We’re kicking off Season Two in an amazing Creative Chat with game designer (and old pal) Andrew Gillis, creator of Girl by Moonlight, an incredible tabletop roleplaying game all about magical girls, in crowdfund at the time of this airing!
I had an unmitigated blast talking with Andrew about their creator backstory, what magical girls mean to them, what’s inspiring their work right now … and some sneaky-peekies into projects currently bubbling away in their brain. *** SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't seen the Netflix show Russian Doll, skip ahead from ~52:30 to 54:45. ***
Andrew is a treasure, and one of the most warm and thoughtful folks I know; I'm sure you'll enjoy their insights and good humor, too. <3
As always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine!
Resources
IG: @littleoracles
We’re kicking off Season Two in an amazing Creative Chat with game designer (and old pal) Andrew Gillis, creator of Girl by Moonlight, an incredible tabletop roleplaying game all about magical girls, in crowdfund at the time of this airing!
I had an unmitigated blast talking with Andrew about their creator backstory, what magical girls mean to them, what’s inspiring their work right now … and some sneaky-peekies into projects currently bubbling away in their brain. *** SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't seen the Netflix show Russian Doll, skip ahead from ~52:30 to 54:45. ***
Andrew is a treasure, and one of the most warm and thoughtful folks I know; I'm sure you'll enjoy their insights and good humor, too. <3
As always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine!
Resources
IG: @littleoracles
[Intro music]
Allison Arth: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth. So I wanna welcome you all to another Creative Chat, and it’s a very exciting and thrilling one for me, because joining me today for this conversation is not only an old friend, but someone who has this incredibly incisive mind and very keen eye for beauty and nuance across media, and I appreciate it so much: game designer Andrew Gillis. Andrew, welcome to the show; thanks for hangin’ out with me.
Andrew Gillis: A pleasure to be here, and thanks for such a glowing introduction. Oh my gosh. [laughs]
AA: [laughs] I— I believe every word of it.
AG: Aw.
AA: It’s true; it’s true! [chuckles] Um, so, Andrew is currently in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign for their Forged in the Dark tabletop roleplaying game called Girl by Moonlight, and we’re gonna get into that in a little bit, but before we do: Andrew, I would love for you to give us just a little bit of backstory about your life and your past as a creator — like, have you always been a writer, a storyteller, a narrative designer, and, like, how has that manifested across your past?
AG: Yeah, I’ve kind of bounced around a bunch through, like, various media and skill sets, and kind of looked for something that really worked, and so, like, I dropped out of fine arts school back when I was like 17, 18; you know, I tried that out, and there were elements of that that I really enjoyed, and parts of it that I completely bounced off of. I always had an interest in writing, and played a lot of roleplaying games and stuff as a kid, and those kind of put you into that storytelling mode and build those skills as well, but nothing formal in that sense until, again, some college courses around creative writing, which I did really enjoy, but, again, just didn’t quite stick. And then I did some video game art education stuff, and that almost worked out: I was in the video game industry for a bit, but couldn’t get an art job — I was just in QA. And then I was a bike mechanic for a while, and so I’ve kind of just flitted about to various things, but I’ve always had an interest in trying creative pursuits, and that impetus to, like, want to make stuff—
AA: Uh-huh.
AG: —has always been there, and so I’ve been looking for a medium in which to engage, and one that would really work for me, or where the ideas would kind of come together and I could actually produce work, which I finally did land on with game design.
AA: Yeah; right. Would you call yourself a creator? Would you have called yourself a creator all those years ago?
AG: I mean, yeah; it’s funny: the, like, language around this has shifted so much over the past, you know, 10 years—
AA: Yeah.
AG: —with all the new, kind of, modes in which one can engage with this stuff, but I’ve always felt like I’m a creative person—
AA: Uh-huh.
AG: —and that I have ideas, and things that I want express, and so however I would’ve put a name to it, something like that would’ve always been an identity that I would’ve claimed.
AA: Was that something that you felt encouraged to do when you were growing up? Were you surrounded by that, and inspired by other people doing it, or was it like, “I’m out here doing my own thing,” and—
AG: Yeah, there was plenty of encouragement. The problem I always ran into was, like, the amount of effort and input that needs to go into actually refining those skills—
AA: Ah.
AG: —and I often struggled to, like, commit to a given craft for long enough, or, like, really get into it. I was just always so restless, and unable to, like, really sink my teeth into stuff — not for lack of support or encouragement from people in my life. [chuckles]
AA: [laughs]
AG: [laughs] It was very much me needing to, like, sort myself out and develop that discipline, you know, which I was lucky to learn those skills later, and those were the things that really— that made art possible. It wasn’t for lack of inspiration or ideas; it was really getting the discipline and the craft kind of nailed down, and the discipline to learn the craft in the first place.
AA: Uh-huh; right. Well, what do you think it is about game design in that case that kind of pushed you over that— that hump, as it were, of, like, that craft and that sustained focus, I guess?
AG: Well I kind of tricked myself into it—
AA: [chuckles]
AG: —because I started doing this design work after having worked just being, like, a cast member on various roleplaying game streams, where I was a performer. So I was kind of immersing myself in the practice of play, and staying curious about that, and starting to have these ideas percolated, and, you know, I was just so deep in it at that point that it didn’t feel like a stretch to start producing my own stuff. And I think one of the really interesting things about roleplaying game design is that you can, kind of, learn through play, and through the practice of play you can understand how these games are working, and see their moving parts as you’re working within them, and that familiarity can then get you grounded and start to develop some skills even if you don’t even realize it. It’s kind of— honestly, now that I reflect on it, it’s kind of analogous to how I ended up stated working as a bike mechanic—
AA: Uh-huh.
AG: —which was: first, I was riding bikes a lot a getting really interested in bikes, and I liked bikes so much; and I was like, “Oh, well I need to know how t fix my own bike, okay,”; and then you start learning these skills and developing techniques, and you’re like, “Oh; I have, like, a trade now that I can do for work” or whatever, right? [chuckles]
AA: Right! [chuckles]
AG: Like, it can emerge out of, just, an interest in a practice of using a related thing. So, yeah, in that sense, I kind of snuck into the discipline a little bit through a side door.
AA: Yeah. I love that you are talking about play and practice, and how those two kind of dovetail because our Season Two theme is Play as Practice.
AG: Mm!
AA: [laughs] This was not set up beforehand; Andrew cam to this on their own.
AG: Yeah, not pre-meditated, we swear.
AA: Yeah, I love what you’re saying about how you can use those tools of the craft that aren’t necessarily the tools of making the craft, or, like, making the thing that you practice the craft in, right?
AG: Mm.
AA: I think that’s so interesting that you can learn that you want to, kind of, do the behind-the-scenes stuff from doing, you know, on-stage, in-front-of-people kind of thing.
