ONE HUNDRED ONE PAGE GAME JAM DEBRIEF

A few months ago I reached my hundredth one-page game, HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOAT GIRL, and to celebrate - to do something about the situation, to lend it some arbitrary significance - I did a game jam on itch.io. 72 people entered! (Or rather: there were 72 games!) 

Today I’m going to talk about it. 

And I announce the winners at the end, too!

THE SETUP

I figured that, seeing as there were a hundred of these damned things, the most novel thing to do with them was to encourage folks to mix them together. We have an established way of selecting one out of a hundred things - the humble D100, one of the few dice which has a maximum result which is the different from the actual numbers shown on the polyhedrons - and so rolling that twice felt like a natural gag.

Participants would generate two games at random and then combine them within two pages of text however they felt was more appropriate. 

I think, looking back on it, while I’m happy with the gag and the pitch (it makes sense, it’s achievable, it’s lo-fi and weird and kinda shitposty) I would have rather had people design something original in my style. 

BUT WHAT AM THAT STYLE?

Okay so I write three types of one-page games.

TYPE ONE: ANIMAL CRIMES. The standout hits of my collection are short games where an animal is involved, and you are that animal, and you do something socially transgressive. Bears stealing honey was the first - and we’ve had raccoons in stolen cars, goatgirls causing public disturbances, corvids heisting the crown jewels, seagulls engaging in beach-adjacent chaos, and so on. 

While none of these are doing much in the realm of furthering the medium of roleplaying games - Honey Heist is little more than Lasers and Feelings after I made it slightly less clever and slightly more accessible - they’re popular because they’re fun and I don’t need to get all het up about it. One of the things games can be is fun and these are that.

(Please bear in mind I also wrote Horse Around The House, a game which is broadly the opposite of fun but in a sort of gratuitous, vicious way that I believe it edges up against fun on the other side. So I’m not above experimenting with things being genuinely unpleasant in an engaging way.

But: there is a contingent of designers who want games to be grown-up artistic pieces and the idea of fun is something banal and childish to them. To them I say: have you seen it. The outside. The world out there. The world is on fire. We are killing each other on an industrial, depersonalised scale unthought of. No-one has their hand on the wheel and everyone is shovelling fuel into the furnace. You think fun is beneath us? You want this to be difficult, too?)

To that end: I could have had people write animal crime games. It seems easy enough, and honestly, it kind of is; the trick is picking a dynamic crime and an animal with enough recognisable variety that you can put together a crew with visual distinctions. 

And it’s been done. It’s been done by me and I keep doing it. I’ll never stop doing it. I’m thinking about doing it right now. In this one you’re a fistful of spiders each and you’re trying to become prom queen.

TYPE TWO: COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. I’ll admit it: I think it’s funny when we refer to something but change the names a little bit, because I can recognise the connection and it makes me feel clever, or at least included, and that’s something. 

I’ve done The Fast and The Furious and Warhammer 40,000 several times each, both of which are Intellectual Property that I hold close to my heart. I’ve done Hackers and Final Destination, both of which I don’t especially care for but I do want to fuck around in. Pride and Prejudice gets an honourable mention, coz I put giant robots in it, and because Jason Statham (presumably) owns the rights to his own image, I live in a continual mild apprehension that one day he will Find Out About Me. I have never enjoyed playing Fighting Fantasy games - you have to quite literally roll high enough on 2D6 every few pages to continue reading - but I always appreciated the grubby fantasy art so I leant into it for Streets of Karazun.

Copyright infringement games usually do okay because people recognise the thing I’m referencing and they like it. I can see why some companies fire tie-in licenses into the market like scattershot; it’s nice to see something you recognise. (The best copyright infringement game I have ever read is a Dune pastiche from Sasha Sienna in which one of your stats is Oscar Isaac.)

In retrospect I could have asked people to write beloved infringements of the things that they like, and no-one would have got in trouble for it really, and honestly it probably would have generated some fun experiments as people seek to emulate and evoke the things they enjoy. The rule would be that you can’t directly mention the names of the things, and instead use awkward workarounds.  

Which is a pretty good idea and I might still do it. 

TYPE THREE: HIGH-CONCEPT BULLSHIT. Oh, you know. A game where you play twenty Seans Bean and you have to act out and film and cater a movie whilst not dying. A game where you’re in a coma and must kill your way out. A game where you play fake spiritual mediums who get caught up in a real haunting AND also play the other victims of that haunting. A murder mystery where you don’t know how you did the murder but you know you did it. A different murder mystery where you’re all competing to be arrested for the murder. 

