As a sort of a goodbye to this website, a previously unpublished essay from last year about playing the 2005 TTRPG Polaris, or rather- reading Polaris with the kind of active engagement that turns reading into play. It is a story about the kinds of imagining that can stem from an unplayed game book over long periods of time, and about how formative experiences can settle into memory and shape us long after we consider them gone.

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That was how it happened

Playing Polaris alone at the edge of the world

Polaris was the first tabletop game I ever took home.

I was 19, maybe 20. At the time, I was playing in an ongoing second edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign that my housemate hosted in our junk-furnished (though artfully arranged) backyard. The story we were telling was slow, almost petulant in places– a melancholic, twisting thing about the slow draining of magic from a world caught up in opulence and politicking.

Our words were matched in affect by the physical setting for our play; us seated on velvet couches that we’d scavenged from the alley on a bulk-pickup day and lit by a sea of Christmas lights, each spliced together from the living sections of dead strands that were guaranteed to give you an electric shock if you brushed into them. This house backed up to train tracks, and the train itself would go by every hour, forcing us to pause for five minutes of horn and roar. As it passed, we would throw our heads back and howl. We rolled dice on a cracked stained glass window, propped up on cinderblocks to form a coffee table. I played a rogue.

I set this scene to underscore that we were being somewhat underserved by the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, even as we attempted to push and pull the system of the (relatively) open second edition from stat checks and areas of effect into a game that was conversational, generous, and vast.

Throughout this year, I was more than a little afraid of the local game store. I would poke my head in and browse the shelves every once in a while, but my bravery faltered well before buying anything, much less staying for a game night. I was visibly out of place, or at least felt it. And game books were expensive besides– I made do with borrowing my housemate’s Monster Manual and Player’s Guide, reading through them and daydreaming of stories I might someday tell, if I were to host my own table.

At this time, I didn’t know what an indie game was. But I knew all about zines, was even making them myself– experimental, messy art school projects I printed after hours on my work’s office printer. So when, on one ill-at-ease browse through the local game store, I saw a rack of zine-format books, I stopped browsing. These were smaller, self-published, messy, and critically– cheap. I picked Polaris on the cover illustration alone, paid my $12, and took it home.

Polaris is a game of Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North. It begins, before the text of the game itself, with this dedication in the forematter;

“There is nothing left.
There are no artifacts.
There are no stories.
There is no history,
not even in secret.
There are most especially no games.”

The table of contents is for all intents and purposes a poem. The introduction is a short story. It sets a scene in a city at the top of the world, where once an architecture of ice sparkled in an endless night. It describes the king, his queen, and her knights in their age of splendor. It tells of the horror and beauty of Dawn– a frenzied, obsessive melting from a new sun. It describes the shattered city, reconfigured into citadels. And it talks about the coming of demons who live in smoke at the center of the world, these beasts summoned by the great Mistake that still haunts the knights. Finally, it tell you about your battles to come– against the Mistaken demons, against your people, and against yourself– and the eventual failure that is your only future. Polaris is, above all else, a tragedy.

I buried myself in it, read the book straight through, just– blazing. Despite teenage years spent free-form roleplaying on forums, I’d never seen anything like it in print. You could play games with no GM? Phrases could be used as effective resolution mechanics? Lighting a candle was a way to begin sessions? This was allowed?

And, as if written just for me– at the end of the book, 10 pages straight of star names. Listed there for you pick among, when you are asked to name yourself.

Polaris is a conversational game for exactly four people. Players each draw up protagonists (as Polaris calls player characters), who are defined by their themes (recurring events, objects, and relationships), their values (their inner worlds), and their cosmos (their outer worlds).

Protagonists also have four guides; the Heart (who holds control of the character), the Full Moon (who holds control of the hierarchical social world around the character), the New Moon (who holds control of the intimate social world), and the Mistaken (who holds control of conflict).

Critically, these guiding roles are taken on by different players for each protagonist. With exactly four people at the game table, each will serve in every role once. The practical effect of this is that Polaris is a conflict and society-rich game, even with no game master. The emotional effect of it is that no character is ever fully within one’s own grasp– they are constantly being tugged one way or another by obligation, conviction, love, fear, greed, or anger. The protagonists are palimpsests as much as they are individuals, and playing them is dizzying.

Finally, Protagonists have three statistics; Ice (relationship to world), Light (conviction in self), and Zeal and/or Weariness (sense or lack of purpose). This is all mapped out on a character sheet that is tri-folded, and made to mirror the shape of the city itself.

Play in Polaris is primarily governed by key phrases, a series of set intonations that begin, end, or pivot scenes. These are specific sentences that have the power to add or remove things from play, begin or end conflict, or oppose or adopt other statements. In play, they become almost invocation-like, magical, with a weight and a substance to them that holds the kind of power a chorus in a song might embody, as it– upon repeating– builds meaning around it.

I knew my own tabletop group wouldn’t be talked into playing. Polaris was too experimental, too strange, and in truth– too sincere. So, alone in my bedroom, behind a closed door– I played by myself.

I drew up my protagonists and assigned them aspects of my own personality as their guides; one character might have my optimistic Heart and my fatalistic Mistaken; another my nihilistic Full Moon and my peaceful New Moon. I gave them their Themes, Values, and Blessings, sketched their relationships to one another, and then, sitting alone on the floor of my bedroom, I lit a candle and said the phrase that marks the start of play;

“Long Ago, The people were dying at the end of the world.”

I played Polaris for three nights straight on my bedroom floor, narrating a burning, desperate story of star-doomed love between knights at the end of days. I built a city of diamond battlements and iridescent solariums, imagined wild beasts trained to snap and snarl at friend and foe alike, described secret plots amongst the orchestra to transcribe the Mistaken army’s music, and told of the Snow Queen’s terrible wrath as she stalked the mausoleums, hunting spies. In this place of beauty and horror, I built my knights their society, their entanglements, their conviction– switching from protagonist to protagonist, muttering out their stories, now Heart, there Full Moon, here Mistaken, then New. My knights loved one another, and they were doomed for it.

