The Play Space
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #177. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
———
What does digital grass feel like?
———
After writing my feature this week, I didn’t want to go back to writing in space in games right away. Let this column serve as a coda to that piece instead: about what it is to live in space and where games fit into the space of a life.
I played a game as soon as I woke up this morning. I realized it was a few minutes before my alarm – I don’t usually use one, but I’m still fighting jetlag – and raced it to get dressed before it went off. I won by about 20 seconds. I went to make coffee and played a game: trying to get as many chores done as possible before the kettle boiled. I only managed to break down a box for the recycling, because there were birds in the garden to watch.
I sit at my desk for an hour or so, which can be closing myself off from the world but in this case isn’t; I read and reply to messages from all over the planet, I organize my calendar, I watch the clouds from the window. I play a game: watching Twitch.
After breakfast, another coffee game (clearing off the table so that I can wash the tablecloth) and back to my desk. This time I tune out the world, writing, and when I resurface, I’m surprised that not much time has passed. I have two drafts that are almost finished, and I need to step away from them for a clearer picture. It’s time for my silliest current game: Wandrer.earth.
Wandrer logs all the roads you’ve walked on (via a Strava integration), and I’ve only been using it since I got back from America, so it will very helpfully tell me I have walked 0% of Earth, 0% of the UK, and 0.18% of the city that I live in. There is no way that these numbers will move considerably, ever, but seeing where I’ve been is compelling enough.
I’ve written before about my consistent struggle to feel “at home” since I moved. I don’t necessarily think that Wandrer will help. I keep thinking about how much of my previous hometown I must have walked over 29 years living there, about all the streets I found familiar even though I could never remember when or why I had visited them. My current hometown, by comparison, is still alien. Earlier this week I went on a run and, pursuing a circular path I’d found while playing around with Wandrer, and ended up somewhere I had never been even though I was only 15 minutes from my own house.
Today I take a different path to the place that I’ve been before, but only recently, after finding it described as a “well-known beauty spot” in the local paper. I didn’t know about it then, but now I do, and today it’s filled with purple and yellow flowers. On the way I pass an elderly couple working in their front garden; I play a game with their dog. My Wandrer completion has gone up to 0.21%.
When I get home it’s lunch time and I play an extended version of the coffee game, this time with pasta. (Laundry, washing up, hole punching some cards for a craft project, organizing a couple of shelves.) I get a box of vegetables from a local farm in an attempt to cook more and eat seasonally. Today it’s four very beautiful tomatoes, a handful of runner beans, the biggest sweet potato I have ever seen, several bright carrots, and, of course, onions. I’ve been drowning in onions since I started getting this box; before I went to America, I made two freezer batches of French onion soup and I still have six – now eight – sprouting in the cupboard.
Afternoons tend to be hazier for me than mornings. Drafts completed, I drift into a series of overlapping games: reading for a class on worldbuilding in TTRPGs, watching and making notes on Ace Attorney for the podcast; picking out stickers for my journal, escalating increasingly esoteric in-jokes with friends, watching the Euros, cleaning (once again racing to do as much as possible, this version during half times). It’s warm, but I don’t want to open the window because it’s the time when the tiny red spider mites swarm all over my office if I let them.
I win an entire tea game (sort of the Pokémon Blue to coffee game’s Pokémon Red) by watching a pigeon wash itself in my bird bath, which is smaller than it is. I think about not turning in this piece, which feels so self-indulgent. But self-indulgence feels like one of the cores of play, and in spending the day reorienting myself back into the world and its games, I remember that writing about them has always been another.
———
Jay Castello is a freelance writer covering games and internet culture. If they’re not down a research rabbit hole you’ll probably find them taking bad photographs in the woods.
