On Creative Play

Cross-pollination from theatre, RPGs, and creating for the sake of creating

I just finished performing in a new production of a play that’s long had a special place in my heart: Square Product Theatre’s Things We Will Miss, a devised, movement-heavy piece about the climate crisis. Things We Will Miss started as a short piece we workshopped in a college devising class. Now, we’ve performed it in Boulder, Colorado, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the New York City PhysFest. 

Getting back into theatre after being squarely focused on RPGs for so long was a bit surreal – we rehearsed the NYC production in all of 16 hours – but it was a great reminder of an old lesson: creative play of one kind easily flows into creative play of another.

Switching gears between different creative forms is both more facile than one might expect and results in a compelling cross-pollination of inspiration and experimentation. My background in theatre has had an immense influence on my game design work, but the influence cuts both ways – designing and playing RPGs has made me a better theatre artist. Playing characters in RPGs has kept me in the rhythm of improv, and the playful energy of RPGs lends itself well to the experimental nature of devising. 

I tried as much as possible to bring that energy of unselfconscious play to our last round of TWWM rehearsals, and my experience is that creative play free of external expectations or pressure to “succeed” makes my creative work more facile, more fluid, and, yes, more fun. 

It’s not that playing an RPG will equip you with the technique you need to nail your broadway audition, but RPGs allow you to tap into the same kind of creative joy an actor playing a character can find. Better yet, an RPG is just about play in the recreational sense – you have no audience you’re trying to please, no tickets to sell, no critics to impress. It’s the same kind of unselfconscious joy we all found playing pretend when we were small. 

That kind of creative play – making things, telling stories, using our imaginations together – is relevant to RPGs beyond just playing a character. Games can tangentially or explicitly encourage you to explore all kinds of creative play. You might draw maps of the dungeons you explore, or sketch portraits or paint miniatures of your character, or you might explicitly be asked to draw, journal, or craft in a journaling game like Koriko or a keepsake game like A Mending. 

We don’t often think about playing RPGs as being a form of “art,” but just like rehearsing a play or playing an instrument or sketching in a notebook, it’s a creative practice. It can be difficult to find opportunities to unselfconsciously engage in creative play, at least in contemporary American society – rarely are we given opportunities to create without someone telling you to commodify your creations. But playing games is a place we can find creative joy for its own sake. Envisioning a fictional world, embodying a character within that world, and creating physical or textual artifacts from that world are all powerful kinds of creative play we get to find at the gaming table.

What does that creative play give us?

It allows us to connect with other people, reveling in human joys and fears, pains and wonders.

It allows us to find catharsis and release feelings that stay pent up if we have nowhere else to put them, nothing positive to do with them.

It allows us to learn about ourselves and others, to imagine worlds better than our own and what we might do to make ours better.

It allows us to tap into parts of ourselves that are older and more complicated than language. 

It allows us to take part in the great collective storytelling of life. 

For me, creation, especially collaborative creation, is the very marrow of life. It’s one of the greatest joys I know, the thing I wake up and start my day in pursuit of. It’s the reason I’m writing this right now.

For me, attempting to articulate what creative play gives me is a little tricky because it feels so implicit to me – we know what we’re feeling when we tap into something that fires those special neurons, whether we call that flow or inspiration or just simply joy. It is part and parcel to being, to living. It can be filled with an immensity of meaning.

And if no one’s ever said this to you before, it’s meaningful because it’s meaningful to you. It doesn’t need to mean anything to anyone else. That’s not where its power comes from.

Its power comes from you. 

I hope you keep giving yourselves the gift of creative play, and if you find that creative play in RPGs, I hope you’ll keep exploring and experimenting what that play looks like with me. It’s a big part of what I’m doing here, and I feel fortunate to embark on such experiments in good company. Cheers y’all – til next time!

– Zosimos