Three nights straight I went to bed dreaming about fur in teeth and blood on ice caps. Night four, my reverie was interrupted by an overdue school assignment, night five by a power outage, and night six by D&D night itself. I put the book back on the pile, telling myself that my knights were close to their end regardless, and that I shouldn’t be in such a rush to see them flame out in the snow.

And then I proceeded to not play– or read– Polaris again for 14 years.

My Dungeons and Dragons campaign exploded soon after in breakups and social drama (as they so often do), and after a clumsy foray into a college friend’s Pathfinder game I stopped playing tabletop games altogether. Polaris would rise in my mind sometimes, when I was rearranging the bookshelf, or when I packed it in a milk crate for one of its many moves– but I didn’t have anyone to play games with at all, much less ones that asked this kind of investment and bravery. Still. Polaris sat on my shelf. For five years it was the only game I owned, in a section all alone. I stuck it between “comics” and “poetry”.

Eventually, it gained company as I returned to field, both playing and designing games. As I continued to study arts and theater movements like Fluxus, or the performance and instruction arts of the 60s and 70s, these histories melded with my own experiences roleplaying into a type of conversational, sliding play that felt like it informed my public-facing work in computational poetry, browser games, and other rule-based experiments that took their weight from language. By this point I was no longer reading games for fun just to imagine the stories I might make with them. The days of browsing the Monster Manual simply to turn ideas over in my mind were long gone, and I was in campaigns again besides, as well as a run of one and two-shot experiments and my own endless playtests.

And so– until last summer– I left Polaris be.

It took a casual mention from the tabletop designer Caro Asercion to bring it back to mind. They said something like “Hey uhh I just read Polaris? Is Polaris really good actually?” to which I replied something like “OH MY GOD I’VE BEEN WANTING TO PLAY THIS GAME FOR SO LONG WE SHOULD PLAY.” We got a group together, made a discord DM, and set some dates.

Those dates coincided with a work trip for me, where I was to be away from home for almost six weeks (a first in many years). I needed to pack light and had planned to play from a PDF, but on the way out the door the book caught my eye from the shelf and I tucked it into my laptop case. One more move for an old friend.

Our group never played. Dates got pushed, then dropped– life got in the way, as it will. In truth, I was thankful when the apology message came in the group chat. I was already reeling from a summer spent so profoundly in the world.
The night we had originally slated for the game I ended up on a northern finger of the Faroe Islands, on a three-day stopover on a ferry. I told myself I needed to hole up and finish some work before my rapidly rising deadlines subsumed me, and that an inn at the far edge of the world would be as good a place as any to do it.

I underestimated quite how far and quite how beautiful. The Faroes are a group of 18 islands made from balsatic lava left over from the opening of the Atlantic ocean 60 million years ago. Just shy of the arctic circle, they are hundreds of miles from the next nearest land. The islands are craggy and rocky, all sharp cliffs descending directly into the sea hundreds of feet below. Boreal grasslands dominate the hills, with isolated pockets of heather in more protected valleys. The gulf stream mediates the temperature from frigid into merely cold, but the wind is almost constant. With no natural predators, sheep graze every hillside. There are no forests.

I found my way up to the village of Gjógv, which is named for the natural gorge that forms a step-well down to the ocean. The room in my inn didn’t have internet. I had one paper book with me. And it was here, in the eternal day of the northern summer solstice, that I reread Polaris.

Polaris’s mechanics feel clunky in places now, with GMless games a genre that have been smoothed and refined by the interceding years. 19 years is a long time for a logic to emerge from experimentation and get hammered into standard operating procedure, and the edges here are both raw and oddly crunchy, a funny mix of phrase-based storytelling and stat tracking that works in some places and falters or flounders in others.

It also has a setting that is not exactly grappling with its inbuilt ideas of a perfect society existing at a northern apex of the world and beset by hordes of demons. The book cites 19th century romantic literature– Lord Dunsany– as direct influence (as well as the more obvious Camelot), and those both come with baggage that I was not fully unpacking at age 19, from ideas of civility and savagery to the rigidity of class-based societies and even some of the (ever-present) Gender.

But all in all– it was a book as strange and brave and burning as I had remembered. Spinning, tragic stories. Weird, almost spell-like mechanics. And an ornate frame with which to hold them.

And I did something that I hadn’t done in well over a decade– I played Polaris by myself. In the 3 am sunlight, pink and strange, I filled out Protagonist Sheets, assigned them their Hearts and Full Moons, picked names from the stars (none of which I could see in the actual sky above me with its eternal dawn).

I wrote about Gienah, the spear knight, bound to service, holder of the left wing archive, a gambler in all things, a devotee of chance.

Then Deneb, matriarch, courtly and courting, straight backed, broad, she names her litany of fallen loves before every meal.

And Procyon, the dog tamer, first to rise, his clean appearance bellies messy quarters where the bed is slept in less than anyone would guess.

Finally Spica, painter of still lives, trained with daggers, composed, quick-motioned, second in devotion to the cause only by Algol himself.

I built a gentler story this time, but no less tragic for it. These were characters with soft, old hurts; knights frozen in themselves, once rigid in their dedication, just now thawing into a brief and temporary blooming (snowmelt watered wildflowers) and then melting further into slumped, desperate shapes. It was a story of subsumed passion and swallowed joy, of a chestnut-blight rot that eats the heart before the shell. It was a story where the knights would falter before their city falls. Where conviction would choke them. I set them in motion against one another and myself, mumbling their stories, painting the stars, feeling the cold.

I played for hours. By the last scene, the phrases that serve as core rules were entrenched enough that I went on a walk, leaving my paper notes behind. I climbed the hill above the village, up and up along a promontory that mirrored the walk of my Knights along the towers and battlements. It was steeper and further than it looked, steps worn into the sod by human feet. As I climbed, my breath became more and more labored and my narration became more intermittent and internal, until I was finally just coughing out the key phrases between pivots: “And so it was…”, “But only if…”, “You ask far too much”, “And that was how it happened.”

I was near the end now, my Weary Knights fading into the softness of a long-waylaid polar dawn. In the face of a burning sun, with nothing left to guard in their own hearts, they laid down their weapons and then their bodies, which were also weapons. Their warmth formed brief hollows in the soon-to-be-vanished snow.

