A New Masculinity

I spent a lot of time thinking about the middle name I wanted after I decided to depart from my birth name fully when it came to my legal name, and it got me thinking about Wolfenstein: The New Order…Real people should not be punished with the weight of anyone’s ideals as their expectation…

Buckle in folks, it’s a long one, and the start of a series! This one is personal AND professional, pursuing an understanding of some complex theory and experiences. I am excited for it, so please join me in that excitement!

Content Warnings for this and the following posts, adding new ones as necessary and bolding the relevant ones for today: gender identity, gender dysphoria, disability, mental illness, Nazis, childhood trauma, physical trauma, death, war, violence, hate crimes (mentioned), racism (mentioned), anti-Semitism, domestic abuse (spousal & parent/child), animal harm (mention), legal struggles for trans persons, social isolation.

Beau in a jean jacket, black shirt, and jean jacket with a shoulder brace. Their hair is blue and silver, cut short on top and shaved on the sides, and they're wearing glasses. The image is double exposed over an older photo of Beau. Image by Beau Sheldon, 2020.
2016 feels like a lifetime ago, with a lot learned and lost in the process. I found some light in B.J. Blazkowicz. Where is yours?

For the longest time, I thought I’d keep my birth name nickname as part of my legal name. While my full legal name has forever been a bane to me, I have seen myself for a long time as The Brie. But that’s it, right? The Brie. It’s a title, not a name that suits me, or that represents who I am. It represents some of what I create, but I am not Brie. I’m Beau.

Brie Beau Sheldon. Still The Brie, still Brie Beau in creation, but not Brie.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the middle name I wanted after I decided to depart from my birth name fully when it came to my legal name, and it got me thinking about Wolfenstein: The New Order. How the designers at Machine Games remade William “B.J.” Joseph Blazkowicz had a huge impact on me, and I had one more element: I wanted my initials to be B.J.

I came out in 2016 while I was playing The New Order off and on. I loved the game passionately, and it was mostly because of B.J. (For the purposes of this post and those related to it, we’ll stick with The New Order. The New Colossus has a lot more to dig into, and I’m not ready for it – and I don’t have a new body on the way, either.)

A screenshot promotional image from the early Wolfenstein games showing a Nazi swastika flag in a stone walled grey space and a hand with a gun pointing toward an enemy soldier carrying a weapon. There is a blue UI with information on the floor, score, lives, health, ammo, and an image of both the weapon and B.J. Blazkowicz.
There is not much subtlety here. Image: id Software/Apogee Software

B.J. started out in games as a one-dimensional angry Nazi killing white guy. He finishes The New Order as a poetic Jewish man in love with the woman who helped him recover from a severe injury and gave his life for his belief that everyone deserves to be free who lets other people be free. That’s quite a turnaround.

I was struggling, I suppose, for people who represented what I saw in masculinity. While I am nonbinary, I don’t struggle as much with expressing and representing that part of my identity because of its flexibility. Masculinity is more of a challenge, but is just as important. In real life, I have quite a few men and nonbinary masc people that I respect massively and appreciate for their masculinity. But, I learned a long time ago not to base my ideals on real people – real people should not be punished with the weight of anyone’s ideals as their expectation, and that’s what happens. So I was hunting.

Beau with green and grey hair in a black and grey hoodie tee entering a doorway lit in green while carrying a blue-lit sword.
In many ways, I’m always hunting. Image: John W. Sheldon, 2020.

I was also hurting. I felt so left out of the community, I had entered two new jobs where I felt alienated and afraid, I had started a Master’s program where I was weird and strange to everyone I met, and I was still struggling with my mental and physical health, as well as various life stuff. I needed someone to restore my faith in me, in what I believed, even if it was fictional – to me, that it could be conceived by others was enough.

As I played the game, I realized slowly that B.J. was the masculinity I see. He is a flawed man, but he is also a man who has been harmed (in some ways, he reflects his original creator (domestic abuse & chronic illness warning)- strange after all these years!). No one is perfect, and he does not subscribe to the idea that the decisions need to be made by or controlled by cis straight white men. His leaders are women and disabled women. He defers to his wife Anya after they escape from his hospice and get married, her leading the way in the bedroom and also being his guiding light in the field. Caroline, a brilliant leader and amputee with a prosthetic, is his most trusted colleague and the person who is in charge of his life.

In his interactions with J, the Black guitarist who survived a U.S. Nazi attack, he works to overcome the ingrained racism he was raised with. He works side by side with disabled veterans and civilians, people of all ages and backgrounds, and even reformed Nazis. While yes, B.J. may initiate a first interaction with someone who violates his worldview in a shitty way, he apologizes, he backs down, he defers to the marginalized, and he tries to change.

