In today’s newsletter, I’m going to share some thoughts about the power of belief. And because this is also about games, I’ll touch on how it applies to play, and how we can explore it through design.
But first, what was April like at Foresight Studio?
Busy. I finally finished packing the second print run of The Cross Stitch to ship! I did not realize just how much bigger a number 300 is than 100 until I had to place 5 inserts in every zine. Regardless, I just mailed them out yesterday, so restocks are coming soon at Exalted Funeral and IPR! I did make a couple small updates in this print run to improve usability: the individual location timelines now include which place the NPC moves to next (with page #s), and the overall Timetable is now included as an additional 5.5” x 8.5” sheet.
Follow Your Bliss playtests are still underway, and I’ve made some needed adjustments to the design. In the meantime, I’m beginning development on the third workshop in Hillbrook Glen, Become Your Best Self.
Somewhere in there, I did a little bit of layout for an upcoming thing I’m really excited about. Not that it’s related or anything, but if you haven’t already, don’t forget to follow Triangle Agency on Kickstarter!
All in all, there should be more to share next month.
Now, the essay below contains spoilers for Psycho-Pass season 1, The City and the City by China Miéville, and a chapter book for kids about fairy houses, the title of which I cannot find (and probably never will). It also contains nearly as much text in the footnotes as the main body, because I think in parentheticals. So be warned.
If you want to jump to a section, you’ll find:
First, an introduction to stories about how belief defines truth
Next, how this extends to the concepts that govern our lives
Last, what we can learn about gameplay & design from thinking about belief
The law doesn't protect people. People protect the law. -Akane Tsunemori, girlboss icon
Clap if you believe
There's a particular kind of story that I find deeply satisfying but a little painful, like picking at a scab. It’s a little hard to describe, but I’d characterize it as: “stories in which the reader is convinced something supernatural is happening, but it turns out that nothing supernatural is involved, but maybe it doesn’t matter, because the belief was strong enough that it might as well be true.”1
The first example I can remember is a short chapter book I read as a kid. I have no idea what it was called or who wrote it, and I still haven't been able to find it despite extensive googling across the last two decades. But it was about fairies.2
In this book, two children had a magical babysitter. She would wear flowy purple outfits, flit from room to room, take them on all kinds of excursions, the usual cool babysitter stuff. She also had a special connection to fairies. She taught the kids to construct little houses from sticks and leaves, and to leave gifts for the fair folk inside—snacks, baubles, trinkets etc. The children waited to glimpse their fairy friends, but inevitably something drew their attention elsewhere. When they returned, the gifts had already vanished.
Here's where it gets good, though.
The babysitter was a kleptomaniac. She stole that shit. The mom noticed stuff was going missing, visited the babysitter’s house, found some stolen glass apple and the babysitter got immediately very fired. Maybe even arrested. That was the end of this children's book, and it broke my prepubescent brain. I was reading this nice story about fairies and all of a sudden, the magic wasn't real? That's not how this was supposed to go. There was supposed to be some lovely ambiguous ending about growing up and the ephemerality of childhood, not an extended lecture on stranger danger.
Still, the moral I took from this story was not about distrusting cool babysitters. For me, it highlighted something I had already started to see in everyday life: truth is in the eye of the observer. To the kids, it didn’t matter that the fairies weren’t real. They still got to experience magic.3
A more nuanced take can be found in The City and the City, which makes sense given that it’s a book for grown adults. It’s about two city-states that occupy the same physical region but are politically distinct, leading to all kinds of bureaucratic headaches—especially after an investigation into a murder case reveals a possible cross-border conspiracy. An important force throughout the book is Breach, a sort of super-powered, supra-political entity that regulates the borders between the cities. Given that the two cities overlap in space, these borders are primarily psychological: citizens of each city are required to completely ignore (“unsee”) buildings and people located in the other.
There’s a ton more to the plot, but throughout, it seems as though agents of Breach possess supernatural abilities. They appear from cracks in existence and spirit violators away, never to be seen again. It’s even implied that they’re tied to a mysterious, ancient progenitor city. But of course, it’s much simpler than that. Breach is entirely mundane (but no less powerful for it). Its agents just know how to navigate the gaps in people’s perception, to take advantage of the societal norm of “unseeing,” thereby existing in both and neither city simultaneously.
