I want to make an app that's a card table.

This is incredibly silly, yes, but: listen.

This is something I can spend time on, that also speaks deeply to me. Touching game components, arranging them clearly, thinking through a line so that these tools disappear, gathering them back to a deck for another go, shuffling, fiddling with tokens or dice: these things have etched themselves into my body for years and years and years.

Because: I've been doing this for a while, already, anyway.

Come with me. It's the year 2000. I'm 14. I step triumphantly into the toy store in via degli Imbriani, in Milan, just beside the photography shop. I step out of it with two Pokémon Trading Card Game decks, my parents' precious money only somewhat wasted.

Only somewhat. It's two years later. I have visited every local game store in Milan, multiple times. I have checked into those leagues. I have made friends, tried to understand the game, loved it to bits. I found something that Is Me in a way few other things can.

I'm fascinated. I know how to make computers do things, and at that point I've known for a while; I've been toying with the idea of taking these ideas coming from this game form and medium, and making them mine. I knew Macromedia Fireworks by that point; an app for screen things, but on the janky Windows XP laptop my parents gave me, in the heat of the Calabrian summer months — blessed, wonderful vacation — it's perfect for the job.

So: I try to make my own game and fail. And I never really stop doing that. When it's not Fireworks, teaching myself graphic design, it's Apprentice and its successors, all the way through, decades later, Tabletop Simulator and their ilk, trying to play games with myself to see if this time it'll be better. On and off: I take breaks but I never stop trying.

But, for now:

It's just four more years later; it's 2006. I've visited every LGS in Milan multiple times. I've seen some come and go. I've also learned to play Magic, tho an asshole at Ready2Play in via Carlo Farini ruins my ability to learn the game for years by being hard on me in a period where, I'm just starting to notice, every single one of my cognitive difficulties feels both like a danger to life and limb and an unreedemable, congenital failure.

(I'm autistic, then as now: and with ADHD, and a learning disability, and no medication, and no mental health support, and living in a society that would happily use a vast array of slurs rather than any of those terms — and that can't be me, or so they say, so I don't get even to learn the words that don't mark me as defective. I am, however, made plenty aware of the consequences that being those slurs could have on my life. I shut up and internalize everything, only vaguely aware that something is really wrong, but unable to do much about it.)

It's five years later yet again. It's May 2011, and I'm discussing my thesis project with my advisor while not-so-stealthily using my first iPhone under the table to try and secure WWDC tickets. (It's a new enough thing that she, despite the boasts one would expect from one of only two UX professors in the faculty, doesn't register the discourtesy.) I have some money set aside from my iPhone app side business; I made an app to send files around, because I had really deep and silly ideas about what to do with files on a platform without a filesystem metaphor, and I was lucky enough to be noticed by Apple and featured on their newfangled store.

In that app, you give people files by moving slides on a table, toward the edges. The slides are a crude Inkscape job — Inkscape briefly taking the place of Adobe, née Macromedia, Fireworks, while I scrape the money to pay for a license — that look like my poor memory of what actual projector slides look like. Last time I saw any, I was 10.

It's 1995. I'm 10. I play with a stack of real projector slides, with my parents' photos in them; I look at them, through them; feel the textured plastic in my hand, the tiny amount of extra weight that marks them as more substantial than a sheet of paper. There is a joy in holding these in my hand. Four years after that, I will shuffle my first deck of Pokémon cards, and holding cards in hand will feel different, but just as intensely right. And so it feels two years after that, and three.

And every year since.

It's 2011. I go to WWDC. I leave a résumé. I get hired.

It's 2012 and my first project at this enormous company — one I uprooted my life for, losing my support network and weathering massive culture shock in the process — fails. It's derided by the world at large; it's going to be a literal punchline to random people's jokes for years and years and years to come. I crack then, and burn, and never stop getting worse.

It's 2013 and I call the emergency mental health support number in my employee benefits.

It's 2014 and I'm exploring myself for real for the first time. I find my niches. I find my spaces. I learn about queerness.

It's 2015 and I come to terms with my sexual orientation, in the sense of actually saying 'I'm bisexual' rather than shrugging and being open to the idea I could be.

It's 2016 and I start transitioning.

