Big Bad Con 2024 (A Thought or Two)

Continuing to Romanticize TTRPGs and the Space They Inhabit

I’m sitting outside of the convention center, flanked by people love games as much as me, who forge them with their bare hands with all the love they can muster. We are laughing, laughing so hard I’m crying, laughing so hard that I’ve had to shed the laugh I’ve had for years to adopt a new one from one of my favorite podcasts, laughing so hard I feel like all I can see are the stars above us. It’s way past my bedtime. My heart and my head feel fuzzy, like I’m drunk, like I’m floating, like I can forget how cold my hands are. I’m content.

The friend to my left is telling me: You’re making faces I didn’t think were possible. The friend to my right says: It’s like one of those renaissance paintings. I’m talking about Strawberry-Lemonade Joe-Joe’s, lamenting their liminal nature, only here for three or so months of the year, the way they fade. I’m somehow also talking about a lyric game I made. They’re telling me: The way you pitch your games feels like a stand-up comic. TTRPGs and the people who love them are the funniest thing to me. We’re all weird lil guys running around, trying to make emotions happen, trying to make rules that tell us what to do and how to be, trying to make us break out of those rules and find something new and different and interesting.

I’m sitting in silence with two people I respect, whose work has produced more moments of laughter and heartache and joy than I can even begin to imagine, and I’m eating fries. I’m trying to figure out the rules to yet another social game I didn’t know existed, didn’t know I needed to play, and I’m trying to be a power gamer at making friends. I want to live in this space forever, between the jokes and the gushing about games and the next fry. I know when I get up, this moment will spill into the next, and the next, and the next. It’ll become a giant jumble, Jenga tower I pull from constantly, until it tumbles.

I’m sitting outside of a room with a larp I’m in, drinking tea and eating a vegan walnut loaf—a strange, sweet, dense beauty. I’m on the verge of crying, had just cried, will cry again. I’m so overwhelmed by it all: the wonder, emotion, je ne sais quoi. I know I will eat the watermelon and reenter the room, I will take back my chance to enjoy a game I’d waited weeks to play, a game I want to talk about and think about and write about. A game I want to inspire me. I won’t let my own emotions, or the emotions of others, get in the way of that, and I take another bite, and I reset the tower, and I pull another block.

I’m sitting at a table with a stranger, about to start pulling Jenga blocks for real—diegesis to the metaphor of this piece or something high brow academic like that—and we’re making up a story together while I feel out the vibes. The jokes are volleys, reminding me of the dance depicted in the game I was handed by a talented, sweet designer the day before, the back and forth volley as we battle not for power, but for consensus. There is no winner in our game, this time. We’re a Terrified Monster Hunter and Gentle Bigfoot. There’s a bit: I’ve convinced this Monster Hunter that I’m a man stuck in a Bigfoot costume. It’s close to Halloween, after all. And our friendship is built on a teetering foundation, blocks on the bottom dwindling. It’s me, who makes it fall—the real tower—as I’m saying: “You know, if we didn’t hunt monsters together, I think we’d be good friends.” And the room applauds after the blocks crash down.

We debrief and I crochet a square for a sweater I’m making for my best friend. I look at all the little connections made in the last two hours. From one to the other to the next, slotting together, rebuilding the towers. Maybe the real game we played was friends along the way or something? I’m exhausted.

I’m sitting across from an academic who is politely, kindly answering my silly little questions as I attempt to understand their driving passion in life. All I want to do is crawl into their brain to understand what they do, not just the minutiae, but to understand what a pervasive passion like that feels like, to love something so much that you’d work as hard as they do, that you’d talk about it again and again and again, and you’d even answer a young designer’s questions about semantics. There’s something so human and stupidly inspirational about how tirelessly they advocate for the thing they love. Being a pioneer (and, in turn, someone who must justify the need for their pioneering) must genuinely be exhausting. I hope I didn’t add to the fatigue, I think as I see them again, pat them on the hand, wish them well, hope I can see their work in the future, to find that way to crawl into their brain, to understand the fire inside of them as they churn and churn and churn.

