EDIT – I get Johnny and Spike the wrong way around in this whole piece. Spike is the efficient winner, Johnny is the “can I win this way” guy.

So I’ve been reading a lot about CCGs this month because hey, they’re back, back in a big way, and it’s a design space I know nothing about. This led me back to the Magic: The Gathering taxonomy of gamers. Many years ago, the folks at Wizards tried to type their main players into three basic groups, and it’s been surprisingly effective and useful and persistent. Their split were called – and you’ll notice the sexism straight away – Timmy, Johnny and Spike. But while I was exploring this I found a lovely video that looked at the component elements of these identities, and it was very useful for getting into how we approach strategies in games, as opposed to just goals.

For goals, we have Bartle’s Taxonomy as a very useful starting point. His 8-point system is really interesting and developed but for our purpose we can start with his simple four, which is enough for most discussions. Richard Bartle proposed these back in 1996 and you can do a test to find out your types, of course. They were more based around computer games but as you’ll see they relate strongly to Timmy, Johnny and Spike.

Bartle’s list is: Achievers, who want to find everything and unlock everything (in a sense dominating the game environment), Killers, who are there to establish domination over other players, Socializers who play to have social fun, and Explorers who want to wander around and see what happens. Timmy is described as a Magic player who wants to play big creatures and have big explosions go off. He’s there for the cool art, and the cool story but also the time his Serra Angel did fourteen damage. Timmy is a Socializer. Johnny doesn’t like Timmy because Johnny doesn’t think Timmy takes the game seriously. Johnny just wants to win, as fast and as efficiently as possible. Johnny is a Killer. Timmy doesn’t like Johnny because Johnny can win on turn one and it’s not fun. Spike is the Magic player who likes to win, but likes the find the craziest way to do it. He doesn’t like Johnny because Johnny has no art to how he plays; Spike wants to win by doing infinite damage or without using any creatures. Spike is an Explorer. Where are the Achievers? That’s easy: they’re collecting the cards and getting the foil versions and the rare printings. They’re Magic “players” but they don’t really play.

As I say, thanks to the tons of market research Wizards did, it should not surprise us that these archetypes proved to be a good summary of how people play the game, and match up to what academics were finding too. But this video I saw then brought up Power, Simplicity and Integrity as kinds of strategy and they also work really well to explain these three player types, while also breaking down game strategies.

A high power strategy involves finding a strong move and you use it to crush folks down. A high simplicity strategy is one that is easy to see, find, and pull off. A high integrity strategy is one that doesn’t fail: it can handle whatever you throw at it and still win through. Note the subtle difference between integrity and power: we’ll come back to this.

Timmy likes POWER and SIMPLICITY. He’s not trying to burn out his brain and he wants those fun creatures and explosions. So he’s looking for something that gives a lot of bang that he can get going without too much work or in a fun way. Johnny on the other hand wants SIMPLICITY and INTEGRITY. Simplicity here doesn’t mean simple, it means accessible, fast, quick to hand, and Johnny needs those “you’ve already lost” pulls, by building mechanics that always, always win. That’s boring to Spike who wants to find more exciting ways to win, but that take a lot of work: Spike wants POWER but INTEGRITY too. Spike’s solutions tend to not always work but when they do, they are both explosive and crushing.

The reason I started with the Magic archetypes is because I know them but I don’t know strategy much. Although compared to most people I play games at a high level, I am not much of a strategy head and I don’t know much about finding strategies. I know even less about putting them into games. But this triangle of Power, Simplicity and Integrity is a great place for me to start learning. Likewise if you are building ANY strategy game you should think about these three pillars AND the three Magic archetypes. They can be sometimes a bit easier to see than Bartle’s taxonomies, especially when you’re looking at strategies. Exploring sounds like wandering the landscape; if you get what Spike is trying to do, you can more easily drill down into what parts of your system are POWER and which parts are INTEGRITY.

Staying with the Magic archetypes though, you’re going to want to have things for Timmy who just picks something and goes for it, but if that always works, the game becomes not-fun for him and others very quickly. Once people SEE something, everyone can see it, and the “meta” can change. For example: Viticulture has an exploit where you should pretty much hold a wine tasting every round for the VPs. It’s simple to do and just cranks out power and it’s boring. Even when I know it’s there I don’t want to do it, because it actually turns quickly into a Johnny move. You’re not making 100 wine bottles and impressing the table, you’re just being a dick. Contrast that to pursuing Science in the game 7 Wonders. It’s well known that Science tends to give the most points, but to get those points, you have to commit. It has Power and Integrity (it produces a big points explosion and is hard to stop without hurting your own game) but it lacks Simplicity, which means people don’t mind losing to it. They even enjoy losing to it!

