3 minute read
Tanya Floaker
The old Dungeons And Dragons reputation of roleplaying games is shifting thanks to figures within the indie gaming community. Lucy Ribchester meets Edinburgh writer and player Tanya Floaker who is part of a movement which is exploring new realms
If you’re enjoying a pint in Edinburgh’s Kilderkin on the last Saturday of each month, you may casually notice a group of people wandering into the back room. You’re unlikely to hear what they’re up to over the noise in the bar, and you’d have no idea that within this inner space, whole worlds are being created, battles enacted, politics discussed, things beyond the realm of human creation conjured into existence with nothing more than words, the occasional roll of a dice, and a set of rules. This is the world of roleplaying games, differentiated from that other, more lurid and famous form of gaming (video) by its quiet, underground scene and slightly geeky reputation.
‘Basically you’re telling a story together,’ says Edinburgh-based games writer Tanya Floaker. ‘You pick a game you want to play, which will tell you something about the setting, genre, mood and tone the story is going to take. It also has a set of rules.’ There can be props: dice, counters, cards. But that is often it. ‘You’re mainly playing roles, and the game changes the direction the roleplay goes in.’
Floaker, who earlier this year released their first gamebook, entitled Be Seeing You, has been a stalwart in the gaming community from an early age. They discovered Fighting Fantasy gamebooks aged seven and fell in love with the ability to shape their own adventures. Once at high school, they began to play regularly in clubs, which continued through university, where they set up a club dedicated to indie games, in order to combat the culture of blockbuster gaming that was taking over the mainstream. Now they play regularly for Edinburgh Indie Gamers as well as co-editing the club zine.
Floaker’s game focuses on a dystopian world, exploring surveillance, compliance and power. Gaming, Floaker says, has a ‘a unique vector compared with a novel or film’, in that it is only one part of a toolkit that creates the ‘magic circle’ of the story world. ‘When you’re actively creating a character, it can allow for interesting exploration of all sorts of topics without being preachy.’
Along with this shift in the tone of games, Floaker says the demographic of the gamers (typically white, male, cis) is quickly shifting too. Inclusivity is one of the cornerstones of this Edinburgh group, with a venue accessible to power-chairs, a strict code of respectful conduct regarding racism, sexism and transphobia, as well as travel expenses available to those who otherwise couldn’t afford to attend.
‘The roleplay games world is not without the problems of other spaces, whether that be computer games, board games or the street,’ Floaker says. ‘Your play informs what you start to think about, and you can take that away. Like any other art, you’ve got that sort of ephemeral moment that you can take with you, that you can think on and talk about.’
Be Seeing You by Tanya Floaker is available at timeoftribes.
