URST & Summer Camp: Making Brink Games

A post about Forbidden Play

This post is based on an article I read thanks to a recommendation from a friend. Originally it came from an episode of RTFM (Read the Fucking Manual), a cool podcast about games. You can find it here:

You can find the article here.

URST

This is partially a rehash of the article I’ve linked above, just in less intense sociology terms, and partially an examination of a “brink game” or “forbidden play space” that I made before I knew what that was. Technically, it was the first real game I ever made, and I made it like, three weeks ago, if that puts things into perspective. (I consume & create on a scale that is quite frankly, silly, and I have ADHD & Hyperfixation to thank for that.)

You don’t need to have read the article to follow this post, although I highly recommend it just because there is so much good stuff in there I won’t be able to get to. Although, a warning that it is, as I said earlier, pretty intense with its sociology, but I see that as a boon and a necessity.

The first game I ever made is called URST, which stands for UnResolved Sexual Tension, an acronym I got from Tin*Star’s game, “Partners.” URST is available on itch, but is still in the playtesting phase. You can get it here.

URST is a game and what I call a “play space”—“a game that you play as yourself, no fiction involved. A sort of exercise with a scenario.” (Taken from the original text of URST.) But, I’ve got new language for that, so my description of it may change, too. Play spaces are actually less about whether or not fiction is involved and more about creating what Cindy Poremba, the author of “Critical Potential on the Brink of the Magic Circle”, aka the article that I linked, calls “forbidden play” or “brink games.”

Brink games are games that use their rules to allow you to break societal rules, all the while saying it’s “not real,” because this is “just a game.” Brink games ask you to bleed and to do so knowingly. Poremba argues that this space created by brink games can allow space for critical examination of the societal rules that the game calls attention to.

For me, the part that stuck out the most was the basic idea of a brink game in relation to the tabletop space. See, Poremba is working within the frame work of “games” at large—they reference things like Twister and Scrabble. They don’t engage with tabletop games, and I want to use this space to do that in some sense, to take the concept of “brink games” and ask what that means in the tabletop space, how we can use that to better engage with brink games, and how we can use that to our advantage as designers. Today we’ll mainly be concerned with what brink games are, and how I have engaged with them so far.

URST, as I said, is concerned with creating a space where you play, and how you play doesn’t matter that much to the game in the sense that your character does not matter. It does not matter if you even play a character. The game sets out a few, simple rules: you cannot touch, you must play the card game War, and you must engage with the prompts. And the scenario URST is meant to simulate is just that: a societal pressure that pushes you to not touch.

URST calls attention to the implicit societal rule: you shouldn’t share such an intimate space with anyone who isn’t your partner (even if you aren’t partnered). And then it asks you to do just that. I’m not saying whether or not the implicit societal rule is correct here, that is for the player to decide (although I’m sure you can guess where I land in terms of opinions). Instead, URST is creating a space where you can explore what Poremba and others call “forbidden play,” play that lets you transgress societal rules through the guise of “just a game.”

I’m not asking folks to cheat on their partners (pls don’t, also these intimate spaces are not, to me, a transgression of trust in a partnership), but URST is asking people to engage with and examine what that societal rule means and why they follow it. It’s, somewhat, a game about how silly it is that a lot of monogamous folks do not allow their partners to have intimate spaces, especially ones that might be charged, with anyone but them. If you approach the play as someone who is monogamous, you are able to hold that societal rule within yourself while playing, and, in the course of play you force what Poremba calls “a second-order observation that includes the game frame.” My clunky examination of that: you get to have some spicy cognitive dissonance.

My original tagline for URST was “Cognitive dissonance never felt so good,” but I eventually dumped that for “dear god I want to touch you” because I felt like the first one called too much attention to what I wanted the game to do—create a space of cognitive dissonance. As I say in the game text, “This game is about frustration and satisfaction and the dialectic between those—cognitive dissonance in a cultivated space.” And while that is true, I think I should expand on it.

