One point I am trying to understand better in all of this discourse is that D&D, it turns out, for many people, is a “system,” not a “game.”

There is not exactly a “game” there, because the “game” is the thing the players create USING the “system,” AND DESPITE the “system.”

So when we say play other “games,” they hear learn a new “system,” despite the fact that many of our “games” don’t have “systems,” per se, because for us, so much of the “system” is simply the “game.”

Accessibility becomes a concern for people because it is difficult to learn “systems,” because “systems” are the things that “games” hinge upon. There is always this inherent separation between the inert “system,” and the built “game.”

The D&D “system” is difficult to learn, thereby implying that other “systems” that run “games” must ALSO be difficult to run, and if the “game” in the end is the same, but built on a different “system,” then why would I use a different “system” to run my “game?”

But the point that seems to be missing is that we are not asking people to use other “systems” to play their “games,” we are asking them to play different games, which is an entirely new way of seeing for people, because our games are powered by “systems,” but simply ARE.

So there’s this really interesting loss in the translation between traditional gaming and indie gaming, such that something like a lyric games becomes utterly incomprehensible, since there is literally no “system” OR “game,” there is only the game, as defined by the lyricist.

So anyway. That’s what I think is important to understand. Is that we are literally always having these dual conversations because we actually enter into this discourse with two different understandings of what it means to speak the word “game” and the baggage of “systems.”