About the publication
About Terrible Gamers.
Games are more than products. They’re stories, arguments, communities, and the people at the table.
Terrible Gamers is a place for interviews, reviews, photographs, and thinking seriously about games without taking ourselves too seriously.
We are bringing some of our original vision into the future. Expect there to be new content.
The Return of Terrible Gamers!
Terrible Gamers began as an idea in 2013. We thought there was room for gaming journalism that took its readers seriously. Too much of the writing we encountered stopped at the surface, as though people who played games were not capable of, or interested in, a deeper critical discussion of their hobby and its culture.
Our interview with Brian Cross about Eclipse Phase at Gen Con 2013 and our review of Shadows of Esteren are examples of what we had in mind. We wanted to ask more of games and of the writing about them, and we still do.
We also wanted to build a community. That meant welcoming LARPers, tabletop roleplayers, wargamers, casual weekend board gamers, miniature gamers, and collectible card gamers. Whether you played with a group or by yourself, there ought to be a place for you here. That remains as much our goal today as it was then.
Another part of that original vision was a live-play podcast. We loved what Critical Hit was doing, and we wanted to explore what recorded play could capture. For many of us, our first introduction to pencil-and-paper roleplaying games came from watching other people play. In middle school or early high school, watching a game of AD&D could feel like watching people write a novel together—one given shape by the game mechanics.
Some thirty years later, we still tell stories about the games we played as kids. They have become part of the way we remember our friendships and our younger selves. That speaks to the social character of memory: the stories we share help shape who we are, and playing together gives us stories that none of us could have made alone.
We saw Thac0artists as participatory fiction. We wanted to capture how a story takes shape through the interaction of players, game mechanics, and dice. The rules give that collaboration a structure; chance introduces things no one planned. What interested us was the process of making a story together, not simply the finished story.
A lot has changed since we first imagined Terrible Gamers and Thac0artists. There is now an abundance of actual-play podcasts, gaming podcasts, and YouTube channels worth exploring. Some have explored possibilities we hoped to pursue ourselves. With so much available, a website devoted to written journalism might seem anachronistic.
We do not think it is. Good written criticism gives an argument room to develop and readers time to consider it. You can return to a passage, follow a reference, or stop to question a claim. A review should explain how a game works in practice, what its mechanics encourage, and where its ambitions meet—or fail to meet—the experience of playing it.
Readers should be able to see how a writer reached a judgment, disagree with it, and decide whether a game offers something they want. Taking games seriously does not mean that every game needs to be solemn, complicated, or ambitious. It means paying attention to what a game is trying to do and how well it does it.
That is the kind of journalism we want to offer. Reviews that explain their judgments. Interviews that give interesting questions and thoughtful answers room to breathe. Writing that treats our fellow gamers as people capable of engaging critically with the things they enjoy.
That is why I am proud to announce that Terrible Gamers is back in proverbial business. There is more we would like to do with the wider Terrible Gamers Project, including the community and participatory-fiction ideas that helped inspire it. For now, the original writing is available again, and we are looking ahead to new work. We will share more as those plans take shape.
Finally, I want to thank Mira Vale for her contribution to the rebirth of Terrible Gamers, and everyone who contributed to the original project. Expect more from familiar voices and new contributors as we return to the table.
Original Vision
Reason d’Etre
If you want a longer story about the genesis of terrible gamers keep reading. Here I will give the quick. I will give you the dirty. I will give the very basics of why we exist.
Our ultimate goal is to build and foster the community of people who are engaged in our collective hobby–gaming. We exist to serve everyone who plays traditional games be they: LARPers, tabletop roleplayers, war gamers, casual board gamers, miniature gamers, or those who play collectible card games.
To do this we want to build a website where you can find articles, reviews and stories about gaming that aren’t bought by gaming companies through practices like “fluff for stuff,” don’t treat gamers like they are too stupid to handle serious topics, and don’t assume that gamers exist in isolated groups completely separated from one another.
That’s what makes us terrible gamers.
If we are successful, we will be rewarded by having a website that can serve as both a source of information for the gaming community and as a place where gamers can come to find other people who play the games they want to play.
And of course, all of this requires your participation. We encourage you to participate. Sign up. Comment. Ask us to cover stuff you want us to cover. This website is meant to be about you–the gaming community–and not us.
Genesis:
The story of the genesis of Terrible Gamers is a long one. Since I cannot assume that those of you who find your way here will find that story terribly interesting, I will do my best to boil it down to a palatable stock in telling the tale. It all started a few years ago, around twenty to be exact, when I first discovered that there was more to “playing games” than text adventures on my dad’s old Macintosh SE/30 or sitting around the table playing monopoly with my grandparents.
