Interviewing Josh Blincow

By Alex White

- 5 minutes read - 929 words
Josh is an illustrator and game designer from the Midlands who is keen that art communicates ideas and produces culture. And games are art!

Please tell me a bit about yourself

I’m Josh, but you can find me lurking about as Goblincow under most suspicious rocks. I’m an illustrator, graphic designer, writer & game designer from the Midlands in the UK.

I’ve been drawing and writing since I was a child and always knew I’d be an artist one way or another, but I think there are three main things that brought me to game design: I grew up observing systems of communication from my autistic perspective, so it’s always been a particular interest of mine; I understood disability as what I am systemically dis-abled of and denied access to, so I’ve always felt a responsibility to design better; I eventually trained in publishing design & visual communication on a course that produced a lot of packaging designers and advertisers, but I wanted to do something actually valuable – as far as I’m concerned the role of the artist is to produce culture and communicate ideas, and I think conversation games are a powerful medium for imagining and modelling new realities.

I take my arts practice quite seriously but part of what makes games such effective design tools is that the people who use them don’t have to do the same.

What do you like best about designing games?

I’m grateful to take part in such a supportive indie scene with a strong DIY tradition that encourages people to experiment and become designers just by having fun and honing our communication skills. That’s a genuinely radical process!

I also really enjoy writing games and adventures as a sort of liminal storytelling medium built on implication and negative space, where every reading and interpretation somehow ‘completes’ the game in play. I don’t have to provide answers, just ask compelling questions, which is both the fun part of writing and my primary tool as a designer. Every other design decision follows in support of that.

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

Back in 2020 I started writing & illustrating The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick, a post-dungeon micro-setting about shrinking to miniature size and adventuring inside a sapient pear tree to navigate an insectoid world that was never yours to delve.

But when I finally finished work on TPPAPPOP earlier this year I had to take some time to recover from burnout (it’s been a tough few years) and learn to work with my ADHD to spin several smaller plates at once, which currently includes:

NASTY BASTARDS: a Slapstick Horror Game for 3-5 Weird Little Freaks; a depraved playset of religious horror for Nasty Bastards called Wail of the Rot King in which players embody an ossuary of colourful skeletons; and a decidedly dungeonless conversation game for woodland walks called Litter, Detective! that I finished in November but am now looking forward to printing a small run of with homemade recycled junkmail paper!

Can you tell me more about that last game?

I actually wrote the first drafts for NASTY BASTARDS (as a one-page Mörk Borg hack) and Wail of the Rot King as part of Exeunt Press’ #Mörktober this autumn while writing a 12,000 word deep dive analysis of Mörk Borg. It was a busy month!

But Mörk Borg was much drier than I expected it to be, so I threw out my hack and decided to fully rebuild it as a push-your-luck game to bring out its comedy & horror extremities. I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of board game & gambling mechanics and taking notes on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia & What We Do In The Shadows for inspiration of the kind of farce I want to encourage, and I’m currently considering producing it as a scroll that can be rolled out on a tabletop while thinking about how the affordances of that form might steer my design.

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

This is a good question! With TPPAPPOP I’m dropping players into difficult circumstances with existential consequences and a ticking clock forcing their hand to make them (and their characters) confront assumptions of adventure, dungeoneering & their position in a world shaped by colonial influence. But it’s also as whimsical as it is horrifying! Players will pull on the threads that interest them most to get out what they put in, which I find very compelling.

With a tiny game like Litter, Detective! the goal was to make a fun conversation game (arguably a kind of LARP) for people unfamiliar with the medium while thinking about our relationships to local environments & the other people who use them through our shared responsibility to these spaces: at the end of the game you’ll pick up all the trash you found.

There’s definitely a pattern there, even if both projects are very different. Ultimately I want to provide tools for thinking and acting, which is basically just what a roleplaying game is!

Is there anything you would like to promote right now?

close up of the front of 'Litter, Detective!' on recycled red paper

I just published a mobile-ready version of Litter, Detective! to itch.io and The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick is being published by the Melsonian Arts Council some time in 2025 – it’s going to be quite a learning experience but I’m looking forward to it and trying not to panic!

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