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[book report] The Ink That Bleeds
Mar. 13th, 2024 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yhlee[repost from my DW, March 2023]
Paul Czege's The Ink That Bleeds: How to Play Immersive Journaling Games is a zine that I found really interesting even though part of what I discovered, from a practical standpoint, is that Czege's experience of such games is really different from mine and that his advice for getting mileage out of solo journaling games doesn't help me much. That's not good or bad, and not a criticism of the zine (in that I fall outside the range of people who will find it helpful), it just is.
[addition] tl;dr The takeaway here, unsurprisingly, is different people have different brains and experience/prefer games differently, so gaming advice for some might fail utterly for others. [end addition]
So, I've tried different solo journaling games or equivalent with different levels of success, where by "success" I mean "this worked for me as a solo game experience." A rundown for context:
One that worked reasonably well for me was Tim Hutchings' Thousand Year Old Vampire, although for me the replayability is somewhat limited, and that's fine.
I looked into Ironsworn (the base version is available as a free download) as well as Ironsworn: Starforged. I actually gave away my copy of Ironsworn: Starforged when I realized, after the third time trying to get through reading the rules, that looking at the book filled me with dread; this was clearly not a game for me. It's a little too crunchy - too many rules! - and that was useful to learn.
I enjoyed Takuma Okada's lyrical Alone Among the Stars, and observed that I would have enjoyed it more with some crunch/peril - that's not a critique of the game, which does what it sets out to do very elegantly, more a statement of player-game mismatch.
I thought anna anthropy's Princess with a Cursed Sword was very evocatively written but it was a little too minimalist; coming up with the story, even with the aid of prompts, basically felt too much like my day job (writing). Again, player-game mismatch.
I had a fabulous time, ironically, with what I am convinced is a parody: Top Ten Games You Can Play in Your Head, By Yourself, specifically Space. I played this during a drive from Baton Rouge to Fort Worth to shelter with friends (Hurricane Ida) and it was fantastic.
I ran into bad luck with Absurdist Production's Transformation, although it had some neat ideas.
I haven't yet played Colostle but I have some thoughts on how to make it a better experience for me once I do try it, which I am eager to do.
So one of the things I realized, that I hadn't deduced earlier, is that solo gameplay experiences that rely on my character interacting with other characters generated/run by me to any substantive degree are just kind of doomed for me. (Systematic analysis is not one of my strengths.) I am most likely to enjoy a solo gaming experience that either has me "inhabiting" a solo character OR that "provides" the NPCs for me. I think this is, in fact, why gamebooks/CYOA, where the author "provides" the other characters within the structure of the gameplay narrative, have tended to work better for me.
I only figured this out when Czege talks about leaning into solo journaling gameplay by writing dialogue with NPCs/other characters at every opportunity.
My brain immediately threw a "divide by gimchi" error.
That was the point at which I realized that I can have really strong, intense experiences of my character/PC, but my brain basically doesn't have any processing power left over for NPCs. There's no there there. When I played Space on that drive (Joe was driving :p), I was basically playing a solo starship pilot out among the stars, without other characters, and focusing on the transcendence of the setting. My crackalicious hack - there were glorious clouds throughout that day - was deciding that every cloud was a starship and going from there. I was surrounded by friendly starships. It was great.
I don't really know why this is! I know it's very solipsistic. And I don't think it matters why. I don't think this means either Czege or I is "wrong," just that we have fundamentally different brains.
One thing I found very interesting was that Czege found the procedural rules for Thousand Year Old Vampire actively hindered his ability to get into the game - I think (very approximately) because the procedural rules were interfering with the things that his subconscious was providing as fruitful things to experience. Whereas I had the opposite experience - my subconscious doesn't do that in a meaningful way (in fact, I had a hard time even following Czege's descriptions of his journaling game experiences because they were so alien), so having the game procedures provide XYZ experiences for me to draw on was generative. I have a really strong need for novelty/surprise, as opposed to echo-chamber generating stuff out of my own head, so game procedures, or the game author providing that material, really helps me. I mean, sure, I can invent whole worlds/characters in my head (it is literally my day job as a writer), but there's sort of that echo chamber quality to it - I can never truly be surprised by my own brain the way I can be surprised by a randomly generated result or someone else's story.
Likewise, Transformation crucially relies on the interplay between your character, who is turning into a monster, and a companion character. Granted that my three turns of play didn't allow much scope here, but I simply didn't have braincycles FOR the companion character in any meaningful way.
On the bright side, this means that now that I've come to this realization, I can better select for solo games with systems that will work for me. That's very valuable, and I'm glad to have gotten that epiphany by reading the zine, even if its immediate advice doesn't work for me.
And if I'd thought about this in those terms, it would have been evident earlier. When I write novels (for instance), I can really only focus, at best, on one or two characters to any depth. Mayyyyyyybe three if I stretch. And if there is a strong pull, it's pretty guaranteed that I'm "in" one character's head. (This may not be the POV. I spent all of Ninefox Gambit in Jedao's head.) If I want to add depth to other characters, I basically have to do it in separate passes. Trust me when I say I envy writers who seem to have giant full-fledged casts of characters walk into their heads! But the brain I have is the brain I have; I think if this modus operandi hasn't changed in 40+ years, it's unlikely to do a volte-face now.
