(cross-posted from my substack)

Why don’t TTRPG design jams build community?

Looking at the game design of game design jams

There is a long history of TTRPG “design contests” or “game design jams” in the indie TTRPG scene. I designed my first TTRPG for a Game Chef, and I’ve participated in multiple contests and jams over the years, they’ve been the starting point for most of the things I’ve designed. Every time I hope that the jam will work as some kind of spark to start more “community” interaction with game design peers, but disappointingly it usually fails to materialize. I think this is a pretty common experience: game jams seem like they ought to be a good building block for building community and enthusiasm for designing games, but they don’t seem to work out that way in practice. Since game jams are themselves a type of game I think we ought to be able to use the lens of game design to interrogate why they don’t seem to work the way a lot of people want them to.

The Threeforged experience

In a discussion thread in a failing TTRPG design community on Google+, Paul Czege suggested the structure of a game design contest that he thought would work to build community. I didn’t want to run it, both because I didn’t think it would work and because I wasn’t in a good place emotionally to try to run a new initiative. Eventually Paul launched the activity himself, Threeforged. Although skeptical, I wanted to approach it with an open mind and give it the best chance to succeed so I entered as a participant. It was a very interesting experience, and a lot of cool stuff happened during it, but what it didn’t seem to do was get people to develop things further or engage in design collaboration. Even though I’m glad I took part I think my “it won’t work to build community” prediction was vindicated. The reaction was “This was cool, I hope someone runs another one some day!” not “This was cool, I want to do things like this even when there’s not an organized activity around it!”. Someone else ran it as a game jam a few years later and I participated again, with similar results: cool while it was happening, and then people moved on and left it in the rear view mirror when it was over.

My initial conclusion

My initial conclusion from the experience was that design jams are essentially games, and what’s created inside the magic circle stays inside the magic circle. When you play Pictionary, the context of drawing within a game gives people the permission and motivation to draw, but nobody invests in their game doodles long-term, they’re happy to toss them in the trash afterwards. I thought the same thing was happening with design jams: you create a game inside it as part of the process, and then you don’t mind if it goes into the trash when its done. What “it’s just a game” giveth in terms of unleashing people’s creativity, “it’s just a game” taketh away in terms of caring about the creations. (I’m talking in generalities here: I myself do get invested in my contest/jam games, and sometimes other people’s jam games, and get disappointed when things don’t continue after the jam, but I seem to be something of an outlier). It’s my impression that other jams have had similar “null results” when it comes to whether they build up a sense community among TTRPG designers.

A more nuanced revision

In philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art, which I talked about in a previous post, he notes the phenomenon that people don’t get invested in game-goals outside of the game. He illustrates it with this point: playing basketball doesn’t make you crave getting balls through hoops, otherwise you could just take a ladder out to the court after hours and pass the ball through the hoop over and over again. The thing you might crave is scoring a basket, something that can only happen within a game. However, it’s not uncommon for the things that are incidentally valuable in a game to transcend the game context. Skill at throwing, general athleticism, and situational awareness are all valuable within the game of basketball, and it’s easy to imagine a player’s investment in playing basketball translating into caring about those outside the game in a way you can’t with “balls passing through hoops”.

My read on that is that analogous to physically setting up a boardgame: there’s a mental “set up / tear down” process that happens to start / end your participation in the game. When you enter into the game you adopt the local values of the game and care about the rule mechanisms, and when you leave it you stop caring about those things. But the human mind is messy: we’re good at tearing down the things we explicitly put in place and the stuff directly connected to them, but not the second-order connections they made while they were in place. We don’t care about the points themselves outside of a game but we often do care about the satisfying experience of scoring points.

So it we take this more nuanced idea of how the “magic circle” works and look at how jams are traditionally structured, we’ll see that making games and interacting with the other designers is almost always directly tied to explicit structural elements of the jam. Often “complete a game by the deadline” is the only structural element! So my hypothesis is that it may be possible to structure jams differently so that the elements that we might want to inculcate are more obliquely situated and therefore less likely to be “mentally torn down” at the end of the jam.

OK, smart guy, how do you do it?

Even though I think it ought to be possible, I’m not 100% confident I know how to do it. A lot of my ideas on the subject relate to variations on the anonymous collaboration of Threeforged, or possibly trying to incorporate game design or game reviewing into a “constrained communication” structure a la Dixit or Mysterium. One huge problem with that is participation and attrition: how do you make multi-round processes work if there’s a good chance people will drop out from round to round over the days or weeks that a jam like that would take? (And, from a purely personal POV, I feel like I’m terrible at convincing people to do things even when they’re good ideas, so it’s hard to stay motivated on working on this as a design problem since I probably couldn’t get people to participate even if I developed a brilliant structure). There are probably other challenges, as well. But it still seems like a tantalizing possibility to me, it would be cool if there was a way to use game design to make design jams do something that people want them to do that they don’t seem to be doing well.