2018 was a tumultuous year in the OSR. The social bonds on which the scene was built had been under strain for years, and in 2018 many straws broke many camels' backs. My own relationships within the community were publicly and privately tested. Some were broken in spectacular fashion, others ended with quiet decisions that I wasn't going to make any effort to share my life and work with certain people any longer. Many keystone figures within the OSR declared the scene unsalvagable on the grounds that it was too infested with bigots to be worth their time. Then, just as the social bonds of the scene were in crisis, the physical bonds evaporated. Google+ shut down, and without it no one was really clear on how or where to talk about games anymore. There were efforts at preserving continuity: facebook groups, discord servers, MeWe, but after the social tempest of the years leading up to this point—and the social tempests that would continue to rock our little art scene—continuity hardly even seemed desirable.
This was the climate in which I wrote the POSER manifesto. It was the first month of 2019, and I didn't feel capable of making art unless I could find a resolution between two conflicting truths. On the one side, the way I played and made games was inextricably OSR. On the other side, the OSR seemed then to be a self-destructive beast that would condemn me to an endless series of fruitless battles if I didn't walk away. I wanted to take control of the environment my work existed in. I wanted to rid myself of the lodestone of this spineless art scene. The opening line of the POSER Manifesto reads:
"Today, this is my best attempt to describe what I want to do with my work. Tomorrow I might discover a better way to describe it."
POSER is mine. It means what I say it means, and I have the right to change what it means at will. Other people can work according to POSER principals if they want—and at the time I hoped they would—but they don't get to have a say in what POSER means. It wasn't a realistic attitude for me to have about community building. Communities own their identity collectively. But while the desire for community was definitely on my mind, it was overshadowed by my need to put the past year to rest. To feel that there was a niche for me and my work, even if it was a niche of one. Given those motivations it's not surprising that my artistic manifesto speaks so shallowly about making art.
1. POSER games are FUN and WEIRD. Sometimes they’re too weird, because that’s better than not being weird enough. They are easy to understand. They’re built on the design philosophies developed in the OSR, but are not beholden to the limitations of the old school.
2. POSER games trust the people who play them. Games are tools to help people have a good time. Games will be remixed and played differently at every table, and the game should facilitate rather than discourage that.
The first two points are an attempt to summarize what I saw as the essential ethos of the OSR. Even my explicit rejection of the old school is essentially just describing what the OSR I knew was all about. It was a Renaissance. It was never beholden to the limitations of the old school. The old school was only ever the bedrock we were building from. There were some who disagreed, who saw the OSR more as a revival of old rules. In POSER I get to explicitly exclude that view, reject the "OSR" name, but keep all the stuff I liked for myself. These two points are doing a lot of heavy lifting, and not doing it particularly elegantly.
3. Art is political. Don’t let your art get coopted by fascists. Make it all as gay, and trans, and leftist, and intersectional as you can imagine. If there aren’t enbies in it then you’re probably doing it wrong. Anyone who wants to ‘keep politics out of gaming’ doesn’t deserve to enjoy what you make.
4. Art is trash. Trash is art. Don’t put anyone’s work on a pedestal. Don’t put your work on a pedestal. Do stuff, put it in front of people, then do that again. Perfection is poison.
Points 3 and 4, likewise, are my distillation of the Mongrel ethos. Exactly what that means is a complex story that I'd like to tell someday. Suffice for now to say it was a substrain within the OSR that I was deeply involved with. I did a somewhat better job with these two points than with the first two—in part because #3 is lifted almost whole from Heather Flower's MEATPUNK MANIFESTO. Point 4 is all me though, and I still like it a great deal. It is my best expression of a realization that changed my life. Something I've worked hard to make part of my thinking, and to live by.
5. MAKE ART. MAKE RENT. Help others do the same. Capitalism is a nightmare and we’re only going to survive it if we help each other. Your work is valuable, don’t be afraid to sell it. Pay the people you work with. No exceptions.
Points 5-9 are only tennuously connected to making art. They're more about how I want to live my life as an artist. I stand by most of it with the partial exception of point 5. This is another I adapted from the Meatpunk manifesto, but my alterations made it worse. Capitalism is still a nightmare, and we're still only going to survive it if we help each other, but I'm less willing to give my full-throated support for turning the hobby into a side-hustle. I woulnd't automatically condemn anyone who did so. It's still my side hustle! But if I ever revise the POSER manifesto again I'll want to add some nuance here. When a person turns their hobby into a job, much of the joy they got from the hobby will wither away. If they don't then earn enough money to improve their material conditions then they've engaged in a sort of mental self harm in exchange for nothing. My thinking on this point is still evolving, but is greatly influenced by my friend Marcia's experience. She came into the scene after it had already become thoroughly commercialized, saw the ruinous effects wrought by that, and chose to reject seeking to profit off her art.