AG: Yeah, exactly. And roleplaying games specifically have this quirk to them, where— so like, the thing you make when you design a game is, like, this intermediary piece—
AA: Yeah.
AG: —that isn’t— it’s not the end piece. The end piece gets produced in play by people who take your thing and run with it, and you’re just making this little, like— I often think of it in terms of a computer-program kind of metaphor, of like: I make a little software package, a little program, and that runs on the hardware of a group of people at a table playing a game. They’re kind of this flexible, adaptable bit of hardware that it’s running on.
AA: Yeah!
AG: And so, in that sense, everyone has a share in the production of this end product, which is this emergent story that you generate. And so you get to do that by playing, and so you’re always part of the process; you’re never just consuming this work; you don’t just watch a roleplaying game, you participate in it. And so you’re always kind of implicated in that sense.
AA: [laughs] Yeah, you’re kind of making the media, in a way. You’re, like, that last mile—
AG: Yes.
AA: —of creating what this is. I lov that you’re thinking of the roleplaying game as, like, this intermediary thing. That is so cool that it, kind of, sits in that space of potential creativity.
AG: Yeah, yeah; it’s a tool set, it’s a— you know, it’s all these different ways you can kind of imagine it, but, yeah: it’s not quite done yet — someone has to take it home and run with it an build on it.
AA: So what was it that drew you to roleplaying games in the first place?
AG: Like, the very first kind of experiences like that that I had of that as a kid were, like, me, and my— literally my one friend in elementary school—
AA: [chuckles]
AG: —just at recess and lunch break, would just, like, walk in circles around the school making up stories together with our little cast of characters and stuff like that. And so it was just this very basic, very free-form, unstructured thing, but that, in some ways, is the essence of the practice, right? It’s just this very loose and undefined version of it. And so, that was really the start, and, just, you know, storytelling is such a central thing, right? Like, movies, books: they’re all just different forms of storytelling. And as humans, we love narrative, and we depend on narrative so much to structure our lives, understand the world, you know, understand concepts; so, in that way, I see it as being part of this very deep and central thing, and this is a really fun venue in which to play with tht, that I just happened to get turned on to early.
AA: Wow. For anyone who is listening who isn’t familiar with what it’s like to play a tabletop roleplaying game, I love thatyou’re saying it starts with story. And then you, kind of, pile on these mechanisms and these ways to kind of further that narrative.
AG: Yeah; it’s like a procedural generation of a narrative together, right? And a collaborative activity as well— very, very important to have that collaboration.
[Music break]
AA: So, I think we’re kind of pushing into that teaser content that I was talking about earlier: Girl by Moonlight—
AG: [chuckles]
AA: —your incredible roleplaying game that is currently in crowdfund — and I’ll put the link to the crowdfund in the show notes, too, so everybody can go and support, because this game is so very cool. But, I’m wondering, Andrew: can you just give us the elevator pitch of Girl by Moonlight? You know, what is it to play, what is it to experience?
AG: Yeah. So it’s a tabletop roleplaying game; it’s a tool for telling stories about the tragic struggles and defiant triumphs of a group of magical girls, and it uses that idea of magical girls really broadly to explore ideas of queer identity, and, you know, solidarity, and interdependence and community, and the ways that you change the world for the better, but also, in the course of that stuggle, you might fall from grace, or fall short of your goals.
AA: Ah, I love that description of it. So what is it about the magical girl genre that drew you to make, you know, a huge creative project, honestly [chuckles] — like—
AG: [chuckles]
AA: —why magical girls?
AG: So, the kind of inciting spark of it was just taking in one particular piece of media, which is called Puella Magica Madoka, which is this very, like, late-genre— you know, it’s like the Westerns where there’s only anti-heroes: it’s like the equivalent piece, but for magical girl stuff.
AA: Okay, ‘cause I’m not in the world of magical girls, so this is as much for me as it is for people listening. [laughs]
AG: Yeah, so in the spectrum of genre, it’s in that, like, late-revisionist genre kind of period for magical girl stuf, and so it’s very— everything’s really fraught, and it questions all of the assumptions of the genre, and, like, really gets into these gritty and strange places. And I watched that, and I was like, “Whoa, okay, there’s this cool thing going on here that’s very inspiring,” and I’d had a past relationship with the genre, and this was just, like, a reignition of that interest, which was in something like 2014, 2015. And I was, like, fully immersed in roleplaying games, and really excited about that, and that was where my creative energies were going, and there just wasn’t— there wasn’t a game that I could reach out and pick up that would do that thing that I wanted. And I was left, then— it was, “Well, you have to make it.”
AA: Right! [laughs]
AG: “You have to make this thing if you wanna play it; it doesn’t exist yet.” And while I was doing that, I also had all of these opinions and thoughts about the practice of play, and how best to play roleplaying games, and how to make good stories, and like— because I had been working a lot on my craft as a player, right? As a cast member on these shows I was doing; I had a lot of thoughts and feelings about that as well. And so designing a game is an opportunity to then get up on a soapbox and shake your fist at the clouds, and be like, [curmudgeonly voice] “This is how you’re supposed to do it! Play it like this!”
AA: [laughs]
AG: And so, in part, there was that opinionated — I don’t know; kind of finger-wagging element of me being just like, “I know better than everyone how roleplaying games should be; this is how it should be.”
AA: [chuckles]
AG: Right? You have to have an opinion to set out on this project. So, it was a confluence of a bunch of factors that gave me enough of a push to get it going and make it. And then I had a couple of false starts with early prototyping, but right around that time was also when I bumped into John Harper’s game Blades in the Dark, and I had this little lightbulb moment of, “Oh hey, this could be a way to get at some of these fraught and complicated revisionist genre ideas that I’m interested in,” by taking this game that’s about, you know, scoundrels doing crimes in a haunted Victorian city, and adapting that to be about magical girls opposing, you know, like, misogyny, or big structural forces in a world that is hostile to them because of their identities, and because of the hope that they represent. And so, everything just lined up at the right time for these things to all intersect and create the seed of this idea that I then ran with.
AA: Mm-hmm. And, you know, you kind of said that it’s magical girls, but, like, the kind of revisionist side of magical girls, but I don’t know if I truly understand what it is about magical girls in the first place that gets you so excited.
AG: Mm.
AA: And why you’d wanna write a game about them, or focused on them — where you play them, essentially.
AG: So, yeah; like, way back in the day, Andrew as a child watching, like, Sailor Moon on TV, and thinking like— not being able to understand why is it that this story about a bunch of young women coming of age, doing all this kind of stuff: why does that appeal to Andrew, this young boy, quote-unquote— [chuckles] supposedly young boy. And that really, like, latched in my mind, but, you know, I never had the—I didn’t have the language to understand myself, and why those things appealed to me, or what was going on. And like— so I just knew that I liked this thing, and that it was a thing that I wasn’t meant to like—
AA: Uh-huh.
