Last week people started getting physical copies of my short zine of games slash design memoir Dice Forager. Idle Cartulary did this nice review of it, and some folks were talking about it on the Dice Exploder discord. But everyone keeps being cagey about the preamble, not wanting to spoil it I guess? But I think it’s funny and I want people to be able to talk about it, so I’m posting it here.
Funny aside: for the holidays I was given a book on the craft of conjuring illusions / stage magic from 1969, and the first chapter had advice on taking feedback that was essentially exactly my advice below. And this advice is so much older than that, across media.
Anyway, enjoy the first few pages of Dice Forager.
Agenda, Principles, and Moves
While reading this book, this is your agenda:
Learn something new about game design
Learn something new about me
Learn something new about yourself
...and these are your principles:
Read with kindness: assume best intentions on my part
Read with cruelty: ruthlessly critique what I get wrong
Think about your own games, too
Question every detail
...and these are your moves:
Continue reading
Skip backwards to remind yourself of something
Skip forward past something that bores you
Put the book down and think about something else
Take notes in the margins
Mutter to yourself: “that can’t be right”
Tell someone else about an idea you just had
Imagine playing the game you’re reading
Imagine what you’d change about what you’re reading
Always ask: “why this?”
Four Manifestos
What’s A Manifesto?: A Manifesto
A good manifesto isn’t hard and fast rules, it’s strong but loosely held beliefs spoken clearly and with confidence.
How To Make Art: Another Manifesto
None of this is new, but:
Know what your thing is about.
Make every choice with intention and in support of what your thing is about.
Everything is a choice.
Don’t be afraid to step back and reevaluate what your thing is about.
But while you’re at it, maybe make sure you remember why you were excited to work on the thing in the first place, and maybe recenter around that.
Get feedback early and often. Listen when people tell you how they felt engaging with your thing.
But ignore plenty of the feedback you get. Don’t listen when people tell you what you should do, unless what they said hit you in the gut.
Always do what you think is right, even when you’re wrong. Every good note you don’t take is a lesson you still need to learn first hand. It’s worth fucking up so you can learn it.
How To Give Feedback: A Third Manifesto
Your goal is to help them figure out what their thing is about and evaluate whether it’s currently about that.
Your goal is not to convince them their thing should be about whatever it is you think it should be about.
Don’t tell people what to do, tell them how their thing made you feel at each important moment.
Ask questions, especially in the form of “I felt X when Y. Is that what you intended?” Always be asking “is that what you intended?”
How To Edit: A Final Manifesto
Consider each thing and ask: why is this here? If your answer isn’t good (and hold yourself to a high standard for good), get rid of the thing.
If something’s working pretty well but you can’t figure out how to make it great, the most common problem is that it’s redundant with something else. It might all be good, but if two things are filling the same purpose, you don’t need both.
If you stop caring about the thing, it’s time to be done. If you can bear to, release it into the world.
One addition for this post: I’ve been thinking about the past couple weeks about just how valuable it is to get specific when making art. You may think you’ve gotten specific, but I promise you can go deeper. It’s something I’ve seen again and again on Dice Exploder itself: my favorite episodes are the ones that go really, really deep into one really, really specific example. At some point down the path of getting more and more specific, some alchemy takes place that makes your creation more universal than ever. Anyway, maybe try it out.