Origin stories

The past year has included an ongoing series of major changes in my personal and professional lives. The largest of these is my family’s recent and indefinite relocation from Austin, TX to the Netherlands. Right along side that is the founding of Hawk & Dove. I have been passionate about game design and the games industry for a long time, and this international move presented us with the opportunity to move into it full-time! These changes have me thinking about new beginnings, fresh starts, how things originate in the world. Today, I want to share a few thoughts about Hawk & Dove, its beginnings, and how those are woven into the fabric of the company.

When I first started dipping my toes into game design, I consumed as much media as possible about the craft. I listened to hours of podcasts, read endless articles, joined social media groups, watched videos, and did just about anything I could to accelerate my learning curve. In many ways, the months I spent learning the “way things are done” could be considered the origin of my design and now publishing journey. I eventually gravitated away from a lot of this standard advice and into other corners of the hobby where things are done differently, and I believe Hawk & Dove will be the better for it. The journey to where I am now in my thinking about design and games has its roots much earlier.

One of the things I hear most from designers when they are asked how they got into design is something along the lines of, “I’ve been designing games since I was 5!” Early on, I balked at hearing this kind of thing. To me, it did not make sense to draw a straight line from the natural and inherent imaginative play of a child with the highly procedural and systems-oriented nature of professional game design. Yes, professional game design is imaginative and creative and artistic, but it requires a structured approach that few children care to entertain (nor should they). Didn’t we all make up new rules to existing games, or new games entirely? Isn’t the primary distinction the context within which you grew up and what games you may have had access to? Why are these designers so invested in painting themselves as child prodigies in game design?

What I have since realized is that I had this backward. These people (at least most of them) are not mythologizing themselves to lend their current work credibility, or to flash some kind of bona fides around how long they’ve been designing. Instead, they are naming something so many adults lose — the notion of childlike play and creativity in their adult pursuits. Because in my own journey what I discovered about games and design is that they are ultimately informed by the designer’s sense of what it means to play. In learning more about design as an adult, I rediscovered my own lost playfulness. I become better able to simply experience games instead of needing to win them. I found pieces of my past self, pieces of my childhood, to which I had not had access for a very long time.

My earliest memories of games are likely similar to most people who grew up in the 1980s and 90s. A dusty cupboard or stuffed closet of flimsy boxes with bright pictures of families having an absolute blast on the covers. Missing pieces, scattered paper money, stained and incomplete rules. Some games were inscrutable to me as a child (I’m looking at you, Dr. Ruth’s Game of Good Sex), and others I knew by heart from such an early age it feels like I was born knowing the rules. The first game I remember truly caring about, however, was HeroQuest. It was amazing. Cool figures, modular board setup, dungeon monsters. I don’t even think I ever played a full, actual game of it, and I loved it so much I wrote short stories about it in middle school English. Around the same time, my uncle introduced me to Axis & Allies. I went to stay with his family, and we stayed up into the wee hours of the morning rolling battle after battle in an epic campaign. I was entranced by what this game could do that I’d never seen board games do before. I was obsessed with Axis & Allies until my early 20s, taking every opportunity to play it.

As I got older, and as responsibilities piled up, I became disconnected from gaming. After a stint dipping into early 2000s hobby games, I just lost touch and missed out on a decade or more of major releases and development. I got married, finished my PhD, divorced, married again, became a stepdad, had another child. You know, life. I was pulled back into games through TTRPGs, then hobby games, then finally war and historical games again. What I found was that games had changed significantly while I was gone. They had morphed from interesting mechanical puzzles and simulationist wargames into works of art that can convey narratives and evoke feelings and make arguments about the world. Maybe they had always done those things, but I had missed it in my first pass through the hobby. Now, it felt like these things were everywhere.

I was once again entranced by games, but this time by their artistry and message. Designers like Amabel Holland and Cole Wehrle and Dan Bullock and Xoe Allred were making games that structured play differently than I’d seen it before. To me, children play to make sense of the world around them, to process big feelings they do not completely understand and filter it through their imaginations as a way to cope with their uncertainty and anxiety and fear. Play is a safe place to occupy alternative possibilities and to explore taboos. This is what adults lose in their understanding of play. We turn it into a competition, into a win or lose proposition through which the only thing we learn is about our (and our opponents’) strengths and weaknesses within the confines of a specific contest. What I found when I came back to gaming was a group of designers and publishers maturing the concept of play, bringing it into our adult context and allowing players to process complex and difficult emotions about the world by embodying challenging player roles. Play does not have to be serious, but it is important, and games help facilitate it for adults as much as they do for children.

Hawk & Dove is born out of this rediscovery of my sense of play and its importance to the human experience. I want to make games that challenge people, and I want those games to serve as vehicles through which players can process their thinking and emotions about difficult subject matter. I want the kinds of games that leave people talking about the subject matter after they are done playing, or that encourage people to take action, whether that means learning more about the topic or choosing to become more active in a social cause or simply telling a friend about this interesting game they played. I want our players to feel comfortable and confident occupying uncomfortable positions temporarily because the games make it safe to do so.

If we can do that, we’ll have accomplished our mission.

Cheers,

Brooks