Generally, you want to support your Timmys and your Spikes in most strategy games: simple, powerful options that work most of the time but can fall apart with bad luck or missing the right combos, and more complex systems that require more commitment. Occasionally Spike needs just the right luck as well (because it’s not Simplistic) but it pays off big enough to be worth it, so press your luck is fun for Spikes and Timmys alike. Indeed that’s why it can be such a great mechanic – it appeals to the bombastic power that they both like, and has a great story for Timmy when it fails and a great sense of mastery for Spike when it pays off.

But in our design of strategic boardgames, wither Johnny? Do we want to appeal to him? Mostly the answer is no, because it can be a sign your game is broken if Johnny can find a move that always works and forces everyone else to go for that move. That’s great for games like Magic; not great for something like Beyond the Sun. A lot of design comes from avoiding Johnny-exploits. You can try to make them boring or unfun, but the Johnnys of the world will still go for them! But there is a Johnny in all of us and there are some things you can do to appeal to it. First of all, it’s okay for a Johnny strategy to become apparent during play, or just for a phase of the game. If it seems like one player will end the game soon, everyone knows to switch to high victory point plays. Likewise, you can have two or three Johnny strategies to choose from, or put them in a position where they have to be raced to reach. If card X tends to be a card that breaks the game, then it can become the game to get that card. It could also be something that takes time to figure out, after many many plays, at which point players can move on (having solved the game) or try expansions or variants. Sometimes it’s a good sign for players to realise they should be playing a variant or a higher difficulty level, because they spotted the exploits others can’t see (and may never see).

Another thing you can do if there’s a Johnny strategy in your game is to remember that it lacks Power, so it might be a win or an advantage that nevertheless doesn’t score very big. It’s not Shooting the Moon. It’s not a win that sweeps the whole board or leaves every opponent devastated. If there is some way to come back in a later phase or build points over time, a few close victories might not add up to much. You can also build in traps for the Johnnys. In most versions of Risk, it is always better to eliminate other players completely (a non-fun Johnny type strategy); in some versions of the game there are hidden objectives where if colour X is eliminated the player holding that goal can win. On a larger scale, in games with negotiation and bluffing, Johnnys can be “tricked” into becoming kingmakers or be taken out by kingmakers. Johnny SHOULD win but it amuses a Timmy or a Spike to act unpredictably to create a weirder outcome. Spikes tend to win those kinds of games every time, because Johnnys are often not interested in that kind of social play – they’re there for the best mathematical play. (But you can get Johnnys who are good at negotiation; I’m generalizing here).

You can also appeal to Johnny players by letting them go head to head against Spikes and not building your game to appeal to Timmys. Now you’re matching simple brutal efficiency with creative exploits. But you probably won’t make anything fun in a game that has only room for Timmys and Johnnys. You can also build your games around just one type of player, too – that will limit its market but make it a really beautiful focused thing. Games with simple powerful exploding strategies are great fun, and so are chaotic things that are difficult or impossible to master for the weird Spikes! And Chess is really just a game for Johnnys.

If you do want variety though, then you’ll want to look at what are the obvious, simple pathways, and what are the hidden ones, what are the reliable ones, and what are the risky ones, what are the flashy and exciting ones and which ones are plodding but rewarding in their own way. Figure out where the Simplicity is and isn’t, where the Integrity is or isn’t, where the Power is or isn’t. As I said, finding these and designing these can be easier than identifying player goals! Got numbers in your game? That’s where the Power lies. Got ways to shut things down and ways to stop that? That’s where Integrity lies. Got open information or obvious pathways? That’s your Simplicity.

Find those three and you might be able to make a proper start on your strategy game.

Roleplaying games were not really invented so much as congealed. The earliest version were skirmish level miniature wargames and Gygax is on record that for him, CRPGs like Diablo and Eye of the Beholder, maybe even things like Skyrim, were how he invisaged the game to be played. They were tactical exercises in I guess commando raids. One person would build a target environment. The other people would drop their characters in and try to survive and come out with loot.

