Play 2011

I logged 319 board game plays (including some expansions) and 78 story game plays in 2011, by far the most in both categories since I began keeping track. In retrospect, what's most remarkable to me about those numbers isn't just how much I played this year, but how easy it was to play that much. I talk a lot about how, at its best, the story game or indie RPG scene or whatever you'd like to call it synthesizes the two formative cultural experiences of my adolescence: Dungeons & Dragons and the DIY punk scene. Both story games and punk place an emphasis on decentralizing creativity; both are relatively small, in terms of population; both can create moments of spontaneous intimacy and understanding between their participants; and as a result, both tend to foster much stronger connections between those participants than one might expect. The last twelve months have really borne out last idea, and really crystallized how much I think of my fellow players as one of my communities, and of many of them as good friends. As a result, I feel like I'm all the closer to an ideal of mine: that play and creativity, rather than being a discrete activity, separate from one's "real" world, would instead be a passion woven into the fabric of everyday life.

Anyway, a few specific highlights from the past twelve months:

Fabricated Realities
I made it to five different play-focused weekends this year (the others were Gamestorm, NemoCon, GoPlay NW, and CozyCon), as well as hosting a game day to play this year's Diana Jones Award nominees, and I had a wonderful time at all of them, but Fabricated Realities was something unique. Somehow, Grace, Jackson, and Ross managed to blend the low-key, friendly feeling of a house con with the open quality of a more traditional convention - not to mention a remarkable physical environment - and the results were amazing.

Netrunner
My CCG experience is practically nil - I hadn't even touched a Magic deck until late 2010 - so Netrunner was a revelation. A lot of that, though, has to do with the specifics of this design: the asymmetrical roles, the bluffing and feinting, the almost unbearable tension of having a vulnerable agenda. I'm grateful as hell to Matthew for inviting me to his closed-environment league, since I'm not sure when I would've otherwise played, and it's currently one of my favorite games.

Microscope
I realized recently that there are two distinct pleasures that I get from roleplaying. One is during those elusive moments when all of the players are in sync, when there's a magical feeling of shared discovery, when play is so intuitive and natural that you're almost not conscious of it anymore. But what I've come to understand is that there's a second pleasure that's equally rewarding, and that's taking another player's wholly unexpected contribution, something you never would have anticipated, and rolling with it, forming something completely new. Microscope excels at creating those moments.

My Daughter, the Queen of France
There's so much that this game does right: the way the fiction created by the players parallels the dynamics at the table; the way it gracefully allows for the false starts and time to warm up that might cause another game to stumble; the way it gradually folds in layers of complexity and emotional engagement. It's a jewel of a design that's never failed to be less than completely rewarding, and like I told Tori after playing two sessions of it, one right after the other: "I wouldn't play this game at a meetup night with strangers... because if they broke this game for me, I think I would cry."