B.J. and J meet with a harsh conflict, but bond when B.J. accepts J’s offer to open his mind and his perspective changes. I recommend not watching past the three minute mark, as things get dark but loud for J at the hands of the villains. Video sourced through SnackPackedd’s YouTube.

And yes, I will be frank – B.J.’s poetic waxing in my noise-cancelling earbuds wooed me to a degree, and I do think he’s a huge hunk of himbo. But when I cried at the end of The New Order, it was not just because the story itself ended. It’s because my time with B.J. had ended, this space of time where a man who does great violence because violence is called for and because he is the right one to do it awkwardly looks like a puppy when his wife kisses him, and overcomes some extreme suffering at the hands of many different people.

He does harm to himself to rip away the marks of Nazism, and takes acid with J to see a new reality, and makes the hard decisions, and dies and lives and breathes freedom and hope. B.J. feels ultra-masculine because he does violence and he speaks harshly, but in reality he is soft and he hurts and fears but keeps going as that ultra-masculine presentation because he is the right one to do it.

To me, we represent the best masculinity not so differently from femininity, aside from weird invisible things I can’t explain. It’s the kind of guy who if you ask him, he will beat down every bully that’s ever threatened you, no matter how big or endless, but he would be so much happier to lay back on green grass while a dog or his kids bound around him and wait for his lover to say “Please do” before he does. That’s B.J. We got that from Blazko, the person who looked like an angry Lego® Man was his avatar.

An avatar of old school dirty blonde square head B.J. Blazkowicz next to a 100% health meter.
Can you imagine a Wolfenstein Lego® movie? Yikes. Image: id Software/Apogee Software (cropped).

I want to examine this in more detail as time passes, with a series of posts, talking about gender, game design, and much more. I will be clear: I do not think B.J. is a perfect person in any incarnation. I don’t think The New Order is perfect, either. But I think there’s a lot of richness there, and I think it’s important to break things down when they latch onto my heart. I hope you’ll join me as I dig deep and try to share ideas for tabletop and video game design both by looking at what The New Order, and B.J., do right and wrong.

I did find a middle name, by the way. It’s Jágr, which is a Czech name in honor of my commitment to Thomas, who blushes sometimes when I say sweet things to him, and pronounced like Jaeger, because it’s the Czech version of Jaeger and Jaeger means hunter. I think it’s undeniable that just like B.J., I am a hunter and always have been – of love, of hope, of joy, of answers, of freedom, and of those who seek to take freedom away.

A split screenshot of Anya, a woman wearing a headset, on the top and B.J., wearing his jacket and gear, on the bottom. They are discussing his next move.
We do what we must because we must. Image: Bethesda via MobyGames.

I’ve pressed submit on the request to have my name change prepared by a legal professional 15 minutes ago. It’s going to be expensive ($160 for legal help, $160 for the courts, ~$200+ for putting my name in the papers for protest), but I can’t wait to be realized as myself.

B.J. was 32 at the beginning of the first story told in games. I turn 33 in two months. It’s time for a change, and some growth. I have so much hunting to do.

Beau Jágr Sheldon.
That’s me.

Celebrate #Epimas2020 by Giving Games!

I hope you all are staying safe and celebrating any holidays you do while respecting COVID-19 guidelines! I want to share some fun and interesting games with you as part of the #Epimas2020 bundle that I’m a part of. I hope you like what I share! The bundle ends in three days!

To tell you a little about Epimas, it is a created holiday season bundle run by Epidiah Ravachol, who I am lucky enough to have known and worked with over the years. The bundle was originally conceived as a way to share games with friends or new players and expand the hobby while maximizing use of the PDF format. You gave a bundle, you got a bundle. This year, it’s on itch.io and while the give/get format isn’t yet feasible on the platform, there are 69 designers contributing to this amazing bundle you can gift a friend or colleague to help them explore so many amazing games that soon, they’ll be inviting you to play them!

This is the first year I can really participate in the bundle, and may be the last. I’ve wanted to be a part of Epimas since I first started in games years ago and saw it, because it demonstrates something I really love – games as a gift, as a way to grow the hobby, as a way to try new things, and as a way to spur new creation when inspiration strikes after checking out so many amazing games. I am so excited to be a part of it, so in the last few days of it, I wanted to recommend you check it out!

This year’s bundles are named in a trend with Santa’s reindeer, starting with the overarching Dunder & Blixem bundle, which covers all games offered in the bundle. The others are Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dasher, Dancer, and Prancer, which break down the bundle into smaller bundles of games. I am in the Vixen bundle with Turn, alongside these others! Note that I haven’t played most of these games, but I’ve read the reviews and some of the text from a few and that’s how I’m compiling my notes.


Continue reading “Celebrate #Epimas2020 by Giving Games!”

A Very Merry Mental Illness to Me

Hey, friends, supporters, consumers, and colleagues. this one is a little important.