AG: —or that wasn’t, you know, super in line with the expectations around what I’m supposed to be into and these kinds of things. And so, for me, the genre has always included this kind of, like, queer relationship to it. And so digging into that, and expanding on that, and having this game that I’m making be about that relationship to the genre specifically — it’s not a generic magical girl game, it’s about— you know, it’s Andrew’s magical girl game. It’s my idea of, and experience of, and relationship to this genre. So, in that way, it felt really important to bring in these images of, like, transformation, where you go from your regular self to this magical alter-ego — you know, that is a really easy thing to then map to, you know; this could be about coming out, this could be about gender transition, this could be abou embodying a different way of being in terms of your gender or, like, your queer identity. So it just kinda fit in with all of these personal journeys that I was experiencing, and that were all— stuff I was figuring out as I was making the game as well. Because coming out is a process; you’re never done; you’re always learning things about yourself and changing.
AA: Right. Do you feel like you see those moments of transition of those moments of, like, struggle into transition or something new present in Blades in the Dark—
AG: Mm.
AA: —and is that why you, kind of, attached this, you know, Forged in the Dark moniker to it?
AG: Yeah. If you substitute the class struggle that’s present in Blades for, like, a queer, or gender— gender politics struggle, right: they do kind of map in this funny way, right, that’s a little bit unexpected. So, like, as I worked on the game, I started realizing exactly how that was operating — this thing that I noticed up front of like, “Oh yeah, these things seem to, maybe, be related, or there’s, like, a twist that I can insert here, and that will somehow work.” And then to understand just why it works took a lot of familiarity of taking apart the thing and putting it back together to really understand exactly why that was. But, yeah; I think, at the end of the day, Baldes in the Dark is about people who are struggling against an oppressive society, but by merit of their class position, but that might also include, you know, things like identity that push them to the margins. But they’re trying to, like, get paid.
AA: [laughs] Sure.
AG: That’s the thing they want out of it, right? [chuckles] They’re just trying to get what’s theirs, and what they feel they deserve.
AA: Yeah; yeah.
AG: But it’s not such a far leap to think: Okay, well, instead of acting in this acquisitive mode of trying to be— you know, trying to get what you’re owed, what if you were trying to change that society, right, instead of getting ahead within it? What if you were trying to, kind of, change the rules of the game in that way? And so— so, yeah; it wasn’t such a big drift in the end to realign the game towards this other goal.
AA: That’s cool. You know, one thing that I also know about Girl by Moonlight is that you kind of have these games within the game, right?
AG: Mm-hmm.
AA: Like, you can play pieces of the story, or, kind of, these discrete stories—
AG: Yeah.
AA: —so it’s almost like different shows, or different seasons. How did you come up with that, and how do you think of that in your mind?
AG: So that was something that was born of the process of design, because it is this process of hacking, right — so, taking another game and adapting it to a different purpose — and in order to do that, I needed to, like, break apart Blades in the Dark into all of its component pieces, and say, “Here are the parts that I’m going to adjust and keep in my game; here’s re the parts I’m going to get rid of.” And looking at the game, if I’m going to adapt something its out of respect for that work, and so I look at aBlades, and I think of Blades like a complete thing that has— that is of an appropriate size, and has the right pieces, and I wanna preserve that integrity and that overall shape, and, kind of, breadth of the game. So every time I took something out, I would wanna replace it with some equivalent piece, or something that does similar work, or fills out the shape of the game appropriately to, kind of, keep it functional, and not have any, you know, vestigial bits that don’t do anything, or that kind of— and not just pile on more and more and more stuff. But in the course of pulling everything apart, and deciding what I’m keeping, and putting everything back together, I started to break down, kind of, the setting, the adversity, some of these kinds of contextual elements that in Blades in the Dark are prescribed — there’s a specific setting; there are specific people that you’re struggling against, different gangs and organizations. I wanted to make a game where you— where everyone at the table makes that stuff up, but it’s still load-bearing for the systems of the game, so there needs to be some scaffolding to make sure that they make something that will be enough to support playing the game. And so I made this way of doing that, and once I had built that out, I kind of was like, “Okay, well, this is a chance, then, to have different versions of that to, like, swap in.” Right?
AA: Mm; mm-hmm.
AG: Like, I created this kind of modular bit that I could unplug, and plug in an equivalent piece now, and so I started having— I had two, kind of, modes of play that I wanted to have: I wanted to have a more hopeful one, and then the really, like, tragic, revisionist one — the one that’s really steeped in misery.
AA: [laughs]
AG: [chuckles] Which, my working title for it was “The Bad One.” Like, I was just like, “This is for the people who are gluttons for punishment; who wanna tell stories where everything goes wrong.”
AA: [laughs] Those people exist! [laughs]
AG: They do exist! I’m one of them.
AA: Yeah; yeah. [laughs]
AG: And so I’m catering to my own tastes in some ways, here. But having then built those two — those were kind of the core of the game, and I did a lot of my playtesting with those two in mind — but I just kept getting more ideas. And it’s already— I’d already taken apart the thing once, and seen all of its pieces—
AA: Right.
AG: —you know, exposed all of its pieces; I had the exploded diagram — and had structured it in a way — and this is true of Blades that it’s structured in a way where it’s relatively to pull out certain parts and replace them — but I had my own little set of tools, and set of processes to do this, and so to do that again and again was not so difficult, and it let me really expand the scope of, you know, my ideas around the genre: what the genre could include.
AA: Yeah!
AG: And so, the initial two offerings are very close to the core, and then the second two that I made are much more out there and weird. One is magical girls piloting giant emotional— emotionally-powered robots to fight big space monsters, and then the other one is magical girls as dream-traveling, kind of like, sleuths. There’s a little bit of, like, a noir thing to it, and you're unraveling this dream conspiracy that is trying to, in some way, change the world for the worse by way of people’s dreams and imaginations.
AA: Oh! I don’t think I was aware of that; that sounds incredible!
AG: So that was the last one that I kind of put together; it is definitely the most abstract and strange; very nebulous and weird — you know, it involves dream logic, and things that are a lot harder to pin down. But I was very pleased with this little constellation of the four, what I call the Series Playsets, so that each one lets you have your different series, and you’re gonna have your different seasons of that series, and episodes within that — I use a lot of, like TV language to kind of frame people up for how the game is going to be paced out and stuff like that. But, yeah.
AA: Sure. I love what you’re talking about with this exploded diagram idea: so this process of dissection of one thing—
AG: Mm-hmm.
