Posted by Caroline.
Lately I’ve found myself craving a certain kind of experience when I’m playing In This World. In addition to making at least one “thanks, I hate it” world together, I’ve been really enjoying creating pretty normal worlds.
I think it all started last summer with our cozy game about furniture. We made some pretty strange worlds (teeny-tiny chairs, folding rooms, etc) that were totally delightful. Then for our last world, Ben steered it into mundane drama territory (family feuds over Granny’s armchair, Sackville-Bagginses vibes). As we added details about inheritance and knock-off portraits, a little lightbulb went off: as much as I like creating brand new worlds, I also love exploring things that are just a little removed from reality.
For the furniture game, it went from, “Here are these interesting worlds that are visually and theoretically cool and strange, it would totally suck to live in an apartment where your only furniture was re-configurable cubes,” to “This doesn’t feel like a totally new world, it feels mostly normal. It reminds me of how my grandmother and her sisters fell out over their inheritance, and how they would feel that very little of what led to their estrangement matters to their descendants. I wish those objects hadn’t mattered so much to them. I wonder why they did…” Heavy stuff from a lighthearted, normal-ish world!
I’ve only had a few of these types of more mundane worlds pop up in recent games. The two that come to mind are:
- A world of sustainable fashion. What would a society that values recycled and sustainable materials do about clothes? What would slow fashion look like in a modern context? Could I be more intentional about resisting consumer culture?
- A world where we use dreams as therapeutic tools. What could we gain as a society by everyone giving themselves a period of reflection every day? Nothing magical, just a little extra thinking time. What can I learn about myself from this dream? Could I set an intention for my sleep in a productive way (so far – no, lol I sleep like garbage)?
In all of these games, we worked together to create something new and interesting. We each contributed things to make unique worlds that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own. Each world is a testament to the magic of putting a bunch of people with different ideas together. That alone is cool as hell. But there is also this residual, solo reflection that can happen afterwards, particularly with a more normal world.
I’ve been calling these “boring worlds” in my head (while also feeling a little sheepish when I feel like I’m contributing boring stuff to a game), but I think that attitude does them a disservice.
“Boring worlds” give me a way to try to understand the world I’m in and a way to envision how to get to a world I want to be in. I’m curious about what a world one step closer toward a gentler, more humane world would be. I’m curious about understanding something about the world that I’m in by exploring something just one step to the side. Maybe I’m trying to answer “why are we like this” and “how can things be better?”
Boring worlds for exploring big questions.