morally upstanding. It attracted some flak from both sides of the fence for simultaneously being too woke and not woke enough, and I get it. You stick your neck out like that and you're going to attract enough attention to ensure that some of it's negative.

But also: the Havoc Engine that underpins Eat the Reich is, I'm realising, great. It opens up an interesting space for players, in that it gives them buckets of narrative authority they're not used to, and it opens up an interesting space for designers because it's piss-easy to write for. There are so few moving parts that it's quite hard to break.

I've been writing the second version of the Havoc SRD. The first version was a by-the-numbers reverse engineering of Eat the Reich, more of a guide for writing additional material than doing anything strictly interesting with the game, and Maz wasn't happy with it. They wanted it to be something more; something that would spark designers to take the engine and build something new. I see now they understood the strengths of the system before I did; I pushed back, I ummed and ahhed over it, and we're currently approaching the two year anniversary of me promising it as a stretch goal.

Then I went to Poland last month, and did a Havoc game jam, and crumbs if I wasn't inspired by what people came up with there. So the new draft is completely rewritten, not a single word shared between it and the old one, and it's an attempt to use the SRD as a crash course in top-down games design. It's taking bloody ages, because I'm breaking down the system into the absolute fundamental inputs and outputs. I don't have an "Injuries" section. I have a "Bad Stuff" section. I hope it's good when its finished.

BUILDING SOMETHING

All of which is a digression (which I'll come back to later, I swear) but suffice to say I was feeling like an impostor at the conference. It didn't help that, when my panel came around, I was sitting on stage alongside a woman who makes interactive historical videogames about prosecuting nazis after World War 2 and a couple who had quite literally written Antifascism: the Game which included real-world methods of resisting within its play.

I tried to give them as much room to speak as possible. Thankfully, at one point, I managed to answer an audience question about the inherent political meanings of certain game mechanics, and I believe I sounded smart enough to get away with it.

But I learned a good deal about the way that games are used on a mechanical level to demonstrate processes we think of as inevitable or inviolate: I attended a panel which challenged the idea of zero-sum competition games as the default, and explored other methods of play. It's hard to think outside the limits we've grown up with. I railed against it initially but it's sat with me and shuffled around my brain parts.

At the end of that panel, an audience member asked them: "If you had a hundred million dollars, what would you build? What's the pipeline to draw people in?" Every single one of them said that they'd get more people to make games. They'd found a Pelican House in every neighbourhood. There's not a solution to this problem that you can write down and enact: you need to build the world where people can solve it.

That got me fizzing. And I thought: why not make a game where you make a game?

DO IT YOURSELF

The first draft of this month's game was SOMETHING SOMETHING LUDIC. I've been coyly fascinated by ludic games - that is, games which you make as you play them, in as much as I think that's the definition, I couldn't find a straightforward answer - since I learned about 1,000 Blank White Cards, oh, twenty years ago. The unfettered nature of them scares me a bit.

I realised as well that a fully ludic game wouldn't fit well with what I do here, and I wanted to provide some guide rails around the outside. So, immersed in Havoc as I was, I put together a dead simple hack of it on the train back from London and then tried to work out what bits I wouldn't finish.

DO IT YOURSELF is the first half of a game, as it says at the top. There's enough there to get you started but not to finish; there are big gaps where some of the rules ought to go. Some of these have explicit outcomes (there are three undefined Conditions on each character, for example, so... come up with three more), some have inferred objectives (there are two open rules slots on what you can spend successes on, so have a think about what might be interesting mechanically) and some which are more freeform (I've only provided the names for most character abilities and equipment - write the rules when you use them).

The setting - antifascist cyberpunk - is purely due to the environment I submerged myself in at Pelican House. It also plays with power in a way that I haven't done since I wrote DEATH WAS THE ONLY ROAD OUT OF TOWN with Alex Roberts; although the GM is in charge of the fascist regime, it's the players who are making the rules.

How do those power structures push against each other, in- and out-of-character? I wonder if players will write rules that swing things wildly in their favour, and approach this like a thing that must be won; or if they write in problems for themselves, put in a challenge, to make the experience more fraught.

There's your academic thinking. I deleted three different gags where I took the piss out of myself for writing it. It's an ongoing process.

I've split it out into two pages - apologies in advance to Producer Chant who has to worry about package weights - because you'll need room to write down your character abilities and it felt daft to make you copy everything out or refer to multiple bits of paper.

That's it for now. Stay beautiful.

• Grant