The process of emotional writing
I'm a late arrival to the genre known broadly as "lyric games"—they were certainly all around me when the movement really hit a boom around 2019-2020 (and there's still at least running podcasts on the topic!) but it wasn't until recently in conversation with Geostatonary that I felt like I really understood them in a way I could get my hands on, which is to say—mostly small personal games invested in creating an emotional experience with logistical concerns taking a backseat. So when I noticed Literary Game Jam, I liked the concept and thought it'd be a good opportunity to try and stretch myself into that area.
Of course, I'm someone who really likes structure—a former arts professor called me a formalist—and I like to have a clear sense of the central thrust of a project, even when it's something looser and more poetic. (In some ways I might argue that I find I need it more in the case of something like this—otherwise it's easy to be meander-prone.)
It took me a few starts to nail down the framing I wanted. I knew I wanted a sense of near-future precarity, and for the narrator/player character to be talking to an implied other character, and the narrative started to form around an article I'd seen recently about the drying of Salt Lake and my ever-present worries about digital preservation and the paper trails or lack thereof of modern friendships. I loosely established a few rules for myself in my head:
- There would be eight sections, to use a number significant in computing;
- It should never say what it's about, but it should be clear from the text;
- The proposed "play" should, like more mainstream roleplaying games (and playground pretend, for that matter), abstract actions that cannot be taken in real life with a substitute that attempts to evoke the same feeling;
- It should also feel vaguely like summoning Bloody Mary in front of a mirror sometimes, as far as the ritual vibe of dredging up something uncomfortable that you don't actually want to look in the face;
- The writing should evoke prose poetry, and the mechanics themselves should be poetic;
- It should overall lend itself to literary interpretation.
The last one was obviously the hardest, since that's in large part out of my hands, but I was really pleased that when people read it, I got comments from friends about how they liked a thing I did that I hadn't thought about directly or done intentionally. I like to think that kind of thing comes from people being really excited about digging into the text, and that you can have additional meaning emerge from the way people engage with a work.
All in all it was an interesting experiment (I'm so flattered someone actually printed it out at home??) and I'm kind of excited to do more things in that direction, if probably in very different veins.
Have you ever tried writing in a game genre you'd never worked in before? How did you decide how to approach it? I'd love to hear about it at carly@smallbird.games or via webmention once I finish implementing those. ;)