AA: —to sort through, and sift through, and figure out what it is you want to, kind of, enhanced; what you want to, maybe, strip away; what you want to create there: is— do you feel like when you are creating anything, do you feel like that’s something you usually go to, this, like, “Oh here’s something that inspires me; I’m gonna diagram it an explode it in some way”?
AG: Yeah; part of that must be informed by, like— so I worked as a bike mechanic for a long time, and—
AA: [chuckles] I was thinkin’ about that too, yeah!
AG: —it’s definitely wher I’m drawing this metaphor out of, because if you’re, like, working on— some bikes have these integrated gear-shifting hubs, where everything is inside this very tightly complicated, little device that, if you then want to maintain it or do any work on it, you have take it all apart, and lay all out on your little hankie on your workbench—
AA: Yeah.
AG: —and clean all the pieces, and find which part is broken or needs adjustment, and reassemble it all: so there’s lots of, like, that as a work practice trickling into other disciplines that I’m working in. ‘Cause, yeah; it just seems to be close at hand: when my brain wants to try to get a handle on something, this is— this is what I end up going into, of, like, breaking it down into the little widgets or components, and how those components fit together, and then how those components then can be exploded into sub-components, and on and on and on. So, yeah.
AA: Sure; sure, yeah. Do you feel like you did that with the magical girl genre as well? Or did you feel like you were kinda steeped in all of that, and you had a lot of those ideas, or were you, like taking these, you know, dissection pieces and, kind of, Frankensteining them together. [laughs]
AG: [chuckles] Well, I was very fortunate to take a really interesting college writing course that was about genre specifically—
AA: Oh!
AG: —that used Westerns as a way of breaking down and talking about genre.
AA: How have we never talked about this? [laughs]
AG: [chuckles] Well, we should talk about it; it was—
AA: [laughs] Yeah, we’re gonna talk about it right now! [laughs]
AG: —I loved the instructor; she was so fucking brilliant, so good. And she did a great job of showing, kind of end-to-end, how the genre, like, goes through its phases of being defined, being founded — the, kind of, seminal works that set the stage — and then, as it matures, how people will start to remix and reinterpret and reapply it more broadly, or question its assumptions. And so we read a book called The Englishman’s Boy; we watched some, like, John Wayne-kind of-era Westerns, and then we watched a movie for the last one, which was a movie called Tampopo, which is a Japanese noodle Western [chuckles]—
AA: Uh-huh. [chuckles]
AG: —which is about a woman who is running a ramen shop [laughs]—
AA: [laughs]
AG: —[laughs] and— and this guy, who is a quote-unquote cowboy, who’s a truck driver; he comes in, and he chases a bunch of roughnecks out of her shop, and helps her figure out how to run this business that belonged to her late husband that she’s struggling with, and it’s interspersed with vignettes about, like the intersection of food and culture and sex and all these things; incredible, brilliant movie; I highly recommend it to anyone. But, you know, that is also a Western, even though there’s a guy who’s a truck drive and he has a friend named Gun.
AA: Yeah, okay! [chuckles]
AG: And that’s the cowboy that rides in, right? [chuckles] Like, really stretching it to its absolute breaking point. But it still holds up, right? That’s still— genre is flexible in that way; you can’t really strictly define it. Genre is like a cloud; it’s a field; you know if you’re within in, maybe, but might also be at the fringes of it, and kind of be half-in, half-out, begging people to put you in one box or another, or in multiple boxes at the same time, and messing with their expectations. So.
AA: That’s a very queer perspective on what genre can be, right?
AG: [chuckles]
AA: You know, it can be many things; it doesn’t have to be, just, strictly, this or that.
AG: Yeah, and genre’s like a lens that you can look at things through, right?
AA: Right.
AG: you can look at any story as a Western and map the pieces in, because we’re— human brains are really good at comparing things, or drawing connections — you know, that apophenic nature—
AA: Yeah, exactly!
AG: —of our minds means that we can kinda make anything into anything, and we can interpret them, read them as these different things if we really want to.
AA: Right, right.
AG: So there’s both the prescriptive and interpretive, kind of, elements of genre, and I try not to use genre in a way that’s gonna limit my thoughts, but in a ways that’s gonna be expansive and generative and get new ideas percolating or new perspectives forming on things.
AA: Yeah! I— I love that! I think there’s definitely something that’s so important about the elasticity of thinking about the way genre can inform, you know, Howe look at the world, or how we approach the creative practices that we have, and how we can take those pieces of genre and— and, like you said, just inform us—
AG: Mm.
AA: —and I just— I love that. Just— again, see? I was right! You have such an incisive mind. [laughs]
AG: Well, shucks. I mean, the other useful thing with genre, too, is that if you want to get a book published, or—
AA: [chuckles] Right.
AG: —you need to be able to show your publisher: it’s in this genre; you can sell this book because it is a familiar thing.
AA: Right.
AG: Even if you want to do something completely different with it. I always think about The City and the City, a book by china Mieville: it’s a murder mystery; it’s a detective story; but, really, the point of the book is to get into this idea that, what if there were two cities that were geographically co-located, but were jurisdictionally distinct, such that people lived in one, and would walk by someone living the other, and would— had to never acknowledge them, had to un-see them.
AA: Whoa.
AG: It has this very high-concept thing, but he got that book published because he was like, “Yeah, it’s a murder mystery, my guy.”
AA: “It’s a murder mystery.” [laughs]
AG: “Don’t worry about about it.” [chuckles] Or like— [laughs] you know, it’s a way to kinda sneak stuff in there, and let people have a hand-hold so they can start to get into your story, and then, you know, they’re gonna run with it and follow you wherever you go.
AA: Yeah. I feel like Girl by Moonlight is definitely in that space, right? Like, even though the overarching thing you can say about it is, “It’s a magical girl game,” you’re also exploring mystery — you know, like, sleuthing. You know?
AG: Yeah; yeah. And so the magical girl thing is, like, the wedge—
AA: [laughs] Right!
AG: —[chuckles] that’s gonna get the game into people’s hands, and be like, “Oh yeah, this is a magical girl thing,” and then they’ll be like, “What is all this gay stuff doing in here?” [laughs]
AA: [laughs]
AG: And I’ll be like, “I got you! Ha-ha!”
AA: [laughs] Well, hopefully, that’ll open the eyes of some people who are playing it as to, you know, their own, like, lives, and what they have to offer the world.
AG: Yeah! And also, both internally, they can discover things about them selves, and they can discover things about the genre, right? Like, the genre includes this stuff, and it works; there’s a synergy there that exists—
AA: Yeah!
AG: —and if you’re not thinking about it that way, this is going to expand your thinking and be generative.
[Music break]
AA: So, Andrew, I am very curious about creative practice, and how people express that, and how they experience it, and so I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what your creative practice looks like — you know, with Girl by Moonlight; with other stuff: what does that look like for you?
