Games Are Dangerous

Posted on May 29, 2025 by dconstructions

Wittgenstein was correct when he said that language is a game and games are about language, and the easiest way to see this is by watching the wonderful British show Taskmaster. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a panel show where five comedians get given bizarre and ridiculous instructions which they must feverishly try to attempt and be measured in their success by various arbitrary standards. Inevitably, nearly every single task is open to some element of interpretation and whenever the participants ask questions the official task deliverer says the catchphrase: “all the information’s on the task”, which it never is.

*A show that will never work in America because Americans have no irony.*

Games are often described as being both freeing because they are not real but also freeing because they are – for once – clear and delineated. In real life we can never know if our car is better than our neighbours, if we are truly good, if we should have another beer or if we should go kill and eat the person who cut us off in traffic but in games we have a magical system that tells us all these things are possible/permitted, and these other things are not possible/not permitted, and at the end we will know for sure who is best and who is not. Which is relaxing, in the same way that doing a sum is less fraught than writing an essay.

All of that is sort of true and almost entirely false.

That is not to say – as some hacky game designers have to my face – that there’s no craft or diligence to our field. It is our job to design rules that are clear and beg no questions, and to be unclear is to fail as game designers. Yes every player can eat all the chess pieces and they maintain that freedom, but you’re not to blame if you begin with “place the pieces on the board”. You also are allowed to make some base assumptions, like that the person reading the rules is also going to explain those rules to the rest of the players, or what “shuffle” means.

Although that said: I used to keep a tally of every time a computer game didn’t say anywhere that you should use ASDF to move because how would anyone know that? So even these assumptions are moving targets as literacy changes. We are always engaging with an audience and the audience is always changing. In this, game designers are like comedians: there is little that is always perfectly funny in all times and all places because audiences change. This is true in the micro (tonight’s group at the game table, tonight’s audience) and the macro (Western hobby gamers, American tv viewers). A comedian I know once told me about how his Amy Winehouse jokes were considered hilarious until she died at which point he instantly retired them all, because humans are like that. We – all of us – had felt okay laughing at her addiction until we didn’t.

It’s a potent example because games are exactly as fragile. Huizinga invented the idea of the magic circle: once we all collective consent to play a game together, we enter the circle where normal social rules vanish and we can lie (bluff), betray, compete ferociously and attack with violence; we can be deeply antisocial and deeply antagonistic and it’s all fine …

… until it isn’t.

There are times in Taskmaster where it’s pretty clear that the players aren’t having fun and are close to what in computer games is called the rage-quit, or they just give up trying, or are otherwise upset. Consent must be FRIES – freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic and specific, and lots of games make all of those things impossible. It is hard to know what is going to happen in many games and how they are going to make you feel and the rage-quit is just one example of rescinding consent. Nowadays in TTRPGs we talk about the open table which means we (try to) discard the obvious social pressure to “keep playing” – you can walk away at any moment.

The anti-racism educator Jane Elliot runs a savage day-long simulation where blue-eyed people are singled out, bullied and subjugated. Sometimes she lets people leave when they become overwhelmed. Sometimes she doesn’t, because black people cannot leave racism. There is an incredible phone game where you are given a little chicken to care for and then sixty seconds later the chicken is killed. You do not consent to that, because if you did the game would not work: the violent shock reminds you that every single day millions of chickens are born then slaughtered in sixty seconds when the machine determines them to be male. The lack of consent makes the game work. In 1940, feeling he had done enough gaming of art, the surrealist Marcel Duchamp abandoned art to become a (terrible) professional chess player. In 1966 he returned to art with a piece called etant donnes. The work invented installation art and forces the viewer to participate (so it is a game) by walking through smaller and smaller rooms until one approaches two eye holes. One is compelled to look through and is met with the sight of looking into a the genitals of a young naked woman. You become complicit in a simulated violation (or are you, as her expression and pose makes it unclear) – and the lack of consent is the point.

