Paul CzegeHow about some #RPGTheory?
Game design, at its essence, is about asking people to do things that they may not be able to do easily or well.
Acquire is about asking people to do a certain kind of narrow margin profiteering that lots of people will struggle to do well.
So you'll never see me say my games are unplayable, or aren't meant to be played. They are absolutely meant to be played.
I've asked people to playtest games with me at conventions that I'm embarrassed about in retrospect. Extemporal. The Game In Last Appearances #4. The Undoers. A few others. But not because they weren't playable.
Even Rules for Makers I think is playable. An instruction like "see that you never stopped aching from beauty" may be hard, but there's people who will do it if they try.
I'm embarrassed and apologetic about those playtests because the games didn't have worthy outcomes. The games asked for time and effort from players and then didn't repay them with anything worthwhile.
There's this thing in the hobby where gamer conversation finds games to stigmatize as unplayable. It's an easy criticism to sling around. Perhaps calling your own games unplayable is an effort to protect them from it. But that playability conversation is stupid.
The real conversation is looking at a game and being able to perceive if its procedures will produce a worthy outcome. But no one has this conversation because it's fucking hard. Beyond Extemporal, The Game In Last Appearances #4, and The Undoers, games that were...
... embarrassingly bad, I've asked people to playtest lots of other games that were just flawed, disappointing, and not fun. It's super, super hard to look at a game and perceive if its procedures will produce a worthy outcome. I didn't know these games...
... wouldn't deliver anything worthy of the effort of playing them.
But that's the ability we should be developing. That's the conversation we should be having. Not one about whether games are playable or not.
If we can't have conversations about game procedures and worthy outcomes then we're mired in conversation about superficialities like production quality and self-defeatism about playability.