# Play Unsafe, For Your Own Good tags: #thoughts/play-unsafe  I would counter this gently, not from the perspective of thinking that safety is the most important thing, but quite the opposite—that safety is dangerous, as it were. We need a "Play Unsafe" movement because that's where the juice is. I keep meaning to write a much longer and more involved piece which goes into this play-unsafe concept. Essentially, the key is that ideas which challenge what you know are inherently unsafe; that is, they will erode what you believe. That's why they're good. If all you ever deal with are ideas which reinforce what you already know and what you already know to be true about the world, then you will never have a better thought than the crappy set you start with. If you don't go out of your way to find things that challenge your ideas, that destabilize your world, if you don't allow yourself to imagine that there is a world in which everything that you believe true is absolutely not, can you really be said to be thinking? Can you really be said to be imagining? Now I get it. Thinking and imagining are hard. But hard work and entertainment are not incompatible, despite what the producers of **D&D** will tell you. Working out is entertaining. Building a house is entertaining. Constructing a world is entertaining. All of these things are hard work. We need *unsafe* games. Games which go out of their way to shake the pillars of personal belief and give you the room to explore personas, behaviors, and worlds that you would not otherwise choose to. Safety kills all of that in the crib. Safety is toxic to thought. Safety is toxic to your development as a person. Safety ends up with you being stuck in a pre-adolescent state of emotional crippling and takes away any tool that you might have to get out of it. This obsession with safety is really all about avoiding emotional or intellectual challenge in the context, not of the game, but the people. Those who are inherently unwell and hold themselves noble for their weakness. I want no part of it. Give me unsafe games every day. Give me dangerous thoughts. The only worthwhile art is unsafe art. Don't take that away from me.