Rough Edges

When art, music, and games are repackaged and sold as polished products, the beautiful messiness of the human experience is lost

by Gwen C. Katz

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A part of getting older that I didn’t anticipate is watching ad-hoc games be repackaged and sold as slick commercial board games. Take Two is a quick-paced game played with repurposed Scrabble tiles; you draw letters two at a time and the first person to assemble them into a valid crossword is the winner. It’s now sold as Bananagrams. You’ve probably played the game where you pass papers around in a circle, taking turns illustrating a phrase and guessing what phrase the illustration represents. It became Telestrations. 

This is not a new phenomenon. Our parents played Fictionary with scratch paper and a dictionary before Balderdash came out in 1984. Before Milton Bradley introduced plastic Battleship sets with their hundreds of pegs waiting to be lost under car seats in the 1960s, our grandparents played it with pencils and graph paper. And it is a one-way street—once the packaged game exists, it becomes virtually impossible to convince people to play the old-fashioned version.

These new commercial games are more professional, more eye-catching, and polished clean of all the rough edges that caused confusion and arguments. They are not, however, more fun. Playing the commercial game comes with the uncanny sense that, while the rules are the same, the experience has been lost. 

Some of it is the incidentals. Telestrations doesn’t create sentences like “A transporter accident makes Captain Kirk beam up butt-in-front;” it doesn’t leave you with odd little pages of art. Bananagrams is full of annoying fruit-themed terms like “peel” and “split.” But even if the small things got fixed, it still feels as though the essence would be missing.

In the age of social media, everything is packaged and polished. Instagram turned every face into a brand. Baking and woodworking transformed from hobbies into gigs. Authors are no longer trash goblins who occasionally shove stacks of paper under editors’ doors; we now must maintain a professional public-facing presence with newsletters, book trailers, cover reveals, unboxings. Dungeons & Dragons, which originally looked like something a middle schooler drew on homework, is now a high-production-value form of streaming entertainment with costumes, props, and professional voice actors. 

Cleaner, slicker, more professional, yes. But is all this really better? Are we having more fun? Or does it actually leave us perpetually stressed out, bored, and kinda missing the game played on a grungy white board where everyone’s miniature was an elf archer because that’s all the DM had?

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When a new student was admitted to the French Academy in the 19^th century, he (it was always a he) was issued a pencil, a sheet of paper, and an engraving of some classical subject—the Parthenon, say. His task was to copy it precisely, line for line. When he could do this to the instructor’s satisfaction, he graduated to a plaster cast of a treasure of antiquity like Venus de Milo—or, more often, only part of it, an arm or a leg. Once again, he would copy. If his drawing strayed from the form in front of him, the instructor would make corrections directly on the page. 

Only when he had mastered this was he finally permitted to draw from a live model. The corrections continued—the instructor would not only fix the places where the drawing didn’t match the model, but the places where the model’s body didn’t match the classical ideal. Individual human variation was no excuse for an artwork’s imperfection.

When, after years, the student finally began to paint, Academy instructions detailed how to render realistic details with pinpoint accuracy. Visible brush strokes were anathema. A proper Academy painting had a perfectly smooth, “licked” surface. Composition had to follow classical rules of balance and harmony. Landscape paintings were ranked near the bottom of the Academy’s hierarchy, because nature’s unruliness clashed with the Academy’s ideals. If an artist must paint a landscape, naturally he couldn’t simply depict what was there—he had to rearrange it to fit the laws of composition. No form of painting could be more polished, which is why the household names of 19^th-century French painting are Jean-Léon Gérôme and William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

They’re not, of course; the great names are Monet and Renoir and Degas, because polish is not what draws people to art. The impressionists and their allies threw the rules of the Academy out the window. Camille Pissarro peppered the greenery with dots of red and the skies with streaks of yellow. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s riotous paintings presage snapshots, with silhouettes blocking the main figures and people’s faces half cut off as they tumble out of the frame. Van Gogh sometimes applied paint directly from the tube. They didn’t capture the precise details of how a scene looked, but they captured what the Academy completely missed—the experience.

The point is not that the impressionists were revolutionary, which is obvious, but rather how baffling the Academy would have found any criticisms of their methods. What was wrong with expecting artists to practice their craft? Who could possibly object to “composition is important” or “trees are not red”? Creators today can find pushback against polish similarly baffling. What, are you saying you want worse games? In a word, yes.

Cleaner, slicker, more professional. But is all this really better? Are we having more fun?

65 years after Monet scandalized the Academy, a 19-year-old runaway arrived in Paris. This was Leonora Carrington, the black sheep of an aristocratic British family, and she had come to join the surrealists. 

Between seances and soirees, Carrington painted and jotted down stories in a composition book in French, which she barely spoke. When Max Ernst, her then-boyfriend, read her story “The House of Fear,” he was delighted. He praised its “beautiful language, truthful and pure,” by which he meant her error-ridden French, unhindered by such shackles as “spelling” and “grammar.” To him, Carrington’s poor grasp of French was not an obstacle, but a gateway to the truer, freer form of expression.

Surrealism and its brash elder cousin dada were fascinated by the unconscious. To these artists, deliberate, planned creation was inherently an artifice, and real truth existed in the part of the mind locked away from conscious thought. Letting the hand wander unguided across the page, drawing words from a bag at random, scraping paint across a rough surface—all these were methods to bypass intentionality and access this truth. Calling the results crude and nonsensical was a meaningless objection—that was the entire point.

