But still!

Talking to alumni from my school, they related that, in their day, the university library subscribed to all the journals in the field and all grad students were expected to have read all the new papers each month. This was unimaginable to us given the number of journals and volume of papers now published.

While designing The Warren, I definitely felt compelled to have/have read every available PbtA game, published and upcoming, to develop a comprehensive understanding of the design space. I was lucky to have begun work when that was possible. It’s now an unreasonable expectation and counterproductive strategy if you hope to publish your own game.

Since then, I’ve backed many but not all of the PbtA games and have yet to read many of them (or I read them in development and forget to read the finished work).