Last year I wrote a blog post one year in the making and immediately set a reminder to revisit it in one year's time.
So here I am.
The difference is that last time around, I had spent a decent amount of time thinking about the topic (time-limited TTRPGs) and the inciting incident (rewatching Gravity Falls). This time? I just knew that I wanted to continue the pattern.
This is, in its own way, a time-limited game, playable exactly one day a year. One with no rules, no other players (except the few readers who might take a gander at it), and a very specific, if thankfully unknown and hopefully far away, end in sight.
I have to say, I'm enjoying it so far. It's a great exercise to force myself to develop my thoughts and get them out all in one day.
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Something I've been thinking about for the past year is how so many of the games I both enjoy playing and want to design are, directly or indirectly, about time.
My game The River Spirit is about memory and sacrifice, and by creating (and then destroying) a physical journal of your playthrough, you're mimicking the experience of your character. After all, if you should ever return to your play artifact later, a lot of what you'll be able to recall is just what remains after play.
Aaron Lim's An Altogether Different River (a direct inspiration for my own game) holds a similar fascination to me as a game about how things in a hometown have changed; indeed, how they must change.
The fantasy of the mega-campaign that lasts for years holds a similar appeal, as it takes on an epic scale not just in-game but out-of-game too. Years come and go, but this weekly game and the friends you play it with stay constant, your ability to shape and create the world you play in unrivaled by any agency you have in your day-to-day life.
A game I've been playtesting incredibly infrequently for a few years now also considers time in multiple ways: a generational game of city/community-building and collapse set in the quasi-historical Stone Age. This is inspired by David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, a fascinating book about how different the dawn of human civilization looked than how we typically imagine it. My game attempts to bring some of what I learned by reading it into a playspace, to see how I and others might do something different ourselves.
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It's kind of funny how much I'm fascinated by this idea of playing with time in games when I am at times deeply frustrated by it elsewhere. In particular, there's this style of storytelling that I've noticed across genres and mediums over the past several years that split perspectives between time. A recent example of this is Project Hail Mary (the movie, I haven't read the book), which reveals main character Ryland Grace's backstory as he begins to recover his own memories, lost during a long cryogenic sleep. But there are a number of other ways of doing this, such as giving flashbacks to a character's past as moments in their present remind them of certain events, or even jumping multiple generations back to give context to what's happening in the present.
This can certainly be done effectively, even artfully, but so often it feels like it is an extension of mystery-box storytelling and that the author is just hiding information from me in order to keep me interested in an otherwise weak plot. A particular (and mostly effective) example of this is the TV show How to Get Away With Murder. In the couple seasons I watched, the show would cut back and forth in time, giving just enough of a glimpse of the aftermath of a murder to keep you intrigued. Who died? Could it have been one of our beloved main characters? And who killed them? Could it have been a different beloved main character? (It usually wasn't, but sometimes it was!) The rest of the show gave you legal procedural drama as leadup to this horrific event for half the season, teasing the various motivations behind it, before it caught up in time and then focused on how the characters recovered (or didn't) in the aftermath.
And while this show was definitely effective at doing this, it also allowed them to hedge their bets. Rather famously (at least to me), Viola Davis cried over a wooden dummy while filming one of the murder aftermath scenes in Season 1 because they hadn't decided who was going to be the murder victim yet. Now is this an example of terrible writing and storytelling, worthy of walking away from to never be engaged with again? Of course not. That's happening with the MCU, which rewrites whole third acts and scene locations in post-production while fucking over the VFX artists who actually make it happen.
But when I see this kind of time trickery play out in books and TV, it frustrates me because it doesn't always feel necessary and it seems increasingly common. Sometimes, it's like a writer doesn't know how to integrate the two halves of a story they've come up with and thus create a lazy framing device to make it work. It's not for my benefit as the reader/viewer, they're just playing peek-a-boo with the important thing until they choose to reveal it.
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So why does playing with time work for me in games more than elsewhere? It really comes back to the agency involved. If I'm playing with time in some significant way in a game, I'm taking an active role in the decisions involved, whether by making use of limited time or in creating the world that is changed by its passage. Nothing's being hidden from me, there's no big reveal to make by cutting around something important, and we're not glossing over things that might be really interesting and meaningful. Games that play with time literalize the limited time we have to play them, and by foregrounding that limitation allow for something really beautiful and exciting to happen.
See you next year.