Games are more participatory art forms – maybe the most participatory – and therefore they violate and mess with consent far more than other forms of art. And this doesn’t just happen between the designer and the players or between the rules and the players: it happens between the players themselves. In both areas, consent is not clear and is constantly negotiated, and so are the exact nature of the rules and their edge cases. And – and this is really important – even when the rules are clear, social negotiation is still going on. We are never truly in the magic circle at all, and we are certainly never only in the orthogame. As an example, consider a small child coming up to bat in cricket (or baseball). Naturally we bowl slowly or underarm, not how we would bowl to an adult. We do not play by the rules, which tell us our goal is to try to get the other person out. Of course, for some people, games exist precisely so they can be anti-social and luxuriate in “wickedness”, or at least in obedience; to some this is not permissible. We MUST bowl as hard as possible at the child, or how will they learn what a game is? When I was about eight years old my father taught me how to play patience (aka solitaire, or Klondike) and after a few games I ran to him jubilantly to tell him that I had “won” the game (which rarely happens in that version) and, I added “I only cheated once”. He shook his head and told me that it didn’t count. It hit me like a blow. But I also – now – see his point. And all of us likely have a moment where we too would yield to the rules. If the child in the cricket example was saying his being caught “didn’t count”, we would insist on the rules kicking in then – or maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe it depends if we thought they had had a fair go first. As another example, a gentleman I know insists that when we play scrabble, we can’t use any “weird” words. When we point out that that’s an impossibly vague description, he gets cross because of course we know what a weird word is. When we suggest adding an authority like a dictionary, he gets cross because we should just be able to know.

And the point is, as much as we pretend that games are these places where these complex, individual beliefs about which rules to follow and how much disappear thanks to a strong structure being opposed from the outside, in fact games are the opposite: BECAUSE they require us to constantly negotiate how much we’re going to obey arbitrary outside rules, games are sometimes just as or even MORE complex and tricky.

Now all my previous talk about Skinner boxes is to bring me to this, which I guess will be next week’s blog: how do we negotiate the inherent savagery of games, as we learn about how games are masked rituals that reveal our bloodlust, but also learn that maybe entering those zones are not something that actually helps us learn or change who we are? And how do we use what we know about how to change behaviour by using game elements (and using play) to perhaps change what people think games are, and maybe even change who people are? Is the key to the glorious Sexy Communist Future of Star Trek perhaps a world where there are no games as we know them, because they’re creepy? That’s not just rhetorical: I’ve always been keen to defend games when they are accused of being unimportant, but one must always be ready – at least philosophically – to consider that one’s life work is monstrous and must be destroyed. I think right now is a good time in our culture to start finding out.

(I am increasingly disenchanted with and horrified by what social media does to people and culture but I hope blogging continues and I hope I can find someway for all of this to be read by someone. I am resisting putting these on substack or Medium as yet. Maybe one day someone will turn some of the hit ones into a book. I live, as always, with the dream of an amanuensis.)

The X Card Will Not Save You

Posted on June 5, 2024 by dconstructions

In 2020, running a game on camera in his popular Actual Play “Far Verona”, game master Adam Koebel described a sex crime happening to one of his players’ characters. A robot PC had gone to see a mechanic, who introduced a technological process that forced the robot to orgasm – for the pleasure of the mechanic. It was not something the player wanted or appreciated; the other players also found it unsettling to say the least. It is not surprising that the game master was male and the player female.

The game and the stream was shut down and Koebel has since mostly been out of the industry or keeping a low profile. In one of the few statements he made about the incident, Koebel explained that the cause of the problem was a lack of “in the moment” tools for controlling content.

This post isn’t about Koebel, although one has to ask how anyone could be a professional game master in 2020 and be that careless and cavalier. Or let such things go to air, because it was apparently not streamed live (and is still online, oddly). The combination of getting into that situation and not taking particular responsibility for the subject choice could suggest that safety tools would have been little help here. If post-facto editing didn’t suggest not to broadcast this moment which was if nothing else in bad taste for the audience, I imagine that the game master would not have checked consent regardless of priming, and may have overridden their use if engaged.

I am a great believer in systems and systemic approaches. I used to work in public health after all. Individual bad actors are not why safety problems occur, and only through properly adjusting everyone’s approach can we change a culture. Safety is a discipline of forethought that as can only learn through practice and rehearsal. This is why we do fire drills. Why we have seatbelts and speed limits and road rules and driving tests.