I have a copy of the Prince Valiant RPG by Greg Stafford. Released in 1989 it makes it clear that it is NOT a roleplaying game because Prince Valiant is designed to tell stories. Stafford takes a whole page to try to explain the difference and talk about how characters might do things that are sub-optimal. His word for the game is a storytelling game. This is the same year that the first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade came out. Now I’m not saying that all those years people were playing Call of Cthulhu or even D&D, that they weren’t roleplaying — my point is nobody really knew what roleplaying WAS. (The term wasn’t even in early D&D books — it first appeared in Castles and Crusades and it was nicked wholecloth from psychology, where it doesn’t mean what we do in D&D either.)

Somewhere along the way we congealed into a rough shared definition that it involves: pretending to be someone else, who exists in a fictional world and interacts as if that fictional world is real, sometimes describing their actions sometimes playing parts (as John Tynes observed, like an improvised radio show). Crucially though, this marriage of simulation and improvisation has no audience; or as John Wick observed, the audience, the author and the character are all the same people. That’s a really interesting tension, because one cannot really be author and character at the same time. The author wants his character to encounter conflict, the character would, for the most part, rather not. Much has been written on the terrible burden of authors to making their characters suffer. Meanwhile, part of the pathos of art was achieved differently: not by being an author creating it, not by being an audience watching it, but by simulating the exprience of being within it. Games are really good at this, or at least approximating it, and it is a wonderful experience. I know that my keyboard isn’t a rope but if my character JUST MAKES the jump, I feel EXACTLY what the fictional character might have felt. That simulation is a potent emotional hit. Video games might be better at simulating it though. Just saying. The edge that RPGs have in flexibility helps, but as video games get better at flexibility or just tell better stories, I think it matters less.

The consequence of simulation is if my fingers aren’t fast enough, I can’t make the jump and Lara Croft hops up and down, crouches, and unloads her inventory over and over. Tabletop RPGs have tried to let such feats be handled with RPGs but at some point there is still a meeting of minds. The tactical battle Gygax envisioned RPGs as, where the players — not the characters — have to solve or resolve a situation. Tactical battle skill morphs into system mastery of sorts, to be combined with general exploration; clever use of powers and improvisational skill morphs into the cleverness of our characters. The clever or the good-at-bullshitting win the day. As I have observed, traditional RPGs most resemble pinatas: one person jiggles a target to increase difficulty, the other participants hit things until rewards (plot points, character moments, experience points) fall out. A gentle GM will not jiggle it too much! No fun is had if the pinata isn’t broken, so it’s really not a game of skill at all. Some do play pure tactics, the pre Prince Valiant style, but its increasingly rare.

To me, this hybrid of story and tactics has stopped being of any interest whatsoever. It was playing D&D 4E than 5E that revealed it to me first: in 4e combat was actually an interesting board game finally, and then in 5E it went away. Leaving us with a poorly designed tool for telling stories, that inevitably ended up with very poor stories indeed. As a GM I felt like I was providing speed bumps or guided escape rooms at best, letting them have an illusion of choice between set pieces and never knowing how much to help them. As a player, I felt like I was running a simulation of an activity I knew nothing about. I don’t know how to save the world. And I’m tired of me, the player, being asked to do so.

And then one day I just saw it: I don’t ever want to have to decide what my character does, ever again.

Obviously, the Author stance isn’t normally as strong as this. The Actor stance is the character-simulation stance, acting as an actor or an avatar within the world, born back in Gygax’s basement. Sometime around Prince Valiant the author limped into view and was paid homage with Drama Points and Fate Points. Authorial influence has injected itself more and more, although often by turning the Actor into semi-self-aware characters who know they are fictional or can at least behave like they do, like the wonderfully genre-tuned mechanics of things like Extreme Vengeance where the harder you got hit the tougher you became. (Buffy was always the best RPG setting ever because the characters in that show were semi-aware of their fictional status too, but I digress).

The problem with the author stance though is that it was often incomplete. Even in games where you viewed your character as a fictional tool, still it came down to a question: what do they do next? The Actor stance says “what would make sense for my character to do (and then I’ll ask the GM, or the dice, if I succeed)”. The Author stance says “whatever makes the best story, (and then I’ll ask the GM and the dice how that pans out and what new hooks it reveals)”. At various times in the history of RPGs these have also been referred to as simulationst vs dramatic styles of play, simulationist vs narrativist or karma vs drama.