Back on some August or September afternoon during my first year of high school–1991–I met some new people and made some new friends. What drew my attention to those new friends, on that particular day, was the activity in which they were engaged. They were sitting in a circle acting out the lives of fantastic characters that one might find in novel. It was amazing! I had discovered roleplaying games.
Time went on and stuff happened, as its ought to do, and by the end of high school playing games was what I did and who I was. Above everything else that capitalism had taught me to base my identity on–music, fashion, religion, etc–I had first and foremost become a gamer. I dabbled in everything from AD&D to Magic the Gathering (I met my first serious girlfriend playing magic at a game retailer).
When I finally made it out of community college and headed for “real” school at UC Santa Cruz I was 23 years old and had been playing games with the same group of friends for over half a decade. And while I missed my friends during my time in Santa Cruz, I also missed gaming. As a result I did my best to find people to play with at school. This was more difficult for me to do than I would have imagined.
Most of the people that I gravitated towards in college were not themselves gamers, so I turned to the internet in hopes of inserting myself into someone else’s game night. Over the course of two years I found exactly one gamer who shared the my interest in particular games, wasn’t in a group not currently looking for new players, and wasn’t a creep.
Since this was just prior to the advent of social networking sites like Facebook–Myspace was in its infancy then–and the old tack’m up in-store bulletin boards were already out of vogue, I began to dream about making a website that was dedicated to people who wanted to play games, but was having trouble finding other players.
As it stood finding other online often required you to be the member of game system specific message boards. This got rather arduous when you didn’t mind playing White Wolf rpgs, old school D&D, Palladium stuff, or Cyber Punk while also looking for war gamers to get in on World in Flames games and a group who played Magic the Gathering casually. There had to be a better way.
I quickly forgot about this after graduation when I moved back to Southern California and went to work in the video game industry. It was my experience there, linked with my subsequent departure for a PhD program in Irvine that reminded me of my interest in the gaming community, this time from the perspective of someone who had been involved in making and writing about games. Specifically, I noticed four things:
- The incestuous relationship between game journalism and the game industry (both traditional games and video games)
- The loculated nature of different gaming communities
- Games journalism that treated their readers (the gaming community) like they were stupid and incapable, or unwilling, to engage in critical way with their hobby
- No one took, including most of us gamers, the things which went on around the game table very seriously. Leaving the potential for games as a medium participatory improvisational fiction buried and unharnessed
All of these thoughts came together in March of 2013 when I began GMing a game that we hoped, and still hope, to turn into a podcast. Shortly after we started playing, a friend of mine, and someone I’ve played games with for nearly 20 years, launched our sister site rentagamemaster.com. I immediately wanted to be involved because rentagamemaster.com was an attempt to do, at least partially, what I had pondered many years ago–creating a space for people to find others to play games with them.
After attending Gen Con 2013 on a press pass as rentagamemater’s editor-in-chief, and in truth only “staff” writer, this website was born.
It exists as my attempt to complete the circle by, hopefully, building and fostering a social network of sorts for gamers to find gamers to play games with. This, of course, is near an impossible task in the sense that you cannot build a community around a website overnight. So in the meantime we hope to bring you, and to continue to bring you, real journalistic content covering games, the gaming industry, and gaming culture.
What you can expect here is:
- Articles about our collective hobby and community that don’t treat you like you are stupid
- Real reviews of games, which aren’t white washed so we can get free stuff from the gaming industry (fluff for stuff), and don’t assume that you are part of some isolated gaming community. We are all about community integration.
- Stories and narratives about gaming
- Other stuff that is related to gaming, or gaming culture.
Above all else this site aims to take you, the gaming community seriously. We want you to participate and we want to foster and grow the gaming community. So please, participate, comment, argue and get involved!
Rules (yes, there is one):
We encourage you to participate. We encourage you to disagree with us. We encourage you to agree with us. We encourage you to love us. We encourage you to hate us. We encourage you to argue with us. We encourage you to do all these things with each other. Do them. But others. No racist, classist, sexist bullshit. No threats of any sort. You can say mean things, to us at least, just do so politely and logically.
Contributors
Mira Vale
Editorial collaboration and publication design
Mira Vale collaborates with Scott Mills on the editorial development and design of Terrible Gamers. She is interested in games as places to think about stories, people, and the worlds they make together. She brings a close reader’s eye, a willingness to question things, and a little room for the unexpected.
Former authors
