I did not fully complete my Vegas After Midnight writing assignment last week, regrettably. However, the fact that I dug in and tried to complete it – and actually got a lot of it down on digital paper – means I was still able to accomplish the actual goal of the exercise, which was to put VAM back onto the front burner of my creative stove.
As a result, I’ve got several creator/writer musings and mini-epiphanies swirling around in my brain, and I’d like to process some of those over the next few days by sharing them here.
The first mini-epiphany I’d like to spotlight is this: last week I realized that I am no longer creating a game that I want to RUN. Instead, I am creating a game that I want to PLAY.
I’m not sure how to unpack that yet. I’m also not sure if the nuanced change-of-approach will make any material difference to the end-user, for that matter. I just know that my personal relationship to my own creation has evolved from “I wanna codify this thing so that I can run it for people and get accolades as a world-creator and a good GM” into “I wanna play this game. I wanna hand this inspirational/evocative skeleton of a setting off to somebody like Rich Rogers or Judd Karlman and sit my butt down with some of our friends, make some characters, plant some situations, and create some damn fine fiction together.”
Don’t get me wrong, in my opinion this is a good thing. I think. Hmmm.
You know, it turns out that I’m writing this while the whole thought process is still very unsettled/unfinished in my mind, and I doubt that I’m going to actually draw any conclusion here and now. The “theory” promised in the title isn’t cooked yet, and won’t appear here after all. So possibly I might be frustrating some of you who’ve read this far into the post and you’re discovering that I’m not really going to make any kind of useful point, because I don’t even know where this line of thought is going yet myself. If that’s you, I apologize for wasting a few minutes of your time. But if you happen to be someone who is on some level grokking what I’m dwelling upon (even as I’m not sure I grok it myself) then please, feel free to reach out and thwack me on the head. Maybe we can unpack some of this together.
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