Introducing Every Game a Playground
Exploring creation within communities and their favourite games.
Hello there!
It's been a while, huh?
I first launched Check Your DMs in 2021 wanting to share the things I've learned from a very fortunate career working with incredible people on some of gaming's largest franchises. Creator Partnerships became a legitimate career path and a space for education appeared.
It felt amazing to hear from both creators and industry colleagues how valuable my early newsletters were. Writing about "how to do xyz" became difficult, however, because it tied closely to my job and the very public games I worked on. Coupled with an international move and a new role, things sputtered out and Check Your DMs started to gather dust.
Since then, my work has shifted. I still work with creators, but now I get to slow down and really think about what makes certain games break through — and why some stick around while others fade, especially in today’s wildly crowded market.
Sure, there are a bunch of different game development factors that contribute, many of which I can't control as a marketing guy, so I turned my attention towards the other side of the equation: the people who play and create surrounding those games. I wanted to reverse-engineer why people turn up in the first place by finding a more emotional explanation behind why people choose to come back to games.
What creates that spark and how is that fire kept alive? If we can better understand the latter, then we can build with that in mind and create a more sustainable ecosystem for our players.
As children (I suppose I'm aging myself considerably here), our parents would take us to the playground and say, "go on, have fun." We'd look at our surroundings and have to figure out just how the hell we're going to take a pre-constructed space and make the most of it.
Maybe the playground equipment isn't cool from the get-go. Maybe there's only so many times you can go down the one slide. So, we plot and scheme about how to bend this place to our will just to eke out another 30 minutes of fun. How can we create a new story to tell ourselves and our friends?
Gaming communities are inherently the same. Each game is a pre-constructed digital space where we are often dictated how to play with a fundamental rule set that shouldn't be broken. Inevitably, a group of players will say "fuck you, I want to play this way though," and find ways to break those rules. They will:
Turn your sci-fi FPS into a 5v5 FPS multiplayer game pitting terrorists vs counter-terrorists.
Mod your RTS so that rather than controlling an entire army, you control a single hero unit in a five player team attempting to destroy the opposition's base.
Morph your MilSim into a last-player-standing deathmatch across a sprawling map.
Build role-playing servers so that players can tell the stories they want to tell with their friends.
Over time, more people find these rule-breakers and communities begin to form around their work. Sometimes they even surpass their progenitor.
My favourite way to highlight this: The most popular games on streaming platforms are because of, or were based off, things that the gaming community made.
Thus Every Game (is) a Playground.
Platforms like YouTube, Discord, Patreon, and various modding sites have created even more space for people to sustain, evolve, or straight up re-invent their favourite games. This is either with the support of, in absence of, or sometimes in spite of the original developers' efforts. They've taken the toys they were originally given and built new experiences purely off their own collective creativity and storytelling.
This has reached the point where community-made experiences (more dryly known as User Generated Content aka UGC) are now a key component of a game's live service. We now have a legitimate generation of game developers who exclusively build and monetise UGC, evidenced by Roblox paying out almost $1bn to developers in 2024.
That's what Every Game A Playground is about: Exploring creation within communities and their favourite games.
If that interests you, you can support me by subscribing to the newsletter. It's free!
If you are a creator, developer, artist, modder, or fan that is part of a gaming community which you think is cool and worth talking about, I'd love to hear your stories so stick around!
I'm excited to see what we uncover :)
JDodd