And as the sun rose again from the surface of the sea for a 3 am sunrise, I ended the game as it is always ended, saying the one phrase with which you can end a story of Polaris;

… but all that happened long ago, and now there are none who remember it.

As most people reading this probably know, on October 1st, Cohost is shutting down. This website meant a lot to me, as it did for a lot of people. I need to write about it and get my thoughts out.

I won’t lie, I spent a good portion of last night sitting in bed crying. Being an artist on the internet is hard, and it keeps getting harder every month. Doubly so if you’re like me and made the bad choice of trying to make a living off of it. Cohost felt like a bit of a reprieve from that. It was an incredibly special community.

As I wrote before, I’ve been struggling with trying to be less scared of what other people think of me. I’ve been trying to allow myself to be more messy, more visibly queer, more open to being whatever I am. Cohost played a big role in that. It helped me realize I HATED the way I was presenting myself online. Being clean and professional and perfect is so boring. I don’t want to limit my online presence to just being an indie game developer. It’s a big part of who I am, but not the only part. I don’t want to be just one thing. Cohost was a space where I could talk about random things like furry conventions or my favourite games or post a bunch of weird pictures of chevrotains. I didn’t feel the need to uphold some reputation. I could just hang out in a way I didn’t feel comfortable doing on sites like Twitter.

The engagement that came from the site is incredible too. I had a modest amount of engagement on Cohost despite not having much interesting to post - the most interesting thing I’ve been working on over the past year is a game that’s too early to announce. I was so excited to finally have something cool and fun to share by the end of the year, and I’m gutted by the fact that there’s not enough time left in the site for me to share this game with the wonderful community Cohost has. I loved the site, but never got the chance to use it to the fullest. But even still, people seemed SIGNIFICANTLY more interested in anything I had to post there than anywhere else. I posted about me going to the Vancouver Game Garden last month all over Twitter, and one person from my modest following on Twitter showed up to play my demo. 3 people who weren’t even following me on Cohost showed up, and then two more showed up because they saw a post made by one of those first 3 recommending people stop by to play my demo specifically. People love things on Cohost in a way no other social media today has. It fills me with dread knowing I’m going to be going back to sites where most people following me really don’t care all that much about my work.

Still, I have hope a website like Cohost will appear again. Maybe it’s foolish to think that, and maybe people will feel too burned from the death of Cohost to want to use it. But I’ve never seen such an emotional, earnest, and deeply mournful response to the loss of a website before in my life. Cohost was needed by so many people. I believe the Cohost staff aren’t the only ones capable of making such a site.

Cohost showed the path to a better internet. Comment more. Curate your social media feeds more deeply. Step away from websites whenever you want. Engage with your communities. My relationship with social media has improved vastly. I’m not going to have as much fun on Twitter or Bluesky as I did on Cohost, and I think that just means I’m going to use them less. If I see something on Twitter that pisses me off, I’ll simply close the website for the day. I’ve seen many people post that Cohost has led them to do the same. The impact Cohost had on those who loved it is deep and positive and will last for a very long time.

A better internet is possible.

Thank you all for the amazing times.

Goodnight, eggbug. One day we will meet again.

It sounds so dumb and overly simple, but it's absolutely true. It's one of those truths that you hate how true it is. You sit there, trying to ignore the truth, avoiding eye contact with the truth, turning up the volume on everything else hoping to drown out the truth that sits and stares at you, waiting for you to admit that it's there, waiting for you to begin.

The key to doing anything, is to begin doing it. To trick to getting good at anything, is to just start doing it. If there are other things you have to do first, then you have to do those things, but it's never too soon to just start the smallest little step.

The key to making dinner, when you're laying exhausted and fatigued, glued to the couch, struggling to motivate yourself to move, is to wiggle your fingers and toes, uncross your legs, sit upright, and stand.

Especially when it comes to creative projects, you can only ever be a success if you begin doing even the smallest little thing. The key to becoming an author is to start writing something and that something can be so so very very small and you just have to finish it.

The key to learning how to sing is to just start singing something at all and keep doing it. Yes, there are exercises you can do that can help. There are things you can study that will help. You should definitely do those things too. But there's nothing to gain from them if you never start singing.

The best advice I ever got was from a Maureen Johnson fan mail blog post about how to become an author. She said to be an author you have to do two things: Write and Live. You have to live your life, so that you have experiences and observations to draw upon. You have to have as many life experiences as you can. Be adventurous. But you also have to write. You will never write a good novel if you don't start by writing a bad novel. Don't begin with a magnum opus. Begin with a 500 word vignette about a bird eating some seeds that you saw while on a walk. Write a lot, write often, and always try to finish what you write. Have people you trust read it and give you feedback. Write under the assumption that the first ten things you finish will never even be published. Maybe your twentieth novel will succeed. But you have to write the first nineteen novels because you can reach that twentieth one.

That's how you get good at things. It's also how you increase your chances of success, if you're hoping to be published or go viral. Do it a lot. @tinysubversions did a talk a while back that I saw a recording on YouTube. In it, Darius says that the trick to going viral online is not to buy the best lottery ticket, it's to buy more lottery tickets. No matter how fantastic the numbers on your own ticket are, your chances of winning the lottery increase by having more tickets, not better tickets.

So it's all about writing a lot, and posting a lot, and just being persistent, and trying again, and again. Keep finishing things. Keep editing them. 90% of writing is editing the finished first draft into something better. Sometimes, it's so much better, it becomes unrecognizable.

You will lose your first 100 games of Go. Your first novel you write during NaNoWriMo will be a disaster. Your voice will crack the first time you try to reach that high note. My first NaNoWriMo novel was horrible. My first essays were obscenely bad. My first thirty poems were embarrassing. My first songs were grating. My first dishes were disgusting.

Sometimes, I find an old poem I wrote ten years ago, and rewrite it as something entirely new, inspired by the key things I liked about the original. Sometimes there was a nugget of good I just didn't know how to express yet. I never would have gotten to the better version if I'd never written it in the first place, before I had the skills to do it justice.

