Worldbuilding
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #184. 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?
———
I keep wondering if, in several years, when I look back on my trip to Argentina, I’m going to remember that I spent a huge percentage of the time mentally inhabiting a TTRPG setting.
At the end of 2022, I said that I was going to put a pause on travelling, because I had a couple of back-to-back trips that I didn’t really enjoy. That didn’t really happen, but again in 2023, the trips that I did take felt strained. I was happy to be seeing new places and meeting friends, but I also wanted, near-constantly, to be at home.
I think, having spent this trip sunk deep in my imagination, what I really wanted was to be able to be me.
As I keep banging on about in this column, space is socially constructed. We make the spaces that we inhabit. But I think I always leaned too far in the other direction, letting those spaces make me. Sure, you can hang out and play Dungeon World at your desk in the UK, but you can’t do it from the bed of an AirBnB in Buenos Aires. That’s not the right way to do things. That’s not the right person to be.
To quote a Tumblr post I think about all the time, “baby every me is me, we are the mask and the wearer.” Nonetheless, I have historically been very bad at this, with certain masks that I refuse to take off in certain spaces, and certain masks that I won’t wear for fear of them being out of place.
Being halfway across the world and still deeply hyperfixated on a silly game that only exists in the shared imaginations of me and three of my friends (and not, notably, the one that I’m here to hang out with) feels like absolutely the wrong mask. And yet, this trip has been easier than any I’ve taken in years. I catch myself expecting to be stressed about setbacks or uncertainties, things that can easily send me spiraling, and realize that I feel fine. I feel like I’m all here, and that means that I can handle things.
It also means that I’m all here. I’m not mentally off in Dungeon World and checked out of Buenos Aires. I’m mentally off in Dungeon World and simultaneously actually able to stay present in a place that I’m very much enjoying. Because I’m not fighting with who gets to come to the table in my brain, I’m simultaneously playing and creating and exploring and experiencing.
I’m building worlds in my brain and I’m being in worlds in real life. And for the first time in a long time, a new, unfamiliar space feels open to me, both physically and mentally.
Are you supposed to spend travel time inside, writing thousands of words of fanfiction? Aren’t you supposed to tap into the firehose of culture and maximize every second of a trip? But you can’t optimize joy. You can’t get more from a place by taking a part of yourself out of it. We make spaces, and we make them with all of ourselves.
———
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.
