Tabletop designers are making players cry, and working to keep them safe
Tabletop designers are making players cry, and working to keep them safe
Tabletop designers are making players cry, and working to keep them safe
September 12, 2022
By Keerthi Sridharan
Summary
People are falling in love with tabletop games that make them cry.
I recently talked to renowned tabletop designers Jay Dragon, Kazumi Chin, and Rae Nedjadi, about games letting us transmute trauma, why we love crying at the table, and how to build safe play spaces from the ground up.
The point of a TTRPG is that it reacts to you, making it a unique avenue of play; video games and classic board games stick to a set of rules, possible choices, and known entities, with little wiggle room, says Dragon: "A video game is this object that exists, and your engagement with it can be one-sided, but with a tabletop game, ideally it's something that is actively responding to the things that you're doing."
"Especially in recent years," Nedjadi says, "TTRPGs really embody this idea of all of us trying to take care of each other and make sure that we're all safe." That's not to say that video games can't promote themes of community and care, but tabletop games give players the agency to decide what kind of game they want to play - and what kinds of portals they want to open together.
How can games that promise to keep players safe deal with issues of racism, homophobia, and disability? And, by extension, why do players actively choose to engage in games that deal with these themes?
The incorporation of these themes into tabletop games can also result in players engaging with them in surprising ways, offering alternate ways of understanding and processing - opening portals, once again, into new ways of being and feeling.
"It's thinking about how we create games where more happens to allow us to be vulnerable and to play in the ways that we want to play."I often enter into games with strangers, being unable to fully partake, because I do not know that [they] know how to do safety.
Reference
Sridharan, K. (2022, September 12). Tabletop designers are making players cry, and working to keep them safe. Polygon. Retrieved September 19, 2022, from https://www.polygon.com/23331167/tabletop-games-make-you-cry-keep-you-safe