Trial and error is a painful and unpleasant experience, but it's unfortunately the best or even only way to learn some things. Social skills too. The only way to become charming and likable is to throw yourself into social situations, observe how people behave, try to figure out how things work, attempt to participate, fuck up, be totally embarrassed, feel terrible, and try to learn the pattern of where you went wrong, if it was even your fault, etc.

Most people's first ever relationship is not their Happily Ever After. Many people win their first hand of poker, but feel despondent when they lose the second one. A short-lived success is still something you learn from. It's how you get better. My first relationship felt like a perfect match until it ended 3 months in. But I could never have had a 3+ year relationship if I hadn't learned from the 3 month relationship. I don't think I'd even have had that first relationship if I hadn't been on a lot of bad first dates.

Sometimes, there are barriers. You can't start a medicine until it's prescribed. You can't start being a doctor until you go to med school. But those are not barriers to beginning. They are the first steps. They are the path to the bus to door to the vestibule to the second door to the stairs and stairs and stairs. You never get to the penthouse until you step out the door and onto the bus. The beginning is working on what you have to do to resolve those barriers and move on to the main meal.

I couldn't become a librarian without grad school, which I couldn't attend without my day job doing data entry, which I didn't get full-time until after I was working it part-time three days a week and working at a bakery cafe at 6am 3 days a week. The bakery was the first step to the library. The endless exhausting applications and interviews for jobs I didn't get were the first steps to the bakery. I never would have gotten to the library without working at the bakery. In fact, I present the bakery prominently on my resume. There's a lot of overlap between a bakery and a library.

Most of life is doing the shit you don't wanna do so you can get to the stuff you wanna do. Most of life is fucking up at shit you're bad at before you can get to the part where you're really really good at it.

There is a card game called Mao. You do not know the rules when you begin. Everyone ends their first game of Mao with a hand full of cards and being told they've lost with no understanding of why. It is acute observation and persistence that gets you an eventual victory and the title of "Mao Master." You'll never get there if you don't lose that first game when you don't even know what you're doing other than the fact that cards are involved. It can feel awful when it feels like everyone else knows the rules but you, and nobody will tell you the rules, but it's only by observing and failing and observing and trying again that you figure out the rules.

I think about this game a lot. It seems like a very silly game with a silly name and a silly premise but it truly changed my life when I figured out the rules. I saw the world differently.

Begin with something small, do it, finish it, and do the next thing.

I still struggle with autistic inertia. It's hard. Feeling stuck and unable to do anything. But the skill I learned in therapy that always helps the most is to break things down to the smallest components and then do the first one. The trick to doing laundry begin with getting out of bed begins with wiggling my fingers and getting off my sides.

The key is to begin.

I know what naysayers are already thinking: "if it's shutting down, how does it prove that your definition of The Pure Internet can happen?"

first, the definition. The Pure Internet, to me, is an internet that functions the way I remember it as a young kid. It's primarily sharing stories and information, whether that be through shitposts and memes or long-form blog entries. Cohost is a fantastic example of The Pure Internet; it's not perfect because it's built by and for humanity, but it's unapologetically built for humans to exist in. It's not built for human consumption, which is your Twitters, your Facebooks, et cetera. You don't "consume content" on The Pure Internet," you are in community with The Pure Internet.

So how does Cohost shutting down prove that The Pure Internet can exist? Well, it fucking existed. That's how. It proves that these things can pop up every now and again. It proves that you can be lucky enough to get pulled into The Pure Internet just because you know somebody who knows somebody, or because you heard about it from someone you're following, or you heard from a friend. It proves that these types of projects aren't unreachable or unattainable.

Furthermore, Cohost's short existence is itself proof of genuine, vintage Internet. Many websites developed back in the day were short-lived and only seen by a few eyes. In retrospect we see all the long-term projects like social media platforms, YouTube, Twitch, et cetera, but we don't remember all the smaller pieces of the puzzle that went missing. we don't notice all the tiny sites that existed in an incredibly small way, here today and gone tomorrow.

These things can happen. People are desperate for a Pure Internet, and there are people willing to step into the Modern Web and make it happen with exhaustive effort. ASSC are just one group of many other passionate people who want Pure Internet to exist. Cohost is a proof-of-concept for a revolution won by paper cuts. If we, as people who've experienced the Internet at its best in 2024, can show others that it's possible to experience the vibes of The Pure Internet, in its true-to-form short-lived nature.

Go forth and proselytize the goodness of The Pure Internet. It can exist in 2024. It can exist in the future. The Human-centric Internet can blossom even in this late-stage capitalist hellscape ruled by the ultra-rich.

Fallen London has a lot of items and we are constantly adding new ones. As such, we write a lot of item descriptions. I’d like to think we’ve gotten pretty good at it!

Item descriptions are, to my mind, an underrated vector of video game storytelling. Inventory interaction is so often a major part, if not the heart, of a game’s economy or affordances. You guns in Destiny, your crafting materials in Minecraft, your medium-sized dry goods in an adventure game like Grim Fandango.

I’m often advocating for embracing the particularities and preoccupations of the medium. Video games are often very concerned with stuff in a way that other media rarely are. A movie might feature a macguffin or two, or a few hero props that are prominent in the story. A video game might feature dozens of things that are important to the player at various times.

To this end, I think video game items should have descriptions. One of the biggest narrative misses in Cyberpunk 2077 is its lack of item descriptions. That game is so, so very concerned with guns! And yet, none of the guns have descriptions.

So, here are my thoughts on how to write good item descriptions. They’re probably biased towards my own circumstances, so let me point them out:

• I write for a game where text is the reward; text is welcomed and beloved and players enjoy seeing it.
• It’s a fantasy game with an expansive setting that’s meant to be evoked through the writing.
• We put out a lot of items and we need to write a lot of item descriptions.

On that last point: by a very rough estimate,¹ over the course of 2023 we’ll have added about 700 new qualities to Fallen London. Some qualities represent physical items; some represent stories or circumstances and so are closer in nature to what another game might call a quest or a task or an attribute. But all of them have a description.

Perspective

One of the great things about item descriptions is that they often don’t have an enforced perspective. In some games they do – every item in a typical point-and-click adventure game is described by the protagonist, according to LucasArts tradition. But there’s no specific expectation that they should fit any particular format or alignment, so in many games an item description can be anything.