I’m sitting at a table with an internet friend, yet another Jenga tower in front of us, my laptop with my game pulled up on it between us. I tell them, I have no idea how this game takes two hours, it shouldn’t be too long. And then we begin to play and I realize that I can’t stop yapping, and sharing how I feel and who I am and what I think in the hopes that the person listening wants to share the same. And I learn about their life and their feelings and their opinions and what they think about this game and the world and I can’t help but feel that when I play my games I’m not really playing them. I’m always using them to connect. And I can’t help but feel that’s what all the people I love do, too.

I designed the game. Of course it takes two hours.

I’m sitting across from one of my biggest inspirations in games, and I’m telling them about how I didn’t know what to do, how much space to take up, how to really navigate something hard. And we’re not people who touch, but the way they speak to me feels the same as someone reaching out to hold my hand, to comfort me and tell me that I’m doing fine, maybe better than fine. I’m doing good, great, even better than I expected, and they’re telling me I deserve to take up space and feel good. They’re validating me about how much I dislike secrets and powers Larps, how much I wish I could have known exactly what to do, how glad I was that people like them exist, will sit next to me, will conversationally hold my hand and tell me it’s okay. I have a million questions for them. Why are your games so sad? Why are all the best games sad? What draws us to that, little gaming moths to a sad, despicable flame? Don’t we deal with enough sadness in all the moments in between?

But I know the answers, I think. It’s because that sadness ends. The anxiety I brought to the table, which sits between us, offering from my hands to theirs, could be pervasive in a way games shouldn’t. And it’s nice to have a short period of contained sadness, to be sad in a different way, to imagine a world where your sadness doesn’t exist. It’s just the imagined problems of imagined people. Towers we build to knock over and know there’s an end to it.

I’m sitting between three people at a small table. A fourth will join us. A light from above, the sun streaming through the windows, blinds me as I talk about Wittgenstein and we all laugh at how pretentious we get to be in that moment, together. There’s something relieving about knowing all of these things that don’t really matter, and then being able to pull them out, to say: I’m thinking of an apple. And to know their apple looks the same. That’s Wittgenstein, sorry. And then for the second time that weekend, Heidegger is mentioned, and I feel at home, even if I’d forgotten he’s the one who came up with the concept of throwness, I know if I’d asked, they would have jumped to compare apples, to help me understand. It’s all just language. Thank god I didn’t have to use semaphores any more that weekend. Flags were so yesterday.

I’m sitting at breakfast with a designer I admire more than I think I ever told them, and I’m eating my cut up pieces of fruit, thinking of how they’d stack, how they’d tumble, when the designer says to me: You’ve made work that imitates your inspirations. Now you’ve got to blow us out of the water. And I feel my stomach drop for a moment, because it’s true. They’re right. There’s no resting on your laurels when you love your art. It’s a nagging feeling, something in me that tells me I must keep going, and I feel validated in my journey in a new way. It felt good to have someone say, You can make it, kid. I eat another piece of honeydew. Probably make a self-deprecating joke. Can’t stomach the saccharine nature of praise, it becomes sickly, feels heavy, like a dense meal in my stomach. Surely people can’t like me, can’t like my work? Who am I to be loved?

I’m sitting at a chair, telling a designer how much I like their game. I’m sitting on the floor, telling someone how much an inspiration they are to me. I’m sitting on a bed, gushing about how wonderful and kind and sweet the people here are. I’m sitting at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, I’m touching someone’s hand, someone’s shoulder, looking into someone’s eyes, thinking: How can I not love their art? How can I not love them? And I’m rebuilding the tower, again and again, just to watch it tumble, again and again.

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Thanks for reading all of my little thoughts. I can’t give out enough little stars to the folks I played with. Here is the full list of games I played, and I didn’t really mention many of them, but all of them were fun in their own way:

The Coup (6 Space larps by Jason Morningstar)

Pick Me!

Zhenya's (Jason’s new card game)

The Audition (A Jason larp)

The Invention of the Reuben Sandwich (My larp!!)

The Clinic (A Jason larp)

Are You An Adventurer? (Randy + Karen's larp)

The Unofficial Highlander II: The Quickening Roleplaying Game (one of the funniest games of all time)

Liaison (my game!! and sadly only partially)

The Final Voyage of the Brigantine Dolores (A larp by Flynn)

Two Golden Cobra larps

A game jam game called "The Divine Print"

Starcrossed: Love Letters

Jason's new desperation playset

It was so so great to meet everyone, and I’m already excited for next year!