Paul Czege's The Ink That Bleeds: How to Play Immersive Journaling Games is a zine that I found really interesting even though part of what I discovered, from a practical standpoint, is that Czege's experience of such games is really different from mine and that his advice for getting mileage out of solo journaling games doesn't help me much. That's not good or bad, and not a criticism of the zine (in that I fall outside the range of people who will find it helpful), it just is.
[addition] tl;dr The takeaway here, unsurprisingly, is different people have different brains and experience/prefer games differently, so gaming advice for some might fail utterly for others. [end addition]
So, I've tried different solo journaling games or equivalent with different levels of success, where by "success" I mean "this worked for me as a solo game experience." A rundown for context:
One that worked reasonably well for me was Tim Hutchings' Thousand Year Old Vampire, although for me the replayability is somewhat limited, and that's fine.
I looked into Ironsworn (the base version is available as a free download) as well as Ironsworn: Starforged. I actually gave away my copy of Ironsworn: Starforged when I realized, after the third time trying to get through reading the rules, that looking at the book filled me with dread; this was clearly not a game for me. It's a little too crunchy - too many rules! - and that was useful to learn.
I enjoyed Takuma Okada's lyrical Alone Among the Stars, and observed that I would have enjoyed it more with some crunch/peril - that's not a critique of the game, which does what it sets out to do very elegantly, more a statement of player-game mismatch.
I thought anna anthropy's Princess with a Cursed Sword was very evocatively written but it was a little too minimalist; coming up with the story, even with the aid of prompts, basically felt too much like my day job (writing). Again, player-game mismatch.
I had a fabulous time, ironically, with what I am convinced is a parody: Top Ten Games You Can Play in Your Head, By Yourself, specifically Space. I played this during a drive from Baton Rouge to Fort Worth to shelter with friends (Hurricane Ida) and it was fantastic.
I ran into bad luck with Absurdist Production's Transformation, although it had some neat ideas.
I haven't yet played Colostle but I have some thoughts on how to make it a better experience for me once I do try it, which I am eager to do.
So one of the things I realized, that I hadn't deduced earlier, is that solo gameplay experiences that rely on my character interacting with other characters generated/run by me to any substantive degree are just kind of doomed for me. (Systematic analysis is not one of my strengths.) I am most likely to enjoy a solo gaming experience that either has me "inhabiting" a solo character OR that "provides" the NPCs for me. I think this is, in fact, why gamebooks/CYOA, where the author "provides" the other characters within the structure of the gameplay narrative, have tended to work better for me.
I only figured this out when Czege talks about leaning into solo journaling gameplay by writing dialogue with NPCs/other characters at every opportunity.
My brain immediately threw a "divide by gimchi" error.
That was the point at which I realized that I can have really strong, intense experiences of my character/PC, but my brain basically doesn't have any processing power left over for NPCs. There's no there there. When I played Space on that drive (Joe was driving :p), I was basically playing a solo starship pilot out among the stars, without other characters, and focusing on the transcendence of the setting. My crackalicious hack - there were glorious clouds throughout that day - was deciding that every cloud was a starship and going from there. I was surrounded by friendly starships. It was great.
I don't really know why this is! I know it's very solipsistic. And I don't think it matters why. I don't think this means either Czege or I is "wrong," just that we have fundamentally different brains.
One thing I found very interesting was that Czege found the procedural rules for Thousand Year Old Vampire actively hindered his ability to get into the game - I think (very approximately) because the procedural rules were interfering with the things that his subconscious was providing as fruitful things to experience. Whereas I had the opposite experience - my subconscious doesn't do that in a meaningful way (in fact, I had a hard time even following Czege's descriptions of his journaling game experiences because they were so alien), so having the game procedures provide XYZ experiences for me to draw on was generative. I have a really strong need for novelty/surprise, as opposed to echo-chamber generating stuff out of my own head, so game procedures, or the game author providing that material, really helps me. I mean, sure, I can invent whole worlds/characters in my head (it is literally my day job as a writer), but there's sort of that echo chamber quality to it - I can never truly be surprised by my own brain the way I can be surprised by a randomly generated result or someone else's story.
Likewise, Transformation crucially relies on the interplay between your character, who is turning into a monster, and a companion character. Granted that my three turns of play didn't allow much scope here, but I simply didn't have braincycles FOR the companion character in any meaningful way.
On the bright side, this means that now that I've come to this realization, I can better select for solo games with systems that will work for me. That's very valuable, and I'm glad to have gotten that epiphany by reading the zine, even if its immediate advice doesn't work for me.
And if I'd thought about this in those terms, it would have been evident earlier. When I write novels (for instance), I can really only focus, at best, on one or two characters to any depth. Mayyyyyyybe three if I stretch. And if there is a strong pull, it's pretty guaranteed that I'm "in" one character's head. (This may not be the POV. I spent all of Ninefox Gambit in Jedao's head.) If I want to add depth to other characters, I basically have to do it in separate passes. Trust me when I say I envy writers who seem to have giant full-fledged casts of characters walk into their heads! But the brain I have is the brain I have; I think if this modus operandi hasn't changed in 40+ years, it's unlikely to do a volte-face now.
