Today, this is my best attempt to describe what I want to do with my work. Tomorrow I might discover a better way to describe it. This page was originally posted on January 20th, 2019, and was last updated on July 29, 2020. It draws heavily on the Meatpunk Manifesto, which is a great document, but doesn’t describe exactly what I want to do.
- POSER games are FUN and WEIRD. Sometimes they’re too weird, because that’s better than not being weird enough. They are easy to understand. They’re built on the design philosophies developed in the OSR, but are not beholden to the limitations of the old school.
- POSER games trust the people who play them. Games are tools to help people have a good time. Games will be remixed and played differently at every table, and the game should facilitate rather than discourage that.
- Art is political. Don’t let your art get coopted by fascists. Make it all as gay, and trans, and leftist, and intersectional as you can imagine. If there aren’t enbies in it then you’re probably doing it wrong. Anyone who wants to ‘keep politics out of gaming’ doesn’t deserve to enjoy what you make.
- Art is trash. Trash is art. Don’t put anyone’s work on a pedestal. Don’t put your work on a pedestal. Do stuff, put it in front of people, then do that again. Perfection is poison.
- MAKE ART. MAKE RENT. Help others do the same. Capitalism is a nightmare and we’re only going to survive it if we help each other. Your work is valuable, don’t be afraid to sell it. Pay the people you work with. No exceptions.
- Build communities, support communities. Push other people up. Fight other people’s battles. Take suffering onto yourself to lessen the burden on others. Come up with new ideas for how you can make your community a more welcoming, more productive, more intersectional space. Nobody will ever ask you, so don’t wait to be asked.
- FIGHT. Don’t let people get away with being shitty. Get angry, make enemies, be hated. Yell at your friends when they deserve it, listen when they yell back at you. Don’t just make shitty people feel unwelcome, make them feel unsafe. Show good people that you’ll go to the mat for them. Fight with your words, your fists, your heart, and your art.
- Learn and Listen and Grow. Never let yourself think you’ve learned enough. Stop to hear what people are saying about their experiences. Empathize with where they’re coming from. Research anything you don’t understand. Experiment with ideas that might not work. Do whatever it takes to understand yourself, and the world, and games better, then take that growth and use it to make better art.
- Failure is temporary. You will fail. You will make bad decisions, you will hurt people who don’t deserve it, you will fall short of your ambitions. It’s only a problem if you wallow in it. Try again. Apologize. Keep going and you’ll get there.
- Aggressive Honesty is at the heart of everything good. Find your truth. The one deep in your brain that hurts you and frees you. The truth your friends won’t understand because it’s not their truth. Then shape that deep truth into a piece of art that they will understand.
- Do not trust nostalgia. Do not trust complexity. Do not trust what worked yesterday. Do not trust nerds. Do not trust consensus. Do not trust social media. These things are not bad, but they will lie to you if you let them.
Related Reading:
Ava at the Permanent Cranial Damage blog has written her own statement of purpose: The Dung Manifesto.
I have revisited the POSER manifesto to explore my thoughts on it as a product of the environment in which I wrote it, and how effective it feels to me some years later.