01 | Liminal Sailor in a Liminal Sea

I write games not out of some intentional effort but because I need to express myself through this very particular way of creating. 

In a way, this means that my professional work in tabletop role-playing game design would be incidental and, to be fair, largely elevated by the many other real professionals who contributed to every one of my published works. And I’m happily fine with that.

In the other way, this means that I can take routes that professional work cannot take in the name of efficiency and certainty of outcome. I’m not a pioneer at this because I’m talking about old, abandoned routes over which I stumbled upon and resonated with me.

I like to call this state of creation the Liminal Sea, a mental space in which I can observe the world around me not by its events but by the foam that spawns when two or more waves of consequential thoughts collide. 

Most of the time, these concepts are dull and discarded. I usually take genuine interest when they become so distant from the source that backtracking is barely possible. Sometimes, these rarefied concepts miss the point so spectacularly that they hit another different one. 

When this happens, I come back ashore and do my best to write them down into the sand. I do that because I like to give the sea the opportunity to corrode further and change them. What remains eventually gets written down somehow and eventually ends up being considered a game idea.

As I write this down, I realize it sounds substantially more convoluted than I had believed. And I’m happily fine with that. 

I realized that I need both the journey and the destination, and this journey is probably the type of journey I need. Also, and this is important for me and also important for you since you’re considering dedicating some of your attention to me, I’m convinced this is not detrimental to the quality of the destination—although it could be for the certainty and quality of the arrival, it’s a risk that I’m willing to take. 

If you stick with me, I’ll share some of these ideas made of foam and lucid dreams with you.

Yours Truly, a Nuclear Manatee