Good afternoon, evening, morning, night. It’s James again. Hot, isn’t it?
I’ve made something new, and the ponytail of how it happened has three strands.
The first is stagnation in prose writing. My novel manuscript is in the tricky middle phase. And it felt hard to write a short story right now without it either ignoring COVID, or being “a COVID story”. And I didn’t know how to do that.
The second is a writer called Robin Sloan. The #writer tag is misleading though; I use it based on his ‘debut’ works, and the things he’s probably best known. But those are two novels, out of a corpus that includes (from memory) short stories, serials, apps, zines, newsletters, and an olive oil brand.
And now he’s making a game called Perils of the Overworld, and sharing his progress in a newsletter diary. It’s really fascinating to see one person get to grips with and exercise his own taste over words, music, graphics, fonts, colours, mechanics, and even sales platforms. He comes at it with a sense of curiosity, and curiosity is the salve to fear.
The third is a bundle of games that’s recently been made available on a platform called itch.io. The Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality is a single purchase of over a thousand games, raising money for Black Lives Matter-related causes. The games are so varied, from classic platformers to a walking simulation based on Theroux’s Walden, a card game about friendship, an aimless hike around an island as a bird, and so many many more. Games made by studios, couples, dreamers. Games that are a whole world, games that are a single, glorious joke. To explore it is to experience a thick slice of the imaginative scope of humanity.
…So I made a game, didn’t I?
It’s called Eggs, Milk. It’s a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure about going shopping during lockdown. I guess it mixes my writing side with my advertising side - I’ve done a lot of thinking over the years about the reasons we give ourselves for buying things. And it takes about 20 minutes to play. I like it. And I’d love it if you gave it a try.
I’ll talk more sometime about the experience of making something completely new to me, transplanting the expertise I have into a new and scary world. But for now, I exhort you to do two things:
Make some very small thing of a kind “you don’t make”. The fact that you normally don’t do it will give you permission to be simple and rough, until you discover you actually really cared about it all along.
I really would love it if you gave my new thing a go! I want to know what you think of it. Does it make sense to people outside my own head, and the editing eye of my partner? And if you make it to the end, I’d love to see a screenshot of your final result. You’ll know the one. Maybe I’ll do a survey?
That’s it. Thanks for continuing to give me a try, as I try some new things. Have a lovely weekend.
❧ James