But to me, I still felt that the author stance wasn’t far enough. I was still doing all the work! Still making all the choices. And what I really wanted was to be surprised. This is what I loved about the author mechanics in Prime Time Adventures, Fiasco and Smallville: you would go into a scene not knowing what your character would do, and you’d find out if they were brave or a coward. All of a sudden, I found a new kind of simulation: simulating the audience. I created these characters and was writing them but at the same time they were alive and could act on their own. It also contained my favourite part of RPGs: character generation, where you get a bunch of random results and have to make them make sense.

So there it was: the death of agency. Remove the ability to choose what your character does and all of a sudden you don’t have to work so damn hard, and you get to be surprised. My games aren’t just author stance, they are anti-agency design. And this isn’t actually so entirely rare. Prompt games like For the Queen and its derivatives do the same thing, although they might give you more choice than I do sometimes. The card will say something like “you’re betraying The Queen, why?”. Weak prompt games will be like “Would you betray your friend? What might drive you to do that?”. Strong prompt games will be like “You’re stabbing your friend now, explain why.”

I don’t know if that’s the new terminology but it might help.

The beauty as I say is you don’t have to work so hard, although sometimes justification can be difficult. In my experience, after thousands of playtests of The Score, is that people find justification way easier than deciding “what my character should do”. Why? Because agency causes pressure. If you’re trying to decide what your character should do, you might GET IT WRONG. You might act out of character, out of genre, or in a way that kills the story or your character. And all you have is your character. You have one playing piece and you don’t want to lose it.

That advantage of surprise is so key though. That’s what helped it come together in my head. When you watch mysteries and when you watch heist movies, there is misdirection. Characters will appear to lose or die or be guilty, but then subvert that evidence. In actor mode, the actor, the author and the audience are all the same person so they all share the same information. In mysteries and heist movies, the characters KNOW MORE THAN THE AUDIENCE. There’s only one way to mimic that in storytelling games and that’s to take away agency from the player. And so I made Partners (mystery) and The Score (heists).

I’m not saying this is rock and roll revolution of a new way to play that I think others should do. I’m just explaining what I’m designing and why. The next few games will also be no-agency games. And I’m done playing the other kind of roleplaying game or storytelling game, because I just can’t be bothered trying to figure out what to do, when I could be playing my games that tell me . I’d rather apply the logic of random character generation to the entire game. I’d rather play to find out a story rather than write one. I‘d rather make a story nobody could have imagined beforehand, that can surprise me at every turn, while still feeling like I’m in control.

I killed agency, and it set me free.

We are not standing on the precipice of a world powered by AI technology and LLMs (Large Language Models): we are already falling.

That is why the conversation is so difficult. The air rushing past us makes it hard to think. Some people are trying to talk about what to do after we hit the ground, while others are finding it really hard to ignore just how hard we will hit and how fast it is rushing towards us. Some of us are way closer than others, too, and thus have less luxury to chat. Meanwhile, the technology is also changing like the landscape. The hand-holds that we’re talking about today have already flown past, weeks ago.

We know AI is all around us. It is predicting what our texts should say. It is answering our inquiries on websites and guessing what we want to know, and doing its very best to appear human as it does so. Some of its uses have come so quickly and so unobtrusively we didn’t notice, or by the time we did, we were fine with it. Future shock isn’t always about hitting the floor; sometimes it can be the shock of finding ourselves far inside the earth and already too comfortable to leave. The future doesn’t arrive in one piece: it arrives not just for the rich first, but for different professions and different models at different times and speeds.

This also makes things hard to talk about. Nobody has a problem with AI being used as a kind of inkblot maker, spooling out mathematical mandelbrots to make patterns no human could make. But that is AI art. That same two words can also mean a game publisher not hiring an artist to make their game cover and pieces because of sufficiently developed drawing programs that need nothing more than an easily google-able code entry. Some will say writing this code is hard, but it’s code: once it’s written once we can modify it easily at higher levels. AI art coders are almost already obsolete – because we’re falling, falling so fast. The people claiming to be experts might be out of a job tomorrow, because their expertise might be just as easy to codify – to code-ify – and duplicate.

(A lot of people also insist that this is all AI is, just another thing like Photoshop to help us do our work better, which is true in some circles, but vastly untrue in others as we discuss below. If it is just another tool and not much will change, and it’s nothing but hype, then why is it already taking jobs?)

