(cross-posted from my substack)

Posting About Play and Social Expectations

Why don’t I talk about my play experiences very much?

When you post about tabletop RPG stuff online there is an expectation that you ought to post about your play. While I think the norms around this are largely well-intentioned I find I don’t always fit comfortably into them, so that seemed like something it might be beneficial to explore in more depth.

Shame about “not playing”

Shame is a social emotion, it’s related to feeling that you haven’t met the social expectations of respected others. “Shaming” people tends to have negative connotations nowadays because it can be used hurtfully, such as mocking someone’s physical appearance in an attempt to get them to feel shame about themselves. Shame isn’t always-and-everywhere bad though, for example it seems to me that we have a reasonably well-calibrated use of shame related to the norm that people should wash their hands after using a restroom: it’s embarrassing if you don’t do it and someone notices. But part of what makes that functional is that we’ve done the work as a society to make it easy to comply with the norm: most restrooms provide ready access to running water.

A desire to withdraw or hide is a normal and natural association with the feeling of shame, so it’s not surprising that it’s tough to feel motivated to post about things when feelings of shame are involved. A norm that people that talk about a hobby ought to actually engage in the hobby seems reasonable. But on the other hand it kind of sucks to feel shame about not playing enough. I haven’t actually played a TTRPG in several years, and to me it doesn’t feel like it’s easy to get a TTRPG session going. Feeling shame for not climbing a mountain recently feels like it’s just stacking more negativity on top of already feeling bad about things in my life.

OK, but what about talking about your previous play?

It’s certainly theoretically possible to talk about play by referring to earlier experiences, and I do indeed sometimes do that, but there are a few reasons I don’t do that very often. One is that if I’m only talking about old stuff then the lack of recent play may become conspicuous by its absence, so: see above. But also I sometimes have a hard time figuring out what to say and I end up reverting to the habit of not saying anything, since that avoids potential downsides. So I’ll make a non-exhaustive list of things that I’ve found to be barriers to posting about play over the years (not to say that these are insurmountable, but that on one occasion or another these have been enough to derail my motivation to post).

Old news

In the social media era there’s a presumption of recency – posting about something that happened a long time ago feels weird without a “news hook” to justify why you’re posting about it now.

Originality

I tend to feel uncomfortable if I feel like I’m saying something I’ve already said, or something that’s obvious, like I’m in the spotlight but not sure why. It feels weird and unnecessary to me to point out that fun games are fun to play, doesn’t everybody already know that? So if I played in a session that was fun for the normal reasons then it doesn’t strike me as something I have a lot to say about. I tend to see questions about why a game is fun or how it works as questions about game design, not the specifics of particular sessions.

Hard to write what you don’t read

Personally I find most posts about play to be boring, reading them feels to me more like tedious homework to me than something intrinsically rewarding. Other people may have different reactions, but I usually don’t find this kind of thing stimulating or interesting. Since I don’t really engage with this type of content it’s not often on my mental radar as a thing I could or should post, and I don’t feel like I know how to make a good post of this type.

Editorial judgment

The kind of actual play content I used to enjoy engaging with was Actual Play podcasts, in the old “recording of a session” style (I even tried my hand at producing one for a while, focused on playtesting, called “Designer vs. Reality”). Eventually I stopped listening to these, partly just because I phased out listening to podcasts while taking walks so I had less listening time, but also because there was a tendency of shows to drift from focus on playing the game to be more “performative” for the audience which made them less appealing to me. Also, the way PbtA games took over the indie scene just made everything seem more monotonous from a mechanics or game design POV. But distilling a game session down to a written report necessarily puts it through a filter of what you find important, so that introduces an element of self-consciousness for me that just putting up a lightly-edited recording doesn’t. Am I giving enough context? Am I including too much and making it unwieldy? Am I eliding things that were important because I only experienced the session from my own perspective?

Calibration

One of the podcasts I used to listen to, The Jank Cast, put out full AP sessions as bonus content on their regular feed. This provided the unusual experience that sometimes you could have a frame of reference for what they meant during their normal discussion shows. One time they played Misspent Youth, and I found it to be an entertaining listen, they did their worldbuilding around the notion of a “social credit system”. But as with many pop culture handlings of political ideas, I found the philosophical implications to be not fully thought through: was it bad because it was accurate about something that should be mysterious, or was it bad because it was being manipulated and fake? But when they discussed their experience on the show they talked about it being a deep exploration of a political topic. That made something snap into focus for me that maybe should have been obvious all along: different people can describe subjective experiences in the same way but mean different things because they have different frames of reference. And that applies to other descriptions, too: whether something is emotional, dramatic, exciting, etc., is not something we’re all mutually calibrated on, but that’s the kind of thing we’re expected to talk about with posts that distill actual play experiences.

Humblebragging?

I don’t know the current state of the RPG podcast scene, but for a while there was a trend on shows to open by discussing what the hosts had been playing since the last podcast. The way people would use this obligatory segment to gush about their play experiences often struck me as humblebragging – look at me and all the great gaming I’ve been doing. That built up some negative emotional associations for me regarding talking about play.

Dirty laundry

Some of the reasons that TTRPG sessions have problems is because of conflict between people or how they’re engaging with the game. That’s certainly happened to me, but it can be hard to talk about that stuff without feeling like I’m dragging dirty laundry into the open. That can suck if it feels like I’m unfairly talking about someone behind their back, or it can create an awkward situation if I’m talking about it in a place where they also participate.

Self-consciousness

Since I feel uncomfortable talking about other people I could focus on myself and my own contributions to a game. But then I worry that I may look self-absorbed or dismissive of the other people’s contribution to the session if I’m always talking about myself.

Fandom Dynamics

Most of the TTRPG scene has a fandom dynamic where people like to hear people saying nice things about games they like. This is great for people who experience overflowing enthusiasm for things, but that’s not me. Even for things I like it’s not natural for me to be emotionally expressive about them, and I’ll often feel there needs to be some caveats or nuance in there, and if something doesn’t work for me it’s far more interesting to me to dig into that and try to understand what was happening. But analysis and nuance are not compatible with the toxic positivity of a fandom culture, so I often feel like the kinds of things I would want to say wouldn’t be welcome.

Eyeballs

People like to read about games they already know and like. If you’re posting about a less popular game you have the challenge of not knowing how much context your audience already has. So if you want to talk about a play experience of a game that’s not already popular you have the challenge of making the post engaging on its own since it can’t rely on the game’s existing goodwill, and some of your effort needs to be devoted to trying to get the reader up to speed. It’s kind of like the “origin story” problem with superhero movies – if you skip it the audience might be lost, if you do it you’ve got less room to include the fresh new stuff.

Can I justify not being cynical?

The heavy commercial focus of the TTRPG world makes it easy to slip into feeling like there’s a transactional element to talking about a game. Maybe my post isn’t just about my experience, maybe it’s also an ad for (or against?) the game. And there’s an internal cynical voice that wonders if I can justify expending effort to market other people’s stuff for free when I have my own projects that aren’t as successful as I want them to be.

Closing thoughts

When I started writing this post I thought it would be something I could write easily, to help maintain my momentum with writing more stuff here. But what’s clear to me in retrospect is that trying to surface my emotional reactions around not posting things tends to work against motivation to get posts written, so it turned out to be more challenging to get these thoughts down than I expected.