Top Ten Games You Can Play In Your Head By Yourself: A Review
By MARK WILSON
Year Published: 2019
Players: 1
I discovered this randomly, and became intrigued when I saw that Sam Gorski was an editor. Sam is one of the founders of Corridor Digital, a VFX company that has massively expanded their brand via popular Youtube videos on VFX, stunts, and other artistry in movies, TV and animation. I’m a big fan of their work, and a subscriber on Youtube. They also have a subscription-based content service on their website that I have considered joining.
It’s with some disappointment, then, that I think this book is a near-complete waste of time. I suppose if you set your expectations accordingly, it can be some goofy fun, though I still think there are better ways to achieve the same result.
The Book’s Authorship
The book was ostensibly discovered by the editors, and is the work of one J. Theophrastus Bartholemew. The name alone should raise some eyebrows, and the almost mythical origins of the book and its creator in the text make me doubt its veracity.
Further, there’s at least one line in Bartholemew’s supposed text that, to my eye, is a thinly-veiled Harry Potter reference. Bartholomew allegedly created the games decades before Rowling’s famous books.
The editors maintain this origin story throughout the book, but it’s always presented in a sort of winking tone that suggests there’s an in-joke we’re not privy to.
When I was in middle school, I made up a fanciful short story wholecloth that was supposed to be non-fiction and from my life. Were I not a child, the attempt would have been painful to read. The lie was beyond obvious. While “Top 10 Games…” and its dubious authorship is perhaps a slightly more plausible scenario, when reading it, I felt like my teacher must have back then, rolling her eyes and scribbling in a generous C- grade. Except in this scenario, we paid for the book.
Anyway, whatever. Theophrastus wrote it. Sure. I have no actual evidence to the contrary, so I will accept it at face value. We’ll come back to tone and style in a bit, though, because it’s the larger issue that this is only a symptom of.
The Central Problem
I want you to read the following and imagine it as a brainstorming or daydreaming prompt:
Imagine you are someone else. Leave behind your current life and inhabit the entire life of another being. It could be anyone, from any time, or even a non-human creature. Or it could be your own life, lived differently. Start at a point of your choosing, and live out your new life until you come to a logical resolution of it or you learn a valuable lesson. Write down or make a mental note of the lesson or resolution, and anything that stood out to you about the experience.
That’s more or less one of the games in this book. Except in the book, it’s padded out to 10-12 pages and includes a bunch of superfluous details.
I actually think the longer version is worse, because it creates more and more preconceptions about what the exercise should or shouldn’t be. There’s even a trope-filled list of potential life lessons to watch out for. “Hey buddy, go learn a lesson, but here are some ideas of lessons you can learn,” it seems to be saying. What worse way to limit an imaginative experience than to script out examples of personal growth, and attempt to lead the reader into them?
On a larger scale, I think the most generous thing that I can say about the games as a whole is that they’d work fine as writing prompts or inspiration fodder for gaming, writing or daydreaming. I actually wrote down a few ideas for future use as writing prompts for myself.
But then, there are plenty of good ways to mine good writing prompts that don’t involve digesting a nearly 200-page book.
The Imaginative Conceit
To call the book’s games rules-lite is an understatement. They’re scenarios for you to think about. There aren’t rules in the mechanical sense, only narrative plotlines that the prompts frequently foist upon you.
This is fine; someone with an active imagination will be able to run with it and enjoy themselves. But it again begs the question of length, since the people who will be able to elicit the most joy out of the book are also those least likely to need its prompts and structure.
As I’ll talk about momentarily, I don’t think each prompt is of equal quality, and the worst are actively unimaginative. I would imagine anyone proficient in adventure generation to be able to come up with ideas of equal or greater quality extemporaneously, let alone after rounds of revisions for a full-scale book.
The Toad-Warrior, or How to Railroad a Daydream
There’s a nonsensical game in the book called “The Visitor” wherein you play a kid who is visited by a frog-warrior from another planet. I’ll spare you the details. It’s on par with what a 5th-grader might spit out on a timed creative writing prompt.
The game is broken into a series of segments that build off of earlier ones. The problem is that the choices presented in one aren’t uniformly represented in later segments. To continue the game with the book’s structure, one particular outcome must happen. Want to give him some water early on, thus saving him? Go ahead, but things are mostly over at that point. He needs to die for any subsequent sections to make sense. Sure, you could branch off and imagine your own adventure after reading just one or two segments, but then why does the rest of the game exist?
Compounding this is that the game seems to be nothing but buildup to your actual imaginative daydreams. The frog-warrior dies and ends up in one of several mythical hellscapes, and you must rescue him if the human race is to be saved. Ok, whatever. The actual game – as in, your chance to make things up in your head – is you descending into these hells, but the game offers basically nothing in the way of inspiration or guidance. Everything is about the railroaded plot leading up to it.
In the book’s end section, there are accounts of playtesters who recount their adventures. One (Niko, presumably Corridor’s other founder) spent aeons in one of the hells trying to rescue poor frog-man. He claims to have had a great time. I’d argue, though, that that says a lot more about Niko than the game, which gave him basically nothing to work from.
