Play Communities (part 1): My History of Play

I went upstate recently and visited home after a couple years in Philadelphia. I played in a LARP at my summer camp for the first time in ages — dressed up as an old vampire and read tarot fortunes for the kids in-character. I met up with old friends and hung out with them, and after a little bit it was like no time at all had passed. That’s the thing about playing with old friends — it doesn’t matter what game you play, it’s about how you play together. And even at my summer camp (where one staff-in-training proudly told me their first game was at my last camp in 2019), I knew how to play with these people, even though all the kids were different and a lot of things had changed. So what is this? Why is this possible? How are we able to bridge this game without common rules or even common experiences?

Bernie De Koven talks about this in The Well-Played Game, one of my personal favorite books and a constant inspiration for how I approach game design. In Chapter 3 De Koven discusses Play Communities: spaces where the priority is learning how to play together over mastery of any one specific game. In this first article I want to talk about this distinction more closely, and give examples of some Play Communities I’ve experienced over the years, along with certain qualities I hope to cultivate in the play communities I construct in the present.

(This article is part 1 of a small series, adapting the thoughts I talked about in this Keynote Speech I gave for Generation Analog in August 2024.)

Playing vs. Gaming

Bernie De Koven is interested in Play Communities specifically contrasted with Game Communities. A Game Community is one where the focus of the rules of the game, its victory and its loss, become more important than the emotional experiences of its players. This is fundamental to competitive sports, for instance. A game community has an orthodox body of rules which are entirely inflexible (frequently enforced by referees or judges) and there’s an expectation that no matter where you go, the game will be the same. 

Meanwhile, a Play Community is a group of people connected together by a shared approach to playing. You can put any game down in front of the group and they’ll engage with it under a shared philosophy. Play Communities tend to prioritize individual player needs over the precise rules of a game (although how they approach that changes based on the game) and are comfortable improvising new games or combining games together. 

There are advantages to Game Communities. I find Magic: The Gathering interesting specifically because of its Game-status, the inflexible rules and global language of the game becoming a shared space for collaboration, creativity, humor, and wordplay. But there’s also downsides. It fosters an anti-compassionate attitude, prioritizing the letter of the law over the needs of the individual. It establishes hierarchies of skill and knowledge, where people abuse their proximity to game-power as a way to exert real social power over others. And because the approach to play is so closely molded around the game, it means changing to a different game becomes impossible, transforming players into consumers and turning the game into a lifestyle brand.

Play Communities also have downsides. If there’s a way I enjoy playing, I can’t go anywhere and find people who play in that style. Even if they say they play like me, we’re going to have different frameworks until we get the chance to play for a while and sync up. Building Play Communities also takes a lot of time, and requires the same tools any other community does — multiple generations of establishing norms and social conflict. But successfully building a play community is a triumph in and of itself, and I find myself more and more drawn to the hard work necessary to create a network of people who are interested in playing games with me through a shared social framework, even if we end up approaching these games in very different ways.

(For the people who are familiar with them, Play Communities are different than Cultures of Play. Play Communities are much more geographically/socially constrained and lack an established orthodoxy. The cultures described by Bell are more like meta-Communities, as many likeminded players form a broader community philosophy, bridging some of the weaknesses of both play and games, and creating weaknesses of their own.)

My First Play Community

When I was first starting out in games as a wee tot, I did a lot of LARPing at the Wayfinder Experience. It’s a different form of LARP than anything else practiced, forged from a combination of New Games, Original Play, New York Improv and 3.5 D&D slamming headfirst into the constraints of being a summer camp for kids. It’s a great example of what a play community can look like, because a lot of De Koven’s philosophy shaped Wayfinder via the New Games Movement. Here are some of the pivotal social norms of Wayfinder:

• Staff vs. Camper Divide: Campers are the “main characters” of the game, with their fun prioritized and supported by the staff. Staff are expected to model play for the campers and provide them with focus and care. Campers can do basically anything and as long as they’re not disrupting other campers, it’s considered part of play.

• High Trust: Wayfinder spends the entire week leading up to a game building up social relationships through lower-stakes games and practicing trust-building activities. Physical contact is negotiated pre-game, and experienced players will develop an intense rapport.

• Empowerment: The goal of playing is for campers to experience empowerment, which was sometimes defined as “the feeling that if this camper wasn’t present, the game would’ve gone differently.” This isn’t necessarily a Big Damn Hero Moment, but the goal for the staff is to make sure every camper has at least one moment of empowerment. Empowerment is produced through the staff’s execution of Flow, a series of instructions on what should happen during the game to ensure kids are split into smaller groups and given concrete goals.

• Physicality: Play is often about movement, with heavy focus on how the staff lead groups of campers to separate spaces and make use of the land. Running, hiding, fighting, and casting magic are all caught up in one’s physical ability. A game without something for the more active kids to do was often considered poorly-written.

• Immersion: Wayfinder games make heavy use of sets, props, costumes, and game materials to represent the world. Everything in play must be physically represented, and if something’s physically represented, it’s often somehow part of play. It’s taboo for staff to break character in front of kids except in emergencies. The goal was often to transform the campsite into a fictional world, or at least to create the illusion of this fictional world.

And here are some outstanding questions which divided players and sparked community discussion:

• How do you step away or negotiate high-intensity moments without breaking immersion?

• How do you empower disabled campers without removing the physicality of the game?