6. Build communities, support communities. Push other people up. Fight other people’s battles. Take suffering onto yourself to lessen the burden on others. Come up with new ideas for how you can make your community a more welcoming, more productive, more intersectional space. Nobody will ever ask you, so don’t wait to be asked.
7. FIGHT. Don’t let people get away with being shitty. Get angry, make enemies, be hated. Yell at your friends when they deserve it, listen when they yell back at you. Don’t just make shitty people feel unwelcome, make them feel unsafe. Show good people that you’ll go to the mat for them. Fight with your words, your fists, your heart, and your art.
Points 6 and 7 remain exciting for me, even that saccharine little rhyme at the end. I get fired up when I read them. Building communities is an accidental vocation of mine. Something I never intended to take seriously, but which I've none the less devoted a great deal of my life to. The past few years have made me realize how important the work is, and given me a desire to actually take it seriously. Fighting, by contrast, is anathema to my nature. I am easygoing and conciliatory to a fault. Truly to a fault, as my natural tendencies are to excuse behavior that ought not be excused; and end my relationships rather than solve problems. Resisting these tendencies is something I was getting better at when I wrote the POSER manifesto, but something I've backslid on recently. It is always good to remind myself of this ideal.
8. Learn and Listen and Grow. Never let yourself think you’ve learned enough. Stop to hear what people are saying about their experiences. Empathize with where they’re coming from. Research anything you don’t understand. Experiment with ideas that might not work. Do whatever it takes to understand yourself, and the world, and games better, then take that growth and use it to make better art.
9. Failure is temporary. You will fail. You will make bad decisions, you will hurt people who don’t deserve it, you will fall short of your ambitions. It’s only a problem if you wallow in it. Try again. Apologize. Keep going and you’ll get there.
By contrast, points 8 and 9 feel tepid to me. I'm not sure if the previous two are just better ideas expressed with greater passion, or if my reaction simply reflects my own needs and inclinations in 2022. These two feel like common sense. They are the expected social norms of the communities I inhabit, and thus so comfortably integrated into my personality that it feels a little silly to declare them this way. As if I'm taking credit for coming up with something everyone already agrees on.
10. Aggressive Honesty is at the heart of everything good. Find your truth. The one deep in your brain that hurts you and frees you. The truth your friends won’t understand because it’s not their truth. Then shape that deep truth into a piece of art that they will understand.
11. Do not trust nostalgia. Do not trust complexity. Do not trust what worked yesterday. Do not trust nerds. Do not trust consensus. Do not trust social media. These things are not bad, but they will lie to you if you let them.
Returning to the production of art, the final two points are products of my own observations. Not especially novel, but lessons which have been important to me. I'd really like to find a better way of phrasing "Aggressive Honesty," because I think it calls to mind the shallow cruelty that is often termed "Brutal Honesty." The aggression in what I call Aggressive Honesty is directed towards the self. It is a search for truth that refuses to be satisfied with easy, comfortable answers. But then, at this point I've been calling it Aggressive Honesty for a decade or more, so I'm probably common-law married to the name by now.
As a person inclined towards being trusting, I must remind myself to be wary with sources of particularly insidious deception. Consensus in particular has been a trap for me, which is why it's also called out in the previous point as "The truth your friends won't understand because it's not their truth." But all of these have been dangerous to me at one time or another.
With minor exceptions, most notably the aspects of point 5 discussed above, I continue to believe everything in the POSER manifesto. It is an adequate reflection of how I'd like to live my life and produce my work. None the less it is a deeply flawed document—not because of its content so much as because it is bound to the time I was living in when it was written. Too wrapped up in the sense of alienation I felt from the scene I had contributed to. Outside of addressing that feeling of alienation, I don't think it has as much to say as I would like. In attempting to take art, life, and community and condense them all to point form, I fear I wound up saying relatively little about any of them which really resonates with me today.
But it's art, and art is trash. Imperfect. Meant to be put in front of people when it is most relevant. The essential meaning of art is ephemeral, even if the art itself sticks around. The exercise of writing out what I needed when I needed it helped clarify my desires for myself, and a few others got something out of it as well. Just as writing out these thoughts has helped me to understand why the POSER manifesto doesn't feel as vital to me as once it did.
—Nick LS Whelan
April 19, 2022