Playground Theory & Competitive Play
When I was a kid, I used to play make believe with my bestest friend in the whole wide world, Parker. I remember we would go into my backyard and play on the porch that my dad built and eventually turned into a screened in porch—a necessity for Mississippi porches. We would play this game where we were both “witches” and we’d gather together leaves and berries and fruits from the nearby plants and trees and then crush them up on the ground to make potions. There was no competition, only joy.
I have never considered myself a competitive person; I don’t enjoy competition, because it has the possibility to sting. I think in some people’s minds that makes me weak, but it’s something I’ve always done to protect myself. When I played games as a kid, board games and the like, I didn’t know how to regulate emotions, so they often flared. I was a bad loser. It was even worse if the game involved any sort of money, even a small amount.
My history with competitive games is long: when I was about 11 I started playing World of Warcraft, but I found I hated PvP, so I turned to Roleplaying servers, and learned to type because of that. At church, we would play Mafia, Werewolf, Murder in the Dark—all games that took some skill, some luck. And honestly, it wasn’t a huge heartbreak if I lost, but I always wanted to win. I played my first LARP when I was around 12-13, a game called “Underground Church,” which I talk about in another post. It wasn’t competitive, but you could, in some ways, win. I didn’t, but it was fun, on its surface.
I played Call of Duty while listening to Panic! At the Disco on repeat when I was in middle school. I sunk hours and hours into the PvE of Guild Wars, but wouldn’t be caught dead in PvP. I did the occasional trivia game in college, but I didn’t participate in games during class, lest I get my heart rate up and feel like I was going to explode. I really hate how academia relies so much on competition, but that’s honestly a post for another day. I also, sadly, played a some League of Legends in college, which I was not good at, and which would make me frustrated beyond compare. Thankfully, I dropped it eventually.
After college, I discovered D&D 5e, first through a little casual play, and then I consumed the Actual Play podcast which used to be called “Drunks and Dragons” but which I believe is now called “Greetings Adventurers.” I fell in love with the idea of a game with collaboration! No competition, no making my heart race, no making me cry if I lost because I hadn’t put in enough strategy, hadn’t been clever or fast enough, etc. A game about working together to defeat something. It seemed so novel and fresh to me.
A part of me is very glad that I found D&D, it has given me a language to communicate with many other TTRPG enjoyers. It also has given me some very uncomfortable experiences, and introduced me to parts of myself I thought I’d left behind during my “competitive” phase. Really, I think TTRPGs should feel, for the most part, like my experiences with Parker in the backyard. Two people playing, with no feeling for competition, just a story we made up as we went along.
I know this has been brought up before, in Jay Dragon’s "A Dozen Fragments on Playground Theory", but I want to talk a little about the difference between a player who utilizes playground theory (a power player) and a player who utilizes competitive play (a player concerned with power).
Power Player
“Power player” is not meant to denote the best player at a table by any means—these are simply the players with the highest “table presence” and that usually means the players with the most time spent talking, planning, etc. I am, usually, a power player. I hope that folks who see themselves that way as well see it less as a commendation and more as a responsibility, and as a warning: don’t become a player concerned with power.
As a power player, I have a responsibility to actively “sit back” at times; to tell myself to back off. I don’t make that the GM’s responsibility. Did I just have a really cool scene that could push a little further? Can I say something to the GM like, “Let’s pause this and check in on X player?” Can I use my current situation to set something up for other players? Can I be more generous? Generosity in play is very important to me, and I learned about it at Big Bad Con, when I received a compliment about being a generous player. I wanted to know how I could do it more!
Generous play is play that invites others in. When I’m about to do something cool, how can I use the other players’ strength in that moment? How do I make my cool moment into our cool moment? Do the other players at the table look like they want to say something? Have they not spoken very much in this scene? Why is that? Am I taking up too much space?
These can feel like overwhelming questions when laid out, but I urge you to work off of instinct. I believe that most power players have enough instinct to know when their table presence is high, and when they need to step back.
An example from a game I’m playing right now called “Picket Line Tango,” a murder mystery adventure for Mothership 1E that we’re playing using Trophy Gold and that I would highly recommend. We have a GM, and it’s me and my best friend, who is a quieter player than myself, but who always has clever ideas, and who I know often sees things I’m missing—plus, he’s a great role player, even if he is still shy about it sometimes!
We were going to interrogate someone about a murder, and I knew what I wanted to ask them about, but I also didn’t want to run the scene, because I’d taken point on the previous scene. My character is kind of the “babysitter” for my friend’s character, so I used that to my advantage by saying, “Okay, I give you the signal that I want you to go and ask her about whether or not she cheated on her partner. Something like, ‘Go run the crimson herring on her,’ and just push her really hard.”
So he went into the scene and did just that! It was great getting to see him take point on a scene and to push himself to roleplay directly with our GM. In my mind, the more he gets to play, the more we both win in the game. For me, that’s being a power player: listening to other players, learning how they want to be supported, and having fun. Other players can 100% exist without my support, but because I love playing loud, high table presence characters, I have to do the work to make sure the table stays balanced, not because the other players aren’t as loud, but because I am loud.
My fun comes from playing those sorts of characters, and the emotional labor of creating a space for other players falls on me. It’s not their job to vie for space at the table. It should be there for them to reach out and take when they want it. I do all of this qualifying because I don’t want to come off as “I’m the director of the table, I could easily take that space away from them. I’m in control.” Because I’m not—good GMs will mitigate a power player who isn’t doing a good job of holding space for others. But I don’t want to add things to my GM’s plate.
This post is first and foremost for other power players—understand how much space you take up, and learn how to hold space for others. Lest you become a player concerned with power.