AG: Yeah, I’m definitely, like, a stew-pot creative. I do a lot of, like– I think about a thing; I write some notes; I do something completely unrelated for, like, two days–
AA: [laughs]
AG: –I come back to it, or I, like, sleep, and I wake up in the morning and I’m like, “Oh!”
AA: Uh-huh.
AG: “I have an idea about this thing now!” And it’ll just kind of– it bubbles in the background, and then I return to it with fresh eyes, or with some idea in hand, and then I do some work, and make some progress, and then I– and then I have to put it down again and let it percolate some more. So it’s very–
AA: Yeah; yeah, that resonates with me.
AG: Yeah; it’s very, like, fits and starts, and it’s unreliable; I can’t just, like, sit down and and start writing and stay writing and just go, go, go. Or, at least, not in terms of– game design work, specifically, is a bit more fiddly in that way; I have to really– it’s very extrapolative, I guess. Like, if I start with a concept, I have to think, “Okay, I’m making this character type that’s gonna do– that’s gonna have these mechanics, or that’ll do these kinds of behaviors, or I want it to output these kinds of aesthetics: I have to sit with that for a while and think, like, okay: if this thing happens, or if they do this thing with this ability, then, like, what’s the next knock-on thing, and the next knock-on thing, and is that really how it would go? Is there another way it could go?”
AA: Mm, mm-hmm.
AG: There’s all this kind of, like, meandering, extrapolative thought to then decide if I’ve hit the mark or not, and what I need to revise and change.
AA: Right, right.
AG: Whereas, if I’m sitting down to, like, write rules text or write example text, now that I’ve– you know, I’ve written a 220-page book now, so I’ve got a lot of practice at doing that [chuckles]–
AA: [laughs]
AG: –and just writing prose, now, is at least something where I can have a goal, sit down, and do it, front to back. And so in that sense, that’s an element of craft that I’ve forced myself to develop over the course of writing this book, which was a bit of a [chuckles]–
AA: [laughs] Right!
AG: –a bit like pulling teeth for a while there [chuckles], but I’ve settled into have a decent bit of comfort with that, and so in those spaces I can be very practical and businesslike in pursuing it. But the more, kind of, fiddly elements of game design for me really involve, like, sitting with it for a long time, and letting these ideas kind of bubble up. And getting my gut reaction to things, and letting that develop slowly.
AA: Sure. Well, and I feel like, especially with game design, because there is – like we talked about – it’s so important for people to create the fiction that the game itself is supporting, basically–
AG: Mm-hmm.
AA: –your creative practice is almost reliant on the creative practice of someone else, in a way, because it’s like: you wanna playtest something; you wanna come up with all of these ideas for how this character might do X, Y, Z things, but you don’t know how that’s gonna work until somebody sits down with the game, or a group of somebodies sit down with the game, and they try it out, right?
AG: Yeah. You start, you know, with internal playtesting, which is much more guided, right? You’re there to kinda keep things on track, or nudge and adjust, or see exactly what’s going wrong, and then, over time you have to broaden your scope of playtesting, and it includes a bigger and bigger range of people. And so, it’s double-mediated in this way — to come back to that point from, you know, the beginning of our conversation; it’s like: I make the game, and I hand it off to a group of people. I can’t even guarantee that their understanding of what roleplaying is — the practice of roleplaying, broadly — I don’t necessarily match up with that. So there’s this, like, double layer of mediation, where the game has to pass through both individuals and their own creativity, and, you know, their collaboration at their table, but also, like, their culture of play, what– what roleplay means to them, which can be very divergent. There are some things that are creating tendencies towards more convergence around that now that we can see, like, actual play streams — like you can watch people play roleplaying games a lot more now. But still, table to table, there’s gonna be this pretty broad variance of, like, what is included and what isn’t included in the act of roleplaying.
AA: Yeah!
AG: You can’t rely on those things to be there, so you kind of have to frame it out, or make a strong stance with your game, and kind of lead people in the right direction. But ultimately, so many of these things are knock-on, second– and third-order effects that are emergent, and that you have no ability to control. [laughs]
AA: [laughs}
AG: You just have to trust that they’re gonna take your game and have fun with it, and that that will be enough. I had to let go of this idea of, like, [curmudgeonly voice] “This the good way to play roleplaying games!”
AA: [laughs]
AG: I had all these opinions, and very quickly I had to absolve myself of any responsibility for any of that ever actually happening at the table, because I can’t make people do that! And their understanding of what roleplaying is, is not necessarily something that I share with them, or I can translate to them. And I just have to hand it to them, and if they say they had fun: cool, great. You know, that’s– that’s win for me. That’s as much as I can really hope for. I can’t be going in there, showing up at their table, and being the referee, and making sure that they’re staying within the lines, or playing it exactly how I want them to. I just can’t control them.
AA: Yeah. What is it that, you know, a year from now, let’s say: people have– have Girl by Moonlight in their hot little hands–
AG: Oh no! Yeah.
AA: –and they’ve played the game, and they’re so excited; what is it that you’re gonna hear or read on the Internet that’s gonna make you say, “Oh yeah; that’s exactly what wanted to happen.”
AG: [laughs]
AA: It’s gonna, like, make your heart grow three sizes. What is it– what is it that you want out of this?
AG: Yeah, there are a couple of little things that I’ve left, very deliberately, to be kind of emergent within the game. I don’t speak about them very explicitly in the rules text or anything; like, I don’t explain them very much. They’re meant to be these things that, kind of, naturally come out of the– you know, if I’ve done my job right, these things will come up, again and again, without me needing to, kind of, mention them. Um, and there are a few different ones in there; um, one of them is around this mechanic called Eclipse in the game, which is this, uh, kind of inversion the characters undergo, with all of their good qualities and the things that, you know, make them who they are get flipped and they become this– this shattered reflection of themselves. The way it’s presented, people are a little bit shy about it usually, because it’s something that you can, kind of, choose whether or not you’re gonna risk getting into that territory. Um, one thing I’m hoping will happen with people getting into the game is that they’re gonna realize how fun that process is, and how– how much free stuff I give them if they choose it. [chuckles]
AA: [chuckles] Right! [laughs]
AG: It’s like: if you go into Eclipse, you get a bunch of cool, free stuff! [chuckles]
AA: [laughs]
AG: And it’s, like, a big power swag; it’s a big moment where you get to take the spotlight; it’s a really fun experience. And so, people kind of, like, need to stumble into discovering that — the joy of that — and I’ve seen groups already do this a little bit, here and there, um, but I’m really excited to have– to have that go broad–
AA: Right.