• Is it acceptable to curse during play, if it would be appropriate for the immersion?

• Is it acceptable for campers to go off without a staff member during play, if it would be empowering?

These questions are valuable because they expose the conflicts between the social norms. Everyone at Wayfinder (at least while I was there) would take all 5 of the social norms listed above for granted, but there would be tremendous debate around which ones were more important. As someone who spent my entire highschool and college career writing games for Wayfinder, the tension between these principles and where I myself stand on them heavily shaped how I approached games and whether or not someone found one of my games enjoyable. 

Running Games At College

While I was at college, I ran a lot of TTRPGs. This was a mix of Monsterhearts, Apocalypse World, my own strange creations, and (unsurprisingly) Dungeons & Dragons 5e. I brought a lot of the principles I learned from Wayfinder with me, but we also cultivated a few social norms of our own. Even after college, up until the start of the pandemic, I continued running games in this style for pretty much the same group of people — a mix of college friends and friends at home. The social norms that emerged were:

• Empowerment: As defined above, but with the focus instead being on the GM empowering the other players. This Empowerment was focused heavily on character arcs, imagined by Players. As GM I’d prepare large-scale sandboxes (megadungeons or hexcrawls) to serve as canvases for players to tell their stories. People would often do side-RP (either 1-on-1 with the GM or with another player) outside of sessions to help flesh out aspects of their character arcs.

• Drop In / Drop Out: I prioritized running large games for dozens of people, built around players dropping in or stepping out whenever they needed to. Even in smaller-sized campaigns, it was common for players to skip sessions as needed, or for someone to show up for just one game. Players were expected to explain why their characters were gone or what they were doing in the meantime.

• Follow The Rules: There was a big focus on following the rules of each game to the best of its ability, rules only getting bent or broken in extreme circumstances for player safety. The GM was the ultimate rules authority, but was trusted to act impartially. Rules were changed through additions that fit the logic of the game. Dice were rolled in the open and the GM wouldn’t keep mechanical secrets.

• Hierarchical Play: There was a GM (me, overwhelmingly) and even if the game was GMless I was a facilitator. The GM was also expected to resolve conflicts between players and help negotiate high-intensity scenes.

And here are some questions and debates that would occur between players:

• What do I do if the rules contradict the character arc I’ve planned? 

• Doesn’t the GM also deserve to be empowered and to have a character arc?

• How do you safely approach and communicate around high-intensity play? 

As a player, I don’t enjoy planning out plot arcs or writing up the future — during this period especially, I would prefer improvising within the rules and responding to what the players might throw at me, but the broader culture that emerged focused on a common ground between my emerging taste preferences and a player style that preferred plot arcs and a “writer’s room” approach. 

Without A Community

I moved to Philly a couple years ago (leaving Wayfinder behind), and after college (and during the Pandemic) my college play community scattered. I’ve been slowly working on building a new one. It’s hard because I don’t have nearly as much time to play games with friends as I used to. Playtesting has a way of eating up a ton of my time and focus, and I have to be careful and mindful about who I see in person and how to do so safely. I have a sense of what principles I’d want to cultivate and which ones I’d want to leave behind, and as I form playgroups in Philly I start to get a better sense of what our priorities are gonna be and how they might change the games I design. 

Some personal focuses of mine that I bring into any play space I enter into are:

• Adaptability: I’m very comfortable changing the rules of the game, or changing the game entirely, if it’s not suiting the sort of play we’re interested in. Decades playtesting and playstorming have given me a big interest in on-the-spot tinkering and encouraging others to do the same. At the table, all players are equal — GMs are rare and even when they are present, any player has the same level of authority.

• High Intensity: I love in-character arguments and pro-social debates. I love it when over-the-top personalities butt heads and lash out at each other. I’m much less interested in story arcs and much more interested in the social interactions that emerge from ideological and personal debates. I’m also very interested in toxic masculinity, queerphobia, and patriarchy — using games as a space for being an awful person in a shitty society.

• Princess Play: I value the experience of being a character in their world more than I value the character’s arc or plot. I’m happy if my character has a shit life and dies an ungracious death — that’s often much more interesting to me than some kind of narrative payoff. The rules are useful for constructing and constraining the world I want to explore, and it’s fun to run head-first into the limits of those rules.

• Player Negotiation: I prioritize stepping back and negotiating with other players around themes, symbolism, and representation. I’m interested in exploring the wide-reaching ramifications of introducing a bit of world-building, and discussing them together as a group before resuming play. Safety tools are useful to me as the start of conversations, rather than as a way to terminate a discussion before it's begun.

This is a playstyle that favors high player skill and high levels of trust. It’s something that works a lot less well when the table is composed of people with substantially less practice or confidence than me, and I have to be careful around steamrolling them in my play. I can calibrate all of this, of course, and focus on different aspects for different games, but I think any Play Community I end up in includes some aspects of these principles, or at least leaves space for their fulfillment.

As a game designer who creates books that go out into the world (and are in some situations, one’s first exposure to RPGs as a whole), I’m very invested in the sorts of Play Communities my games help cultivate. I’m not interested in creating lifestyle brands. Rather, I want my games to help inspire people to create or find their play communities and bring new principles and philosophies to those communities. In part 2 of this article, I’ll talk more about Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, The Seven-Part Pact, and how as a game designer you can both foster Play Communities and build the sorts of spaces you’re interested in.