Players Concerned With Power
I think players concerned with power—who I’ll call “PCWPs” because the title is too long—are first and foremost, possible power players. They are folks who have big ideas, who want big narratives, but they are not concerned with others. I believe, and you’ll see this not just my theory but in my games, that TTRPGs are an incredible medium for playing with personal power. They create spaces where we can feel powerful, clever, and very cool. But when players take that too far, and forget the collaborative aspect, they become PCWPs.
PCWPs lack generosity. They are the player who, at their worst, is just the skit from Game Changer that Brennan Lee Mulligan does about “The Problem Player at every D&D table.” Most of the time, they don’t manifest as that, but instead, manifest as folks concerned with feeling powerful. I’ll let you in on a little secret: I was this player when I started! As much as I cite my fiction background as a boon, it was once a big hindrance. I didn’t know how to tell stories collaboratively, so I came to the table with my own story, and tried to tell it alongside the story of the game. Which, in fact, is not how you play collaborative storytelling games, who knew!
I was lucky enough to break this habit, I’d like to think (we can always improve, and I know I still have leaps and bounds to go), by discovering that, wow, shocker, people at the table have a lot of cool things they can add to my story! My story could be better if I listened to and integrated the interesting, wild things my friends suggest and want to do.
At its worst, and I’m ashamed to admit this, it manifested in me attempting to kill a fellow PC, covered up as, “It’s what my character would do.” I now see that for what it was—I didn’t like that someone else’s story was conflicting with my own, and I wanted it to stop, so I lashed out. Thankfully, my character was not successful, and that incident made me reflect a lot on why I was playing D&D, what I wanted out of it, and how I could have a more enjoyable experience at the table.
“Winning” in TTRPGs
A large help to that was moving away from D&D and the culture that goes with it, at least, for me it was. Being in the indie scene has really helped me understand how you can tell competitive stories collaboratively, to want to “win,” and yet understand that the larger narrative—telling a good story—is more important than any win condition. At Big Bad Con I played four games that a win condition, The King is Dead, World Wide Wrestling, Die! Grave Robber! Die!, and Butter Princess. I “won” three of the games, and no one really won D!GR!D! because it’s a Trophy Dark Game, and things kind of went off the rails.
In The King is Dead, winning was bittersweet, as I lost my love, and a condition leveraged against me in the final hand that could have spelled disaster was mitigated by the entire table to be good for me because the fiction was better for it. I can’t say my character Dawn really “won” in the traditional sense, but I know the table did (cheesy, yes) because we created an amazing story. The same for WWW—I won because the rest of the table liked my character (which was a pre-gen!) and rolls just went my way for a lot of it. But did I really win? I don’t know! My character ended up retiring, so she got the championship, but eventually got out of wrestling. And in Butter Princess, I won, but was ruined. Yet! Our final showdown in the Butter Princess fridge was intense, filled with great character moments, and fun.
In D!GR!D! I found out the hard way that I hadn’t really adjusted to competitive play when I wasn’t winning. Another player almost killed my character and I was distraught over being taken out of the game without a way to fight back. Thankfully, we talked it out, and found something narratively satisfying, but honestly? I think it would have been fine if I had died in that moment. It would have been sad that I didn’t get to play any more of the game, but I also understand where the other player was coming from, and I don’t think they were in the wrong. I just had to have an experience like that—and reflect on it—to understand that sometimes, “losing” is the most narratively satisfying thing you can do.
I still struggle with this. I absolutely do. I have trouble with games that throw a lot of hardship my way, a lot of conflict, and might ultimately give my character what I consider an “unsatisfying” ending. That doesn’t mean dying, but if I ever feel powerless in the fiction, it stings. It’s the PCWP trait I struggle with the most, that games often take away player power in favor of luck and chance in the form of a mechanic, and is probably why I like creamier games. I want to be in a place where I am confident enough that the story can be satisfying with a lot of conflict and hardship. I don’t know if I’m there yet, but I am working toward it, trying games that push me in that direction, and doing my best to reflect.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to walk away from a game and feel like I “lost” and not feel a little sunk. Maybe it’ll happen! I don’t know if other players feel that, too. Did the folks who didn’t “win” those games at BBC feel that way? Or were they just satisfied that they told a good story? This is one of those things that I’m not sure what I’m working toward, and if it’s possible. It would be more convenient, certainly, if I didn’t feel bad after telling a good story that just so happened to end in my character “losing.” And I think some of that comes in reframing a lot of my language.
In this post, I referred to “winning” and “losing” and I’m not even sure if those are words I should use for TTRPGs! Is there another way to frame “winning” in the context of a collaborative story game that I can utilize? (If you have an answer, let me know!) I think “winning” is built into the games I mentioned, but I’d like to think I, as a designer and a player, can frame it differently for myself, without having to resort to the language that I know can trigger my PCWP habits—that concern with feeling powerful, feeling like a winner.
I know, intellectually, that I win if I have fun, and I think it’s an inner conversation and reflection that I need to do to figure out if I can have fun while still “losing” because I love playing. Seems sad on it’s surface, honestly! But I also know it’s probably not my fault—we’re obviously conditioned to like winning. I think it’s innate—at the very least, it’s ingrained in me. Moving forward, I’ll be looking to push myself to reflect on the fact that just last night, I played Dominos with my friends and, you guessed it, I didn’t win! But I had so much fun. So why do I get so wrapped up in “winning” in TTRPGs? I feel like that’s a post for another time. Probably something, something, ego. We’ll see. Until then, a final thought:
A lot of these post are patting myself on the back for things, and I think it’s important that we shout ourselves out when we do good! But I also want them to be testaments to the journey I am on of becoming (what I hope) is a better player. I’m not a perfect power player, and never will be. No one is. But I hope that I am slowly, consistently, moving away from the habits I had as a player concerned with power, and towards being a player concerned with generosity, collaboration, and good storytelling—a power player.