URST is asking you to hold the frustration of the societal rule (don’t share intimate spaces with people who aren’t your partner or someone you intend to become partners with), aka Purity, and the satisfaction that transgressing that within specific, defined confines and boundaries gives you. Essentially how play can satisfy something inside of you, even when you aren’t getting “what you want.” Especially how “forbidden play” can allow you to do that—to keep societal framing at bay and move toward the game’s framing.

This is why I say this game is made for folks who are already in this situation, who are already experiencing URST in their real lives, and need something to engage with that will allow them to express it. This game can be played by anyone, but it is best played by those who have URST with one another, because it calls even greater attention to the societal rule and, in that safe Play Space, it can be examined.

Take, for example, Twister, cited and explained by Poremba, “The popularity of Twister lies in its forbidden play or brink status; the framing of the game allowing the temporary reinscribing of rules of intimate social distance. In real life, only intimate partners get this close.” In URST, the framing of the game allows you to have an emotional intimacy and tension that, for a moment, imitates the intimate distance partners share, with someone who is not your partner, (or at least not imagined in the fiction to be). And it’s aware of that fact, and wants you to be, too.

The light set dressing of the fiction does not stop you from the bleed—you feel the things your character feels because the space is, in and of itself, something—(god so sorry) sui generis, a thing in and of itself. You aren’t just creating or emulating the feelings, you’re creating and emulating the space in which it is allowed to exist, according to the rules of society. And doing so while understanding that it’s just play, it’s not “real,” and thereby absolving you of the responsibility and consequences of transgression.

I don’t really have a conclusion, but would love to know if you stumble upon brink games and want to share. Shoot me a message via some online platform or ya know, write it down and give it to a crow. I think we should all engage more with brink games, and forbidden play, because of it’s critical potential. Find these games, make these games, and begin to question why they exist in this state. What is a game? What constitutes it? Knowing the answers to these questions isn’t important in the sense of taxonomy, but in the sense of bending, breaking, and remaking the rules, an act we should all engage in more.

I Went to Summer Camp and All I Got Was This Religious Trauma

I’m currently working on a game that’s one of my favorite types of games to write, as I’ve recently found out. It’s a metagame, so it’s basis is playing one game, but the actual LARP/RPG of it is built explicitly around the mechanics and knowledge that you are playing the Inner Game as well.

An easy example: I have a game I am writing called “Solar Flare” where you play as people who are gathering for their last game of Train Dominoes before the sun eats the Earth. You are playing characters who are playing a game, specifically, Trains. So the mechanics of the metagame are directly influenced by, or really, are an extension of, the mechanics of the Inner Game. I love this for two reasons: 1. I don’t have to create new mechanics and 2. I get to work on the story primarily while still retaining the flavor that comes with crunchy games.

Anyway, Summer Camp is built on a LARP (although it’s not called that) that I played when I was at summer camp as a kid, and also while I was in Youth Group at my church during a big event that we hosted each year. Underground Church is a brink game, although it’s not super explicit in its brinkness and, like a lot of LARPs, is more concerned with simulation than its own conversation with Forbidden Play.

In Underground Church you play as Christians in a “foreign country” (unspecified, and it doesn’t matter too much.) The facilitators, of which there can really be any number, play the Police and the Guards who are attempting to jail you for your faith. As the Christians, you walk around the space provided and wait for the Police to find you and question you. When they do, you have to talk your way out of going to jail. If you weren’t able to talk your way out, you were taken to jail and made to sit and wait before being released and repeating the process.

As a kid, I didn’t understand brink games or forbidden play in language, but I sure got the Vibes. I loved acting, I loved theater, I loved getting to play a character. And specifically, I loved playing a character that transgressed, a character that got to do something I usually couldn’t–the exact nature of forbidden play. In short, I loved lying. I loved feeling clever in a lie. But of course, not just as someone raised Christian or in as a human in the South, but as a general member of society, I was told I shouldn’t lie.