In a world this fast, where technology is changing the argument before we can keep up, and where words don’t mean the same things, ignorance and confusion reign. It is becoming increasingly difficult to know anything about AI, for even the most educated, for longer than five minutes. In an epistemological crisis, we fall back on fear and paranoia; snap judgements are made. Emotions take over. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Because the ground really is rushing up towards us and not everyone will walk away uninjured.

That, more than anything, seems hard to explain to people: not everything is going to be alright. We know this. That’s why actors are on strike, or rather one reason: studios want to scan bodies and replace actors with CGI and never need to pay the humans again. And it’s not just jobs: it’s become harder and harder to sell books because AI is writing them even faster than the find and replace movement. The novels are bad now, but that’s today. Woosh! Tomorrow they’ll be on the best seller list. Meanwhile, the internet is breaking because search engines care about volume, not accuracy, and AI can lie faster and faster. And all of these things – like so much of our technology – are under the control and design of the worst people on earth, who would pay to watch us die if they couldn’t already do it for free.

In the face of all that, what do we do? What CAN we do?

I have a few suggestions.

1. Admit that we don’t know everything but also admit that things are going to break. People have a bad habit of accusing others of assumptions and ignoring their own, and the idea that everything will be fine is just as crazy as everything is over. The idea that all technology will be used for good is a mad belief in capitalism as a cult. The idea that we have to accept technology as inevitable is the same belief, turned into a weapon against ourselves. We can’t afford to be that stupid. None of us can. We’re falling.
2. Try to know what we CAN know, which means understanding how capitalism works and the economic subsystems. That means learning from capitalists and businessmen how they see the world, and also knowing your Marxism, because Marxism is the only study of capitalism there is. Understand that capitalism operates by separating the creator from the created object, and associating it with a brand, and that mind-magic doesn’t have to work on you. Understand that every product has a person attached to it, which leads to:
3. See all the parts of the system and recognize them. Obviously in times of great change there are a million small struggles; and many of those struggles are lost and that can break our hearts. I don’t mean get attached like that. I mean see that every product and every purchase is about people. If you want something, consider the people who made it. Know how many there are. Know what they do. Find out if they are well paid. If the process was different, who stops getting paid? Who keeps getting paid? And of course…
4. Figure out if you care about these things. Why are you buying things? Do you care who makes them? Do you believe that people matter more than money, that the environment matters more than money, that art matters more than money? Are you a creator to make art, to communicate, to bring people together, to spread joy, to share a story, or are you here to make money? And with that, understand…
5. Not everyone shares your values. They just don’t. They might not even have your values on their radar. But everyone is driven BY values. That’s how we do everything we do. When you’re discussing these things, try to front load your values and probe those of others, because if you don’t, you’ll be talking in circles until eventually you find out that your values just differ. And look, that may be a hard pill to swallow, but it’s good to know. You want to know who cares about things you care about. and on the subject of how we talk about things…
6. If you’re discussing something, try to be specific about what you’re discussing. AI/LLM is too wide a subject, and the fact that it is changing everything means everything is attached, so every emotion is coming in. Of course, it is okay to bring in those subjects too – it doesn’t make sense to pretend AI art can’t take jobs when AI is already taking jobs of actors and screenwriters and authors! But if you’re going to go in, you can be the bigger person and the smarter arguer by establishing your terms.
7. Pick your battles. Social media is all battles, and not all of them are helping right now. A lot of people are bad at reading the room and sign-posting their conversations and even if they were good at communicating they might still just not even have a clue what your values are and would despise them if they knew. You don’t have to talk to those people. But likewise, you probably don’t gain anything by calling them cunts. You just know you don’t want to work with them. Which brings me to:
8. Be aware that you’re on show. The internet remembers everything and shows it off to everyone. Meanwhile the game industry is perishingly small. A lot of very dumb people are showing off that they have terrible values about the industry right now, but you don’t have to join them. Stay calm. Write a blog post instead. And on that note:
9. Consider what’s best for everyone. Obviously this is a value so a lot of your colleagues don’t give a damn. You shouldn’t be that person. Everyone in the game industry is watching you, and your vast disregard for your fellow workers is not something you should advertise. We do keep notes. We do remember. You matter, in every sense, and if you’re hurting the industry, we notice. And you really do matter. and what’s more….
10. Remember you’re an artist. Act like one. Give a damn about your art. Maybe that means using wonderful new tools, yes! But it also means caring about things. Being glib or falling back on cliches makes you look like you don’t care and to be an artist is to care. And it also makes you look thoughtless. Running around assuming everyone who hates technology doesn’t understand it is just as stupid and thoughtless as assuming all change is going to destroy us. We may be falling, we may have no idea what’s going on but we can still be smart about it.