It's 2018. I'm back from another Friday Night Magic at local LGS, Gamescape. I feel terrible and cry and don't know why. I feel like my lack of skill is an unreedemable, congenital failure. It feels like danger to life and limb, and I don't know why, still. Though: the words that aren't slurs that describe what is happening to me, I do know — I just haven't connected the dots to me, too busy dodging the possibility that I am somehow forever broken, with all the depressive bouts on the bus home.

And then it's 2020.

It's 2020 and the lockdown hits. I've never stopped reading the design articles around extensible card games. I've played many, but the job has been hard on me — burning me out bit by bit — and when I can't do anything social but stay home all day for two years, I tell myself: it's time perhaps that I put some time into actually being good at card games, rather than just mediocre. I'm sure it's just a matter of practice and time; and time, apparently, is all I'll have for a while.

Time, despite my insistence I have it, doesn't stop moving moving on.

It's 2021, after that: and my girlfriend and the people around me tell me they're worried for my mental health.

It's 2022, and I'm finally on medication. It's two thousand fucking twenty two and my brain is finally closer to working, gods be damned. I can, now, fail at something and not break down. I'm still burning out at both ends, mind you — the pandemic sure didn't help, but the forces that push me have been at it there a while, and get worse every year, no matter how many times the words 'top performer' are uttered in my presence. I give up on my pro Magic dreams: there are things to fix with me to get there, and maybe I will, but also, the money is just too much.

It's late 2023, early 2024, and I play a game I only ever saw in online reviews and mangled OCTGN files, Netrunner. It's had a kind of revival. I start organizing stuff. Unfortunately, turns out: the only way to get things to happen is to move your ass and get them to happen yourself. Universal rule, never broken. I also finally have my ADHD diagnosis, giving me access to clarity for the first time in a long while.

It's 2024 and after a very bad weekend I decide I'm done. My two partners have jobs. I have money set aside. I can take a break before the burnout becomes critical. In the middle of this, I attend Netrunner Worlds — which was held in San Francisco, on the waterfront. I realize just how blessed I am, and how hard things are gonna be. I hold tight.

It was then. It is now. In all this time, I never stopped shuffling cards. Sleeving them, holding them, playing with the stacks and the piles, triumphantly putting dice down or rotating them to mark different counts, and now, with Netrunner, playing with stacks of lovingly crafter poker chips for credits and clicks. I never stopped designing them, thinking about them, reading Blogatog, exploring what it means to love a work and then let it go and love something else new. Failing failing failing. But never, ever stopping.

So, I mean, if nothing else, I think I'm qualified.

It's a problem space that is etched into me deeply.

It taught me about organization, about community, about anarchy, about competition, about wanting something and taking steps to pursue it. It put me into the deepest pits of despair on and off, also long enough to realize why and how they were dug. It's been a force that pushed me to be better. I never really stopped thinking about it. I never stopped opening files — in Fireworks, then later in Sketch — with stacks of orderly cards, spreadsheets of mechanics, trying to recapture that feeling in my own ideas. It's been a road littered with failures and bad results. And, as angry as I've been at myself for failing, I've loved every second of it.

And, very closely related: I've never stopped thinking about UI/UX. About what it means to be at the edge of the machine and touch it — through tools, and then on it directly, and now, in my last couple years, inside it, letting it define a space. What does this kind of motion mean? What could it mean?

Which is all a long-winded way to say: I want to sit down and build an app to play games like this. One that isn't built like ass.

No, not just to play. To make. An app that scales from a quick sit down with a friend for a game to a component of a prototyping and production workflow, without missing a beat. Letting you pull in your graphics work with a touch. Letting you correct it on the fly, as quickly and easily as people do with index cards and felt pens.

It's not the same but I want it to feel as close to right as it can be with all the declinations it can take. With a mouse. A trackpad. A touchscreen. A headset.

And fuck it, why not — I'm doing this to make a good thing, and I'm also doing this for me, so deeply for me that to want it is like breathing.

Well then:

Wish me luck. I have a little time on my own, and I will fail in so much, but you can be sure I will certainly try, because time in the world keeps running out, and I'm not as young at 39 as I was at 14, and if not now: when?

I still remember what felt good in my life. And I want to make it as good as it can be, goddammit.

And for now, in these shitty times: take care. Perhaps you'll see me work on this. Either way, see you around.

✾ Aura V. — San Francisco, 2024