The other day, I sat down at my laptop at the lil makeshift work-from-home desk I set up in my living room. My To-Do list was open, my fingers were perched on the keys, and I did… absolutely… Nothing. I just sat there, frozen, at the laptop, for upwards of 15 minutes, unable to bring myself to begin working. More than that, I couldn’t even seem to look at my laptop’s screen, like one of those dogs being shamed by their owner for chewing up a remote control.
I wish I had some sort of poetic reasoning behind this sudden statis, but it was embarrassingly simple: I was really, really tired of looking at screens.
I think it’s safe to say that I’m not the only one feeling this particular form of exhaustion; literally every Zoom call has a moment where everyone’s soul appears to leave their bodies and we’re all just digitally staring at one another, glassy-eyed.
This would all be bearable (not great, but bearable), except that it brings me a very private form of sadness: in these recent days, I haven’t found the same solace in video games that I normally do.
I say it’s a private sadness because it feels like such a silly thing, but it is nonetheless a small damper on my heart: video games are one of my favorite form of play. I mean play in the very literal sense of the word: an activity done for enjoyment rather than productive or practical purposes. I mean play like how kids play, filling “idle hours” with dedicated nonsense: throwing balls against walls, building forts out in the woods, doodling in notebooks for hours on end, making our dolls kiss when no one else was around.
Play is how we re-configure our ideas of ourselves and the world, testing out new ways of interaction (with ourselves, with ideas, with others) without any pressure. It’s a realm of self-driven exploration, free of oversight or expectations or the need to have a salable product at the end. With play, if something doesn’t work, that’s just fine, we can just move on to the next.
Despite its value, I’d argue that adults are afforded very few opportunities for play. We seem to work pretty hard to convince others that everything we do during our alleged “free time” is actually work by a different name: count your steps on a pedometer; chart what books you read on Goodreads; buy guides from “self-care” gurus full of itineraries to structure your day; re-brand your hobbies as “side hustles.” If we really were OK with taking time for ourselves to do whatever we wished — to explore, to make mistakes, to play — would we really be that pre-occupied with making sure to internally and externally reinforce how hard we’re working to not be working?
There’s a deep-set belief that any time dedicated to play is time that should have been spent being “productive.” Just look at the idea of the stereotypical gamer, languishing away in their parents’ basement without a job or prospects. This is the culturally-implied consequence for putting play over “reality.” Play is self-centered. It’s childish.
With shelter-in-place and the disruption of a usually daily grind, it’s been unsurprising to see the cognitive dissonance that goes along with having time without work. I’ve heard it repeated too many times to be fun anymore that “if you don’t leave quarantine without a new skill, you aren’t doing quarantine right.” Or any other permutation of that sentiment. We have to be doing something, and even better if that doing thing comes with documentation of us doing it. Learn a language! Get a new skill! Improve your resume! Work out!
And so, taking a huge page from Jenny Odell (which I’ve already done once, but what’s one more time?), I ask: what would it mean to do nothing during this time? And by “nothing,” I mean things done without an eye towards productivity.
I mean: what if we play. (Naturally.)
I’ve actually never found play all that easy, which might be why I’m so preoccupied with it. As a kid, I remember playing by myself with my stuffed animals and desperately wondering if I was doing it “right.” Every once in a while, I would find myself absorbed by whatever story I was telling myself and realize, with a sudden burst of clarity, that I was playing. Play nirvana, attained.
That’s part of the reason I like video games: they provide enough structure and enough pre-existing story to provide an easy on-ramp to quiet moments of imagination and suspension of disbelief. They’re a ready-build dollhouse, where I can peek in and imagine the story that’s already underway.
But, now, video games are just more screen time and need to be carefully meted out to avoid my eyes drying out in their sockets. So, in an attempt to spend less time in front of screens but also have just a smidgen of structure to my play, I’ve found a lot of joy in one-player journaling games, a quieter, more introspective version of table-top role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.
