WIP Wednesday #5 - Dispatches from the Periphery

This WIP Wednesday, I want to share a game I’m working on. I did a very early test over the holidays — which is (wildly) more than a month ago at this point!

There’s a lot of people in my life who I cherish, and I love being in contact with them, but it’s been increasingly hard for me to keep in touch especially across long distances. I wish it was true that we could just fall back into the old connection easily, but sometimes that feels like a fantasy when so much happens on both sides. A gulf of experience widens. I want to keep those deep emotional connections, I want to correspond with my friends — but I’m somehow really bad at keeping it up on a regular basis.

Travel, change and connection over distance are fascinating and scary to me. I’ve always had deep friendships with people who lived too far away to really keep up connection. Some of the first people I truly fell in love with were those people. At this point, I’ve spent fully a quarter of my life living in a different country on a different continent from where I grew up, and every time I go home, I feel the distance — in both directions.

One game that deals with this that I think is truly brilliant (probably one of the best games I’ve ever played) is Signs of the Sojourner. You’re a young caravan driver collecting goods from across a post-calamity society for your store while uncovering relationships and history through conversations with other denizens. It’s a deck-building game; each of your cards has an in- and out-symbol. You match your in-symbol to your conversation partner’s out-symbol to simulate the movements of each turn of the conversation. When you finish talking with them you take one of their cards to replace one of your own. This means over time the tools you have for communicating with others slowly change. The emotional kick for me was when I came back home after one long caravan journey and couldn’t finish a conversation with the character’s best friend.

My work in progress follows the theme in it’s own way.

Dispatches from the Periphery is an epistolary game in which two players take the roles of space probes launched from the same rocket traveling in opposite directions across distant star systems. The game is played across 24 postcards through which you share your observations of the universe as you drift further and further away. Each postcard gives different prompts that ask you to extend different senses out into the space around you, ‘use your sensors to observe the world’ and record your observations in different ways.

Dispatches from the Periphery asks you to maintain a connection, but intentionally embraces the distance, the time, the limited bandwidth. Each player gets 12 cards to describe their world to the other, to express some degree of intimacy and life. Each card has some clear and some ambiguous prompts. And then you’re too far away, your battery runs out, maybe you’ve been bombarded by too many cosmic particles, whatever it is, this part of the game is over, and the next steps are up to you. Figure out how to keep that system running and keep up the connection like you're the voyager probes.

Currently I’m assembling a very rough alpha test for the game. I’ve got piles of notes and sketches and now I’m putting the cards together. The first hand-painted one went with my partner on vacation, and it took four weeks for it to make it back to me — success! I have to adjust the post-card formatting for better reliability in the mail, but I also have a lot of other cards to finish designing.

My end goal is to publish it in little envelopes of cards, so each person gets their half in a neat and ordered package that they can throw it in a drawer and pull out when it’s their turn. Because I struggle with this long-distance communication, I want it to be as easy as possible.

I'm excited about this. The very first draft of this idea was written in April 2021, and it's gone through some transformations. Now that I've settled on this postcard approach, I'm ready to see it through. I’ve included photos of the first alpha card below the paywall below — subscribe to see it. Anything you can pitch in here helps me find more time to work on it and complete it sooner.