The Language of Design: Worlds in Conversation

November 26, 2024 Summer 2024

Hosted in the 2024 Summer course catalog, “Worlds in Conversation: Tabletop Storytelling Games” was a foray into worldbuilding as an artistic and political practice through the lens of analog RPGs. In this blog post, Assistant Teachers Caro Asercion and Rufus “Weaver” Walker reflect on class learnings, putting them into a conversation of their own.

CARO: There are so many places that we could begin a discussion about this class, but perhaps it’s easiest to start from the beginning. When you and Everest and I were all brainstorming the syllabus for this class, what excited you most about teaching a class on tabletop storytelling games?

WEAVER: I was excited to teach design. You can teach it in any medium, but I don’t think I could name a better one than tabletop games.

Learning how to design—rather than learning a specific discipline, like say, graphic design—is the art of learning how to have an active role in your material world. To design well, you have to know what you like and why you like it; you have to know why things are the way they are and you have to have an idea of how they could be instead. It’s really an approach to art making that demands specificity.

On the other hand, tabletop games are a medium that defies specificity. There’s no definition of what a game is, what play is, or even what a story is that we can give students that does not immediately fall apart. Tabletop games can look like almost anything. Because of this, it’s possible to design a shirt without having an opinion on why you like wearing clothes, but it’s not possible to design a tabletop game without having an opinion on why you like playing games.

It’s a medium that gives early designers an opportunity to make radical, experimental design jumps from hour one. That’s an opportunity I think this cohort really showed off.

CARO: Game design calls for a spirit of curious inquiry. It demands a willingness to grapple not only with content, but with form—which is why I was so impressed by the eagerness with which our students rose to the challenge.

Our class participants brought an enormous range of experience. Some were extremely familiar with the tabletop scene; others worked in adjacent fields like screenwriting or improv; still others brought in skills that were less overtly related to storytelling, like environmental studies, textile design, zinemaking, linguistics. In spite of this, a sentiment that nearly all of our students voiced on the first day: “I feel like this class was tailored directly to my interests.” I think it’s very reflective of SFPC’s community and audiences—but I think it’s also indicative of a larger cultural desire to grapple with this idea of worldbuilding, within this current social and political moment.

WEAVER: I deeply agree. It is easy to say, “people were excited about game design because people like games.” Or even just “well, games are fun.” But actually I think people are excited about designing their own games because they aren’t satisfied with the gameplay that’s out there. Gamification rules the world, but it’s the same types of games everywhere, the same characters in every game, and more than that these game structures have real consequences without producing real meaning. Games are the fabric of our world, and people, our students among them, want an active role in shaping their worlds. In many ways, all game design is worldbuilding.

I could name a hundred examples of the way this came up this summer, but I’m more curious if there was a moment of naming the world in the form of a game that really stands out to you?

CARO: So many moments to choose from! But the most obvious, and most enjoyable for me, was the way we bumped up against the constraints of the classroom, and turned them into constraints of play.

The container of the classroom has certain guide rails which are rigid by necessity: scheduled course length, a predetermined syllabus, the technological limitations of Zoom rooms and Discord servers. Those guide rails led to some moments of friction—not bad friction, to be clear, but friction nevertheless—but we found very quickly we could engage with those guide rails quite similarly to the ways we might engage with the rules text of a game, and began treating them as such.

Consider one question that came up frequently in the Wednesday course section: “We only have an hour to discuss this week’s readings, but we want to go deeper”. Time is just as finite a resource in the classroom as it is when you’re scheduling a game session. Okay, well, can we optimize our use of breakout rooms? Can we hold two concurrent conversations in the Zoom chat? Can we set up threads in the Discord server to continue the discussion after the fact? Can we catalog all the references and allusions that folks named, if students want to do more reading on their own time? These solutions aren’t novel in the virtual classroom, but we discovered them alongside our students over the course of the class, as we learned each other’s teaching and discussion and communication styles.

WEAVER: And that problem solving spirit really carried up until the final moments. A lot of our penultimate class periods were spent playtesting—I think we had been a little uncertain about that—but you could really see how that time paid off. I wasn’t in the final presentation for your section of the class, but I can say almost every student who presented in mine had at least one moment where they said “oh this was an idea that came from my classmate x” or “my playgroup and I worked this solution out together”.

It’s one thing to sit in an office hour and talk through a design process with a student, and another to see proof that those design skills are getting used and built upon and put into conversation. So much of game design is simply having the power to go “what if the world was like this instead of like that”—and what could be more crucial to learn and experiment with right now. I really am so proud of them.

CARO: And to watch that design practice emerge in a way that showcased each student’s individual talents as well—new perspectives, put into conversation with pre existing skills. What a joy. What a privilege!

WEAVER: It really was a privilege. And I’m really excited to see the games, art, and worlds that these students will go on to build with the tools we began to learn together. But for that we’ll just have to wait and see.