Juan Tramontina (T): Welcome. First off, what is your relationship with gaming in general and RPGs specifically?
Johan Eriksson (JE): Okay, that's a good question. In general, I teach game design. I've spent my last 20 years working as a teacher at a university or at the department of game design. I have been focused on systems design and iterative game development and a lot of different courses and also the 2D graphic aspect of game design, both digital and analog games. I have been playing games since I was like six or five or six. I started reading role-playing games when I was like kind of early teenager. I played my first role-playing game way later when I was like in my 20s. Something like that. And the delay in actually playing role-playing games was due to not having friends who were interested in it. So during that long period of time, I just read rule books and were fascinated by them. These tomes of amazing imagination. Favorite thing was bestiaries because monsters are cool, right? When I got into role-playing games more as an active hobby, I haven't really stuck to one system for a long time ever. I have jumped around and tried out different things and tasted the flavors of all the different systems and designs out there. I've been really interested in how they in different ways shape the narratives that come out of them. I've never been much for playing homebrew things when I'm playing with my gaming groups because I want to see what the intended vision of the author of the game was. So I kind of tend to play along with the rules very much. My favorite titles right now is Tales from the Loop, Red Carnations on a Black Grave, Vampire the Masquerade has been a long-term thing. I kind of find that interesting and engaging. There is a bunch of smaller things that I really have loved, but there are too many and too obscure to make sense of. I think that's it.
(T )I actually had prepared a different question, but your answer threw me off a bit. What kind of a fairy world do you live where you can teach game design? Where there is a department of games?
(JE) I live in Sweden. The work was a continuation of me studying game design in the early 2000s and I got the opportunity to jump in as a teacher's assistant. And then I continued on and I became a teacher over the course of years. And I further developed my pedagogical skills and I am now one of two people that's been at the department the longest, a veteran in the field, so to speak. I mean, I guess one important thing with that specific part of who I am in this is that I did a quick calculation the other day on approximately how many student games I've been part of supervising or helping along the way of production. And it's around 2,000 or 2,500 projects over the years. And that is literally like an amount of experimental approaches to games that I think few people have had the opportunity to engage with. I feel like I just recently realized that that is such a gift, honestly. And for me, it's just been work. It's been the work on the side of everything else I do in my life.
(T) I understand the feeling of that, the fairy world aspect of it. No, definitely. I'm happy for you. For the most of the time, gaming has been dominated by competitive rules and settings. It's only in the last years that cooperative gaming has entered the scene in full. And it would seem that RPGs are like an early prototype of cooperative gaming. Do you agree?
(JE) They are. They are. I would definitely agree to that. Even this whole conversation that's existed in RPG landscapes around antagonistic GMs or things like that, and that's been kind of frowned upon. It shows us that even the problems of RPGs are actually some kind of co-created, cooperative storytelling aspect of it. You want your GM to be harsh enough so that you believe the narratives or the world that you're experiencing and that it gives you the experience you want. But ultimately, you don't want them to go in for the kill unless it's called for. And that takes a lot of trust and cooperation. For me, RPGs have been the collaborative art of gaming for all these years. It's probably why I've been so fascinated about them and reading the rule systems and stuff.
(T) This is also my follow-up question. Do you think this is also a reason why so many anti-authoritarians, as you self-describe, are drawn to RPGs?
(JE) I think so. I definitely think so. And it is this feeling also in it that we are responsible for the game we're creating together. I mean, the game rules only give us a starting point. And then we take it from there and we co-create that thing. That allows us to be both in a position of trust with each other, building affinity and a position of collective imagination where we get to explore what if the world was different, which is a really cool thing to be allowed to do and have the possibility to do. I think that's part of it, but also to be some kind of like there is this almost jokey aspect of this, which is that there is no stickler for rules such as an anarchist, which I kind of find true. I love rules. As long as I'm part of thinking about them and collectively changing them and adapting them to our needs, because rules allows us to negotiate the social contract. And I really think that there is something profound in that. I think it's really cool to have games to experiment with this in.
(T) And maybe also fleeing from reality.
(JE) Definitely. I mean, escapism is definitely part of it. I mean, this is a critique that my latest game, Oceania 2084, has always brought up. Why would I want to play a game that's so much like reality? Because it's actually not meant to be escapist. It's meant to be something else. I mean, that same argument could be said about Dostoevsky's books. Why would I read realism? But of course, it fills a niche, it fills a need in us. But escapism is definitely a big part of it.
(T) Let's get to Oceania 2084, your newest game. What is it about and how do you play it?
