Games for an Ordinary Life — Deep Dive
Starting Tuesday February 11, I'm launching a kickstarter for Games for an Ordinary Life is an art zine of minimalist games that I wrote mostly during the 36 Word RPG Jam that ran through January. It'll be around 32 pages, including four brand new linoleum block prints that I'll design and cut — similar to the cover image above.
If this is up your alley, I'd love your support. You can visit the pre-launch page now and follow it for the release on Tuesday!
Why this project?
I've been involved with roleplaying games for most of my life! My enthusiasm for them might be clear with some of my other projects like the actual plays I make. I've also dabbled in game design and have a number of ideas kicking around in my head that I'd love to make. It's an interest in describing an experience of collaborative storytelling that I'd like to share with people. Some of them are bigger projects, but of course those take a big lift to get off the ground.
I approached this project like a sketchbook and aimed for one 36-word game a day in January. Many artists keep sketchbooks or other practice to hone their craft. I found that in this restricted format, with only 36 words, I had to be really specific about my idea — story, mechanics, and experience. And, it could really only be one thing. Years ago, the SFF author Michael Swanwick was on a panel to write a short story at Readercon and as ideas got a bit out of hand, he reminded everyone that "a short story is like a knife. It does one job."
Another way I looked at it is as studies of form, like a painter would make pencil sketches. In acting school we had a homework in speech formation studies (Sprachgestaltung). We were instructed to take a notebook and write one letter of the alphabet on each page, and then sit with each letter for a while exploring the form of, for example, a ‘B’, to understand it, like where it turns into a ‘P’ or ‘D’, how it feels in our voice and on our tongue, and other observations.
Repetitive creation in heavily restricted conditions is a common artistic craft practice. You can search online and see people who draw the same thing a hundred times. I have an improvisation exercise where you perform a scene for some minutes - three or four. Then you perform it again in half the time, then half that, then half that, until you end up at 7 seconds, then 3, then one. It usually ends with the two players shouting the main word or idea at each other. But the repetitions in between often reveal hidden gems and understandings that weren't apparent at first pass.
With these games, it's a practice of technique, ideas I'm interested in, testing them out the smallest size to see if I really understand them. I've revealed some of my deeper interests, tendencies, weak spots, and strengths. I've tested ideas, challenged myself, and privately answered questions or challenges I interpreted from other game designers talking about craft. I think some of the games in here are fun for a general audience, and some of them are for game designers and very committed indie tabletop gamers.
Some games
Here's a handful of the games I've polished the most that you'll find in the collection, and some of my design notes on them. I think a few are really interesting personal discoveries and quite layered for their small size — and several are online and free or for donation:
(Un)Fortunately, Fate
I love the theater warmup game Fortunately, Unfortunately. It's like One Word Story, you go around telling a story but each sentence must start with 'fortunately' or 'unfortunately.' You practice telling a cohesive story together — a poorly connected ensemble usually struggles to hold it together and build on each other — and you practice your dramatic chops with constant twists and turns.
This game mechanizes randomness. You roll, and on odd or even you start with one or the other of the two prompts. It's very similar to other games that play with this concept of dramatic narrative flow as a mechanic such as Fiasco and Swords Without Master by Epidiah Ravachol. The roll breaks up the repetition of the original game, which creates for a more interesting story and keeps you on your feet.
At the end of each round you collectively award a player with a Fate Token, which can be used to change any die result to the other option. This in itself is an interesting power, but I'm really also interested in the collective decision process — in my work I want to model ways of being that I want to see in the world, and collective process is one of those. This game subtly asks you to practice it.
Insatiable Mountain
Insatiable Mountain is a different kind of game! It's a duet. There's no dice in it - it's all worldbuilding and prompts. Here's the game in all its 36-word glory:
You’re an orphan. I’m the mountain.
I must be fed.
Every day
say how you feed me.
I say
how I’m sated &
how I’m hungry
Once a month
I say how I see you grow.
This is a game about a mountain that can never be satisfied and an orphan. Is it obstacle, an obstruction that must be overcome. Is it a real mountain? Skill, ambition, career? Regardless of the metaphor, the orphan grows over time. This is an advancement mechanic.