We very regularly maintain psychological borders in our everyday lives, including (but not limited to) removing people and things from our perception that we think we shouldn’t be seeing, or that we find inconvenient. But beyond that, like the citizens of Miéville’s cities giving Breach outsized power through the credence they give societal norms, we too lend unimaginable power to the mundane via belief.4
Just have faith
Money has value. Living a specific way will make you happy, or healthy, or both. Hard work is morally good. Anything is morally good, for that matter. (I will not touch religion.)
These are all stories, and faith in them fuels our everyday lives. None is intrinsically true, but some are made true by enough people treating them as such.5
Which brings me to Psycho-Pass. The show is premised on an artificial superintelligence, Sibyl, predicting and executing the optimal way of life for everyone in Japan, using constant monitoring of mental state to determine citizens’ capacity for both productive and destructive action. As these things usually go, it’s a utopia until it isn’t. People (murderers, mostly) start asking questions about free will, about what sacrifices they’re willing to make for the greater good, and about what defines “criminal” when the definition of “normal” is more slippery than expected.
After an intense late-season reveal, the truth of Sibyl becomes clear: it’s not exactly “artificial,” instead composed of the harvested brains of those criminals it could not fit into its model. By subsuming them into one enormous network, it is capable of a level of computation and decision-making a computer can’t reach alone.
Yet, the content of this reveal doesn’t really matter. The major reason this twist works is Sibyl’s optics are bad bad, especially for the officers who are tasked with upholding its judgments. Even after finding out the truth, investigator Akane Tsunemori makes the decision to keep her position, because:
The law is the accumulation of … people's feelings. They're neither the provisions nor the system. They're the fragile and irreplaceable feelings that everyone carries in their hearts.
She argues that “people protect the law,” that it’s the manifestation of their hopes and dreams about what makes a just society. If they dream of a different society, they will break these laws, and new ones will form in their place.6 While it's not exactly the same, as with Breach in The City and the City, the reality of the situation doesn’t matter—what matters is the credence people give it.
Unfortunately, I’m not smart enough or well-versed enough in political philosophy to write about how Tsunemori’s thesis is reflected in reality. If laws are defined by the belief of the people, the question I have when I look at our system of governance in the US is: the belief of which people? Or, which corporate entities, as the case may be?7
But, ultimately, I’m here to talk about games. And what are tabletop roleplaying games if not an exercise in defining the boundaries of what’s possible?
Rules as written
To play a game is to believe in it. Maybe not 100% of its rules, but at least its world or its core conceit. Players invest in the idea that, by acting in accordance with specific guidelines, they'll get something out of it. It’s a fun way to toy with how belief changes reality, because it’s done with the understanding that the world you make together is not real.8
In the same way we protect societal structures, we protect the rules of the games we play, drawing lines that technically do not need to be there. Rules serve a lot of purposes in games, but mostly they challenge us to find ways to play creatively within them.9 And we have an easier time accepting our characters’ failures and celebrating their triumphs if we believe in the rules. If you already trust the rules, or the setting, or even just the general vibe of a game, you’re less likely to feel cognitive resistance when the GM introduces something new. (That familiarity is why I think certain very very popular games remain very popular.)10
But I think more games can explicitly interact with player belief.
The Carved from Brindlewood (CfB) system (Brindlewood Bay, The Between, Public Access) takes an anti-canon approach outright, using player input to determine in-game reality at the table. Something that unites CfB games is the extreme specificity of their settings, including colorful descriptions of places and clues, striking a balance with the system’s open-ended nature. When a player is asked to generate flavor about a location or to solve a mystery based on a seemingly random collection of objects, there are concrete waypoints to anchor their theories, lending them credence.11 Without this—and I’ve seen it happen as a result of my own inadequate GMing—players find it hard to believe what they’re saying.
Still, I think this can be pushed further. I imagine a game that challenges what the players believe to be the rules even as they play it.12 As in The City and the City, I imagine a game in which players think they’re playing one thing, but partway through it shows itself to be another kind of thing entirely.