In my personal life and philosophy, I adopt a sort of Radical Honesty, one that is not usually hampered by social niceties, but I do keep myself, when at all possible, from offending or outright insulting someone with a Truth. That is how I have reclaimed the power that I, as a kid, felt in a lie. When you hold the Truth, whether that is on its face, as it is with Radical Honesty, or inside of yourself, as it is with lies, you hold power. And if you’ve talked to me for more than ten minutes you probably know I’m a little obsessed with Personal Power as a concept and in action.

I am always thinking about how my games facilitate and shape personal power in the context of play. How do I make players feel clever? How do I make players feel powerful? How do I allow players to hold feelings of both weakness and power in dialectic with one another as their characters wrestle with helplessness, inevitability, and responsibility?

In Summer Camp, I take a very intense, direct approach to those questions: Transgression is power. The forbidden play of the Inner Game is that you, as the player, get to lie. As a kid, especially one in the church, you never do that without punishment, provided you get caught. And as a kid, you usually did. Summer Camp seeks to capture that feeling of reclamation of personal power by setting up your character to feel that, and in turn, to allow your own feelings about transgression to bleed both ways. That is, in my mind, the power of a brink game.

When you are playing the metagame, your character is a teenager, around fifteen years old, and they are excited about the transgressive potential of the game. They are acknowledging their own participation in forbidden play–although some of them might do it more than others. As a player, you are getting to participate in that transgression as the character, but you are also entering into your own conversation with forbidden play.

There is nothing new about the idea that, societally, we are taught we should not lie. That’s a given societal rule, and in this context we don’t have to worry too much about exceptions, like whether or not someone thinks white lies are permitted given the correct circumstances, or if lying by omission counts as actually lying. There is no nuance to be taken into account when setting up the dichotomy of societal rule (don’t lie) and transgression (lie).

To dive a little bit more into the specifics: as a Christian in this game, you are giving the police an excuse as to why you’re out late. It’s important here to distinguish that the lie is not playing a character (that of a Christian in a foreign country) but that your character is breaking the rule, and it’s okay! Because it’s “just a game.” Wink.

As the Police, though, you are in conversation with a different type of forbidden play, one that, culturally in this context, is very intense. The police engage with dominance and aggression, and this the metagame sets you up as a female counselor, a divinity or theology student at the local college. You don’t dance with dominance, you don’t entertain aggression. Those aren’t a part of your everyday, or even occasional, repertoire. You are getting to be someone you are told in your everyday life that you cannot be, because it isn’t becoming, it isn’t right, it isn’t who you are meant to be.

For the Police/Counselors, the transgression speaks not just to the societal rule, but the societal role, the imposition of a set of rules and ideas that create the part played by these Counselors on the whole, every day, but especially in the performance space of Being a Counselor. On top of their normal societal role as Young Christian Women, they take on a role of authority and, in most cases, assumed wisdom and understanding in being a Counselor. They are stacking responsibilities on responsibilities at that point. The good news for them: the expectations are usually the same, although the standards they’re held to get higher.

The performance space they inhabit requires always Being On in a way. For Neurodivergent folks, a good analogue is masking. But even non-neurodivergent folks experience the fatigue and burn out that comes from “being on.” I’ve been a camp counselor before, and it’s drilled into you that you’re not just performing your role when on the clock, because the clock never really stops. You don’t get time off in a traditional sense, you are always performing this role and living to this standard. The campers are always watching, always soaking up information.

This extra societal role adds another level of transgressive play for the Counselors in the game, and, by extension, to the players, especially if the players engage in role with similar responsibility–it doesn’t have to be in education, it can really be any role where you need to be a model for others, a bastion of something, a champion of composure, etc. It’s not hard to understand the frustration that managers or service workers feel when they have to do something “professionally” instead of “instinctually.”

The metagame allows the transgression of the societal rules that engage with professionalism/work space as a whole, and that’s something we all have felt at one time or another, even just in school. There are rules for how to act in social spaces, and they exclude aggression and dominance.The only people who get to break that rule explicitly are, wow, yes, you probably guessed it–police! Which is why this game is anti-cop. No cops can play it, sorry. If you want to be more aggressive as a police officer, sure, whatever, go fuck yourself. Don’t play this game! You wouldn’t get it, anyway.