AG: –and to have people have these moments of, like, “Oh yeah; and then I have this totally amazing story moment where, like, right at the climactic confrontation, or whatever, my character, like, fell into Eclipse, and then I did this, like– we won, but I did this horrible thing!” [chuckles]
AA: [laughs]
AG: And like, you know, “It was all, like, inverted and bad; and we had to deal with the aftermath of that,” or like, “the next season of play centered around that,” or whatever. It’s kind of meant to, like, shift the story or the arc of the character in this really dramatic way that I can’t map out or explain discretely in the game — it just kind of has to happen–
AA: Right; right.
AG: –and only really gains significance in hindsight, which is the other really interesting thing a lot of the time with roleplaying games, right?
AA: Mm-hmm.
AG: It’s like the story– a story is a retroactive thing, right? We only know about the story after having gone through it, and then seeing it in its totality, right? From– from the other side. So there are some things like that that I’m, kind of, just sitting, waiting for people to discover. And even a lot of the core symbolism and metaphor of the game is pretty understated, and is something that people will kind of feel their way through, rather than– you know, you don’t have, like, your “queer points” or whatever. [chuckles]
AA: [laughs]
AG: It’s not– It’s not really, like, explicit and laid out in that way, mechanically, but rather, all of these kind of tendencies within the game, and the way it’s gonna push the characters and the kinds of stories that you’re gonna be telling, it’s gonna make space for asking these kinds of questions about identity, and exploring ideas about, like, transformation, and embodying difficult parts of oneself, and things that you wouldn’t expect. Or, you know, forcing people to confront interiority in all of these complicated ways, that, again, I can’t– I can’t really like– I can’t map it out [chuckles] ahead of time; I can’t explain it to you. You’re gonna see that; it’s gonna form in the, kind of, the gaps in between the little bits and pieces of the game as you’re playing it, and you’re gonna see that, hopefully, once you’re, you know– at the end of a session, you’re gonna look back and go, “Oh yeah; we– we got into this whole moment with my character about, you know, people’s expectations for her, and all of the ways in which she rejected those, and how that was what pushed this conflict over the edge or resolved some big important moment.” They’re very intangible things that you’re–
AA: Yeah.
AG: –these moments that you’re trying to create that you’re never gonna even see.
AA: [chuckles] Right! Yeah.
AG: [chuckles] It’s a very weird craft that you’re engaging in, right? It’s like, “I have a secret for you; I can’t tell you about it, and I don’t even know if you’re ever gonna discover it, but it’s there, and I hope you do.”
AA: Right. What’s interesting about that, too, is that I think there are secrets in that game that people are going to discover, that you didn’t even think you were putting in there, you know what I mean?
AG: That’s the real mind-wrecker, right? [chuckles]
AA: Yeah! [laughs]
AG: Is when they’re like, “What about this thing, Andrew, that you put in there? I found this easter egg,” or whatever, “this thing you designed.” And I’ll be like, “I didn’t do that. That wasn’t me.” [laughs]
AA: [laughs] And giving people these moments of realization and transformation — these kinds of, you know, like you said, easter eggs, but you didn’t even necessarily assume were gonna be easter eggs for people … for me, that, I think, is the most exciting thing: when I experience a piece of art, or when I make a piece of art, that transforms me if I’m experiencing it, or that someone comes back to me and says that. They’re like, “Oh, I just, like– I read this poem, and the way that these two images played off each other,” and I’m like, “Wow, I– I didn’t– I never would’ve interpreted it that way!” [laughs]
AG: Yeah, because all arts is relational, and is received personally in that important way, right?
AA: Yeah! Yeah.
AG: It’s why you share it with other people, right? I could make this perfectly crafted, you know–
AA: Right! [laughs]
AG: –little, multifaceted, intricate clockwork thing of a game–
AA: Yeah.
AG: –and I could just keep that to myself and never share it with anyone, and that would be a very different relationship to the craft than, yeah, wanting to put it in people’s hands and share it with them.
AA: Well, and I think the fact that you’re making a game, too, is also, like, indicative of this– this wanting to share, you know; and this wanting to give people tools, and options, and new ways to think about narrative, too, right? Because you could just– you could write a novel.
AG: Mm-hmm.
AA: You could write the script to a TV show; you could make a piece of visual art; you could make a song, or whatever. But that’s not necessarily a direct invitation in the way that a game is, right?
AG: Yeah. With the subject matter that I’m engaging in, with all the stuff around trans and queer identity, and implicating people in it: there is a power in that, that I think is really important.
AA: Mm; mm-hmm.
AG: And there is a way that you can bring people into topics of identity that they– they will dismiss out of turn if they’re not part of them. Because we’re really quick to, you know, label ourselves one way or another, and then just discount anything that doesn’t apply. Just be like, “Oh yeah, I’m straight; I’m gay; whatever, and so I don’t need to think about any of those other possible connections I might experience, or all of the ways in which there might be fuzzy edges to my identity, or that my identity might change over time. I’m just not gonna think about that, because I’m a busy person; I need to make rent, I need to feed my kids–”
AA: Right.
AG: Whatever, right? Like, “I’m busy.”
AA: Right.
AG: And “I’m just gonna put myself in a little box because it’s comfortable and easy.” But those truths are never complete or absolute, as far as I’m concerned. Like, I don’t really believe– I don’t believe that anyone’s really straight! [chuckles]
AA: [laughs]
AG: Or any of these other things. I think these things are kind of monolithic and imposed ideas that server particular agendas, and it’s important to undermine them. And you’re not gonna do that by just generating a more complicated set of labels; you need to generate that by really breaking up the boundaries of them and pushing people into those border spaces and ambiguous places; the in-betweens, and the undefineds, and getting them uncomfortable, and, you know, shaking off of these scaffoldings that aren’t helping them.
AA: Right. You know, it’s very similar to what we were talking about with genre, too, right? Like, genre is basically an artificial, barrier-creating idea, where–
AG: Exactly.
AA: –we can say, you know, “Oh, this is a– this is a mystery story,” but it– it’s so much more, right? It’s just like humans! [laughs]
AG: Yeah! We contain multitudes; we are in flux and changing all the time, and to try to– to lock people in stasis, to try to freeze them in a moment, or a particular place or mode or identity is a fallacy. And I think it serves a– it serves a very particular set of interests to do that. Not interests that I align with, as you might imagine. [laughs]
AA: [laughs] …that you share, yeah! [laughs] So, we kind of talked a little bit about Tampopo, but I’m also curious about what other television, film, books, music: like, what is– what’s kind of getting you really excited creatively, like, media-wise and stuff, because I always love your recommendations.
AG. Well.
AA: [chuckles]
AG: I’ve been most excited about, over the last couple of years, I’ve read through two trilogies of books by Jeff Vandermeer.
AA: [gasps] I love it.
AG: One is called Ambergris, and the other is the Southern Reach trilogy, which of course, is Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance. Jeff Vandermeer is just an incredibly amazing author; he’s so good; I love his work.
