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radiantfracture(An ocean of your own making?)
Have you ever played a journalling game?
I hadn't until I started exploring indie table-top RPGs. I just wrote one for a game jam. That was a great way to engage intensely with a new form.
(It's the twilight of early morning just now, that luminous indigo of night washing out of the sky before the day's true colour shows.)
In a journalling game, obviously enough, you write a journal, usually as a character, though you could certainly make a real-life journalling game (and um now I want to because it would be perfect for my classes).
(Short hiatus while I jot some notes about that)
(I can hear the gulls crying like the ghosts of every morning.)
Here find a few thoughts on this flavour of game.
Okay, so. Form. Rules and prompts.
A journalling game is built of rules and prompts. A simple rule set brings prompts in sequence to the reader, who creates the series of journal entries.
These games generally use easily available mechanisms like a deck of cards or a six-sided die, things many people would have on hand. (And of course there are lots of online generators.)
As I worked up ideas for the jam, I went back and forth between playing cards and Tarot cards, between the accessibility and relative neutrality of the playing cards and the given resonance and lore of the Tarot. For the game I recently completed, I went with the playing cards.
This meant that I needed to provide more detailed prompts associated with each card.
I feel like the ideal is for the player never to feel dropped by the game, but always to have some spark kindled, to be gently lifted into the air again with each prompt, yes, like a swing, and also not to feel trapped by a too-specific prompt, one that feels like it's already written the entry for you.
(Whatever bird it is that goes phwheeeee chip chip chip is going phwheeeee chip chip chip right now. I'm drinking winter blend coffee, but this is not the bird's opinion.)
What makes a game like this different from a writing prompt? I think primarily the spirit in which the player arrives at the game, looking for joy, to have joy gently drawn from them, rather than to face the hard task of writing something that meets whatever standard of writing the player has internalized as Good.
There are rules to follow, though usually very simple ones, but just this much surrender is freeing. When I try these games, and I write, it takes me only a short time to become attached to the vision the game has softly scaffolded me to create. I have a stone cottage by the sea that I now visit in my mind, just from playing One Day at a Thyme for a few minutes.
It makes me feel humble about the imagination.
(I can hear, I think, a helicopter approaching the hospital down the street, or anyway some big mechanical hum not far away. I take these background mechanical hums for granted, and yet when I pause to think about them, their sources are often mysterious.)
For me, the hardest thing was stripping out as many rules as possible. I wanted to design the experience, give it some narrative energy, yet leave the imaginative possibilities as open as possible. I think in the end what works best is very simple rule design and vivid yet open prompts. The point in this case is the writing much more than the gameplay.
Questions make strong prompts. Something about having to provide an answer, maybe just the sheer grammar of it, makes the mind go to work.
And they should surprise the player a little, push them slightly off-kilter (or very, if you want a more challenging game).
Oh, and last but first, right at the beginning you need to create a moment of character and setting generation is essential. You can do this in just a few questions, not too many -- say four or five, with very loose prompts angled for the particular game, to establish the sketch of a place and a person in that place. Again, the mind just takes off from there.
I worried away at several ideas before this one came to me, more or less whole, in the beautiful and infuriating way of the mind when it says, finally, "oh, you want one of those? Sure. Here you go."
I got this game down to four pages, which feels like the maximum length for this kind of thing -- nearly half of that just being the card prompts.
Some designers are very brave and give you a single page, and yet it's amazing. I'm still aspiring to that sort of brevity.
My entry in the game jam is here, free or with an optional suggested price.*
I really like it! It feels like the first mature game I've written, in that it has longer gameplay and deeper engagement than the little games I've made so far.
[ETA] Oh, right, the game concept! Here it is:
Somewhere and somewhen, on the edge of the vast deep, you keep the light shining, even as you prepare for a catastrophic storm.
In this solo journalling RPG, you play the keeper of a lighthouse station. You maintain the light, collect information, deal with the sea and its strange gifts, and prepare for the coming storm. When the storm comes, the journal ends in your witnessing of nature’s raw power.
(We were promised a sunny day, just one, and I think, by this new fresh blue, it has arrived.)
{rf}
*Don't feel shy downloading it for free.
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Date: 2022-01-09 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-09 06:03 pm (UTC)I don't think I knew that! What a good thing.
It's one of the sounds I kind of take for granted in the mornings, and yet not everyone gets to hear it.
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