Nobody Gets Left Behind (with Jay Dragon)
Jay Dragon on Trust and Safety
Hi friends!
(If you’re new here, we are in the middle of a series on the Buddhist Perfections—virtues for daily life. This interview is a scheduled departure. We’ll pick up the series next week, with a post on truthfulness.)
When we talk about safety in gaming spaces, mindfulness practice, or even political rhetoric, we often frame it as protection from harm. But who is safety for? And how does safety connect to trust—trust in ourselves, institutions, each other?
These questions led me to reach out to someone I admire a lot when it comes to these things: Jay Dragon. Jay is a queer, disabled tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) designer, who serves as editorial director of Possum Creek Games and lead game designer for Steve Jackson Games. Jay, prolific, is perhaps best known for the award-winning games Wanderhome and Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast.
In this March interview (slightly more complete and linear here), Jay suggests safety is itself fantastical. Trust matters more.
Increasingly I find myself drawn to making games that, rather than seeking escapism, seek presence. — Jay Dragon
Three Practices for Building Trust Through Presence
This section covers timely, intense topics, sometimes in blunt language. Never graphic but clear takes on bodily harm, climate change, transphobia follow.
1) Name what is actually happening
We cannot change what we refuse to acknowledge. The ability to re-envision and reframe with compassion and frailty can be rare in play-centric spaces.
In many RPGs, violence is not violence. In D&D, when you kill a goblin with a sword, no one in that situation is conceptualizing what you have done as real life violence.
We are conceptualizing it as empowerment, as self-actualization, as a battle of will or a negotiation of truth, but we're not thinking of it as violence. If we thought of it as violence, we'd be horrified at the reality of taking another sentient being's life.
In a lot of my games, violence is violence. That's why it's so rare. Violence is a sound that consumes everything else. And you cannot appreciate the depth to which it does, until you understand what it's like without it.
We know what a world sounds like without violence [from games like Wanderhome and Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast]. What happens when I add violence? Now what does it sound like?
It's like that poem, why don't you write poems about bird songs? Because I can't hear them over the Israeli drones.
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.
– Marwan Makhoul, Palestinian Poet
Jay is developing a new game called Seven Part Pact, that deals with real-world parallels.
You play as wizards who are expected to be men. And there is a lot of structural misogyny. You are expected to be a man. If you're not one, that truth either freaks you out and you're trying to hide it, or it is a guilty pleasure you indulge in, or it is a front that you must hide from your fellow wizards. It's a pressure that chokes you.
To me, the structures of the game parallel patriarchy. The game is about how even when you're a cis man, you're never enough of a man.
That shit is not escapist, right? But I wanted to make a game that really sat with kind of the heavy and difficult truth of the world. And that to me is a much more important thing.
Jay’s planned mechanics around healing, restoration, and repair make explicit how violence impacts bodies.
Seven Part Pact has a hundred thousand words of spells that kill people. And it's so easy to kill someone. It is horrific.
You'll just be like, “Oh, I could use this spell to blow up someone's head. Or I could use this spell to give them a plague. I could use this spell to turn them into locusts.” It's so incidental. It's so thoughtless.
And what if I want to heal someone? What if I wanna put a bone back together? What if I want to help a mother give birth?
There is nothing that will help you. It is incredibly difficult to use magic to heal someone's body.
Honoring impact of harm to oneself and others, is a process that isn’t always comfortable or linear, in play or real life. And it can be difficult when playing in groups “trained” in play, as Maria Mison noted in her interview.
But with shared intention, we might be able to reach a point where measures of trust turn into care.
We can really push the emotional limits of what it is to care for each other. And we can use the fact that we care for each other to explore the darker side of the world, but we couldn't do that until we cared for each other.
It's not very compassionate of us to say we can't think about what violence means until we trust each other. Because if we don't trust each other, violence is just part of the slapstick.
But if we care about each other, we can really sit there and think about it.
And that, to me, has to occur.
Light Hive offers essays on applied mindfulness for complex identities, the polycrisis, and the power of play. Subscribe for takes on Buddhist wisdom, filtered through the lens of a recovering academic and queer, transracial adoptee.
2. Focus on response rather than policing
Prevention and censorship will not eliminate dukkha (suffering, stress). Jay offers a grid to practice articulating needs, wants, and boundaries.
Common, if imperfect, “safety tools” to keep players feeling imaginative, open, and expressive, include lines to prohibit topics and veils to "fade to black" on scenes with triggering content.
Another, the X-Card, interrupts play to announce harm. This emergency brake is often available and rarely used.
Meg Baker talked about [going “harder” into safety tools] a while ago as there's two approaches you can take: one is nobody gets hurt and the other is nobody gets left behind. We can either prevent harm from occurring or we can acknowledge harm as possible and we can take steps to restore, repair, and heal when harm occurs.
My issue with safety tools is that so many of them are either structured or utilized solely around nobody getting hurt.