AA: Me too.
AG: So many ideas; so many fascinating and complicated structures to his stories.
AA: Yeah.
AG: So many unexpected choices; so many interesting ways of portraying characters, just … so he’s been really big on my, kind of, creative horizon, informing all of these–
AA: Uh-huh.
AG: He came in a little too late to into my experience to be part of Girl by Moonlight, or he would’ve been if I were still working on it. But his work is gonna inform a bunch of things that I have lined up, kind of my next two or three projects are all gonna be very Jeff Vandermeer–driven in various ways.
AA: I’m very excited about that! [laughs]
AG: [laughs] I– I hope that I can do justice to his work with my little homages, you know? That’s–
AA: Yeah.
AG: So, he’s been really big for me. Another author I’ve been reading a bunch of is Becky Chambers, um, who has a set of sci-fi books; I think I’ve read four that’re all set in the same universe; they were all very good. A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is the first of the series that I was reading. She’s a very hopeful author; it’s not quite– I wouldn’t call it utopian, but just, it isn’t dystopian either. [chuckles]
AA: Uh-huh. [chuckles]
AG: Like, it’s not– it’s not actively creating a world that’s messed up and bad, and trying to make you feel bad; there’s hope; there’s room for characters to understand each other, and relate to each other, and overcome things in constructive ways. It’s very uplifting fiction in that way. But there’s another series of books that she’s writing that I just read the first installment in, which is the Monk and Robot series.
AA: [gasps] Yes!
AG: Which, they’re very, very delightful, vibrant stories; it’s a setting in which there was this whole industrial automation crisis, and the settlement of that was humanity being like, “Cool; we have messed up real bad, so we’re just gonna back off of about half of the planet; we’re just gonna set up our nice little, like, solarpunk, eco-sustainable civilization here, and then the robots get the nature part.” And there’s just, like, the rest of it that they give over to nature. And then they haven’t interacted for a long time, and these two characters from each of those worlds end up meeting in this chance encounter, and, you know, form a friendship, and go do a thing, and it’s very– it’s very sweet! It’s very cute and strange; they’re very quirky little people, both of them; and they’re trying to learn about each other and get along. And, yeah, it’s just a very charming and heartfelt story that just gets to you, and it doesn’t do that by killing everyone off, or doing all these, like, heavy-handed, tragic things; it’s just very earnest and very heartfelt.
AA: Mm. And that’s Song for the Wild-Built? Is that the first one?
AG: A Psalm for the Wild-Built, yes.
AA: Psalm for the Wild-Built; right, right, right. Very recently, my friend Drew, we were having lunch, and he was like, “I just read this book called Psalm for the Wild-Built,” and he told me this same thing, and then described the cover, and I was like, “Wait a minute; I think I have this book in my house!”
AG: Mm!
AA: And so I am definitely putting this on my to-be-read-very-soon list–
AG: [laughs]
AA: –because two people that I really trust and really adore are saying I should read this book, so, thank you very much. [laughs]
AG: [chuckles] Yes, highly recommend; highly recommend.
AA: Anything else? Any other, like, visual media, or TV, or games that you’re playing?
AG: Well, so a friend of mine, uh, works at the studio that makes Darkest Dungeon, and they just released Darkest Dungeon II, and that game is gorgeous.
AA: That’s what I’ve heard!
AG: It’s so– it’s just so aesthetically, like, tightly coordinated. Everything just works really wonderfully together, and all of the elements — every aspect, ever facet — supports this overriding goal of, like, everything is tense; everything is dark and tenuous; and the music is amazing. My friend does the environment assets, so she does all of these beautiful, modular assembled environments that you go through — yeah, it’s just been very, very fun to get into that. You know, I have this personal connection; I’m really delighted by seeing my friend’s work, and knowing that she worked on this really, really brilliant thing, um, and, you know, I’m just a fan of the series already, so, loving that; playing a fair bit of that. And I picked up the new Legend of Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, and I’ve made various cursed jalopy creations–
AA: [laughs]
AG: –with all the little, you know, sticking sticks together, and making weird little vehicles and stuff. [chuckles] I’m doing that too, and that’s lots of fun; and it’s really nice to have games that offer, like, big worlds to explore. That’s something that, when Breath of the Wild came out, that was, uh, early in my experience of disability, where I was really missing getting to run around and do stuff, and that was an opportunity to have a little simulated version of that, where there’s some nice sunshine, and you can run around and have an adventure and explore and stuff like that. And so I have a very big soft spot for those kinds of games now, as a result of that.
AA: Yeah; yeah. I– I’ve just watched John play the Zelda games; I haven’t watched the– him play the new one, but he’s telling me all about the, like– [laughs] the sticking; like, you can put anything on anything else and fling it around and all that good stuff. [chuckles]
AG: [chuckles] It’s very– I really admire and respect when designers are just like, “We are going to give you the most dangerous, volatile, and destructive tool that we can conceive of–” [chuckles]
AA: [laughs]
AG: –“and we’re just gonna let you do whatever the hell you want with it.” [chuckles] Like, “Go nuts!” Right? It’s very open-ended; you can just do stuff! Like, a lot of games are like, “No, no, no; here’s the parameters of the puzzle; they’re tightly defined; you’re gonna move the little pieces in these ways.” The characters are gonna constantly bark at you about how you should say on task and do that. But Zelda is like, “No. It’s a big world; go nuts; do whatever you want, we’re not gonna tell you how to live. It’s your life.”
AA: [chuckles] Yeah!
AG: “Make your giant wheel and run it around the countryside.”
AA: Sure.
AG: “Never find the princess; we don’t care.”
AA: [laughs]
AG: So much respect for that; like, it is truly an important and under-appreciated position for designers to take in a video game, so very much enjoying that. [laughs]
AA: [laughs] Yeah. That sounds amazing! [laughs] So, Andrew, is there anything that you want to hype up or shout out right now? Um, and also, where can we find you online?
AG: So, anytime I get asked to hype up or shout out a thing in such an open-ended way, it is my habit to say things like the following, which is: I’m gonna hype up being gay or queer; it’s really cool!
AA: Yes! Yes! [laughs]
AG: Have you considered that gender is a complicated thing, and a space that you get to play in? It doesn’t have to be stuffy and prescribed like your grandparents did it; you can just go nuts and do whatever the fuck you want. And I encourage you to do so, and to play with it, and to try things on, and then, maybe they don’t work out for you, and that’s fine; it’s not high-stakes. Embrace your human experience and enjoy it to the fullest [chuckles]–
AA: [laughs]
AG: –by being a big slut and sleeping around and doing gay stuff. It’s the best. So, that’s my plug. [chuckles]
AA: [laughs]
AG: [chuckles] And you can find me on social media; uh, my Twitter at is (at) Commuting Crow, for as long as Twitter remains. I’m also (at) Andrew Gillis on Cohost. I’ve got my game, Girl by Moonlight, a tragic magical girl came, which you can back on Backerkit, and, you know, it’ll be out there in stores at some point, as well — I can’t wait to get my grubby little paws on a printed, physical copy of this book that I wrote and to see it on a shelf; it’s gonna be really exciting. So, yeah.
