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In This World, In Your Head

or, “Can you play this game solo?”

Ever since I starting working on In This World, it has been slowly taking over my brain. I don’t mean I’m working on it all the time, I mean it is working on me!

I’m just going about my day, minding my own business, and then something crosses my mind, some topic like Toys or Museums or Weather. And immediately I start thinking of statements: common and obvious things that are true about that topic. Things we don’t even normally think about. Things we take for granted.

And then, naturally, because In This World has a hold on me, I think “hmmmm, well, what if that wasn’t true?” And before I know it I’m imagining new worlds and questioning everything.

Like just now, after dealing with social media, I imagined an alternate world where people leave each other secret notes in the woods. The most adorable social media!!!

But let’s be clear: the game is designed to be a group activity. It’s not built for solo play. And yet… I find myself playing it solo all the time. I start applying the method and suddenly I’m interrogating the world and percolating new ideas.

And that’s not even counting cases where I play a normal session, and then walk around afterwards thinking of even more ideas (yeah, ask me about my Dating world where instead of “people have a wide range of expectations of dating” there are Five Schools of dating philosophy and everyone adheres to one of them, like a 70s kung fu movie).

It’s a compulsion! I can’t stop myself!

And you know what? I like it.

    Ben Robbins | May 24th, 2023 | | leave a comment