Lines and veils is a “nobody gets hurt” model because it says if we simply eliminate all triggering content nobody gets hurt. The X-card is a nobody gets hurt model. The X-card says if we just use this properly, it's impossible for anyone to get hurt, right?
What happens if something happens to my character and it takes me 20 minutes to realize I should X-card that I got hurt [signal to stop play], what do I do? The X-card is only useful if your goal is to prevent harm, and preventing harm is impossible.
That's simply not how the world works. And so to me [trust is built via] communication tools. What if we build them around the principle of making sure that when people get hurt, there's a way out of it?
Jay’s palette grid provides more nuanced ways to communicate about comfort and consent. It facilitates what some trauma-informed practitioners might call “titration and pendulation”—engaging with difficult material in measured doses that challenge without overwhelming.
I wanna think about what it means to lean in deeper into the “nobody gets left behind” approach, bringing that to the pallet grid. But that idea being, “I know there's no way for me to keep you from getting hurt, but here's some things we can do if something gets triggered.”
Reality Bites, but meta-communication practices (communicating about how you communicate) can always be handy.
As a game designer, you can't be in the room [when your game is played]. But your games can absolutely set up situations for people to have an excuse and permission to be kind, period. — Jay Dragon
3. To bleed or not to bleed (it’s the same world)
Jay challenges the divisions between "in-game” and “out of game,” or “play” and “real life.”
I live in a world like…fucking Trump's president again, right? In the United States, shit's awful. I don't want to pretend everything's fine. If I play at a tabletop RPG where transphobia doesn't exist…at this point, it actively feels dissonant for me.
The world is dying. I can play games where we say, “the world is dying, but not in here.” I can play games where the world was dying, but we found a better way. These are what a lot of my software games are about.
I don't wanna play a game that says, “this world will never die, the world has never died. Everything will be good forever” because I don't believe you. That feels like there's a corpse under the floor. There's a heart in the wall, and we're just all ignoring it.
Truly: how can life not all be interdependent? We are never not ourselves, while those selves are themselves fungible.
For this reason, I’ve always found the notion of “bleed” fascinating. Bleed occurs when the player allows the character’s circumstances to psychologically or emotionally move them.
And I completely respect Jay’s critique of the premise: the player is always the player. Our experiences exist on a continuum expressing embodiment, agency, and our stories about significance…all housed in this finite, feeling body.
I would articulate bleed as when emotions and concepts from the game linger in you outside of the game. Which is, to me, really strange. Imagine if there was a special word for when you go to church on Sunday and then afterwards you're still feeling devotion.
[Or] I went to work and then, I'm tired after work. I have bleed from work.
Your life is continuous.
Just because you're doing something under the pretense and make believe doesn't mean that it's not continuous with all other experiences and feelings you have in the world.
If you and I had an intimate moment during play and afterwards we're both carrying those feelings of care and intimacy…that is “bleed” under a normal definition, but we had an intimate moment.
Just because it was through play doesn't mean it's not intimate.
I give the final word to an excerpt from Possum Creek Games’ mission statement.
We believe it’s possible to find magic in the mundane and adventure in the uneventful. There is beauty and horror in equal measures in the liminal spaces at the edges of society, where the highway ends, the lights flicker out, and dreams blend seamlessly with the world around us. While our games might visit distant lands and traipse across the stars, they are always grounded in our home in the Hudson Valley, the liminality of queerness, and the majesty of the everyday.
See their itch page
Follow Jay on BlueSky
For more on these themes:
Takeaway Practice
“Shit’s awful.” Mobilize.
This past weekend the volunteer coalition 50501 donated two uhauls, an suv and a car full of food to the LA Regional Food Bank. My shift was not long, but it was noteworthy how many donors asked for protest and volunteer info.
Besides any 50501 social media feed, we directed folks to mobilize.us.
If you’ve been waiting for a sign to join the crowds, this is it.
Creative Coalition: May 4th, 3-6 PT
Join Creative Coalition for a guided experience blending mindful play and collaborative storytelling.
Using Carrion Comfort/ Wes Frank's This Old House, we'll tell the story of a house as its inhabitants change over time.
Base Rate: $20
Light Hive Readers may use code: Hive50 (50% off)
Paid subscribers get this one for free! I’ll give you a code in the chat.
No one is turned away for lack of funds. If the registration fee is cost-prohibitive, please email for the link.
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a queer, transracial adoptee who blends rigor and lived experience to create brave spaces where mindfulness meets playful exploration. Through Light Hive and as co-editor of Notes from the Inflection Point, they offer readers practices and reflections for interfacing with uncertainty. Logan holds a PhD in Performance Studies and are neither a mental health provider, nor an authorized teacher in any Buddhist lineage. They were recently convinced to purchase Roll Player, a board game. They don’t like it but many others do. If you want it, please make an offer. They will handwrite you a letter of thanks.