AA: Excellent. Excellent! Um, I actually wanna go back — this sounds like we’re ending the episode, but I do wanna go back a little bit–
AG: Mm.
AA: –and ask you: are you at liberty, or are you feeling comfortable to talk about those projects that you have on the horizon?
AG: Oh, you wanna hear about my many cheap ideas? [laughs]
AA: [laughs] Ooh! I mean, you don’t have to tell me! You know, they don’t have to be– [laughs]
AG: Oh I love to talk about these.
AA: Okay, yeah, go! [laughs]
AG: So, I mean, the next thing I wanna do is make a small game, because I think I kind of did a misstep in diving into Girl by Moonlight and making it as big as I did. Um, the better thing to have done for my personal development as a designer would’ve been to make a lot of little, small things, and, like, throw a bunch of them away, and just never even talk about them. [chuckles]
AA: [laughs]
AG: And just iterate, right? And get through those processes.
AA: Yeah. [chuckles]
AG: But, so, I’m gonna try and catch up on that; you know I have no regrets about GBM, but I am gonna try to catch up, so I’m gonna make a small game. Uh, I have this idea for a two-player game kind of inspired by, in Russian Doll, if you’ve seen that show?
AA: Yes! Yes.
AG: In the first season, there’s the whole birthday party scene that you repeat over and over again, and that degrades over the course of the show, until, at the end, it’s a completely empty apartment, with just her one friend dancing eerily with no music, saying, [singsong] “Sweet birthday baby!” And I wanna make that moment through this, like, two-player roleplaying game; that’s kind of the target. And I have this idea of doing that with this, kind of, guided prose-writing thing, where you make that whole scene, and then over the course of play, the scene degrades, you cross out pieces of it in a particular order, so you eliminate this prose until there is just this, kind of, patchwork of elements from this thing you’ve written. And you read it aloud, right? And so you get this feeling of the, like, sparse isolation born of that. So that’s whole–
AA: I’m obsessed with that idea. [laughs] That is so cool!
AG: There’s definitely something there; I need to figure out exactly. You know, the details of it are obviously gonna be a lot of work–
AA: Yeah, yeah.
AG: –but I really like this idea that the, kind of, tension in the game is that the two players have a character, and that their characters are trying to– they have, like, a thing that they can’t acknowledge or come to terms with, and every time they come close to maybe saying it aloud, or when they hit that sore spot, that’s when– that’s when the loop resets; that’s when you lose a piece and jump back. And so, like, they have to find some way to carefully, gently approach this topic for themselves before their timeline just kind of falls to pieces completely, um, but that, as they– as it degrades, they’re more exposed, and maybe there’re more opportunities, so it kind of naturally will pace towards a conclusion. This is my high-level brief on that one.
AA: Yeah. I love the idea of using redaction and using erasure to– to further a story.
AG: Mm-hmm.
AA: I think that is just such a powerful way of thinking about narrative: the– the elimination of it, you know?
AG: Yeah; yeah, I thought you might–
AA: I’m obsessed with it; I’m not joking! [laughs]
AG: –[laughs] yeah! … that this idea world resonate with you because you work in poetry and all of this.
AA: Yeah; yeah.
AG: So that’s one. I have a middle-sized project that I can’t really get into the details of because it’s for someone else–
AA: Okay.
AG: –a mutual friend of ours. And then the third one that I have, kind of, back-burnered, is basically an impossible game to make — this is like my white whale — which is a parliamentary procedural set in Hell–
AA: [laughs]
AG: –that is, like, a competitive roleplaying game, where you’re trying to legislate Hell Parliament to satisfy your faction’s goals and ends, and the premise is that, like, Hell has been set up — it’s like this whole big, bureaucratic thing — and then Lucifer just leaves, and Hell continues governing itself [chuckles], and kind of degrading over time–
AA: [laughs]
AG: –and unraveling, and becoming more and more complicated politically. And you need to, like, argue about the law with people, and the law is gonna be a document that gets redacted or changed. I’m prototyping some ideas around prose as a unit of play in that previous one we talked about for this other game. But, yeah; trying to make this complicated game about– about revision, and editing, and changing of the law; and the rules of it morph as you play it, and you’re trying to, like, get stuff out of it, and pull one over on the other characters, or, the other players, and stuff. And impossible game to design; I mean, I am an idiot for trying this. This is the peak of hubris.
AA: [laughs]
AG: But, it would be really cool if I could do it, so I’m gonna try to do it. [chuckles]
AA: [laughs] Well, in ten years, when we come back and do our reunion episode on, you know, Season– Season 15 of Little Oracles, we’ll talk about your parliamentary procedure in Hell. [laughs]
AG: [laughs] Yeah, I’ll be, like, haggard; I’ll have an eye-patch–
AA: [laughs]
AG: –a huge scar across my face. I’ll be like, [old sailor voice] “Yeah, I tried makin’ that game; it’s still out there.” And then I’ll, like, smoke from my pipe and keel over dead.
AA: [laughs] “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!” [laughs] Amazing.
AG: [laughs] Yeah! That might not ever get finished, but I’ll keep working on it.
AA: Hey, you know what? Speaking it into existence is step one, right? [laughs] Oh my goodness.
AG: [laughs] Speaking my own doom into existence. [chuckles]
AA: Right. [laughs] Oh my gosh. Andrew, thank you so much for taking this time to hang out, and talking about your work, and I– I– this has just been a wonderful chat, so thank you.
AG: You were a delightful person to dig into all of these things with–
AA: [laughs]
AG: –the pleasure is all mine, I assure you. [chuckles]
AA: Aw; oh, fabulous. [chuckles]
AG: [chuckles]
AA: You can follow Little Oracles (at) little oracles on Instagram, check out the blog for more big book energy and creativity content at little oracles dot com, and, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.
[Music outro]
[Secret outtake]
AA: Did you hear Gulliver, like, two minutes ago? Did you hear him yelling?
AG: No; it didn’t come through.
AA: You didn’t hear him? Okay. He sleeps, like, really deeply now, and when he wakes up, he’s, like, yelling. [laughs] ‘Cause he’s like, “Where am I?!?” [laughs]
AG: Yeah; he’s like, “Where am I?!? What’s going on?” I’ve had mornings like that.
AA: Mm; mm-hmm. [cat meows four times, insistently]