Hello all you Epic Table fans out there! I’m Tucker, and it’s great to meet you! The Paladins of Podcast have recruited me to the party to write a little for the website, so you’ll be seeing more of me around here soon. Look for new content every Monday. Today, I want to start with a topic near and dear to my heart: gaming thoughtfully.
What Is Gaming Thoughtfully?
You heard it here last: tabletop gaming is an act of creative expression. When we play tabletop games, we’re constantly creating. The most obvious example is the story we write together, of course, but so is character creation. So is picking our spell lists or weapon type—choosing the lens through which our characters want to interact with the world. (Literally, for all you modern, cyberpunk, or sci-fi snipers out there!) Every choice we make is a creative one, and creative choices are acts of expression.
Not convinced? Think about the Academy Awards. Sure, there are awards for acting, writing, and directing. But there are also awards for costume design, sound design, editing. There’s a lot that goes into any film, and that’s just as true for tabletop gaming. Every choice we make about our characters, settings, or worlds is an act of creative expression.
Okay, gaming is creative. So what’s gaming thoughtfully? Well, gaming itself is an act of creative expression. Gaming thoughtfully means thinking about it. That… probably doesn’t seem particularly groundbreaking, so let me explain.
Being Thoughtful About Gaming
Gaming can be seen as a series of choices. Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: the Gathering, defines games as requiring agency: “A game needs to have decisions, and those decisions must matter.” (Sidenote: I actually strenuously disagree with other elements of Rosewater’s definition, but that’s probably for a future post.) When we express ourselves in games, we’re doing so in response to choices. As I said, every choice we make is an expression of creative self.
Gaming thoughtfully is thinking about those choices and why we make them in a deep, meaningful way. Why are we choosing to creatively express ourselves in the ways that we are? Why are our creative choices leading us in certain directions, down certain paths? What can they tell us about ourselves as creators?
Now, I can already hear the sound of millions of keyboards clattering to disagree with me. (Okay, maybe just hundreds, but it never hurts to be optimistic.) Something along the lines of: “This is ridiculous! Not everything we do in games is significant! Sometimes it just us screwing around! The curtains are fucking blue!”
And my reply to that is: you are absolutely correct.
Gaming Thoughtfully About Nothing
The first and most important thing to acknowledge in this process is that sometimes, as Freud almost certainly did not actually say, a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes, the creative expression we are making is to simply portray something rather than load it with deeper symbolism. We are not, in fact, consciously making a statement about ourselves when doing it.
But the second and most important thing to do is to distinguish when that’s the case. There’s a difference between coming to that conclusion after thinking about the question and never thinking about it at all. This is a huge part of gaming thoughtfully: consciously deciding whether something has symbolism or not after considering whether it might. It is absolutely crucial not to write expressions off without examining them.
And then, of course, there’s the next-level question: why is this something that’s not meaningful to us? What does it say about our creative expression that we don’t consider this something symbolic or important? As science tells us, a negative result is still important data. That’s absolutely crucial when establishing patterns of absence.
Patterns, by the way, are what it’s all about.
Thoughtful Gaming Patterns
One dot is just a dot. Two dots form the ends of a line. Three dots form the sides of a triangle. Being thoughtful about gaming is all about seeing the patterns and repetitions—or lack thereof—in the creative choices we make at the table.
Let’s look at an easy example. Say Joan always plays super buff physical characters. She maxes her Strength and Toughness stats; she’s always picking the tanky archetypes; her first go-to in every situation is to take the physical route. If Joan starts gaming thoughtfully, she notices this pattern. It gives her some insight into how she expresses herself creatively: by telling stories about feats of physical power.
What does Joan take away from this? Maybe nothing, and that’s fine. Games don’t have to be constant moments of self-discovery. But maybe Joan realizes that these are the kinds of stories she enjoys the most, and resolves to follow the Olympics next year. Maybe she realizes that she’s filling a lack in her own life and signs up for a gym. Or maybe she discovers that she’s been taught that heroes have to be strong to be heroes and resolves to prove that idea wrong. Who knows? Only her. But the point is that she gets the opportunity to figure it out.
And again: maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe Joan just likes playing games where the Strength and Toughness stats are overpowered. (Next level question: why does she gravitate towards those games?) But the point is she was thoughtful in her inquiry. She engaged with her creativity and came to a conclusion about it. Even if the result was negative, she gained a result by gaming thoughtfully. And that’s what’s important.
Gaming Thoughtfully and Comfortably
And now, the elephant in the room.
Gaming thoughtfully requires thinking critically about the ways we express ourselves creatively. It means we take a hard look at our own patterns of behavior and ways we experiment through playing games. It means, in other words, that we have to feel comfortable with really taking a hard look at ourselves and being honest about what we see.
Frankly, this is going to be very hard to do if you are currently gaming with assholes.
I’m writing a blog post, so it’s pretty hard to get more up on a soapbox than I already am. But here, let me stick another box of soap on the stack. What’s an asshole in this case? An asshole is someone who makes you feel small for making a certain creative choice. And to be clear: this is not one of those times where I’m using “creative” as distinguished from “mechanical.” I really mean a person who tries to cut you down for choosing things in games.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I have to explain to anyone who these people are. We’ve all encountered them. They’re the gamers who crack mocking jokes about the backstory you lovingly crafted, or who dismiss your character build as “totally nonoptimal.” They’re the gamers who fake yawn every time you start explaining the world’s history. And they’re absolutely the gamers who snigger and wiggle their eyebrows whenever you sit down to play a character with a different gender identity than your own.
These people are the enemies of gaming thoughtfully. And—my soapbox here—they shouldn’t be tolerated at a gaming table.
Gaming is a time for play. Play, as humans, is when we experiment with things in order to see how we react to them. People who are going to mock your creative expression during play are destructive assholes. You’re better off without them. Your games certainly are.
Game thoughtfully. Game comfortably. Don’t game with assholes.
Final Thought(fully)
Gaming thoughtfully is hard. It’s work. It requires practice to do effectively. It’s done best in dialogue with others, which requires terrifying amounts of vulnerability. For all those reasons, this is not a manifesto demanding that everyone start doing it tomorrow.
This is instead a recommendation. Try it out. Start small. The next time you make a decision, think, “Huh. Why did I do that? What does it say?” Take a little time to examine your motives. You’ll be surprised at what you might find—and how often you start doing it after.
And hey: thanks for sticking with me through the post. Feel free to drop me an email if you’ve got thoughts. I’d love to hear about your own revelations from gaming thoughtfully. Look for more musings about RPGs—as well as news and even the occasional review—coming every Monday. It’s great to be here, and I’ll see you ’round the Table.
The contents of this post are © 2024 H. Tucker Cobey. All rights reserved.
