These notes and Arneson’s would ultimately become Dungeons & Dragons, but only by being codified could the game really be propagated and begin to gather a following. This same problem persists for designers today.

Gus has written a long essay on procedures in gaming, why they mater, and a mode of thinking about games he calls Proceduralism. One could call this tract of thinking the Pahvelorn School of Game Design. As it was for Gus, that campaign was so inspirational for me. It really shaped how I think and play games now, all these years later. I had bugged Gus to break this post up, there is so much here, and a lot of it could stand by itself, but he said “no way!” A man’s gotta have a code, I suppose.

— Ramanan Sivaranjan, microblogging, June 16, 2022 [osr theory ] #