Let's Keep It On The Down-Low

Hello my dear readers, fans, friends, and foes,

I've been in Alabama at Auburn College as a visiting writer, and I've been working on a new article. It's gonna be really big and explosive when it comes out, one of those real passionate calls to action that I know is gonna get everyone to start talking. I would like to release it early for my patrons (and I know that having all your eyes on it asking me questions about it will help me clarify my thoughts), but I also know that it's gonna be a bombshell when it hits bluesky and twitter and all that, and my impulses demand that I don't diffuse the explosion.

So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna share the article with you here and you're going to read it and then you're going to be come over to the Creekside Community Center and talk about it. If the article compels you to write a counter-article, or to compose a thread, or to make a game, or otherwise publicly respond — that's awesome! Please bottle up all that energy and release it next week when I am actually confidently done with the article.

You can tell your friends privately that this Patreon is cool and worth reading (obviously I won't stop you) but please avoid throwing around the terms I put forward here or sharing this article in other Discord servers until ... just give me a week, okay? I just want to avoid putting my foot in my mouth, especially since this is such a culmination of what I've been working on up to this point.

Obviously I can't stop you if you decide to break this soft embargo, especially since there's like 700 of you and I cannot confidently frieNDA my entire Patreon. But I would really appreciate it if you played along with me!

Okay, enough said...

The Expressionist Games Manifesto

"Work! Intoxication! Brain-racking! Chewing, eating, gorging, rooting up! Rapturous birth pangs! Jabbing of the brush, preferably right through the canvas. Trampling on paint tubes."

— Max Pechstein, when asked to define Expressionism

There's a moment when we play where the imagination aches against the confines of its cage. A character feels a longing for a world they'll never have, a hopeful opportunity goes awry through no one's fault, a relationship collapses just out of sight. There is the sensation of something real, something powerful, something more, and yet the game we play keeps us from reaching out and touching it. I became familiar with this sensation on accident, but the more I steered my play to seek it out the more I found it hidden away. These games showed me the opportunity for inarticulate passion boxed in by strict and exhausting social expectations, mirroring the social conditions I found myself struggling against in my day-to-day life. I wanted more. I started writing games pushing deeper and deeper into this space, and I found fellow creatives in all corners of the medium doing the same. They all grappled with the same uncertainty I faced — how could we tell others what we were looking for if we didn't even know what they were called? 

I call them expressionist games.

This is a call to action that seeks to provide shared language and identity to creatives who are working toward these goals and direction for people who are interested in exploring this space. In this essay I will provide a definition and framework for the idea of expressionist game design — what these games are as objects, as ritual experiences, and as a movement.

Expressionist games are negotiated experiences shaped by the unresolvable tension between mechanically-imposed external worlds and passionate inarticulate internal worlds.

Why Expressionism

Expressionism is an early 20th century art movement that emerged in Germany at the start of the 20th century. Expressionist art depicts the world from subjective viewpoints, using bold and dynamic brush strokes to articulate emotions and perspectives, prioritizing emotional meaning over objective truth. American Expressionist theater often explores the tension between the emotional perspectives of its characters and the mechanical factory-like reality they're trapped in. Machinal by Sophie Treadwell depicts a young woman struggling to maintain any illusion of sanity in the face of a ceaseless mechanistic set of social expectations. The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill tells the story of a factory worker, previously lost in the flow-state of his machine, alienated from modernity and forced to seek out new systems of self-definition.

Games contain both the capacity for tremendous shared artistic expression and the toolkit necessary to inspire obsession. The flow state of many videogames mirrors the mental violence of slot machines and Tiktok, slowly extracting money from those who engage with it. People seek games to "turn their brains off" while existing in a society that pushes them to turn their brain off at all times. Games culture at large encourages conflict aversion, author-worship, incentive-chasing, and a stifling of creative capacity. The 21st century has exposed the base contradictions at the heart of its existence, and the phantasm of our cultural perception struggles under the weight of its heaving crumbling form.

I call the movement expressionism to historically situate the concerns of modern game designers in the framework and culture of their predecessors grappling with the same challenges, while also emphasizing how expressionist game designers are ultimately doing something quite different from what has come before them. I found in conversations with many of the designers engaged in expressionist games that they were influenced (either directly or indirectly) by expressionist art and theater. My parents are expressionists, and the way my dad and I would talk about art when I was younger heavily influences by perspective on games to this day.

It's worth saying that my practice is centered in tabletop RPGs, but I've written this to be inclusive of any analog game (including board games and larps). I'm certain this can be applied, although perhaps through a different lens, to videogames. I align myself with a history of shared design goals, alongside various writers in the OSR, post-Forge, lyric game, and board game traditions.

Critical Qualities of Expressionist Games

In an expressionist game, every character possesses a rich and complex inner world. They are compelled by passionate desires, driven to seek out all manners of personal pleasure, and have a "true" version of themself they long to access. This is treated as true about characters regardless of the amount of focus they're given by the players. Even if a character appears to be a flat stereotype at onset, there is a shared understanding in play that one could pick them apart and discover hidden depths. This richness and humanity is left completely unarticulated by the rules of the game.

The rules cannot describe or depict the inner worlds of these characters. They are fruitful voids, implied by the rules but left undescribed. The game-text may provide tools to descriptively imagine these inner worlds (through lists of possible goals, advice on articulating minor characters, or space for players to self-describe their characters) but the game does not and cannot enforce any particular interior perspective through its rules. 

Instead, the rules abstractly simulate the social reality of the characters. Rules in an expressionist game tell you who your character is expected to be, how society sees them, and how they ought to behave. Rules define the cultural norms and structures enforced upon the characters by themselves, by their communities, and by their world. These are simulations, focusing on representing the subjective structure of these social realities, even when that reality is unfair, unbalanced, or narratively uninteresting. The characters are frequently aware of their position in life and the way the rules work upon them, even if it's only metaphorical or abstract. "Power gaming" in an expressionist game means pursuing the goals set out by the social reality of the characters.