At the end of the day, all TTRPGs are like that, in a way. When we play a game, we know it’s not real. But like the kids in that fairy book with the thieving babysitter, we still get to experience magic.
Looking to the future,
Ben // Foresight Studio
This got a little more philosophical than I intended, but I’d love to hear what you think—especially if you know of games that explicitly toy with player belief. In the meantime, find me on twitter or mastodon, or come chat on the Foresight Studio discord server.
I would like to note that this absolutely does not extend to “but it turns out they were mentally unstable all along!” narratives. I love an unreliable narrator, but using a reveal of “mental illness” as a one-and-done explanation for the supernatural is lazy, harmful, and mischaracterizes the experience of people who actually live with psychosis.
I went through a fairy phase as a kid. I had this notion that although humans couldn’t usually see fairies, if you looked at the reflection of the sun off a car’s back windshield or in a puddle on the ground, the afterimage floating in your vision was the aura of a fairy. Retinal damage aside, this book was about fairies, so you know I was ready to believe whatever it threw at me.
Meanwhile, I was attempting to take this idea to its logical conclusion: I decided teleportation was possible if (and only if) the person trying to do it could close their eyes and 100% identically replicate the experience of being in the place they were trying to go, using just their imagination—basically, if they could trick themself into believing they were actually already there. I spent a while trying to make it work, but eventually realized I couldn’t quite get the exact cocktail of scents, the direction of the breeze, etc. right, so it wouldn’t really ever work.
This idea overlaps but is not exactly the same as the trope found in stories like American Gods or The Silt Verses, in which belief is directly tied to the strength of a divine entity. These stories ask: what if, through some supernatural means, our belief in concepts, legends, or gods manifested directly into reality? In stories like The City and the City, the concepts and legends don’t manifest, but the outcome is surprisingly similar. These stories argue that, as in real life, the presence of “actual” divinity is not necessary for people to experience the divine.
Now, there is extreme local variation in stories, and as a result, variation in the truth. State a particular kind of fact in one part of the USA and the reception will be much, much different than if you state it as fact elsewhere in the States (for example, restauranteurs outside of Philly commit regular blasphemy alleging that they serve Philly cheesesteaks, and yet, to the uninitiated, this is taken as truth). This is also something that The Silt Verses explores effectively through local deities and family gods, but, as noted above, it doesn’t exactly make the same argument that I’m talking about here.
Tsunemori still disagrees with major aspects of the law—particularly, those which mandate execution for behavior she believes to be redeemable. But if that’s what Psycho-Pass-Japan’s citizens believe will keep them safe, then it’s her job to keep doing it. It’s implied that she wants to work within the system to gradually shift it away from such harsh penalties, but... yeah. ACAB. (Maybe I should watch season 2.)
At the very least, I do want to point out that society’s determination that money is a unifying system of measuring value means that “normal” is defined by whatever allows a person to acquire money, or to produce things that allow others to acquire money. This becomes troublingly clear in the realm of medicine, the where line between health and illness, disability, or neurodivergence is defined primarily as “interfering with everyday functioning,” i.e., can’t work. Can’t work, can’t make money.
Unless this is Ender’s Game, but let’s hope it isn’t.
I can’t help but wonder: do we need games to practice bending made-up laws because it helps us feel less restricted by the societally-imposed rules that govern our everyday lives? Do we need games solely because we live in cages of our own making??? …loljk haha i’m probably overthinking it… unless?
There’s also some stuff here about rules-light vs heavier games. This is entirely a matter of personal preference, but I think every player has a level of rules that they find peak-believable—too crunchy, and the rules seem more convoluted than is reasonable, too light, and you’re just engaging in a poetic exercise with no framework or world to invest in. It’s also why I personally struggle with solo TTRPGs regardless of crunch, especially when the game world is loosely defined: I have trouble believing that a ruleset alone can generate the kind of narrative experience I want from a game, so I usually lose interest partway through.
As I noted in a past newsletter, I think presentation has a big role here. Working on layout for Public Access, I wanted to make its 80s/90s/early-2000s-cursed-magazine vibe as believable as I could.
I think it would spoil some things if I discuss the only example I can currently think of, so that will be for another time.