And I don’t need to tell you how punk burst into the glossy, overproduced world of 80s music with safety-pinned clothes and cassettes recorded in garages. By practically every evaluable metric, punk rock was terrible music. Except, of course, that it was really good.

By the time I was a teenager, punk had devolved into glossy mall punk with production values, stadium shows, and music videos that didn’t look like they were filmed on Super 8 by someone’s little brother. The polish was there. But the music sucked. Old-school punks held it in contempt. Punk’s acute allergy to posers is largely a recognition that roughness is an essential part of the medium.

Avant-garde and fringe movements in the arts have always sought the rough edges; it’s almost their defining trait. And people respond. They connect with that lack of polish. They feel in those bold swipes of color that ineffable something that has been scrupulously polished away from the rest of their lives.

By now, it should be obvious that “Why do we enjoy these rougher things despite their lack of polish?” is the wrong question. A better question is “Why did we conflate polish with quality in the first place?” A packaged product was never what people were looking for in art, music, or games. They are looking for the experience, and the experience never had anything to do with production values.

In fact, the ad hoc nature is the experience. In music, it’s jamming with friends who can barely play their instruments, mixtapes with scribbled marker labels, green rooms with initials carved in the walls. In games, it is spreading the rules from person to person like hobo signs, meeting someone who knows the same game under a different name, being told “Just watch us play. You’ll figure it out.” The rough edges are everything.

I’ve seen this often as a watercolor painter. Poor artists crouch over the painting making careful, precise strokes, and they end up with muddy, flat colors and stiff, lifeless shapes. Good artists paint from the shoulder in quick, loose strokes, guiding the paint but allowing it to move naturally. This creates the flows, blends, and delicate variations of transparency that make watercolor so beautiful, all of which are quickly obliterated by overworking a piece.

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Probably no hobby has been as thoroughly ruined by Instagram as home baking. The pressure to document everything plus the flood of professional-level decorators online has shifted the expectation from “a relaxing activity with loved ones” to “everyone is a patisserie chef.” Lopsided cakes and slightly-burned pie crusts are now an embarrassment; ordinary amateur bakers feel pressure to master fondant and mirror glazes so they can produce baked goods on the level of those they see online. 

But think of your favorite baking memory. There used to be a bramble at the end of our street and every year we picked more blackberries than we could eat. When I was eleven or twelve, I made a blackberry pie and was so crestfallen when the filling didn’t thicken. A family friend told me, “Everyone said my grandma made the best pies in the family and her fillings never thickened.” You, too, probably aren’t thinking of an elaborate patisserie-level confection. You’re probably thinking of something a bit wonky, a bit simplistic, but made for and shared with people you love.

The elephant in the room is money. In the gig economy, there’s overwhelming pressure to turn everything into a side hustle. When I posted some homemade candles to Instagram, I instantly received spam for small business promotional services; apparently it’s unthinkable that I might be making candles purely for fun. Under late capitalism, cashing in on hobbies is understandable, but I don’t think money is the only motivation at work. It doesn’t explain why people prefer packaged board games. Earning a scant $10 or $20 by turning your DeviantArt pieces into stickers or prints isn’t really a good return on your effort. The bigger factor is claiming legitimacy—there’s cachet to calling yourself a professional artist rather than a doodler, or a published TTRPG author rather than someone who runs games with their friends for fun. But why should there be?

A packaged product was never what people were looking for in art, music, or games. They are looking for the experience.

A common source of confusion in the arts is that there are two fundamentally different—but overlapping—types of activities: Skill and behaviors. Skills are things that we must learn and practice in order to master; behaviors are things that we do naturally. But while there are certainly activities that are purely skills (quantum physics) and activities that are purely behaviors (eating), there’s a large middle category that are both skills and behaviors, and it includes most forms of creativity.

For example, music is a skill. It takes decades of rigorous training and practice to become an elite musician. Music is also a behavior. Dogs bark; birds chirp; humans make music. Every culture on earth makes music, the vast majority by amateurs as a recreational community-building activity. To suggest that rigorous training would improve informal group singing would be inane; it would worsen the experience by turning it into a high-pressure performance. Not having to be good is why everyone can enjoy it. 

And yet, for some reason, today we are convinced that our games and hobbies are improved by professionalizing them and turning them from behaviors that everyone does naturally into skills that it’s possible to be good or bad at. No wonder we’re so stressed.

The closest a TTRPG has ever brought me to the primal experience of storytelling as a behavior was Wanderhome from Possum Creek Games. We were sitting on my parents’ back porch on one of Seattle’s rare nice afternoons. We had no map, no game mat, and no miniatures. The plot was no more than “A bridge is out and you need to find a way across.” We lapsed in and out of accents, forgot the NPCs’ personalities, conjured dei ex machina when we weren’t sure where the plot was going. Could we have come up with a better name for the bridge town than “Bridgerton”? Yep. Did it matter? Nope. This was how paleolithic people probably felt telling stories around the fire fifty thousand years ago.

Keep those rough edges. Share that story written on stapled sheets of notebook paper. Print a zine wrong so that half the pages are upside down. Enter that neighborhood Battle of the Bands with the group you only formed last week. Shout down that voice telling you that the thing you made isn’t ready—it’s not polished enough—not practiced enough—the art isn’t good enough—the setup isn’t professional enough. Because we don’t live in the product. We live in the experience.

There’s one game I learned in college that I have yet to see packaged as a commercial party game. It’s called Contact, and it’s a word-guessing game. One person thinks of a word and tells everyone the first letter, and then they…oh, just watch us play. You’ll figure it out.

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