(JE) It is about totalitarian oppression and resistance against it. It does that by taking on George Orwell's book 1984 and adapting it and updating it and creating it, recreating it through a rule system that allows us to collectively re-imagine what dystopia is today, basically. It does so because we need to understand the pitfalls of society in order to counteract them. How do you play it? Well, this is a niche game. It is an antagonistic, asymmetrical storytelling game, which is a bit of a mouthful and hard to understand unless we talk about the functions of the system. There is one team of players called the resistance players who are playing as characters that are living within this dystopian world and they are just by who they are considered traitors, but they haven't yet been discovered as traitors. So they are forced into the position of being resistance fighters if they want to live. Then we have one player who is playing as a big brother who is actually not playing as a GM, which is an important distinction. The big brother player is playing as the state, the surveillance system and the thought police. They are playing as the oppression basically and they are actually antagonistically out to kill off all the resistance player characters. They will try to do so at every possibility they have at their disposal, but they are very limited by the rules regarding how they can do this. They are regulated by a point system. This point system generates points based on the resistance player's actions. So the big brother player is actually literally a reactionary force. They are always reacting to the resistance players. They're dependent on resistance players doing things to be able to enact anything within the game. The resistance players on the other hand are not limited by rules in what they can do or what they can achieve. They are instead freeform storytelling together and they are telling the stories of their characters as they see fit. The thing that creates tension for the resistance players is that at every turn of the way, you don't know how much of what you've done has been seen by big brother and maybe generated points for big brother. So maybe there might be consequences coming that you really don't want. So you have to weigh in an insecure information position what could come of your actions. I'm doing this very consciously to simulate the way that the real world works from the perspective of resistance fighters. If you're a politically organized person, you know that this is something you're constantly thinking about. What are the repercussions of doing this? Will the wins of that outweigh those repercussions or will it just do it in spite of these consequences? That's on me as a resistance person to consider and take into account. I think that's, without getting off track, kind of what I need to say about this.
(T) I can definitely imagine how this creates anguish and really gives that real life feeling of being surveyed. You don't know where you're being, whether you're being surveyed or not. And yeah, I can very well imagine how this works. So it's basically a GM-less game with an added antagonist as a player. And did you consider a model without anyone playing antagonist of sorts?
(JE) I did. I was also toying with creating an actual language model that would be an AI playing as Big Brother. But I scrapped that idea because I don't like AI. But I had this one idea to have the rule system for Big Brother being more like a systemic, like a board game system almost. But I felt when I was doing that, that it felt too mechanistic. That system was better delivered when it was a person doing it. Because it felt more real. That's kind of what I ended up with.
(T) You already said some things, but maybe you can dive more deeply into it. To what degree is your game a commentary on the current world situation?
(JE) Well, to 99%, I would say. It contains small glimmers of sci-fi in it. But ultimately, the game system at large just looks at what happens when liberal democracies turn fascist. This is a process we're in the middle of right now from my perspective. This is what I'm seeing happening across the world right now. The face of oppression might be smiling, greenwashed, and queer friendly. But if the force is driving that forward as authoritarian, we as humans are still pretty fucked. So the game tries to take on that whole problem.
(T) In this case, much of the world building had already been done by George Orwell. How did you dive into this and expand on the original ideas? Do you have some method of world building in place?
(JE) Yes. So I came up to the question in my design process. This is one year into the process. For the first year, I was developing as truthfully as I could a game of 1984. Just looking at exactly how his world building had been done and deep reading the book and looking at reference material from his contemporaries. Looking at reviews of his book that was published when it came out. Looking at his Homage to Catalonia book. What thought processes were he in when he was writing the book of 1984? Where was it coming from and who was he talking to? All of those things were important. It provided a really good foundation for me. After one year, I started thinking about, wait, do I really feel the need to make the exact same statement as Orwell did? No, not really. That's not going to make it interesting for me or probably for anyone else besides people who just love Orwell. So instead, I changed that approach into using terminology from Orwell, such as big brother or thought police or thought crime or things like that, and treating it as symbolic placeholders for forms of oppression. In the rules of the game, a whole chapter is based around how to collectively in your gaming group agree on what to fill these containers with. How does big brother work in this campaign of ours? What is the city? Because I stepped away from... Orwell has this fictional version of Britain, which is called Airstrip One, which is basically the whole book is taking place in what used to be London. Instead of using that straight up, I depersonalized the place, called it the city and gave the players a bunch of tools to reimagine what this city is. It does so from a series of random tables and different generation questions that help you generate a common understanding of what the world that you will explore will be, basically. The same is true for the big brother setup, which is in part done in character creation of the resistance characters. The resistance characters have one thing to them, which is called their deviation. A deviation is basically the one thing that your character has as some kind of a hidden or secret drive in the world. This drive is deemed as being treasonous by the state. When you're creating your character, you're actually also defining the type of oppression that you will fill big brother with, so to speak. To summarize, the game deals with the original text as a kind of meta text or a starting point, and then it expands on ways of reimagining collectively, collaboratively, what that oppression is in your gaming.