Also, F*** the Working Class
There is a bizarre, insulting through-line in the book, which disparages working class, 8-to-5 jobs and portrays them as soulless grinds designed to strip you of your humanity, passion and worth. On a couple occasions, the book specifically addresses the reader and calls them out on the pointlessness of this type of life, presuming that they’re in such a job.
This is writ large in one of the book’s worst games, which can be roughly summarized as follows:
You work a meaningless job in a factory, one destined to be replaced by automation. Your job options are all of roughly equal banality. You have a discussion in a bar about this inevitable outcome, then the next day you (probably) lose your job to robots. Or you don’t and you…survive this round of layoffs, apparently. What happens next?
Extra bits to flesh this out provide no comfort. Perhaps, the book muses, you could have led a different life, but stayed in the factory because of your spouse and kids. Cool, so let’s just bake some familial resentment into a game about a depressing life and losing your job. Escapism ftw!
Collectively, it’s a shocking stance to take in a game about make-believe. The editors (authors?) likely thought nothing of this, since they’re self-made creatives working within a non-traditional financial model. In practice, though, it looks like the writer(s) have decided to give the unwashed masses some creative nuggets from their minds to distract from their dreary existences, and that they think this is a kindness.
It’s dumb as hell, is what it is. And even if we overlook the possible condescension, the games (yes, more than one, plural games) in the book centered around this theme are, in fact, uniformly dreary. But hey, at least you can drive a monster truck for a bit in the one about grinding out a living as a truck driver, selling corn in the Midwest between dusty highway pit stops and brothels. What fun!
Signature Game?
The book’s “signature game” is one called Dungeon, where you…create a dungeon. The author says he wants people to remember him for this one after he’s gone.
…ok.
Google “RPG dungeon design” and you’ll get a bunch of better toolboxes to work from. Maybe if this really were published originally in the 70s/80s, D&D literature (and its myriad RPG spinoffs) wouldn’t have been as ubiquitous, so maybe there was something interesting here. But now? Not so much.
Tone and Style
I’ve encountered this elsewhere, and have struggled to fully elucidate my position. But I’ll try here again.
There’s a style of writing in RPGs that seems as though it’s trying to convince you that something is awesome, rather than allowing the merits of the game to sell itself. Creator passion is a good thing, but this is separate from that.
In practice, it comes across as cloying when it’s 150+ pages of it. What seems to me to be frequent (almost constant) attempts at irreverent humor also fall flat due to overuse. In all, it seems almost flippant. Like, sure, here’s another reference to the frogman, but in a completely different game…aren’t we clever?
Paired with the condescending segments mentioned earlier and the “is this true or not” shenanigans of the authorship, in reading the entire book, I felt like its creator(s) were laughing at me for having purchased it. Even the book’s final lines of increasingly existential questions, which ends with “why am I by myself, in my own head?” could be interpreted as mocking the very premise the book is based upon.
It’s a stunning miscalculation in authorial voice, one that left me feeling like I’d been taken advantage of for my trust in the authors/editors.
Look, this probably wasn’t their intent. I can’t get in the creators’ head to know why they made certain decisions, and I’m more than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But I also have to be honest about the book’s effect on me.
The Chess Variant & Mind Palaces
Ok, screw it, let’s end on a high note, shall we?
There was one game I enjoyed: Chess.
There’s a prelude involving a doomed chess mentor who will act as your ghostly guide in the games to come (you determine many of these details), then four chess games against varying opponents and wildly different contexts. The main gameplay opportunities are in fleshing out these contests.
The games themselves take on a metaphoric aura due to the opponents (a “one that got away” romantic interest, your own shadow self, etc.). The book also suggests a handful of fantastical pieces not found in traditional chess, which allow for a dream-like fantasy quality to the proceedings.
This is all really good, because it gives you tools and evocative prompts, but with enough space to create your own world within it. Unfortunately, it’s the only game of the 10 where I felt this way.
I also enjoyed the pseudo-mind palace they have you establish at the onset (and revisit from time to time), and how you keep a trinket or gift from each game to keep there. It’s a nice narrative device, and an interesting way to think about disparate but ultimately shared adventures and link them together. I just wish the rest was similarly inspired.
Here Are Some Links to Writing and Daydream Prompts
Increasingly, I have little patience for creative works that I would leave in a draft folder that people think are worth publishing. The creators’ fame undoubtedly made this book a success. Its contents did not.
I’m ending this in a way I think will be useful: with Google’s top results for writing and daydream prompts. If you need ideas for daydreaming and would prefer not to pay for this luxury, I think they will serve you well.
Corridor Digital advertises this book on their website, and while I think they do a ton of awesome, inspired creative work, and that you should absolutely check out their Youtube channels and website, this book is not among that quality output.
Anyway, the links:
…
For more content, or just to chat, find me on Twitter @BTDungeons, or check out my other reviews and game musings!