This is the approach we use in Fallen London, in fact. Most item descriptions are written in the voice of the game’s narrator, but not always. Some item descriptions are direct quotes of in-universe documents. Some item descriptions are written in something other than the narratorial voice, like the classic description for the item ‘Bottle of Strangling Willow Absinthe’:

Get it off! GET IT OFF!

Or the description for the item ‘Shared Case File’, which is brought into existence when one player sends a letter to train another in the investigative arts:

“And that’s when I realised there was something odd about the number of antimacassars left in the parlour…”

This is genuinely really powerful. These little pieces of interstitial text, which are somewhat divorced from any surrounding narrative context, can travel around in the setting and world of the game and look at different aspects of the narrative from different lengths and produce different effects.

This is also invaluable just from a process point of view. We have to write a lot of these descriptions. Often they’re easy enough to write; sometimes they’re not. In those cases, shifting perspective or format can unblock writing.

Explaining versus Situating

Is a description for a given item explaining what that item is, or is it merely situating an item in the game world?

In many cases, an item description has to do some lifting in defining or expositing what a setting-specific concept is. Consider our description for the item ‘Pair of Lenguals’:

Polythreme’s finest: gloves that can taste! And speak! And salivate!

This short description doesn’t get into what Polythreme is or why it produces gloves that are also tongues, but it does serve to explain what ‘lenguals’ are: disgusting gloves that are also tongues.

Contrast that to a description of something that’s mundane and familiar to the player, but which is written to place that mundane and familiar object in the context of Neathy weirdness. This is the description for the item ‘Surface-Silk Scrap’:

None of your sorrow-spider squeezings. This came out of a real Surface worm.

That is to say, the salient information here isn’t what silk is; we can assume that the player knows what silk is. What the description is trying to convey is that conventional silk from a real mulberry-bush-eating silkworm is slightly unusual or rare relative to the spider silk made by Neathy sorrow-spiders.

This ‘situating’ frame is very valuable in settings that mix the grounded and the fantastical. Pathologic 2 has many beautiful item descriptions that place a lot of mundane items – needles, hazelnuts, rags, bullets – in the context of that game’s surreal environment.

As an exercise, consider all these different descriptions for a simple metal fork:

Whether for picking at your plate of slowly congealing roast or sending a strong signal to a challenging relative, nothing beats a good fork.

Transjovian Supply Corporation Catalogue Item CUTL-00001: Standard size fork, stamped aluminum construction. Billions of these things exist. Most have never been raised in anger.

This one doesn’t have any water spots on it, thank God. The sous would know.

Describing versus evoking

Another aspect to consider is whether your descriptions need to be, well, descriptions. Often the space is better used to evoke a feeling or an image, rather than literally try to describe the object in front of the player.

In Fallen London, of course, many items are feelings or images. But we often prefer to let the context of how you get an item, or events surrounding it, do the heavy lifting of providing plot-wise narrative context; while the description of the item itself serves to evoke its emotional valence.

See, for example, the description for the item ‘Birth-Name of a New Power’, which describes the mood of the moment it stands in for, more so than what it is:

Urchins shout in the rooftops. Light shines in the west.

Or the exceptionally effective description for the item ‘Memory of Discordance’, an item that represents knowledge that was excised from reality by the powers that be:²

Forbidden.

Microscopes

Probably the most important technique in description writing is honing in on the most salient aspect of the thing being described. Space is limited; even in a game like Fallen London, where we are allowed to be indulgent with writing, we do want to lean on the side of brevity. Consider the description for a ‘Pair of Iron Manacles’:

Heavy as a wretched memory.

By the categories we’ve set up so far, I’d say we’re not really situating; that we’re describing just a little bit, and that we’re also evoking. But think of all the things this description is uninterested in: the manacles’ manufacture, their origin, their intended purpose, the way they work. It focuses in on what matters most, which is the feeling of wearing them, and the emotional valence of that object in its context. Another good example that distills an item down to exactly one great joke is the ‘Crate of Incorruptible Biscuits’:

They never go off. Arguably they were never on.

Telescopes

Of course, you can also zoom outwards to the broader setting. A lot of Fallen London lore originates as throwing things at the wall in throwaway bits of text and figuring out what they are later. Eg, ‘Drop of Prisoner’s Honey’:

The most delightful secret of the Neath: the honey of lamplighter bees fed exclusively on the Exile’s Rose.

This description is notable because it doesn’t get into the salient things about honey that matter to the player at the point where they first encounter it – what it is and what it does. Rather, the description sets up a bunch of setting detail that will only be resolved much later. You don’t have to treat this as a place to hang lore; you can just be expansive about what an item signifies. Eg, ‘A Vast Network of Connections Wherever the Bazaar’s Influence can be Found’:

Wherever you go, someone there owes you something. Tax on silks. A share in a railway venture. A ritual gift consisting of two masks.

This is, again, the magic of perspective. We don’t need to fully set up and construct the scene with the ritual gift and the two masks. We can just conjure it up. That’s really, really powerful.

Emotional Valence

Finally, let me talk a little about one of the key tasks of descriptive text, which is to situate an item in the game’s flow, economy, and play experience. Items in games are components of the story, and as such they have emotional tints to them. An item might be a burden that you have to carry, or a reward that you get for doing something challenging, or a transient resource. And while I don’t think item descriptions should be tied down by trying to imply the exact mechanical category that an item falls into, it does make sense to think about it.

For example, a lot of the time when we describe an item that’s a major reward we will write a longer description that in itself builds up the player character a bit. For example, the item ‘Memory of a Much Greater Self’, which is the final capstone of a very long questline:

If you follow the threads of your own destiny far enough, you will find ever-stranger knots. Eventually, you may find a knot that you tied yourself.

Similarly, if an item is rare or hard to get, it then commands a more forceful description. For example, the ‘Limpid Soul’:

Nothing escapes the bottom of a well, not even history. Souls like this one have been scoured clean of everything, even their past; wells don’t ‘eject’ them so much as bring them into existence.

A tight-ropey example here are the Burden items (debuffs, essentially) that you could get during this years’ Estival event. They’re called ‘A Stalwart Commitment to Helping’ and ‘A Fierce Commitment to London’s Defense’. They lower the players’ stats, but represent that this is happening because the player is exhausted by giving aid during an ongoing crisis.

