[AE.Mailbag] Mailbag for Friday, 3/11/22: Journal games, Flash emulators, and more.
So, one of my ambitions since moving my newsletter to Buttondown has been to get a regular reader mailbag type thing going on the end of the weeks, in order to foster more of a sense of community and conversation in a site/medium that does not include comments.
That's been slow going as it requires a regular enough update schedule for such a recurring feature to actually recur, but I have been on a bit of a roll lately, and I think bringing in some community voices will only help there.
Reader sinopiasaur [they/them] wrote in response to my March NiNoBilMa post to say:
"So, I think NiNoBilMa is awesome and was thinking if I should also do it, since a decade in Amazon's software trenches killed my desire/energy to write, extending to half a decade after I left due to permanent disability.
... but then I realized I accidentally had already done something similar to NiNoBilMa, at least in terms of learning to write with childlike abandon?I realized just now that for a large part of 2020-2021 I was actually writing every single day, and still do today, and I did it because of Alone Among the Stars and other journaling games. Basically lots of prompt generation to build little solo storytelling for oneself.
One deck of playing cards, one d6, and 1-2 pages of prompt generation on a common theme, is what drives lots of these 'journaling games.'
Also when I was active on Twitch I wrote reviews about a bunch of my favorite games using and altering the system here:
https://itch.io/c/1634078/alone-games-i-quite-likeThere are actually more reviews I wrote about other journaling games that were more geared towards creating full narratives. Still working on my village of small hedgehogs from time to time, for instance.
I've since transitioned to writing about three drawn Tarot cards a day, just about life in general (my life, world events, etc). For the first time in my life I completely filled out a large writing journal and am already nearly halfway through another one, and I'm not even counting my daily planner journal (which has so little planning it it that it's just basically a diary at this point).
And I actually had not realized I'm writing daily all by myself without any journaling game behind it—until just now.
Anyways, much cheer to you in these hard times."
It's been interesting to hear what others are doing with the NiNoBilMa concept, including these kinds of realizations about existing sources of childlike writing inspiration in their lives, but this one was especially interesting to me because I've only ever been tangentially aware of this genre of hybrid roleplaying/writing game.
I have a feeling a younger version of myself probably looked at one of them at some point and dismissed it as not being terribly interesting because the point of a roleplaying game is playing with others, and when it comes to writing, who needs a random prompt or cards or dice to figure out what to write?
Obviously, I'm now at a point in my life where I'm very open to using random prompts or any other available tools to help get me started writing, and as I mentioned on Twitter yesterday, in a thread in conversation with my last newsletter, I'm also loosening up with regards to questions about the nature or point or definition of a roleplaying game.
That thread is about boardgames more than roleplaying games, but more and more I find the lines between categories games with any story element at all are fading in both distinctiveness and perceived importance.
— Alexandra Erin (she/her) (@AlexandraErin) March 10, 2022
So, I'm looking at the journal games that sinopiasaur shared and I'm thinking I might try incorporating one into my day.
Don't know if I'll hand write it or not... part of my disability is that my handwriting is slow, unreliable, and painful... but I think I would like to practice it in a separate medium or space than I do most of my writing, and one of my Twitter mutuals has recently been posting about their experiences in keeping a handwritten journal of their faith practices with dysgraphia.
And one of the things about writing by hand being so exacting for me in comparison to typing... I mean, I am a very fast and fluid typist in large part because of my disability. I learned to type at a much younger age than any of my peers, in a time before elementary schoolers regularly learned to type, because once the demands of class went much further than block-printing "CAT" it became impossible for me to keep up otherwise.
So if you put a QWERTY keyboard in front of me, even an unfamiliar one, chances are that within a few minutes of putting my fingers to it, I will capable of typing my thoughts at roughly the same speed at which they arrive in words. That's great when I know exactly what I'm going to say, or it's obvious enough that my fingers can't run ahead of my mind.
But when the words aren't there, the excess capacity in the idling engine that is my mechanical ability to write starts to work against me in a way that's hard to explain.
This is why when I have a general idea what to write, I like to pick up something like a controller-shaped handheld Bluetooth keyboard, something that demands at least a little bit of that idle capacity be devoted to actually hitting the right keys, and where I can't type quite as fast even when I know what I'm writing.
Writing longhand, I have learned over the years, performs a similar function for me, albeit at a cost that means I've never used it much or for long as an aid to creative focus in my writing... but a journal game that might be something like recording a line or two in a "ship's logbook" once a day... with real-life rest days on days when I absolutely do not have the ability... could be something that works.
It's certainly something I'll be thinking about.
The other notable dispatch I'd like to highlight comes from friend of the endeavor Sumana Harihareswara [she/her], who wrote to make sure I knew about a Flash emulator at https://ruffle.rs/. I did not, but I was happy to learn!
I installed the browser plugin version of it. It is lamentably not yet capable of rendering the Wish Book archive's Flash version of their catalogue viewer (though the site FAQ indicates they are actively working towards full compatibility), but it's still interesting and useful to me for other Flash-dependent sites that still haunt the internet.
This is a good time to mention that Sumana is performing the role of auctioneer to benefit the Otherwise Award at WisCon, with an emphasis on "perform", which is to say that she is a skilled comic and host who gives a good show.
This is regrettably the first year in many where there's an in-person Wiscon tht I will not be attending... there's just too many variables for me to feel comfortable committing to travel in advance... but you can sign up to participate virtually or in-person here.
And I think that is it for the ol'... Community Voice Bucket... this week. We'll see if we can keep the momentum going next week, so please keep reading, and keep writing.