A game where you modify the rules text to win, or a game I wrote half of and require the players to finish during play. A game where you only ever get worse and more exhausted until you die. A game where everything is random tables. A game where you process my suicidal ideation and if you play rules-as-written it gives you RSI. Two games in the same universe, both post-Brexit in a nebulous sort of way: in one you’re in charge of a murderous dog the size of a caravan and in the other you’re a power-armoured cop tethered to a moving tram. 

That sort of thing.

I’m very glad I have this Patreon with which to experiment with these ideas, and I’m doubly glad that no-one expects me to sustain them for longer than a page or two.

The high-concept bullshit category rarely does well because, you know. I’m trying something weird. I think they’re the closest I come to game poems - things that are the shape of games, but not necessarily the most playable version of themselves. Or even playable at all. And I think that hosting an expressly high-concept games jam is doomed to failure, or at least doomed to generate some unplayable ephemera. 

BACK TO THE JAM

Thankfully, itch.io offers a way for folks to vote on game jams, which meant that I wouldn’t be solely responsible for working out which one was best; as experienced as I am, I didn’t relish the thought of being the sole arbiter. I did, however, have to choose what metrics the contestants should be judged on, and I came down to the following three:

DID THEY COMBINE THE GAMES IN AN INTERESTING WAY?

That’s the gag, right? That’s the main thing. This is a difficult challenge and whatever falls out of it will be by necessity derivative, so I’m not expecting anyone to turn out the next Big Motherfuckin Crab Truckers or what have you; I wanted to see how people could work from a limited palette and do something unusual with it.

NOTEWORTHY COMBINERS 

The ones I found most interesting were those that clearly put additional restrictions on themselves, like only using words from the games they rolled (and physically cutting and pasting the texts together); I’m a fan of cut-up poetry, or at least the concept of it, and it was fun to see my work transformed like that.

WHAT I INSPIRED ON MY MALIGN HOLIDAYS and GENIUS LOCUST both used the limitations in interesting ways, and both look a bit like ransom notes which is always fun. GENIUS LOCUST deserves a particular mention as it combines GENIUS LOCI with another copy of GENIUS LOCI, and manages to make a game about insects with them.

YOU WOULDN’T DOWNLOAD A GOAT conjures the idea of a goat printer, accessing the collective memories and opinion of goats and then recreating something out of leftover carbon and vibes. (Players are not in direct control of the goat they have printed that must solve their problems.)

GUTTER MAGES combines WAKE (coma-induced hellscape) and UNCANNY RALLY (malfunctioning android road trip) and takes it in a fascinating direction: a nightmare “magic-fucked” sewer system that’s so monstrously unreal you have to take a bunch of drugs to make it seem normal. Plus the colour-coding is nice.

Lastly, I want to put in an honourable mention for A BRIAR, NOT A WOOD here, because it has the cleanest shuffling of my work that I’ve seen. There’s not a lot of new material in the game, but I think it combines the two originals so elegantly that it feels coherent and looks like it’d work just fine. 

DOES THE GAME LOOK FUN OR AT LEAST ENGAGING TO PLAY?

You can see my cowardice here when I wrote “fun” and then watered it down with “at least engaging,” mainly because I was worried the cool expressionist games design kids would come around and beat me up for not sufficiently endorsing overwrought metatextuality. 

You know the movie Airplane? Came out in the 70’s. Leslie Nielsen's debut as a comic actor. One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Couldn’t love it more. 

Airplane is ostensibly a comedy disaster movie, but here’s the interesting bit about it: it’s based on a normal disaster movie written a few years previously. The writers purchased a script for a film that had already been shot and rewrote it over and over until only the skeleton of the original plot remained - the shape of some of the characters, the arc of the narrative, the kernels of the drama - and replaced everything else with jokes.

Part of the reason that Airplane has endured, and why it has outlasted the Scary Movies and Meet the Spartans that came after it, is that beneath the gags and goofs it’s still an engaging story - an ex-fighter pilot must overcome his fear of flying caused by wartime trauma to get a struggling commercial jet home safe. 

You can listen to Charlie Booker talk about this at length here.

I aim to do the same thing with my games, but I make the skeleton myself. (Or: maybe John Harper does it. You get me.) No matter how shitposty or how high the concept is, it has to work. The mechanics have to feel fair, or at least suitable to emulate what’s going on. It has to be a game you could sit down and play for an hour and have a laugh otherwise the rest of the bit doesn’t function. It’s not funny to me if it’s not an actual game; that’s just a series of sentences you’ve arranged into something that’s game-shaped.

