The Portal Commons: Designer's Notes
From Fountains to Fasteners: How a Trip to the Bay Area Became a Game About Community Infrastructure
The Portal Commons started decomposing in my head while waiting to board a flight home from Oakland in early June. Not decomposing in the sense of decay, but like organic matter breaking down into rich soil - all the observations and encounters from our week in San Francisco settling into something that could grow into a game.
Nancy and I hadn't been back to the city since 2013, when we flew in for The Three O'Clock's reunion concert. It used to be a relatively frequent getaway destination in the decades prior: food, shopping, music, the unique neighborhoods, and the West Coast counterculture myth, all serving as a gravity well until the pull had somehow waned. This time we arrived to quietly celebrate her birthday and to witness the Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA.
I'd anticipated that this visit would be not just an experience of a place, but also of memory; a ledger of contradictions wasn't on the to-do list.
The Uber ride from Oakland into the city primed the observation. Stretches of East Bay freeways looking more brown than green, presumably having shifted with the climate over the past decade-plus. Passing through neighborhoods where "AI branding" competed with hand-painted signs, robot taxis prowling like Cyberdyne Hunter-Killers while people waited for buses, billboards claiming companies didn't hire humans while humans swept the sidewalks underneath them. Snowflake's annual conference a block away from the skid row of down and outs, lines of Nintendo devotees waiting for the Switch 2 to drop, while I spy the Sig Sauer sidearms of the SFPD in Union Square. The Bay Area as cybernetic implant - simultaneously symbiotic and parasitic on its host community.
But the people... keep on peopling.
At SFMOMA, Asawa's work demonstrated something I'd never articulated clearly before: art as community infrastructure rather than individual expression. Her public fountains exist outside the $40 museum admission, embedded in the actual neighborhood fabric. You encounter them while getting boba tea in Japantown, not as aesthetic pilgrimage but as functional beauty woven into daily life.
That principle became the game's design foundation. Every mechanic in The Portal Commons rewards collective function over individual achievement. Signature Gear serves community needs. Cross-Pollination bonuses emerge from coalition-building. Victory conditions center on relationship strengthening rather than personal advancement.
The morning tai chi practitioners in Washington Square Park, the unhurried regulars at Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store, the browsers and believers among City Lights' shelves - these scenes illustrated how community infrastructure operates through persistent, quiet presence. Not dramatic organizing moments, but the daily maintenance of cultural space.
Then we met Jeff and Dan.
Pausing for a snack at a pizzeria on our departure morning, we met two retired postal workers whose careers had woven them into the boundary where North Beach meets Chinatown. Lunchtime regulars, they embodied what I later termed "stress-strengthened bolts and fasteners" - not community anchors exactly, but key elements of the quiet infrastructure that holds neighborhoods together across decades.
Talking with Jeff and Dan felt like meeting grand-uncles I'd never had. Their knowledge of the area was embodied, accumulated through years of actually connecting people across neighborhoods. They represented everything corporate algorithms can't capture or commodify about how communities function.
That encounter crystallized the game's core insight: the "dragons running printshops" already exist. They just look like old friends having lunch at the same table every Tuesday, maintaining cultural memory through simple persistence.
The airport departure lounge became perfect synthesis space. Neither origin nor destination, but threshold where different experiences could coalesce into playable mechanics. The game started writing itself in that liminal moment, translating lived observation into systematic design.
The development process from June through August involved constant return to those source experiences. When mechanics felt too abstract, I'd remember Jeff and Dan's easy knowledge of their neighborhood's rhythms. When the fantasy-meets-cyberpunk frame seemed like pure whimsy, I'd think about Asawa's fountains - how the fantastical can make the familiar newly visible.
The field research components emerged directly from our weekend methodology. We hadn't set out to study community organizing theory. We'd traveled for art and anniversary celebration, then found ourselves documenting the exact patterns the game's ethnographic prompts now encourage players to recognize.
The Portal Commons works because it emerged from patient attention to how neighborhoods actually function, rather than starting from ideological positions about how they should function. The game's effectiveness stems from grounding in lived observation rather than abstract organizing theory.
The three-month revision process involved stripping away complexity that obscured this foundation. Early drafts had elaborate token economies and complex facilitation procedures. But the core insight remained simple: communities thrive through accumulated care, and games can teach players to recognize the infrastructure of that care.
The final design maintains what made those San Francisco encounters meaningful - the capacity for patient observation, the recognition of persistent community wisdom, the understanding that the most radical technologies often look like the most ordinary human practices.
Jeff and Dan probably don't know they inspired a role-playing game about interdimensional mutual aid networks. But their example of quiet community maintenance runs through every mechanic, every safety tool, every prompt encouraging players to notice the line holders in their own neighborhoods.
The compost pile has become fertile ground. Now we see what grows.