Top 10 inspiring quotes from the first TTRPG Manifesto Jam

Why does the RPG scene enjoy manifestos so much? Are they the cries of an eternal false battle between game and art — a mudwrestling competition with the spectre of Roger Ebert? Are they statements of personal direction or calls to action? I read every submission to the TTRPG Manifesto Jam, and while I didn’t come away with answers, I did find some quotable lines.

1. Game Design as Rebellion: TTRPGs for the Preservation of Anarchism and Imagination by Bright Sun Games

Tabletop role-playing games are inherently exercises in community building…Playing games at a table requires you to be close to other people, to share an experience… and to engage in conflict resolution when inevitable disagreements or tensions arise.

2. Quantum Seed Gaming: A Manifesto by Chris M-S:

All gaming is ritual. More specifically, all gaming is a ritual for communicating across time and space. Even more specifically, all gaming is a ritual by which players are quantum entangled with players in a different game in a different time in a different space, for the purposes of sharing information. Very few TTRPG designers realize this.

3. Flare Against The Void by Stepnix:

I want advice for a game from 1974 and with just a few clicks I have dozens of posts ready to guide me
I want advice for a game from 2016 and it’s already link-rotted away
I want advice for a game from 2024 and it’s hidden away in a private discord server
It’s not each other we’re fighting, it’s being forgotten.

4. Attic Games by Snow

Know that most works are never finished.
Know that most finished works are never seen
Know that most seen works are never read.
Embrace that most read works are never played.
Don’t care that most played works are never played twice.

5. The Neglected Player: Design for DMs: A Manifesto by AfterIcarus

The experience of agency is about real agency, not hypothetical agency. Rules facilitate real agency by constraining hypothetical agency.

6. Play Manifesto by Rookery Games

Play means that we will never be here, doing exactly this, again.

7. Game Design as Play: In Pursuit of Bad Art by Spencer "Dream" Kenning

I simply do not care if your game is good. I care that you put yourself into the game.

8. A game is a piece of myself I give form outside of myself because I want to be seen. A manifesto by Logan Timmins

I make games to see myself over and over, and to love him more and more each time.

9. Design to Feel Manifesto by Wafergix

Learn to write.
Learn to express.
Design to feel.

10. PALARONG MAKINISMO by gawa ng mumu

A great many things inform the tarpit that is online TTRPG discourse but a noninsignificant amount of it is due to the fact that nobody knows what the fuck they’re talking about.

Top 3 quotes about manifestos from books about manifestos

1. "[T]he genre of the manifesto … in a textual space ambiguously poised between the aesthetic and the political, between the work of art and propaganda, between practice and theory." (Luca Somigli, Legitimizing The Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885–1915)
2. [A manifesto] never mumbles, is always in overdose and overdrive. (Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms)
3. To manifesto is to perform…To make a manifesto is to imagine or hallucinate the Promised Land. (Alex Danchev, 100 Artists Manifestos)

Top 1 postscript in a listicle of quotes of manifestos

1. PS: There’s currently an ongoing Manifesto jam. This is technically the third iteration — the first was in 2018, and the second in 2022. It began, I believe, because game designer Robert Yang asked in a blog post that surveyed a recent spate of manifesto-ing in the video game world: “Maybe we should all just write manifestos? A #GameManifestoJam?” Blame him, essentially.