I can think of some great art pieces that are unplayable games, or games that buck against the idea that rules must be followed; very clever things that use the medium as the message. But I try not to write things like that, in general.

NOTEWORTHY FUN-LOOKERS

SURVIVORS OF THE BUG GOD takes Fucked Up Little Man and mashes it insectile into Hollow Knight - and, given that the author has run FULM a few times, also incorporates some neat pacing mechanics themed around colour-coding the map. From the looks of it, it’ll run better than the original.

JUSTIFIED HORSE ANXIETY does a good job of putting a deranged horse into a Paranoia scenario. I wrote the mid-2010’s rerelease of Paranoia with James Wallis and Paul Dean, and though I spent a lot of time on the mechanics the real joy of the game comes from the scenario design: cooking up horrible things for players to do to, with and on behalf of each other whilst a lunatic Computer makes everything more difficult. This game is that. And it has a horse in it!

SECRET CAR GIRLS didn’t use two games, so really it shouldn’t qualify as a submission, but I think it takes the original KAIJU GIRLS and makes it more grounded, tragic, and funnier. Broadly: you turn into a honking great American car when you get stressed and you need to become prom queen and run everyone over. 

ABOUT LAST KNIGHT does an elegant job of tackling the wild storytelling genre made famous by Baron Munchausen and supported by Tippling: a Dwarven Drinking Game and WE SET OUT, the first game I released on this Patreon, and which was weird and didn’t work very well so I don’t talk about it often. The map and setup provide plenty of scene-framing grist and the unusual role of the GM as inquisitive friend rather than an omniscient narrator is interesting too.

DID THEY DRAW A LITTLE PICTURE AND DOES IT LOOK ANY GOOD?

In the decade I’ve spent writing rules, I’ve realised something crucial and heartbreaking: no-one cares about rules. Not really. What people care about is a nice colourful drawing of something attractive, exciting or ideally both.

I can’t work in colour (I have a stark memory of one time in Year 4 when the coloured pencils were taken away from me in art class to stop me from making my attempt at a still life of an unattended lemon any less recognisable) and my grasp of “attractive” and “exciting” is as limited as my capacity to depict recognisable people, perspective, figures in movement or the same thing twice. 

But that’s not stopped me from scribbling black and white guff all over my games, and the ones where I did a good(ish) drawing seem to generally fare better than the ones where I don’t. I like to think that I’ve even become slightly better at drawing, having re-remembered all the stuff about starting with shapes and going from there that I learned from half-reading a multitude of HOW TO DRAW CARTOONS books that my parents valiantly purchased for me as a child. 

So I wanted people to try that themselves, and have a bloody go at it. (More on that below, after the pictures)

NOTEWORTHY PICTURERS

Lots to enjoy here. We got a two headed calf from that bittersweet poem:

We got an excellent map of the Master Magus Tower:

We got the grand Duke, who takes up a whole page:

We got an undressing wizard:

We got a crow arguing with Jesus:

We got a bunch of birds telling you everything’s going to be okay:

We got a yelling goat:

And we got Jason Statham in a bridle and tack:

AN ASIDE ON HAVING A BLOODY GO

I think that aside from the thousands of dollars, and aside from the creative pressure outlet, and aside from the mewling toothless scabrous beast crouched pathetic in my chest that longs for praise, and aside from tethering a rope around the neck of my undiagnosed ADHD, and aside from the fact that it was relatively cheap, that the reason for me doing one-page games was that it looks easy.

Both in as much as I thought it would be easy to do - which it’s not, it’s surprisingly difficult and time-consuming, so more fool me - but that the lo-fi nature of the games and the scrappy nature of the rules makes it seem as though anyone can do it.

(And: they can! Not, you know, well. You have to practice; you have to do it enough times that eventually you get an eye for it, and you have to take swings, and you have to do the things that don’t work. And you never really know what’ll land.)

And even if they can’t write a game themselves, surely they can run this sort of thing. It’s not three tomes that cost sixty bucks apiece. (How much is a D&D these days? How many books is it?) It’s a picture you saw on the internet. Surely it’s not difficult to use.