Police inherently get to shirk societal rules, and there’s no set dressing: they just have power. But playing as a young woman in the church, one who has to be a model on two fronts: as a Christian and as a Counselor, the player gets to engage with the aggression and force that we give to the cops under the guise of, again, you guessed it–it’s “just a game.” Wink.

The text I’ve written for Summer Camp so far dives into this pretty directly, as I am want to do, (this is currently a draft and the language may change over time) and says: 

“But tonight you get to forget about all of that. The weeks of prep. All the meetings, meetings, meetings with the staff to tell you about how you’re a “Shining example to these young girls! They watch everything you do. So be a good role model!” Friggin Jeffrey and Carol. Friggin Mark and Sarah. Friggin everybody that runs this place. You get to forget about them and perform something outside of yourself. Outside of good little church girl. Outside of divinity student poring over theology, biting into apologetics as if it could sate you. Outside of who you’ve been your whole life—a bastion of Christian morals. Tonight, you get to be powerful.

They give you a uniform: all black. A long, black flashlight like the ones real cops carry. It looks like it could hurt. Any thoughts you have about that are fifteen levels deep. You flirt with power carefully. You understand your role: be mean, be harsh, but be restrained. But maybe that’s not how it’s going to go. You’re afraid of your capacity for cruelty, and this game has always brought that forward. Maybe you don’t pity the campers. Maybe you hate them.”

If you just went “oof” when reading that, great! That’s what I wanted. I think we love to talk about power and aggression in tabletop games, but it’s really hard to talk about the blatant power we hand to young women in particular when it comes to education settings in the real world. When I was a camp counselor, I didn’t hate the kids I worked with or anything, but I did want to break out of the role sometimes and tell them to “Shut up! Stop! Just listen to me!” And I think we’ve all seen someone reach their breaking point with a kid.

This breaking point is produced by society’s pressure on us and the pressure we have to put on our kids. I don’t have any children of my own, so I’m speaking more from an educator’s perspective, as someone who is tasked with teaching kids how to act in society in a very metered, controlled environment. You just get tired because you’re always on, but also because you’re very aware of the fact that the kids are watching. The transgression for the counselors is two fold, too, in their shedding of both of their roles, that of Christian and Counselor, and the catharsis, I hope, is two fold as well.

Really, brink games are about catharsis, and I love that I landed on that conclusion, because I love talking about three things as a fact of my life: power, ache, and catharsis. In participating in forbidden play, you get to enact power, and in enacting that power, perform catharsis for the ache–in this case the ache is the dissonance between who you are (someone who enjoys, on some level, feeling powerful) and the role you play in society and how it takes that power away from you. How societal roles are inherently something that creates a split self, or an inauthentic realization of the self. 

(I believe, for the philosophy nerds, I should insert something here alluding to Sartre’s work on “Bad Faith,” but I’m not with it enough anymore to actually comment on it, so I’ll just gesture vaguely towards his ideas. For those interested but who have not read the work I’m referring to, here’s a quick primer courtesy of Wikipedia: “In the philosophy of existentialism, bad faith (mauvaise foi) is the psychological phenomenon whereby individuals act inauthentically, by yielding to the external pressures of society to adopt false values and disown their innate freedom as sentient human beings.”)

As a game, Summer Camp seeks to not just be a brink game experience, but to draw attention to the brink status of Underground Church, and why that status has such an effect on the characters playing it. It’s an inherently fun experience because it’s a brink game, and I want to draw attention to why that is cathartic for the characters because of their current societal roles. It’s really cool to have stumbled upon the idea of brink games and forbidden play (shoutout to my friend who sent me the article) and to get to see it in the games that I make and use that as a lens for framing some of my work.

As always, we should all examine the work we engage with, what it means for us, and how it helps us feel powerful, perform catharsis, and learn to love our ache.