You refuse to turn away when help is needed. But so much is needed.

You won’t run away from a fight when one is needed. You run towards, instead.

So, these descriptions get across that these are negative items that you don’t want to have; but they are also building up the player character a little.

In conclusion

This isn’t really a single coherent methodology; I don’t think you can devise a unified way of writing this type of text, at least not at the rate that we write it. But I hope this collection of strategies and best practices is helpful.

Watchful +7; Bizarre +1; Mithridacy +2; Reduces Nightmares build-up.

---

1. My methodology here is literally “how many rows were added to the qualities table between an item that came out in late 2022 and an item that was created at an equivalent time in 2023” so take this number with a grain of salt.

2. This is a simplification of a lot of complex setting knowledge, don’t @ me.

hello timewatcher!! the answer may surprise you! Behold:

iokodobaba

are you surprised? do you feel terror? I was shocked when I first experienced this word. I could feel my bones trying to escape my flesh. This is a word no human is meant to utter or hear or even conceive of. but it is through its power that corru.observer came to be

its meaning is, "have a plan. work on your big project at least 30 minutes a day. even if it's just planning." that's it!

iokodobaba is what made me able to work on corru.observer despite being continuously burnt out at my old job - 30 minutes doesn't seem like a lot, but it very quickly becomes more than 30 minutes if you get into a flow state, and then that all adds up over the course of a year or two or three!!

the very first page of corru.observer was literally a black circle floating in an inverted 3D CSS box with the basement walls - what would become the entrance. then after a day or two, I added fake lighting and the first moth sprite. then after a few more days, the scanning and readout system in their earliest forms were added... then 24+ months later, we're here!

if you have something you're trying to get done, or you keep falling off working on projects like I know I did before C.O, give it a shot!! I cannot understate the unfathomable effectiveness of iokodobaba.

(but also to answer your question a little more directly - yea it's all html/css/vanilla js. just a lot of work poured into it over time! I use some libraries here and there for little things like audio control and whatnot but no full on frameworks)

Getting a headstart by collating this as time progresses rather than trying to go through a backlog way at the end of the year, though this in no way means I'll keep up with doing this each month. Going to be missing a lot of good posts (and probably including the same people a fair bit) simply as a consequence of what crosses my timeline.

<== March 2024

Friction and games by @FreyjaKatra

Bad friction is any kind of gameplay element, incongruity with the fiction and broken fictional promises that takes you out of the game. These are mechanics or elements that "get in the way of the story." Almost universally, when someone says they want mechanics that "get out of the way," they're actually speaking from experience with bad friction.

Why the "old fighting game good, new game bad" discourse actually matters by @pattheflip

Modern fighting games have largely undergone a multi-generational process of transformation into pop music. Fighting game developers are “better” at their jobs than ever before, but the improvements are largely confined to making fighting games a more consumable product. Pop producers will sample liberally across genre, but the fundamental logic of pop music is easy to consume.

just a little Daily Reminder by @cathoderaydude, @pendell, @blazehedgehog

the second you go an inch beyond the intended 4x3 frame you see everything, all the strings, lights, cables, C-stands, everything that makes the show work. Everything is deliberately framed to work in 4x3 and absolutely nothing else, because they were working in tight sets on tight money.

On Sherlock Holmes and "mysteries" by @calliope

As I said earlier, detective fiction is a form of gothic fiction, and gothic fiction is traditionally about destabilizing our view of the order the world is in. Good and Evil do not exist in nature; crimes can go unpunished; the houses of God can house the worst sinners. Gothic fiction disrupts our feeling of safety in the world, that even if we aren't safe, the world has justice and truth in it. What if, really, it's all whatever the hell?

"I put Venom in is not because I love him. It is about Success Rate." by @Unangbangkay

Slop machines have been a bonanza for consumers of a particular style of porn as well, which is that glossy, excessively lit pinup style so common to gravure art and cartoon art that's made to look a bit gravure.

Gendered languages and translation by @lokeloski

For example, most people are aware enough to signal in a dialogue when it's a man talking to a woman, or a woman talking to a woman, and so on. But then, there's a man talking to a group. Is this a group of men or women? If it's a mixed group, are there more women than men, or vice-versa? It might seem silly, but this matters when trying to have a clean and well-written line that needs to follow grammatical gender rules.

on inclusivity by @kirinwoah, @winedark

true inclusivity, in my opinion, immediately collapses once it has a definable static identity. ie, associated stereotype. let me explain.

a home i cannot return to by @SaidLikeCaleen

and to listen to it now? hurts. it feels like grieving, mourning. the turning of time has made an irony of it. none of my family lives in the places we once did, which places so many people call beautiful and i can see only desolation. bereft of its people, its nature, its life.

Investors Need A Story, and AI Is A Plot Device by @Sheri

The machine can be trusted to behave exactly as you ask it, because it cannot resist you, only break. A machine cannot die, and dying would be bad for business. But breaking things… is just a consequence of moving fast.

the "AI" death cult by @sarahzedig

"the end times" are, really, just a poetic verbalization of the civilization-level need for a people's revolution in everything, an objectively extant pressure correctly identified but wildly misdiagnosed. it's a refusal to countenance any possibility that we can become better than ourselves in a way that actually matters, not through technology or devotion or purity, but through action. it is a desperate plea to the universe for an all-knowing adult to just take charge already so we can stop pretending like any of this is actually our responsibility.

Kids Looking Out For Other Kids by @kylelabriola

I think when a kid spends time with someone who’s, like, three or four years younger than them…they’re forced to recognize that sometimes they have to be the “adult in the room.” And that they have to be a caretaker, and be “the bigger person”, and be sympathetic to the needs of someone else.

does the audience have kindness you're ignoring? by @Sheri

but that doesn't mean people, at large, don't care. many have been beaten down, or never had a chance to learn the lies they were told to make capitalism work just kept them fighting amongst themselves.

untitled by @duskwingmoth

This is not a time or place in any way resembling the flowery image of junior scholars being patiently cultivated by kindly sages, this is a Workplace where children are LARPing as employees under their supervisor and pit boss, The Teacher. This is horrendous for building thoughtful, curious adults, but it's perfect for creating an unquestioning labor force that will bend over backwards to accrue capital for the capitalist class.