And not be an asshole. Because it’s smart to be nice. That is indeed, Steve’s first law of game design: Be Nice. Same as in Roadhouse. Be nice. We’re all falling and we don’t need you being a dick on the way down.

I don’t like MOSAIC strict. This is not the fault of MOSAIC strict. MOSAIC strict, near as I can tell, was designed for no real purpose except whimsy. Somehow it has been used to build modular game mechanics, but is it designed to do that? We may never know. Does it do that well? Not really.

I prefer to be a more of a light a candle than curse the darkness guy, so I don’t want to go into why I don’t like it but I do have to justify this whole post so here we go:

• Modular, this one is weird. A game cannot SAY that it is a complete game, but it can BE a complete game. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. I also don’t know why not allowing complete games is useful. Just fucking let games be complete. Who does that hurt?
• Optional. This I can see is trying to get to a decent idea – we don’t want to make entries that require other entries. Sure. But I think we can have a stab at better language.
• Short. Length seems very arbitrary. But as I say, it was just a bunch of letters designed to see what they do, so everything is arbitrary.
• Attested. Yes, this makes sense. Helps with googling. Keeping this one.
• Independent. I actually want things to interact with each other! That lets us build. So Independent feels like a dead end.
• Coreless. Appears to mostly exist to make the acronym work.

So why FRESCO? What is its purpose? The idea of FRESCO is to encourage the sharing of complete free-standing mechanics across the RPG design scene so that people don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel and can credit other designers in a simple way. Imagine if instead of everyone using PBTA or D&D, instead they had a shared library of stuff with a similar vibe but more variety. A FRESCO mechanic is one that has been road-tested and is well known much like things in PBTA, but then anyone can use in their games.

NOTE: yes of course everyone can already use everyone else’s game mechanics because they can’t be copyrighted, but they are often locked away in games you can’t read or are harder to see how to separate out from other things. FRESCO isn’t saying you can’t already do these things. It’s trying to make things easier. (Heck maybe MOSAIC makes things easier for you too. I’m not necessarily saying one should exist and the other shouldn’t. Great art scenes benefit from multiple systems, doubly so when they create feuds!)

F is for Free All FRESCO works must be free. You cannot produce a body of shared and shareable work if it is behind paywalls. However you can take rules that were presented as FRESCO, stick them in a book and sell that. You just can’t label that book as FRESCO, because of R.

R is for Registered All FRESCO products have to say they are FRESCO. You absolutely can go back and tag your old stuff as FRESCO though. Or indeed write out the rules of something you love, into a FRESCO format so it becomes FRESCO, but either way, it must be labeled. If it doesn’t say it, it isn’t FRESCO.

E is for Explicit MOSAIC says you can’t make assumptions, but I’d prefer to say you must state the assumptions you are making. You can say “this is a way to do stats, assuming you want stats”. You should also be clear on EVERY assumption if you can. MOSAIC says “assume there’s freeform play” but what is that? Figure out exactly what you’re doing and what you’re assuming and say so.

S is for Self-Contained A better version of Independent. Your mechanics must be complete within themselves. They might need input variables (eg this assumes you have some kind of stats that measure physical speed) and they produce some kind of output variable (eg this produces an order of play), but everything within that is a black box that operates on its own. Anyone can then refer to the element to get the result they want. Someone can improve the element, so it produces the same thing differently, but I don’t need to know if they did, if I don’t care. I can just say “insert thing that produces order of play here” and you can go find a FRESCO that does that (or make up your own).

C is for Creative Commons You cannot copyright anything that is FRESCO. Specifically, it must be released under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0). Other people can share it around but they owe you a credit. Respect authorship! FRESCO is designed to build a shared language but not fuck people over.