Though there is some variance, most of these games follow a similar instructional pattern: the creator of the game creates a one-page guide for the player, outlining the environment or quest. They then instruct the player to do a randomized task — draw a card from a playing deck, roll a die, flip a coin — that will determine what happens to their character next. After each randomized task, the player is asked to journal about what happens to their character.
And that’s it. It’s story-writing with a game structure.
I didn’t think it was going to be for me at first. As someone who is very often in their own head, the thought of playing something that was so reliant on my ability to tell myself the story felt a little overwhelming. I say this as someone who regularly writes for the stage. As other writers might attest, I can’t not do it, but it still fills me with a certain sort of performance anxiety . My writing, in other words, is usually filled with the dread pallor that I am somehow doing it wrong… just as I used to worry that I was playing with my stuffed animals wrong.
Where I didn’t expect to be proven that I was wrong was with how much I really love these games, in all their quiet glory.
I love quietly sitting on my couch in the early morning with a pen, paper, and deck of cards. I love when I realized that I didn’t have to play these games in just one sitting, that I could instead keep coming back to a story to build on it like it was a serialized drama. I loved that there was nothing attached to it, no consequences, no one that I had to turn this in to. It could be messy. It could be weird. It could be playful. It could be mine, for no other purpose than exploring my own wild internal unknown.
Looking for some places you can start your own one-person journaling game? Here are a few I’ve picked up over the past couple of weeks:
Princess with a Cursed Sword by anna anthopy. “A figure stands in an ancient ruin, bare feet on crumbling stone. Her gown far too fine, her sword much too dark. She can not put down the sword until she finds where it came from. So she has come.”
In this game, you are a princess with, as you might have guessed, a cursed sword. Start the game by asking the following questions: what does her gown signify, why are her feet bare, what does her sword want, and what are her pronouns? From there, players draw cards from their tarot deck (though this could be adapted for a standard playing card deck) to determine what the princess experiences as she goes through the ruins. The game ends when the player feels that their princess either finds a place to rest the sword or makes a pact with it.Alone Among the Stars by Takuma Okada. “You are a solitary adventurer, hopping from planet to planet exploring. Each world has unique features for you to discover and record.”
Using a combination of die rolls and drawing cards, the player writes down a log of their exploration of a series of planets i their “ship’s log.” According to the game’s instructions, “Play until you are tired, and want to return home. If you want to remember your travels, save the journal. If the memories bring you pain, burn it.”Within the House by Christine Prevas. “A solo game about exploring a haunted house, using playing cards for narrative prompts as you move from room to room and explore its contents.”
I’m really excited about this one, even though I’m the most easily spooped person on the planet. In this game, a player lays out a square of playing cards, faced down. These represent rooms in a haunted house (a la Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House). As the player moves through the house, they flip over the cards and follow prompts about what they find in each room, writing down their adventure as they go.Opportunity Knocks by Audrey Arcana: “Millions of miles from home, you’ve survived a terrible storm - but your communication devices are damaged, your solar panels are covered in dust, and it’s starting to get dark. For the first time ever, though, you are fully in control.
This game has the player in the role of a doomed mech (a giant robot), abandoned on a distant planet. Through die rolls, the player is given prompts about what the mech experiences as its battery runs out, prompting larger questions about life, loneliness, and wonder.Quill by Trollish Delver Games: “In a game of Quill you will write real letters, with the aim to craft the best, most beautiful missive possible in order to get a favourable response.”
Quill is, by far, the most rules-involved journaling game I’ve seen so far. The player is tasked with writing the best letter to a recipient of their choice (as outlined by a number of possible “situations” in the game’s rulebook). Through die-rolls, they determine how well-received their letter is. It’s a more D&D skill-check approach to a journaling experience, and thus I find it very intriguing
A number of these games were found in r/Solo_Roleplaying (which sounds more risque than it is), a Reddit group dedicated to sharing one-player role-playing games. Check out a more detailed list of recommendations here.
Now, let’s go out and play, yeah?