Consider The Threshold

I wrote a new article! It's a bit rambly but I hope it's still helpful for people. I just finished moving into a new apartment and outside of my fiction work I'm going to try and get more writing done for folks, so if there's ever any essay topics you'd be interested, please let me know and I'll see if I can't take a stab at them.

There's a moment in nearly every tabletop game that bugs the living hell out of me. It occurs at roughly the 1 hour mark in a oneshot, and while it's not a damning sin, it is a constant pet peeve that always makes me feel like I tripped while getting out of my car, a silly preventable stumble that I never enjoy feeling. It reflects an absence in the game's design and could be easily solved. I call it the Threshold Pause.

So we've made our characters and learned the rules to the game. It took us about an hour. We're all sitting there, maybe we've grabbed some snacks, and we've realized we're all set with preparation. There's this awkward silence (this is what I hate!) when finally someone says "I guess we should start?" and everyone else goes "yeah, yeah." and so we play the game.

In her article Ritual In Game Design (a must-read for any designers), Meguey Baker discusses the Journey Inwards, the moment when the players cross from the out-of-game space into the game space. This serves to contain play that helps show a distinction in time and space from what came before to what is now. That threshold pause is a sign the game hasn't clearly transitioned the environment, and that now we have to sculpt our own mechanism inwards to enter the play space.

Crossing the threshold is a safety mechanism. In her essay, Baker discusses the importance of a game conclusively ending, but this is also just as critically important for a game's beginning. By constructing a ritual environment, moving in and out of play clearly allows players to understand precisely where they're at and what is being discussed. It helps segregate character-emotions and player-emotions, and allows for more clearly defined borders when people need to step away.

It's not a hanging crime for a game to lack a threshold-crossing mechanism. It's totally possible for players to build their own, and there are even some games that benefit from not having one. But as game designers, we're organizing and curating the flow of play through our environment. Shouldn't we be concerned about making sure our front door is well put together? We can't spend all our energy worrying about character creation and gameplay — surely we can curate and present the other parts of the experience with clarity and direction.

Ten Candles is exemplary in its approach, slowly building the playspace during character creation by the lighting of candles, followed by a ritual series of truths to define the limits of the space. If you need one example of how this can be perfectly and fully integrated, this is where I would go. Video games also tend to be really good at welcoming you into the play space, especially because the interface tends to lend itself to that sort of consideration. Even clicking a play/continue button on the main menu is a simple form of threshold crossing.

In my own work, I've tried to approach this consideration in a few different ways. In Wanderhome, at the start of each session players read a few paragraphs out loud and ask each other four questions, with the fourth always answered silently. In play I've noticed this creates a "shiver" sensation for many people, indicating that the room has quietly and palpably shifted. In Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, we quickly found that the intro fiction of each chapter was an effective method to bridge the gap from outside the B&B to inside, and it's part of why we put such a heavy focus on that fiction throughout the game.

Consider this article an invitation to work in ritual and event design into every portion of your game. When you playtest a session, think about how each moment flows into each moment, what it's like to facilitate your game for others. Is there a natural ending point? Is there a natural starting point? How can you structurally emphasize these qualities over the course of play? I hope to someday see more games that can help its players along every step of the process, so that any particular session feels like a coherent and though-through whole.