I grew up playing games over a long period of time. Some of the most satisfying gaming experiences I've had lasted years with one character. I grew as they did. Moments of change in their lives mirrored moments of change in mine. It's an experience that many people don't get. This game offers that — it is played in real time. You play it one move a day, and each month you grow, you change through playing it.
There's also a question of mechanic. This is kind of a story game, but I'm also implicitly leaning on time and a concept known as "bleed" to give an element of randomness, or at least a change in perspective that changes the storytelling of the characters over time. Bleed is experienced by a player when their thoughts and feelings are influenced by those of their character, or vice versa (from Nordic Larp Wiki). My proposal with this game is that over time your interests as a player will subtly change and bleed into how you interpret the game space. If you played it all on one day, you would make very different choices and tell a very different story from how it would be if you came to it day by day, at the pace of life.
I'm attempting to offer something close to the experience I had over a decade of playing one character in a game that you could write in the palm of your hand. If I can do that, maybe I can get it into a deeper game.
Grandmother Guide
This one isn't up on my itch.io page. I'm honestly a bit bummed that I didn't manage to submit it because I was so busy at the end of the month. It's one of the games that required a graphical layout to explain it within the word limit.
This game is ambitious for 36 words. I might expand it for the zine to capture a little more — but it is worldbuilding, mechanics and experimental table relationship structures all rolled into one.
The idea is that you have Grandmother and her Daughters as players. There's clearly grandchildren implied but 36 words meant I couldn't fit that in, you gotta just trust it's there. You have to analyze the text a little. I hope it's not a big ask!
Grandmother is the GM. She describes the world as she knows it. When a challenge comes up, you play an altered version of the casino card game Red Dog. In Red Dog, you lay down two cards face up, and then one between them face down and you bet if the face down card is going to be some relation of between the face up cards. In Grandmother Guide, you lay two sets of face up cards and you draw a hand of two cards. You get to choose how to allocate them — you can place them on the table to tie or land between the face up cards to succeed, otherwise if you're outside the bounds you fail.
Each set of face up cards represents a different type of decision in facing the challenge. One of them represents the challenge itself — do you succeed or fail it. The other one represents how Grandmother (mother, to the players) feels about how you approached the challenge — if you succeed, she's pleased, otherwise you've disappointed her. You can succeed the challenge and disappoint mother, or please mother but fail the challenge, along with total success or total failure.
What's important to me is that the GM is not an omniscient god in this game, but a potentially unreliable and hostile narrator as a character — they are Grandmother with her own perspective and opinion about the world, and that is the framing of the challenges. There are some games that offer different "framing" or essentially a flavored name for the GM, there are fewer where the GM is a character perspective, but I've never heard of a game where the players can decide to emotionally confront the GM's perspective. If you know of one, please let me know!
Obviously this iteration of the game, all 36 words of it propped up by the diagram above, is barely able to offer this proposal, and there's many places to take it. But the idea is there, and I hope people find it interesting, even compelling.
It is part of a series of studies of ideas that I want to incorporate into a game that I'm writing for the Bad Moon Jam.
Reveal Your Heart Quest
Argyx Games
Finally, Reveal Your Heart Quest is a magnetic poetry game system. I'm not going to say much about this one because it got late and I think it's pretty explanatory!
There are some deeper ideas in it. You can make up a game but then interpreting how to play is up to you. It's one thing to have a ruleset, but to have heuristics is something else. The rules don't immediately mean you know how to play the game! That might be evident from other games in this list, but Reveal Your Heart Quest is special, because there's obviously no way that an intention is baked in except that you discover it for yourself. The means of game production are gifted to the players with this one.
If I'm clever, I'll figure out how to make an actual magnetic poetry set for the kickstarter, and won't that be fancy!
In conclusion...
Thanks so much for making it through this post. I hope you found my thoughts interesting. If you're into ttrpgs, please engage me in conversation about them! Hello, I'm here for it!
If you're not into ttrpgs, but you want to be, take one of these games and try it out with a friend! You might come into a place where a rule is unclear or something like that. That's fine—make up a path through! Half of what's interesting will come out as you try to adjudicate for yourself.
And finally, if you've made it this far, please consider supporting the kickstarter campaign for Games for an Ordinary Life, which is a collection of games that are anything but.
Thanks :)
Jacob
