Games for the Mind

I’ve been fiddling around with Uns in some of my spare time and trying to figure our how to relate the spatial and temporal elements of the game.  It is not too complicated, really, but when I was thinking through the discrete spatial locations and movement between them, I kept having this faint sense of familiarity.  It was like I was mimicking something I couldn’t quite remember.

Then I remembered.  All the way back to ancient times, when I was growing up, playing these text-based computer games on the TRS-80, things like Zork.  Simultaneously, I’m first discovering D&D and modules, with their constrained movement between spaces.  Then flash forward to early college when I knew a guy running a low-fantasy themed talker, when I discovered MUD’s.

I didn’t much enjoy MUD/MUSH stuff.  I just never spent enough time online to hook into the social dynamics that seemed to be the secret to their success.  I always felt a little too much like a spectator.  Still, the interface had its appeal.  What do they all have in common, though?  They are readerly mediums that rewarded attention to words.

When Wizards of the Coast decided to trim down description blocks, I was a little disappointed.  It made sense; they saw people at gaming tables tuning out during longer descriptions.  I still had the curmudgeonly “oh, that it weren’t so” reaction, though.

In a group, especially in a convention setting (where the WotC observations were made), there is a lot vying for your attention.  Other players at the table are people with whom you want to engage, not just sit quietly together.  Does that hold with just two people?  Attention shifts quite a bit when we read to and with just one other person.

That’s one of the appeals of making Uns aimed for two person play, though, to recapture the readerly space and intensify it, give to the players the tools to complicate and ’sink into’ that written-spoken word.  It’s an effort to create a ‘living’ book, with a real emphasis on the book-ish quality of the experience.