I think a lot of it comes back to the idea of the magic circle, as I mentioned in my Belgium piece when I was whinging about how other people did art; part of the appeal of TTRPGs is the majesty and complexity, the sense of entering another world, the reams of text and the peculiar rules and the difference between a 4th level Fireball and a 7th level Fireball. That weight of information, those fancy-looking books, the secret language and system mastery all bring with them a sense of importance that the GM can tap into and make the game - for the want of a better word - sacred.

One-page-games are not sacred; these are disposable things. These are things designed to be stolen, changed, cut up and rebuilt, perverted, owned, destroyed. They are fragmentary and unfinished and strange. 

Instead of a sacred object, the game is a joke that you’re in on. The magic circle is replaced with The Bit, as in “commitment to,” and - whisper it! - it’s just another magic circle. But I think I prefer The Bit. 

THE WINNERS

All five winners (it was meant to be three but I felt generous) will be sent something unearthed from my reams of notes, drafts, sketches, aborted manuscripts etc. As I have previously mentioned, if I get famous before I die these have the capacity to be worth upwards of five pounds each, so hang onto them.

The first two were determined by voting amongst the jam participants; the last three were selected by me, just now, and I decided that the categories should be tied to the three types of one-pagers that I write because that seems tidy.

FIRST PLACE

The overall winner of the contest by popular vote was THE (ORC) DERELICT IS FLYING, a mashup of RULES FOR FLYING DUNGEONS and THE (ORC) POPE IS DEAD by Rollinkunz. This is to be expected, as Rollinkunz is a professional games designer and illustrator and as you can see he is employably good at this sort of thing (to the extent that I have worked with him often in the past, most notably on ORC BORG). 

It’s good stuff! It functions, broadly, as an expansion of the bit we did in ORC BORG where we encourage you to steal other people’s level design and pass it off as your own: you take control of a section of dungeon that can fly through space for fun and profit. The capricious whims of Bog Al-Kurruk map well onto the unpredictable AI of a spaceship built by orks, which is neat too.

I’d feel bad giving someone I’ve worked with the big prize. But thankfully I didn’t - you did - so I don’t have to feel anything aside from the usual mild benevolence and gentle confusion. 

SECOND PLACE

A close second was THE WITCH IS DEAD (BUT WE HAVE HER CAR KEYS) by Docrimbo, again someone who I know and have worked with in the past (this time crewing the stall at Gencon), but I cannot stress enough that I was only tangentially involved in this voting process. You did this. 

THE WITCH IS DEAD (BUT WE HAVE HER CAR KEYS) has excellent Little Drawings by CyberellaDraws, urban animal stats that spell out W.I.T.C.H. (Walkability, Infrastructure, Transit, Crime Rate, Healthcare) and an excuse to put five grimy critters into a souped-up dragula and smash apart some poorly-constructed waterfront buildings on the streets of San Bernagual. 

It’s taken the good bits of both games and given them more room to breathe, which I appreciate. I feel like it could do with an equipment table, but I appreciate the decision to leave it out so to retain additional room for Little Drawings.

BEST ANIMAL CRIME

Goats were a popular theme in the jam. This is because over half of the games I write focus on goats, or goat-related topics, so much like Statham and Horse Madness, the shadow of these capric iconoclasts looms large over my oeuvre. GOATS OF THUNDER escalated the genre, taking the goats from everyday troublemakers to divine forces in search of vengeance. Plus it’s got a good drawing AND a map.

BEST COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

STAG BEETLE PARTY is a Warhammer 40,000 game about playing honking great Tyranid Warriors (TM Games Workshop) that land on an Imperial planet and in search of suitable wedding gifts for their Norn Queen (TM Games Workshop) wife-to-be. The original STAG PARTY has a sort of nobility to the beasts portrayed; I’m interested to see how it works when you replace that with gribbly alien nightmares. However the thing I like most about this game is the drawing of a Lamenter (TM Games Workshop) Space Marine (not TM Games Workshop):

BEST HIGH-CONCEPT BULLSHIT

KILLED BY YOUR DARLINGS takes the (frankly) kinky DEATH WAS THE ONLY ROAD OUT OF TOWN, a game about punishing the GM and being punished in return, and then slaps a beautiful hat on that hat with the introduction of LEXICUTIONERS’ text-fuckery. It’s about being the ultimate bratty little players, which I’m into, but to talk about it at length is to gaze into Evan Saft’s navel so deeply that I start to see through it and into my own. So take your prize and get outta here.

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That’s it for now. I do want to do that Copyright Infringement Jam at some point, because of all the reasons mentioned above. Maybe next year. MAYBE TOMORROW. Who knows.

Love and fury,

- Grant