A couple of months ago I teased you guys that I was flying to the USA to film a new People Make Games documentary. [cockney accent] It's only bloody gone and COME OUT!!
Almost every day for 40 years, Jerry Gretzinger has been making a single, gargantuan map of an imaginary place. Depending the angle and day you approach it from, Jerry's map might resemble:
A deranged compulsion
A single piece of outsider art on an inconceivable scale
A one-player mapmaking game like The Quiet Year
But 100% of the time, Jerry's Map is a spellbinding thing. I first saw it on Bluesky being reposted by Aaron King (one of the hosts of RTFM, a podcast from which I have found many great things) and there was almost no time between me learning about its existence and messaging my colleagues on PMG we should fly out and (this is a technical term) film the shit out of it.
And yet... this is me once again pitching People Make Games on a documentary that's not about a game. Wasteland Weekend wasn't a game. Neither was my video on VR Chat or the sex workers of Second Life. Along the same lines, look at my Blaseball work! That's not a game, that's... I mean, I still don't know what that was. A fevered fandom around a quantum sport that both did and didn't exist? Certainly, trying to fit Blaseball into the genre of "game" is like trying to fit a boiled egg in a light socket.
So no, Jerry's map isn't a "game". What it is, however, is "play". And I've become a bit obsessed with that word recently. When I meet people I've actually started introducing myself not as a games YouTuber but "a YouTuber on games and play", and just tanking the assumption that I might be some sort of professional pervert.
But basically, when I made the jump from video games to board games and discovered how many of the skills for designers and critics were transferrable, I started seeing genre distinctions as unambiguously stupid. Videogamers could learn a hundred things from TTRPGs, right? But take my word from it, TTRPGs could learn from larp, and larp could learn from immersive theatre, which could learn from haunted houses, which could learn from Burning Man, which could learn from Blaseball, which learned from sports fantasy league apps.
If my Quinns Quest work is about me repeatedly dropkicking the old oak tree that is Dungeons & Dragons to hurry it in falling over, my People Make Games work is me flinging my lanky frame at the bars of the cage that the video games industry finds itself in, trying to get "gamers" to accept that their discipline wasn't invented in the 1960s with the creation of Spacewar, but is so much older and more amazing! Ours is a practice that includes sports and the first ever casino and children's playgrounds and medieval knights roleplaying with one another and ancient humans carving mancala boards 8000 years ago. Which would make for better, weirder, more inventive games, created and played by an inconceivably more diverse swathe of the population.
I'm actually going to be writing a talk on this in a couple of weeks which I'll be giving at Guadalindie in Spain, so that should be recorded and you'll be able to see my whole melodramatic manifesto in full.
For today, though? I hope you guys love watching my trip to see Jerry's map. Our whole team think this video is a little bit special.
-- Quinns