Interviewing James Wallis

By Alex White

- 4 minutes read - 822 words
James Wallis has been influencing the RPG industry in a positive way for many years. And he's got big plans for the future...

Please tell me a bit about yourself

I’m James Wallis and I was big in the 90s. I set up and ran Hogshead Publishing, the first successful UK RPG publisher since Games Workshop, re-releasing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as well as SLA Industries and Nobilis. I also designed and published the first modern ‘story game’, meaning a GM-less rules-light narrative-heavy single-session RPG or post-RPG: The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, in 1998, predating the Forge by a couple of years. I set up Dragonmeet (with friends) and chaired it for the first three years; I set up the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming and ran that for its first twenty years; I wrote the game-history books Board Games In 100 Moves (with Sir Ian Livingstone) and Everybody Wins. I co-host the RPG podcast Ludonarrative Dissidents. And more, but that’s enough for a start.

What do you like best about designing games?

Of all the artforms, games are the only one that’s interactive, where the observers of the art are also participants in its creation(*). So being a game designer isn’t showing off, like painting or film-making or writing a book, you’re inviting people to come and collaborate with you. You’re building a piece of art that’s also a tool for the creation of more art. And that’s amazing.

(*) Okay, interactive theatre as well perhaps, but I’d argue that derives more from games than it does from theatre.

What are you working on at the moment, and what excites you about it?

My main project for the last year isn’t a game at all, it’s a trade body for the UK and Irish tabletop games industry. It’s called it BIG TABLE (British & Irish Game Trade Association) and it’ll represent all elements of our industry in an increasingly competitive market. We’ve got so used to living with the gaping holes in our knowledge that we don’t even notice them any more. How big is the UK and Irish games industry? How many people does it employ? Is it growing or shrinking? What was the best-selling game in the UK and Ireland last year? I can’t tell you, I don’t know anyone who can tell you, and for an industry that turns over nine figures a year that’s a ridiculous situation.

We need to talk to each other more, we need to understand the challenges that face us (new EU regulations on product safety are coming in this month—do you know about them?) and we need to realise that we gain more from cooperating than from competing.

Big Table will launch in early 2025, and you can find out more about our aims, sign up for updates and fill out a short survey about what we can do for you at our website https://www.bigtable.games

Can you tell me more about who runs BIG TABLE?

It’ll be a non-profit run by a board that’s elected by the members. The plan is to include the whole UK&I games industry: all sectors and all tiers. So we’ll cover RPGs, board games, wargames and minis, mass market and more, and everyone from publishers and distributors to retailers, games cafes and conventions. It won’t have a specific RPG focus because RPGs are a small fraction of the industry, but they’re an important part of the mix and they punch well above their weight in terms of creativity and participation.

What experience(s) are you trying to give to players?

I’ve always gone for the meta, I’ve always been about taking a step back and asking how something works, how we can understand it better, and how it can be done differently. The first thing I published professionally in the games industry was the first journal about interactive story-making systems (Interactive Fantasy, now a free download from DriveThruRPG). Munchausen was an extension of that: why in 1998 were all RPGs still based on the paradigm that Gygax and Arneson created in 1974, and what happens if we moved away from that? With Big Table I’m doing the same thing again, only looking at the business of games rather than the creative end of it.

Is there anything you would like to promote right now?

I’m really proud of the work I’m doing with Greg Stolze and Ross Payton on Ludonarrative Dissidents, our RPG podcast. We’re all game designers, and each episode is a deep-dive on one particular RPG or supplement, taking it apart to see how it works from a design perspective, and putting it back together to understand how people play it. We’re about a third of the way through our third season now and I think we’ve really hit our stride.

Where should people go to follow you, and to find your products?