The rules are mediated through friction between the text and the players. The text of an expressionist game is frequently written from a hostile or facetious perspective. Frequently the line between endogenous, diegetic, and hypodiegetic rules are blurred. The text insists on all of them with an equal weight, and leaves it open to the players to challenge and argue with the rules. In a post-lyric game way, expressionist games will insist upon impossible, contradictory, uncomfortable, or confusing rules — leaving players in a position to figure out how to build a game from the materials they've been given. 

The players alternate between experiencing bleed, alienation, and tension. Players desire to be fully emotionally present with their characters, and for their characters to be emotionally honest with each other. The rules prevent this from occurring, alienating the players from their characters, and their characters from the world. Characters will face pressure to engage with social systems that do not align with the player's perspectives, morality, or desires. "Optimal gameplay" frequently involves rejecting one's inner life and conforming to social expectations. Dissonance defines the tension between the narrative of how the characters want to relate to others and the rules enforcing how the characters must relate to others.

The "expression" of the game comes from the way players are forced to frame their emotions in response to the stimuli they experience from the game. As a designer, you are different from historical expressionists because rules function as a limited palette. You must create the conditions under which expression occurs.

Secondary Qualities of Expressionist Games

There are a number of qualities that expressionist games can have that I find really interesting, but do not believe are necessary for a call to action around expressionism. These are:

• An inability to resolve the tension within the rules of the game, requiring players to break the rules to have any chance to achieve their player goals.

• Use of unexpected or unfamiliar game components, such as candles, spare game boards, or plungers.

• Encouraging players to pro-socially argue with each other, "rules lawyer" the text constructively, and engage in interpretive conflict without disrupting the game.

• Cunning use of formatting, layout, art, and visuals to enable the friction to operate throughout the text.

• Ambivalence towards intended player actions, with rules that might or might not get broken or multiple presented player goals.

• Irreverence towards established mediums, combining tools from RPGs, board games, LARPs, and videogames freely to achieve particular mechanical effects. 

• (in an RPG context) player characters who are no different from anyone else, or a diegetic explanation for why they're different from everyone else.

• (in a board game context) distance between the immediate actions possible for players to take and the ultimate goals of the game, or even a complete disinterest in "winning" and "losing."

• The neurodivergant, the disabled, the erotic, the queer, the transfeminized, the racialized, the subaltern.

Examples and Counter-Examples

Some particular design choices in various current games (which might or might not consider themselves expressionist) that work towards the goals I'm laying out here include:

• Basically everything going on with Triangle Agency by Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland, but especially the way the text demands to not be interpreted and rules which can only be accessed by breaking the rules of the game.

• The titular mollies in Molly House by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle operate non-transactionally as people represented by playing cards dancing their way in and out of people's lives in various positions on the table.

• The way it is possible for virtues and vices in Pendragon by Greg Stafford to strip away character agency through social expectations of how best to perform your knightly qualities.

• Zedeck Siew's blogpost on How To Play The Revolution is itself a manifesto in approaching OSR games expressionistically.

• The roles and gender presentation of sexual violence in Praise The Hawkmoth King by Sage The Anagogue as an imposed social system the players are struggling to reconcile.

• The poetic interludes of Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine by Jenna Moran represents the rare mechanic expressionistically gesturing towards the inner world which does not drown it out.

• The prompts in Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings in which vampires will unconsciously replicate violent systems due to the hunger governing them.

• The expectations around gender and limited time for social self-expression in my upcoming game Seven-Part Pact.

Elements of game design which, while potentially interesting and worthwhile, do not speak towards expressionism include:

• The divide in Apocalypse World by Meguey and Vincent Baker between PCs with playbooks and NPCs with threat rules. (This would be expressionist if there was a socially determined reason why characters were divided in this way.)

• Conditions in Masks by Brendan Conway acting as emotional states imposed by the rules onto the interiority of the character. (This would be expressionist if the players treated these emotions as coming from an external or social source and as disorienting for the characters.)

• The way Wanderhome approaches the absence of violence in most of its playbooks, enabling characters who completely fail to struggle against violence in any way. (Wanderhome becomes more expressionist the more you lean into the Veteran playbook, who struggles under social pressure in a way the other playbooks don't, and if you engage in Wanderhome in an explicitly puppyplay style.)

An explicitly non-expressionist game can be played in an expressionist style by emphasizing the inarticulate inner worlds of the characters, identifying how the rules shape and restrict those inner lives, and playing explicitly into the game space where this restriction occurs until the game struggles and fails. 

I Am An Expressionist

I play games in an expressionist style. I write games hoping and praying other players will play them expressionistically. The past several years have been shaped by a slow and gradual progression towards expressionism, as each game I've designed has cleared the way to enable my ability to articulate this desire. I know other designers feel the same way. 

I refuse to make slot machine games. I refuse to make games that turn people's brains off. I refuse to make games that people can insert their OCs into and escape inside without struggle. I want games that challenge me, that provoke me, that force me to fight against the harsh confines of society. I want to rattle the bars of my proverbial cage. I want games that I can argue with, games that trust me to read them closely, games that demand I think through them. I want to realize I'm something I'm not, get embarrassed, get stupid. I want to lose and lose and lose and still feel like I'm going somewhere. I want games that make me work for the taste of it. I want to practice dissenting against bullshit systems and bullshit laws. I want games that make me bleed and games that make me stare across the gulf of human comprehension and I want games that make me appreciate the power that constructs every square inch of my life. I want to fight, piss, claw, bite, and love!