Sword Loser gives adults a terrific excuse to play like kids again
“So this is the tale of how Tyngauld the rake acquired his beloved mustache-sword. No, it isn’t a sword for trimming mustaches, it’s a sword hilt with a mustache sticking out of it where the blade would normally be. What’s the point, you ask? Why a mustache-sword? You’re about to find out. ”
Back in 2010, I had one of the best interview experiences of my journalistic career: two hours talking to cartoonist and author Lynda Barry about what it takes to get adults comfortable with making art. Barry’s signature work, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, was a quirky, often dark, often joyous four-panel experience that was like nothing else in the comics space. But it had been published primarily in independent newspapers, and those were drying up all across the country. With the comic ended, Barry shifted to writing books inspired by her time teaching art classes for adults who came from “many different circumstances, from prison to graduate students.”
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Over and over, she found that adults would flinch when asked to draw something, out of a fear that they weren’t objectively talented enough to impress other people. Where a kid can sit down with crayons or paints without any sense of self-consciousness, she said, adults assume that if they create something that isn’t technically competitive with professional work, they’re exposing a weakness.
As Barry put it, if you give a 4-year-old a paper and paint, and they refuse to touch it, “we worry about her emotionally” — but the same refusal in an adult just seems normal. Barry was fascinated with figuring out why at some point, drawing for fun stops seeming like a natural impulse, and starts to seem — well, childish.
I’ve thought about that conversation a lot over the years, especially as I encounter more and more small indie RPGs built around creating artifacts of play at the table, whether it’s cutting out paper snowflakes in To Serve Her Wintry Hunger, making a conspiracy string-board in The
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