Marine Science Mondays 🦈🦦🐚🦐: A short personal history of crabs by @dismallyOriented

When you research clams and oysters, crabs are also a huge deal just because they eat the shit out of your study organism. Blue crabs are generalist scavengers who've made it their life's business to play garbage disposal to the entire rest of the estuarine food web.

Remember when Japan Studio was a division of PlayStation that published cool, groundbreaking games? by @iiotenki

The writing was already on the wall that the days of Sony fostering smaller domestic titles were drawing to a close and, with the hindsight available now in 2024, that's exactly how Tokyo Jungle feels today: independent-minded from beginning to end, a last call for drinks at a beloved neighborhood bar before closing it doors.

Cohost Tips: Things About Tagging That Are Maybe Not Immediately Obvious by @ChrisStapley

I see a lot of people on here who are presumably still operating off of their tumblr or twitter reflexes and I just wanna try and help clear up some potential confusion about how the tagging system works here cause I don't think any of this is officially documented anywhere

poe's masquerade by @dreamcastaway

When fans imply impenetrabilities in the works by virtue of cultural difference, there's a risk of veering into a kind of Orientalism. One which mystifies the culture and turns it into a kind of "other." Distant, strange.

untitled by @shel

Their actions, feelings, and decisions are outside of my control. I fundamentally cannot control other people. It's just simply not possible to do at a fundamental level. I can try and try and try. I could be a master of manipulation and social steering. Yet still, other people would always be uncontrolled variables. Every single person in the entire world no matter how important they were to me could still, at any time, decide to leave me. And then they could leave. And there's nothing I could ever possibly do to prevent that.

On the Restriction of Authority by @Meinberg

In fact, unwritten social convention is often the main restriction on inbalanced authority, as fault of a tool as that can be. The reason that the DM doesn’t send a tarrasque after a group of level 5 PCs with nowhere to escape is because that’s a dick move and no one would want to play with that DM again unless they promise to do better.

community building lessons by @Inumo

There is no risk nullification, only risk mitigation, and the law of truly large numbers dictates that with enough time, shit'll go wrong. If you want to build a long-term, stable community, you gotta be ready to make mistakes & come back from them. If you aren't as concerned about long-term stability, then just be ready to bail before you hit burnout & trauma.

On Grammar. by @iiotenki

Of course, different people have different thoughts and different mentalities in day to day life, but as a linguistic framework, Japanese as a language examines and frames certain things in ways that are pretty distinctly different from other languages and especially western ones like English. That might sound obvious enough on paper given the difficulty that people like you can very understandably have with it, but I don't just mean in terms of obvious social and cultural dynamics that emerge from it.

They don't succeed because they're not intended to succeed by @TrainsgenderFoxgirl2816, @BridgeUnit

The primary function of the state in a capitalist system is to facilitate capitalism. A state by its very nature as a vertical power structure will attract and promote the most ruthless actors, and capitalism is the natural outcome of such people holding sway over society. This power structure will then work towards the most efficient ways to funnel wealth and/or power from society to its own members. Capitalists will constantly demand as much of this power and money as they can get, limiting state funds and therefore state spending to only those things that will squeeze more money out of a society.

on Fighting, and the concept of "Psychological Pressure" by @NireBryce

The smaller and more mobile you are, and the larger and more bureaucratic the opponent is, the more opportunities there are to have outsized impact. Very outsized. (To a point. You need some percentage of their numbers in order to make it work). But you have to shift your goals and how you look at things. You need to see what all is connected of your opposition, and you need to use that as places to apply additional, disproportionate leverage by keeping them off-plan and guessing.

You are not an idiot. Puzzle solving is a skill. by @Pauline-Ragny, @SomeEgrets, @morayati, @vectorpoem

this is critical! it's a fundamental building block of human knowledge! people our culture typically portrays as "smart" are doing this all the time! so much of our collective knowledge and understanding is not built on the perfect synthesis of new ideas in a vacuum and "Eureka!" moments, but by the willingness to be repeatedly incredibly wrong until we understand enough that we start being somewhat less wrong

Dungeons & Dragons & Depression by @Clouder

Everyone is here means I get to wrestle once again with the nature of corporate art and who gets to do what with it. It means I get to reevaluate once again the fact that I have a lot of nostalgia for published D&D settings and works and that nostalgia is now, more than ever, a cudgel marketers swing at me and my wallet. I have to work through why I like 1990s Planescape and Spelljammer and hate 2020s Planescape and Spelljammer despite both of them fundamentally being exercises in finding ways to sell gamers books and supplements they otherwise would not purchase by painting every setting as being connected.

The Economics of Releasing a Videogame, or: DLC Was Always a Trap by @CriminallyVulgar, @kylelabriola

Paid DLC is something to be deployed in special circumstances, where it makes perfect sense for your game and your audience. For every new idea you have, the options are either to "Add it as a free content patch", "Make it a paid DLC" or "Save it for a future sequel" and it's worth really carefully weighing those options.

Thinking about video game prices again by @retroheart, @Adell

I once owned a copy of ClayFighter 63 1/3: Sculptor's Cut, the N64 exclusive that was only available for rental. I bought it from a Blockbuster as a loose cartridge for $25 god knows when, and sold it a couple years back after a nightmarish set of experiences that almost had me give up on selling it at all. I bought a nice couch with the money to replace the hand-me-down futon I was given when I moved out to begin with. That couch has done a hell of a lot more for me than Sculptor's Cut ever did.

