[It Was A Mutual Decision] OrcCon 2007

Hi Meg,

I'll out the two of us a little bit and disclose that you asked me privately whether I'd playtested the game with different combinations of gender arrangement pe character. The answer is no; I wrote and playtested the game with that particular feature nailed down shut from the beginning. Part of the reason for that is process-based - it began as a 24-hour design, and in my case anyway, the consequence was to playtest it to see whether that design functioned. The men-play-the-woman and the women-play-the-men feature was therefore my game-specific sacred cow.

Given that as a constraint, my design goals became how to experience that feature as a positive engine. Contrary to a number of people's reactions when I was posting about it, achieving those goals had nothing to do with preventing unwanted behavior. What really gets up my nose about gender hassles is the idea that strife - especially petty, accusatory blame - is the default content of any explicit reflection about men/women. I don't think it is, even if certain forms of conflict are reliably present in men/women interactions.

So rather than blanket the game with placatory language and with all sorts of No One Gets Hurt safe-words or anything similar, I merely (meaning far more simply) established buy-in for empathy - if that empathy is present among the real people and if they actually use the game's rules. Therefore the game is about fictional men and women in conflict, as authored by men and women using rules that do not rely on a state of strife.

What I'm seeing from Jesse's description of the Orccon game is that it worked, again.

Best, Ron