Just so folks know why I get so cranky about gatekeeping in the , here's some history for those of you who were fortunate enough not to have lived it:

when I was writing my first game in 2007, it was common consensus that hacks weren't real games.

"Real" games were games with "original" systems.

Hack was a perjorative term used to separate the hack designers from the "real" designers. Lots of digital ink was spilled by lots of people (white men) on forums (The Forge, Story-Games) about why people who "only" wrote hacks...

...weren't "real"game designers.

BUT WAIT.

Development cycles for hacks are long, but for original systems? Double, triple, or even quadruple. And then you have the problem of fun. Original systems in alpha are very often NOT FUN.

But quick hacks can be and often are very fun!

Often with very little effort or playtesting. So guess which type of game most marginalized ppl started their game design career with, because 2nd shift labor and other disadvantages?

Hacks

And which games weren't real games?

Hacks

And who wrote the "real games"

White guys

I argued with people who called me a game designer for TWO YEARS after publishing my first game because of this poisonous dynamic. I literally didn't think that my first game was actually a roleplaying game.

And then Dungeon World and Blades In The Dark happened.

And that was the end of that bullshit.

Because suddenly white guys were FUCKING CRUSHING IT with HACKS. And who's going to say that John Harper isn't a real game designer because Blades began as "just" a hack?

Nobody. That's who.

And I was fucking glad.

Because hacks have democratized game design. The 1st advice I give to aspiring designers is: WRITE HACKS. Maybe you'll move on to original systems, and maybe you won't. But hacks are real games that you can play with real people right away, that will teach you to write good games

Because of shitty gatekeeping by people defining what counted as "real" game design about how my games weren't worth anything because I didn't reinvent the wheel from scratch, I lost three years to not making games after my first because I didn't think my 1st game was "real"

I've also watched this kind of "small scrappy designers are the enemy of PROFESSIONAL design" drive promising and talented marginalized designers out of the hobby. And that SUCKS. Game design is poorer for their absence.

So anyway. That's why I get fucking cranky when people start fencing off what counts as "real" or "professional" or whatever we want to call it game design. Because none of this is new, and it almost always comes from people who should know better.