The Wall Game:
You are a wall.
You:
Choose what material your wall is made of: brick, wood, or glass. Your choice reflects your desires for play. Glass walls let you see through to other rooms, brick walls break concepts wide open, revealing hidden meaning, wood walls have creatures inside them that whisper of another place.
You pick a decorative feature for yourself. This is just fun flavor; it is under no circumstances allowed to have any game effect, minor or otherwise. For example, the wall with a beautiful painting is not allowed to boost the spirits of people in that room or the voices of those spirits.
Me:
I will describe the layout of the text; and my readers will select what rooms or areas their wall borders. This is to reflect how readers are positioned related to each other. For example, the Wall between B2 and C2 can see into both rooms: * B2 — Agency requiring concepts like free will, choice, self-efficacy (contrasting with coercion and constraints). and * C2 — Agency as having fuzzy boundaries around free will, responsibility, constraint (having flexibility).
Walls:
Walls “talk” about anything that has ever happened in rooms they are adjacent to. This communicates to other walls what (of all setting elements I have described) the player is interesting in exploring.
Challenges:
Challenges like holding up the building during an earthquake, blocking a fire from spreading, keeping intruders out, overhearing or sitting uncomfortably with important information will, strictly, never come up, as safety is a coefficient of agency cannot safely be abstracted away, and dims the harsh illumination of agency.
Maintenance:
A wall getting damaged or destroyed sees the reader as having stopped reading, the reader has put the text down, or has been disconnected from the internet group chat, in such cases, leaving the other walls to either creatively reinforce their sense of *†*control or to adopt a state of loss. Secret letters, passages, or footings will be revealed in the loss of a wall, vestibules built into the collapse of certain walls for readers to recover their exigence as that with one less wall.
Control:
Framing roleplaying games primarily around challenging readers can be limiting and push the experience too far towards a narrow vision of “texts as tests of will”. Role-playing at its best can facilitate verdant storytelling, collective worldbuilding, dramatic improvisation, and quiet exploration of a text. Walls are moved beyond a confrontation/challenge-focused lens.
We:
We will emphasize collaboration over competition. Readers will cooperate to create stories and worlds, and this cooperation will be their obstacles ( — for the math nerds: we are essentially setting the value of *†*obstacles to *†*zero; oh, and for this next part know that obstacles and challenges are coefficients — ). Creativity and problem solving will be treated as roles against a challenge of Control or Coherence, not pressured into rolls. Ask “how would you read this?” not “make a DC 15 check to see if you can speak torch for 1 round”.
Focus:
Focusing is hard enough challenge today; this erosion of focus must be framed in the context of increased nominal stimuli. If the fiction can’t lead, add a visual aid or follow another line of text; don’t adhere to a pre-plotted plan of amended excerpts.
Failure:
This is a spell. When they reach — or otherwise discover themselves in — a state of “I’m sorry my mind wandered what’s going on”, readers cast this spell. To cast this spell, a reader recites this litany:
“The time is nigh this time it’s mine I give my life and light to lign.”
When cast successfully, Failure sees one or more walls catch the reader up on a current understanding of the text — there will be errors in this summation. For any errors, the spell may be interrupted and cast anew to correct for the error, but otherwise any such current understanding of the text becomes canon in the text.
Failure will be cast in response to a turn of phrase. failure will be cast in response to an entire subject. FAILURE WILL BE RESPECTED. Failure, unlike other portions of the game, is what allows the building to be made. Say you won’t censor your reading or you’ll read into whatever you want and you will find yourself without a shared text surface to read from.
End:
When the need for a centralized protagonist figure or party whose text is being read emerges. Or the concept of dramatic narrative arcs and climaxes arise.
Begin:
Evoke a sense of place, time and community (as a poultice for dramatic narrative). Read into a rich world with a goal to emerge as the interactivity that de-determines some problematic predefined story beat. Befriend themes of the passage of time (through the description of a sunbeam waiting to glisten over a tree-shadowing spring), or a legacy of a failure, or a change in an otherwise perma-capitalistic lacunatundra. Commune with these friends. Visit them. Treat your walls’ parapets and moulding more like windows into an empty room than any membranes of a place lost to honor.
Brick Playbook:
Assumptions close up more possibilities than they open. Unless they don’t. Ask an empty room: What kinds of play experiences do we want to cultivate? Ask the fenestra: What existing concepts stand in the way? Any time a wall is torn down, you may ask: How can we reconceive the basic elements?