(T) I found myself trying to imagine possible RPG models for recreating a 1984 world, as you said, and the question that popped up for me was if an anti-authoritarian mindset is actually needed to do this properly. What do you think?
(JE) I think so. I believe that George Orwell, even though he in his later years became a bit of a bastard, he at the time of writing 1984, I think he was clearly anti authoritarian more than he was anti communist or anti fascist or anti anything. He was anti authoritarian. He saw that his movement was cooperating with authoritarian leftists, and he wanted to talk to his comrades about this. This is also a path towards oppression. He had that as the fundamental point of view that he was trying to get across, and so I think in order to do that, that fiction of his, that social commentary fiction of his justice, I think you need to have that as the outlook. Orwell has been misinterpreted or mishandled or mistreated by a lot of right wing readers of him that see him as just anti communist, which is not the case. He was actually fighting Franco. He was actually there, gun in hand, trying to help anarchist forces in Spain. He wrote this commentary in the way I interpret it as an internal debate piece, in a sense, and then it grew and became a huge thing. I don't think he expected that, honestly.
(T) The website – where the austere edition is available on a pay-what-you-want basis – says, and you also mentioned this shortly before, that amongst your inspirations are also RPGs like Vampire the Masquerade and Paranoia, which from my impression are based on quite dysfunctional group settings with practically no hope of survival in the long run. Is this an important aspect of the game?
(JE) It is. At the end of the day, the game is exploring existential questions. We live in a world where authoritarian forces will always be present. There is no winning in the sense that we can win against it and then be done with it. We have to consider what resistance is. Resistance is fighting against oppression, even when the outlook of winning is non-existent. It's a mode of existence more than it is an attainable goal, and this counter movement, this insurgent movement, if you wish, I think for a game to capture that, you have to give up on the idea of winning anything. You have to start acting in the game as if it's the small things, it's the short term or the semi long term strategies you apply that are important, because you create pockets of livable conditions for the people who you affect, and when our movements, I'm saying our movements now as anti-authoritarian anarchist movements, gain momentum, we affect and give that pocket of space to more people, even to areas such as Rojava, which for a moment were really huge and provided kind of a big such pocket. This is the way that historically we can see our movements shifting and changing and going back and forth, none of that would have been attainable if we believed that there was this very clear end goal that would mean we can stop fighting. That's not, it's just not my analysis of the world. So yeah, yeah, I think it's necessary.
(T) Let's come to something more practical. You are also doing a crowdfunding for a printed version of Oceania 2084. What does this comprise and till when can people join the effort? (When publishing this interview on itch the campaign is over and was sucessfully funded at 121%, if you want to pre-order the hardback book you can do that here)
(JE) All right, so the campaign is live now. It's in the last week now. It's available until the 10th of May at 10 in the morning Central European time. The campaign is aimed at helping me fund a limited edition hardback A5 book of the ruleset that will be fully illustrated by a comrade of mine. And it will be visually designed and layouted by me. It's going to be around 200 pages. It will also contain a solo ruleset, so you can play the game by yourself. The crowdfunding campaign's end goal is to give me enough money to print up 500 books. It means that there will be a surplus of books at the end of this campaign, which I then can get to distribute to different info shops, bookstores around the world. This is my hope. It's a crowdfunding campaign that also is, I consider it a collector's edition. So the books are fairly expensive. It's not a cheap product. I don't think it should be. The game is available for free already, so you can actually download it and play it. You don't have to buy the book. The book is if you want to see this as a physical manifestation of this thing. That's kind of what it is, actually.
(T) I know that you have also published other games before. Do you have your own website or another place where people can find your work?
(JE) It is all my games, all my creations that I've made public. I have several unpublished things that I probably will never publish, but they are available on my itch page. They are all pay-what-you-want products, so you can download them all for free if you don't want to support my thing financially. They're yours to download and copy and spread. They're published under a Creative Commons license, so do remixes of them. Take them and turn them into something new. That's amazing if you do that.
(T) Anything else?
(JE) Well, not really, but I want to say thank you for taking the time out of your day to talk to me about this. I'm doing this whole game development part of my life because I have a passion for game design. It's not to make business out of it. It's not to create a big company or make a living out of it. I already feel I have that secured, so getting the word out is paramount for me. Getting people to just try out my games and experience them and also tell me what they think about it and do reviews and stuff like that, that's ultimately the goal here. Thank you for helping in that endeavor.
(T) Thank you for answering and giving this very interesting interview.
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