GREEN MILK | #008 | save vs despair — mörk borg: a holistic retrospective
:// A little over a month & 14,000 edited & well-considered words later, SAVE VS DESPAIR is complete to read in its entirety.
If you have any interest in TTRPGs or ever wondered what Mörk Borg's whole deal is – this is for you.
I approached it as a writing exercise & design analysis to understand what's so special about this game and art object, and I'm really proud of both this piece and what I learned for my own practice.
If you're invested in the TTRPG scene I'd appreciate it if you shared this with anyone who might enjoy it.
Our artform deserves as much high-quality analysis as we can cultivate, and the fact that I stumbled into writing what is currently the most thorough analysis I could find (which still has huge gaps in its perspective & approach) of one of the most successful games to emerge from the scene in recent years indicates that there is a need to encourage more writing like this.
In a perpetually collapsing digital infrastructure where so much of our design writing is ephemeral and lost to time (I've heard ancient tales of The Forge & Google+ eras, Discord is an unreferencable void & I really hope someone wiser than me is archiving all these podcasts) I hope that longer form writing might represent an opportunity for the ideas we have now to still be accessible (in one form or another) in years to come.
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Too much patting myself on the back? Maybe.
But it's good writing and I think you'll get something out of it.
Personally I learned that cross posting on multiple platforms is exactly as fun as it sounds (I thought the whole point of starting a newsletter was to avoid this crap in the first place) and by the end of the month I just wasn't posting the illustrations I was making or sharing the last 2 (?) individual parts here as they went up after burning myself out on instagram.
So for the sake of my poor microwaved brain, if any of this interests you:
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