A Blog Post 2 Years in the Making

 

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.

A Blog Post 1 Year in the Making

 

Last summer (2024), I completed my third rewatch of the incredible show of Gravity Falls and I found myself struck by something going into the 3-part "Weirdmageddon" finale: the entire show has been taking place under the looming specter of the Pines siblings going home at the end of summer.

Upon this realization, I felt a little odd. That is, after all, the premise of the whole show. It's referenced many times throughout its two-season run, whether it's Mabel wanting a summer romance or Dipper feeling compelled to solve Gravity Falls' mysteries before he has to leave. But it doesn't feel particularly urgent until the end of Episode 37 "Dipper and Mabel vs. the Future" when (spoilers for a 10-year old show) Mabel tries to create an endless summer and inadvertently releases Bill Cipher into our reality.

Why does Mabel do this? Well, for a constellation of reasons, but primarily because the summer is about to end and all her friends (including her twin brother) are seemingly about to abandon her on her birthday of all days. It's been a wonderful summer, but the prospect of it ending so badly almost retrospectively taints it for her to the point of it all being for nothing. Worse than nothing even, because she had something so good and then would have lost it.

So what does this have to do with TTRPGs? I felt like there was something there but wasn't sure at the time, so I wrote the reminder you see at the top of this post to make myself return to the idea at a later date. Then that date came and went. And went. And went. Until I could barely even see it in the rearview as I drove out of Gravity Falls with Dipper and Mabel.

At some point, I decided that I would simply revisit it in a year's time. It'll make for a funny bit, I thought, a blog post about time-limited games that itself is time-limited. Then today came and I actually deleted that reminder because I felt that I had nothing to say. A whole year to think of the perfect blog post and what did I have to show for it? A masterpiece of theory? An incredible bit of advice? Something even halfway funny or thoughtful or interesting? No!!!!!

But then I restored the reminder and chose to write this anyways, because I realized that this post was never about having the perfect thing to say. It was about deadlines, procrastination, and time, both in-game and out.

So what would it mean to have a game on a timer? The Cross Stitch by Ben Mansky is a MÖRK BORG adventure where the players are stuck in a 30-minute timeloop that resets in real time. 60 Minutes to Curtain, a LARP I just wrote for Dice Exploder's 1 Hour or Less Jam, is about a community theater group having just 60 minutes to get their show ready for opening night. OMEN by Spencer Campbell is a one-shot game about a world ticking ever closer to its doom via a dwindling dice pool that gets rolled at the beginning of the session and never refreshes; when it's gone, so is everything else.

Games on timers are nothing new, but they are often short. The games mentioned above take only one session to play (maybe two in the case of The Cross Stitch); what would a whole campaign on a timer look like?

In many ways, grand TTRPG campaigns of the sort imagined by many a Dungeons & Dragons or Call of Cthulhu or Shadowrun player are already on a timer. How long until the players' schedules make it so that the game ends by default, in a whimper and not a bang as weeks since playing become months and months become years? How long until some thoughtless comment or action from the real world causes two or more of the players to cease speaking to each other? How long until a major life event (a child's birth, a new job, a family tragedy) makes it impossible for one or more players to devote 4 hours a week every week to Faerun or Eberron or your DM's homebrew world that's definitely not Middle Earth mashed up with whatever other fantasy series they were reading most recently?

Truly, the longer a campaign goes the more likely something like this will happen - and while the same is true for non-trad games, it is definitely trad games that tend to have the longest running campaigns and therefore fall afoul of these pitfalls most often. And I challenge any players of those campaigns to turn down the promise that was made to Mabel: a chance to keep playing, forever, in a perfect game where your friends will never be sidetracked by other things going on in their lives.

So I want to see games that face this grim reality head on, much like Mabel must do to save her brother and everyone else in Gravity Falls. What would it be like to have a game where one of the rules is that you can only play during the summer? What would it be like to have in-game and out-of-game time pass at the same rate, with telegraphed calendar events in-game barreling toward you at a seemingly breakneck pace? What would it be like to play a game you know will end on a specific day and time (either in-game or out-of-game)?

Ultimately what I'm really asking is, what choices would you make in those games, knowing those things? What choices would your characters make if they knew the same things you knew?

I think it would look a lot like it did in Gravity Falls: it wouldn't feel like it mattered, right up until it did.