DO NOT BUY HISENSE TV'S LOL (Or at least keep them offline) by @ghoulnoise

If I had spent a few days carrying out a clean install and re-installing all my work stuff, my problem would have come back. If I had taken the PC out back and shot it and replaced it with a fancy new computer, the problem would have come back.

aimless post about nature of complaining by @spookydichotomy

I like to complain about stuff if it sucks. complaining identifies what is useless or detrimental and seeks to cut it away. it is therapeutic, satisfying in itself, but it is also a whetstone, making both the complainer and what is complained about sharper in the act. this is the hater's wisdom.

technology, community, and idealism by @ireneista

other problems come back because they're problems that just... only exist when humans gather in large groups. oops, your compiler's "benevolent dictator for life" turns out to be racist and that has created a huge bias in who is and isn't part of the community you didn't realize you were building? .... oh, and that lack of feedback from other groups has meant that a lot of the technology has reductive assumptions baked into it that it's too late to change? surely nobody could have predicted this

Bodies of Art & Bodies of Labour by @ChevyRay

You see, it is very common to hear this kind of statement or sentiment echoed in games, tech, and software. Not just from nasty, unkind people, but also from my kind, supportive, and astoundingly creative peers. I don't think people are really aware that they do it at all, and Beaton's talk explores why this kind of thing happens (albeit in writing/art more than games/tech, but it still rings true) with great empathy and analysis.

You will never be able to explain it in words by @kylelabriola

Whatever your idea is…it’s an emotion, or aesthetic, or vibe, or story that will be expressed through the thing you make. It will make sense once you make it. It’ll start to make sense once you start sketching on paper, or start fiddling around on the piano, or when you take your camera out onto location.

When to write Good Code by @zaratustra

SO we've established that writing Bad Code is good, efficient and sexy. Which brings the question, why would anyone want to write Good Code? Just to lord it over us poor mortals? The answer is, "NO"

psa: you can talk to strangers in public by @bark, @mahalis

people are interesting, and you can talk to them. anything from letting someone know their shoelace is undone to jumping into full just-like-we're-old-friends conversation; it's fun, and if you're anything like me, either could be the highlight of your day.

Sunday night poetry: Don't read poetry by @hecker

You can love the work of one musician without loving that of another, and love a song by a particular musician without liking any of their others.

So it is with poetry: don’t read poetry, read poems. Sample widely enough that you can find something you like, and — if you want to go further — read people who can enhance your enjoyment of a poem by exploring how it works.

My timeloop RPG In Stars and Time is done! Which means I can clear all my ISAT gamedev related bookmarks. But I figured I would show them here, in case they can be useful to someone. These range from "useful to write a story/characters/world" to "these are SUPER rpgmaker focused and will help with the terrible math that comes with making a game".

This is what I used to make my RPG game, but it could be useful for writers, game devs of all genres, DMs, artists, what have you. YIPPEE

Writing (Names)

Behind The Name - Why don't you have this bookmarked already. Search for names and their meanings from all over the world!

Medieval Names Archive - Medieval names. Useful. For ME

City and Town Name Generator - Create "fake" names for cities, generated from datasets from any country you desire! I used those for the couple city names in ISAT. I say "fake" in quotes because some of them do end up being actual city names, especially for french generated ones. Don't forget to double check you're not 1. just taking a real city name or 2. using a word that's like, Very Bad, especially if you don't know the country you're taking inspiration from! Don't want to end up with Poopaville, USA

Writing (Words)

Onym - A website full of websites that are full of words. And by that I mean dictionaries, thesauruses, translators, glossaries, ways to mix up words, and way more. HIGHLY recommend checking this website out!!!

Moby Thesaurus - My thesaurus of choice!

Rhyme Zone - Find words that rhyme with others. Perfect for poets, lyricists, punmasters.

In Different Languages - Search for a word, have it translated in MANY different languages in one page.

ASSETS

In general, I will say: just look up what you want on itch.io. There are SO MANY assets for you to buy on itch.io. You want a font? You want a background? You want a sound effect? You want a plugin? A pixel base? An attack animation? A cool UI?!?!?! JUST GO ON ITCH.IO!!!!!!

Visual Assets (General)

Creative Market - Shop for all kinds of assets, from fonts to mockups to templates to brushes to WHATEVER YOU WANT

Velvetyne - Cool and weird fonts

Chevy Ray's Pixel Fonts - They're good fonts.

Contrast Checker - Stop making your text white when your background is lime green no one can read that shit babe!!!!!!

Visual Assets (Game Focused)

Interface In Game - Screenshots of UI (User Interfaces) from SO MANY GAMES. Shows you everything and you can just look at what every single menu in a game looks like. You can also sort them by game genre! GREAT reference!

Game UI Database - Same as above!

Sound Assets

Zapsplat, Freesound - There are many sound effect websites out there but those are the ones I saved. Royalty free!

Shapeforms - Paid packs for music and sounds and stuff.

Other

CloudConvert - Convert files into other files. MAKE THAT .AVI A .MOV

EZGifs - Make those gifs bigger. Smaller. Optimize them. Take a video and make it a gif. The Sky Is The Limit

Marketing

Press Kitty - Did not end up needing this- this will help with creating a press kit! Useful for ANY indie dev. Yes, even if you're making a tiny game, you should have a press kit. You never know!!!

presskit() - Same as above, but a different one.

Itch.io Page Image Guide and Templates - Make your project pages on itch.io look nice.

MOOMANiBE's IGF post - If you're making indie games, you might wanna try and submit your game to the Independent Game Festival at some point. Here are some tips on how, and why you should.

Game Design (General)

An insightful thread where game developers discuss hidden mechanics designed to make games feel more interesting - Title says it all. Check those comments too.

Game Design (RPGs)

Yanfly "Let's Make a Game" Comics - INCREDIBLY useful tips on how to make RPGs, going from dungeons to towns to enemy stats!!!!

Attack Patterns - A nice post on enemy attack patterns, and what attacks you should give your enemies to make them challenging (but not TOO challenging!) A very good starting point.

How To Balance An RPG - Twitter thread on how to balance player stats VS enemy stats.

Nobody Cares About It But It’s The Only Thing That Matters: Pacing And Level Design In JRPGs - a Good Post.

Game Design (Visual Novels)

Feniks Renpy Tutorials - They're good tutorials.

I played over 100 visual novels in one month and here’s my advice to devs. - General VN advice. Also highly recommend this whole blog for help on marketing your games.

I hope that was useful! If it was. Maybe. You'd like to buy me a coffee. Or maybe you could check out my comics and games. Or just my new critically acclaimed game In Stars and Time. If you want. Ok bye