Making and Breaking a New Game at Metatopia

It was close to midnight on a Wednesday evening, and my kitchen table was completely covered in hand-written notes, black felt markers of every size, and exactly 52 Jenga blocks. A Jenga tower has 54 blocks, and in the moment I realized this, the game I'd been working on for almost three years had disintegrated before my eyes into a pile of self-indulgent scribbles.

I was exhausted. Driving eight hours to a game design festival suddenly seemed ridiculous, and I felt a powerful urge to cancel all the play tests that had been so meticulously scheduled for the next four days. It was the night before Metatopia. I was thankful that I knew other designers who'd been through this before, because that mean that emotionally, this was pretty much exactly where I expected to be. Metatopia bills itself rather boldly as "The Game Design Festival" and, though it's a relatively small convention held in the humble town of Morristown, New Jersey, there really is no other event quite like it. This is where designers bring their unfinished games (board, card, tabletop, live-action—pretty much anything that isn't digital) for feedback, input, and, hopefully, a little indie market buzz. Attendees can hop into anything from a kid-friendly party game about warrior princesses to a devastating freeform larp about the Khmer Rouge.

I was bringing a two-player role-playing game that uses a tower of wooden blocks to represent unresolved romantic and sexual attraction. All these games have in common is that they need to be played, in person, multiple times, in order to develop. So, why not get a bunch of people together to run through as many works-in-progress as possible in one weekend?

When I spoke with Metatopia's co-organizer, Avonelle Wing, she told me everyone—including her—laughed out loud when her husband and business partner Vincent Salzillo proposed the idea in 2011. Asking game designers and publishers to attend as the primary customer when they were used to being treated as honored guests seemed counter-intuitive to say the least.
Some doubted players would show up, much less pay, to play games that weren't even done yet. Though they'd been running conventions for over a decade at that point, Avonelle describes that first Metatopia to me as "a lesson in compassion. And scheduling." Publishers and players alike did come, and with great enthusiasm, but no one was prepared for the emotional bombshells going off all around them. People weren't just testing systems, they were sharing what Avie gently called "their heart songs," the products of years of work and lifetimes of passion. It was like the opening night of a hundred simultaneous plays, all happening in one hotel. Like much of what comes to Metatopia, the con itself was an experiment. Six years later, I suspect it's still in beta, and always will be. Like tabletop and live-action games, the con itself is a hands-on, face-to-face affair.

I got to speak with the main organizers not just because I'm a journalist, but because I was bringing a game—my first. Everyone who registered, whether they were an industry veteran or complete unknown, got a phone call and an in-depth discussion about what they and their game needed. Should your game be played in public, or private? Do you need a huge room? A quiet corner? Is there anyone in particular you want there—or don't? My game, tentatively titled Tension, deals with what some might consider sensitive subject matter, and Avie and Vinnie were just as selective about who got to join in the tests as I was. They tossed a few names out on the call, and followed up later about some others who'd expressed interest. I felt like the boss in a heist movie, assembling my team of experts.

Avie wasn't kidding about compassion. Over the years, the team behind Metatopia has made it clear that care and support are at the core of what they're trying to achieve. One of the only things scheduled for Thursday night was a meeting of The Cred Bureau, a network for women and non-binary gamers. The name is a reference to having one's credentials "checked," an exhausting experience familiar to many women and non-binary folks in geek spaces (and academia, and in business, and… pretty much everywhere.) At the inaugural Cred Bureau gathering last year, we each pledged our personal support to someone for the rest of the con, and someone else pledged to support us. We talked about how terrified we were to debut and promote our games and other projects. We made charm bracelets for each other as symbols of our shared strength. We were each others' cred. It was fucking rad.

I missed the Bureau meeting this year, but caught the Friday morning info session for first-time attendees. It's decidedly informal; Avonelle and her Accessibility Coordinator Elsa S. Henry sit down with everyone who's interested, do a round of introductions, and explain a few ground rules and expectations for the weekend. The message is: you matter. If a player bails on your game, they'll find you a new player. If you're given game materials you can't use because of a disability, they'll fix them. If you're being harassed, they'll help you build whatever kind of resolution you want. By they I do mean actual individual people, who you are introduced to, and who make themselves visible and available throughout the event. Vinnie seemed in constant motion for the entire weekend, checking the schedule, asking potential players to fill in, moving games to new slots and locations as shifting schedules demanded. And yet, he never seemed too busy for thoughtful feedback.

We had a long, quiet conversation at one point about Tension—how I'd pitched it, and how to attract the sensitive but enthusiastic players that would really make it sing. How many chats like that he had over the course of the weekend, I don't know. I wondered how he managed do that much one-on-one consulting while also co-running a gaming convention, before I realized those two jobs were one in the same. You might be wondering what the experience of playtesting a role-playing game is like. When it goes well, it's sort of like telling a really good joke that makes people laugh for two to four hours. In fact, it's better than that, because they start telling each other jokes that spin off what you said and take your idea in directions you couldn't even have imagined. I envisioned Tension as a tool to tell stories about flirtation and budding love. My first set of players told me a story about a lifetime of unfulfilled longing in which their characters never even made direct eye contact. They seemed to love it.

In another test, I made a small change in how dialogue could be used, based on some player feedback. Within the first few minutes, I knew it wasn't the right choice. Gone were the furtive glances, aching silences, words caught in throats for fear of saying too much. The player characters were having the sort of conversation two average people somewhat romantically interested in each other might have! It was unbearable, and I knew I couldn't stop it.

Painful though it was, I had to let them see it through, and my notes on that useless rule helped me figure out what should take its place. This experience was a gentle breeze compared to what I saw some other designers going through—the work they thought was ready for market being brought back to square one, or a clever mechanic they'd invested their ego in unravelling in the hands of a player other than themselves. I saw more than one person in tears. I attribute the excessive drinking common to most nerdy conventions to excitement and social awkwardness, but I wonder if there's more to it, here. Whether my tests were going well or poorly, I had this funny feeling all weekend, like I was vibrating at an imperceptible frequency. I didn't sleep much. Probably not just for the usual reasons.

By Sunday, the overall energy of the attendees dwindled to almost nothing. This is fine because it is universal. Conversation is almost easier, because no one has the energy to be nervous. Near the bar, I sat down with a small group of mostly strangers and asked about the game they just tested. The woman across from me was wearing a flat-bill snapback with the word SENPAI in huge block letters on the front so I was most interested in her opinion. She expressed cautious optimism. "They've got a steak in there somewhere, but it's not there yet. It's still a cow." The rest of us nod. "But that's why you come here, right?" She shrugs. "To slaughter it."

For weeks after the con, I wondered about the apparent contradiction between the love and butchery both equally on display in this hotel full of people taking personal, creative, and in many cases, commercial risks.The emotions running high aren't just about playtests. Like any community, there's pain in the RPG and larp scene, some of it fresh, some of it long-standing. Some of it healed at an odd angle and won't ever be quite right. Some people are putting their livelihoods on the line when they publish a game. For others it may feel like a lot more. All I can say is that it works. Whatever it may be doing for "games," it's helping the people who make, play, publish, critique, and cultivate them. I can understand if that seemed impossible in 2011. It hardly seems possible to me now.