But just as nobody would treat a car roaring along at the speed limit as inherently risk-free, systems alone do not make us safe. Bad actors exist, but more importantly mistakes occur. No system is perfect and certainly no system allows us to turn off our brains and coast. But we do know safety processes can cause the latter. People will allow their dogs to act more irresponsibly at the dog park, or stop watching the dogs welfare, because there is an idea of safety inside the fence. I work as a dog trainer: safety and safety culture is my business.

As well as dog training and public health I have some experience in the kink subculture, where safety is the most important factor of all. Everyone in kink has some experience with the safety issues of kink. And everyone I’ve ever met has a story of safety being violated and tools failing to be applied correctly.

One of the biggest safety tools used right now in roleplaying games is the X card. Formally coined by John Stavropoulos in 2013, an X-card is a way for players at a table to indicate they are uncomfortable with the current nature of a scene by touching or picking up the card. The advantage of the card is it can be activated without words, which can be a crucial thing for those with social difficulties or if actual traumas are engaged or simply because it’s hard to say no, stop. The X card is a great idea. But I also think it is on its own not enough. It is at best incomplete safety culture as it is currently used. X cards are slapped on tables as a prophylactic, as if they are infallible. They may have short explanations but that’s not the same as proper training in their use. They have been used as a signal of virtue rather than a tool: games without them must be recklessly, brutally unsafe; games with them must be totally safe. And we act like they solve everything.

Understand that I’m not saying x-cards are useless or always make us complacent. But I have seen them and other tools fail. They will inevitably always fail. If we act like they are the beginning and end of safety culture, and a pathway to virtue, we’ve learnt nothing and have done nothing. Too often the x-card is not a part of good safety culture, but exists instead of one.

Safety culture is the name for the discipline of building environments which minimize our exposure to harm. (By which I mean actual harm to our physical and mental health , to be clear: the term of late is often broadened to the point of uselessness, which makes us actually less safe.) Safety is a much-studied area and we know very well what contributes to strong safety culture. Key principles of good safety include things like:

Acknowledgement of the risks that exist
Determination to change that
Understanding responsibility lies with everyone
Focussing on solutions not blame
Education and training at the core
Buy-in to all of these at every level but especially by leaders, mentors and managers
Continuous monitoring and ongoing improvement

But the good news is, the X card has all this stuff. Not in the card, but in the text around it. Go and read the whole goddamn document. I’m not sure how many folks actually have. (If you all have, write in and tell me I’m wrong). That document is long. REALLY long. Because safety culture is complicated. The most important parts to read are the latest update notes on page 3, and this quote from page 12: “The X-Card talk is more important than the X-Card itself.” Between those two things we get most of those above bullet points: that we need to acknowledge risk, that we need to all decide together to buy in on changing the level of risk, and that responsibility lies with all of us, without blame. It doesn’t quite get into monitoring and checking in (not even in the whole essay) but it points the way to other tools like the completely free TTRPG Safety Toolkit and the great book Consent in Gaming. It does not phone it in.

But the thing is, we have not risen to that. The essay and accompanying material is forgotten. I see very empty X cards in use. No links. Low explanation. I see people NOT using John’s spiel – and not because they are replacing it with something better. The X card is at risk of becoming a victim of its own success and its own succinctness. The whole brilliance of the card is that with one card on the table, we can shift an entire culture. The terrible risk of the card is we stop there. I was there when this conversation about safety began in the 90s, and I’ll be damned if we stop the train now it’s finally moved an inch forward in public acceptance. You could draw a parallel to pride flags: important, clear messaging. But easy to wave. Easy to be a t-shirt for a clubhouse instead of a process of dismantling assumptions. Easy to co-opt. Not complete proof that the waver actually gives a damn. Not the end of the process.

I haven’t read Consent in Gaming but being autistic as well as all those other things above means I’m an expert in how games are full of danger because they have the illusion of safety without any actual safety at all. So I may do another blog soon about how I think about safety in gaming. For now though, I want you to say to yourself: The X Card Will Not Save You. The buck does not stop there, and neither should you. Read further, understand safety, and deal with it properly.

EDIT: As always, I’m far from the only person who has found that a more abrupt version of safety leaves out variations – safety is rarely one size fits all. Beau Jagr Sheldon points out here that if your ONLY response is to completely remove a topic, it might feel pretty bad too.