O is for Outstretching It’s not just that we want to stop having to reinvent the wheel, we want to build on each other. A FRESCO element is self-contained but it is totally okay to improve them, alter them, develop them and stack them. You can make a game entirely out of FRESCO elements, and that could also be FRESCO, if you think your way of stacking them is awesome. Therefore the design of FRESCO elements can stretch out with suggestions for input and output, and what it might work best with, in an EXPLICIT way. A FRESCO element could say “this works great with games/FRESCOs that have X in them, not so good with Ys” because combination is the heart of game design.

+Flexible is part of the name because it sounds good but also because the point of any system should be to grow and improve. If you have a piece that is almost FRESCO but breaks a few rules, label that FRESCO Flexible, or FRESCO+. FRESCO strict, FRESCO-, FRESCO pure whatever you call it, is encouraged. But we trust you that if you need to colour outside the lines but also hat-tip the FRESCO collective, you have a good reason to do so. Better to bring together than get het up on specifics.

Something made that is FRESCO strict can be called “a fresco”. It can be as large or as small as you want. Calling it a fresco is a way of indicating it is something you want others to use if they need it. It’s possible that something could be MOSAIC strict and FRESCO. FRESCO doesn’t care.

As with all good manifestos, I will take no questions. Go make shit.

Obviously when you have a hammer, you find nails but I feel privileged to have studied modern and contemporary art. Knowing your art history helps you be a better artist, and nothing is so interesting as painting in the 19th and 20th centuries. Because it is such an ancient and storied art, there is so much within the art form that has questioned art itself. Architecutre maybe the father of arts, but painting is the mother. And like the ancient mother gods she is chaos, boiling and angry.

The 19th century saw painting begin to change from the absolute demands of perfectly capturing light and shade and experimenting with impressionism, of painting what it felt like. Soon enough, the doors came off and chaos came stalking. Turner painted “Rain, Steam and Speed” in 1844 which isn’t “of” anything but is exactly what it says somehow. By the end of that century, art was starting to tear itself apart, and society was doing the same, and each reflected the other. Too much change was happening too fast. And so the artists felt like there old rules had to be challenged. Expressionism was about what you felt inside. Cubism was about making shapes and lines in a pleasing way, which then gave way to the abstractionists. The Fauves were called that because they considered themselves wild animals, free from all rules. Then came Dada which was a movement that defined itself by refusing to be a movement. I’m summarising this very badly but I need to set the stage, as briefly but as well as I can, for what came next.

Picasso wanted to throw away everything but the idea, painting for the sake of painting. He made several studies of a bull trying to fnd the very minimal shape that could evoke a bull in the mind. Painting almost without painting. The same sort of idea would produce the Readymade movement, which was an assault on the art gallery. If putting something in an art gallery made it valuable and important, then the Readymades would satirise that by choosing objects and imparting no change to them except the referent. Duchamp was probably not the actual originator of Fountain, but his fame and culture made it part of his body of work. Meanwhile Pollock was trying to remove the canvas from art, frustrated by that limitation. Painting demanded so much regulation and rule: a flat surface, an orientation, colour, light, line, and finally a viewer but also a viewer in place, in situ, in an art gallery, and outside the painting itself.

One of Duchamp’s last works was a piece that haunts me called Etant Donne, which is trying to assault the idea of the picture plane, of the problem that the artist can only attack a canvas and then the observer must stand back. Etant Donne is hard to translate but it sort of means “As it is” or “As it comes”. It was one of the first of what we now called interactive arts or installation works. We now live in a world where installations are almost the most common art we encounter, but like everything it is worth understanding what it was like before then.

Etant Donne is set outside the art gallery. Going beyond the paintings, one encounters a small door, into another room. There there is nothng but two more doors which clearly will not open. The eye is drawn however, to two peep holes in the doors. Struck with nothing to look at, the viewer bends down and peers through the holes. He is then struck by a pornographic scene: a standard early 19th century landscape contains a young woman, her head unseen, displaying herself sexually. One becomes a voyeur and pervert instantly, interrupting something without a choice (although of course it is an extremely masculine/male piece therein). And yet of course it was your choice to look through the peephole. Duchamp wanted you to become something of the artist yourself. To make the choice.

But to get you to make that choice, the room was specifically designed to entice you to look. It wasn’t really a free choice. And the art of the installation has become this constant battle. The viewer can never have the same experience as the artist, or indeed can be controlled compeletely. Art is a conversation. The viewer brings everything to it that they are and walks away having changed themselves (and in some recent works, changing the art too.) The installation gives much more freedom than the picture plane: the audience can walk around it and see it from every angle. Yet many pieces work more like Etant Donne and control your line of approach, making you take on views that mess with your eyes and your thoughts. You are free, and yet you absolutely are not. The moment you walk into an installation piece, you are at the mercy of the artist. That was part of the point of Etant Donne: to give you control but also to make you the art, to bring you inside the picture plane.

Of course, this all comes back to games, because games are, like all art, a willing surrender of consent, and a conversation. By agreeing to follow the rules we become part of the picture plane. Roger Ebert argued (and it was a good argument) that the interactivity of games stopped them from being art because they became a tool to be used, and the “viewer” ends up being not captive enough to the artist. He has a point, even if I think it isn’t quite so clear cut. I think back to Etant Donne where you are the participant — but not.

And I think there’s a blurring issue particularly when it comes to RPGs. Because an RPG is two things at once: it is both the art work and a rulebook. That’s not how any other game works. Have you sat down and read the rules for say cricket or baseball? They’re dull. They’re a little booklet that reads something like a wargame manual about how long things have to be and how far to put them. If you gave someone these rules, you would not be giving them any idea what baseball is. We instinctively understand this: there is chess as a concept. But chess as a concept is not the rules of chess, nor is it a game of chess. It is not the chess board and pieces. It is not a chess tournament. Chess is a thing that exists outside of the pieces and the rules.

We know this. When we pull the rulebook out of our fresh copy of Twilight Imperium we do not think “this is the game of Twilight Imperium”. But roleplaying games have no choice. John Wick (the game designer) once summarised that RPGs are the only medium where the artist is also the audience. I’ll go further: RPGs are the only medium where the instructions on how to engage with the art is also the art itself.

You might argue that the art is in fact the session that arises, and it certainly is, but you can compare that to the experience once has walking into Etant Donne. That is a “session” of play, an experience of the art. The instructions of Etant Donne, the structure that causes the experience, that is the art work. Likewise, I argue, the rulebook is the artwork. It, like Etant Donne, is a device to create individual experiences. And unlike other games it has only one piece: just a paper form to encode your movement as you go through the process, and that is delivered by the rulebook also — it contains instructions to copy that and disseminate it.

(Yes, most computer games have tutorials or have hidden tutorials, but that’s not the rules manual, that’s putting the rules manual inside the art. Rpgs are the opposite: the art is inside the rules manual.)

I often tell my roleplaying students that an RPG is really a sales catalogue for a holiday. You are seducing people into coming aboard an experience, by explaining all the cool places you can go, while also explaining how to get there. You try to minimise how hard it will be to have those experiences and highlight how exciting the experiences will be. But it’s more than that: you’re also creating the sense of those experiences as you go. You’re already on holiday the moment you crack the book.

Much is said about how too many RPGs are read not played, but to an extent that is inescapable: that is the art form. The journey begins when you see the dragon on the cover. Frank Mentzer, designer of the red book DnD set made this exact point: when you see a picutre of or read about a hero fighting a dragon, you’ve already begun playing an RPG. Part of you imagined yourself as the hero, ready to fight, facing the danger. Much has also been said that RPGs should not emulate media but they can’t really help that either because they are media. They contain images and fiction and text designed to evoke, as well as explain the rules in technical language. You don’t have to ever play an RPG to be changed by it; the fictional ideas it evokes work on you like any other art form, and just reading the rules can do that too. You can then put them into practice, walk into Etant Donne and have your moment through the keyhole, but there is no point where we switch from passively reading to practical experience. You have already walked in the moment you opened to the first page.

Like the sales catalogue, then, part of the job of the rulebook is to seduce you into playing, to hack your brain until you cannot not play, until playing seems like your destiny or something you must do lest you explode. I’ve had plenty of RPGs seduce me like this, taking me from “eh, I’m not really interested” to “I must play this”. And that’s not just a sales pitch. That’s building an art work that forces me to the keyhole. That’s the art of the roleplaying game. You thought you could choose if you should play it or not, but you never had a chance; you were already part of the painting.

We were playing Partners the other day and without the rules even prompting us we evoked a trope of the genre, like a ghost was haunting us. That’s how I design: to hack your brain so you end up doing things I want you to do. All game designers do this, but as I say it’s particularly potent in RPGs because the art and the control is hiding inside a rulebook. The game of chess is inside the rules of chess. And really, there’s nothing else quite like that.