I hope the best came for you in major holidays for each culture and religion or lack thereof that came before this post, and the same wishes for you in the festivities (or lack thereof!) to come. Please stay safe in the continuance of COVID-19 and the many dangers all marginalized people face, and seek joy in every moment – even if it’s fleeting, it heals more than all the rest.

That being said, this is me. Beau Sheldon.

Beau in a black and grey hoodie tee with festive makeup.
Me. 2020.
Content warnings for discussion of mental illness, physical disability, financial insecurity, gender identity, gender dysphoria, mention of hallucinations, mention of schizoaffective disorder, mentions of political and social issues in the United States, and details of creative dysfunction.
Continue reading “A Very Merry Mental Illness to Me”

Behold, Products! Ultimate Micro-RPG Book Pre-Orders!

Hello all!

I’ve been honored to be a part of the Ultimate Micro-RPG Book, edited by James D’Amato, which is currently on PREORDER! Preorders are a great way to support the product and the idea if you like it, because it lets big box stores know that there’s demand, so they’ll order more AND it lets the publisher know there’s a market for these kind of badass products! Check it out!

The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book cover with various illustrations indicating the genres of the games inside.

I would love if my readers who love my games would pre-order this awesome book filled with games by myself and other designers we know well like Alex Roberts and Jason Morningstar but also newer designers on the scene like Ben Chong, Jay Dragon, and Jeeyon Shim, and some rad entries from people like the popular Dread Singles/Hottest Singles writer Jordan Shiveley! I’m ecstatic for this collection!

My entry is a game about werewolves and is a mostly-solo (with option to interview others as part of the game!) game called Lycantree – here’s the blurb:

In Lycantree, you play the youngest member of your werewolf pack who is exploring the history of your Lycantree—the events that created your family. Your pack is a biological family that collectively raises young, and are very long-lived. You can trace over lifetimes the individual stories and the pack’s legacy by interviewing family and reading their journals. By doing this, you will find your own path through the visions of the Lycantree!

Lycantree blurb

Please check out the Ultimate Micro-RPG Book, edited by the amazing James D’Amato and filled with games by tons of other rad designers – preorder today!

Wouldn’t It Be Nice? sale

A new sale on itchio of my games!  The Wouldn’t It Be Nice? sale hopefully will cover any of my COVID-19 testing costs and related expenses. Wouldn’t that be nice? $40 for all my games on PDF!

Runs the length of a quarantine so get it while it’s good 😉

https://itch.io/s/28845/wouldnt-it-be-nice-sale

Beau in a beanie cap, a red and black flannel shirt, and a grey tank top.
Trying to make it thru!

What’s in a Ring?

I have a big life thing coming up soon – specifically, my partner Thomas and I will be exchanging rings near Halloween to make our relationship “official.” While looking at rings and thinking a lot about love and relationships, I realized there’s just not a lot of support for polyamorous people who want to have a formal aspect to their relationship, and especially when you’re not religious in any way, it can be difficult to have a way to mark your relationship.

Someday Thomas and I want to have a more formal commitment ceremony, when things are more secure, but for now, we’re just gonna have a quiet exchange of rings. I decided to write a little game about love, polyamory, self love, consent, and commitment – and give people like us a ritual to mark their love, too. I tried to be inclusive – I hope it is inclusive to you! If you like it, consider picking it up at https://briebeau.itch.io/whats-in-a-ring and leaving a donation to help us pay for a celebratory dinner. 🙂

Love to all <3

An image of the full text of What's In a Ring? over a watercolor flower.
What’s in a Ring? by Brie Beau Sheldon, dedicated to Thomas Novosel.

Five or So Questions on Thousand Year Old Vampire

Hello all, today I have an interview with Tim Hutchings on Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV), a single-player game coming up on Kickstarter! (Check out the Facebook event here!) The game sounds pretty interesting, exploring the life of a vampire in intimate and deep ways. You can see a playtest version here. Check out what Tim had to say!

Content Warning for discussion of memory loss, especially near the end of the interview.

A vintage-appearing image of a vampire attacking a man

Tell me a little about Thousand Year Old Vampire. What excites you about it?

Well, first let me say that I don’t often get excited about things I make. I get nervous, nauseous, pent up. I used to joke about the “sweat test”; if I wasn’t sweating when I showed something to someone I wasn’t sufficiently invested in the project or the showing. This came out of the time when I was showing art in galleries, and it has something to do with the way I made and thought about art at the time. It still applies to a lot of games I make, but in a different way–the games I make are personal, or visceral, or difficult in ways that my art never was. Now I sweat because I’m making a machine that people play with, and if the manual for that machine is unclear people will break it or maybe even get hurt. There’s not a lot of room for excitement in any of this.

But I’m excited about Thousand Year Old Vampire in a way that leaves me quietly alarmed at myself.  I’ve worked on this game differently than other games, with the biggest difference being that a reaching back to my old studio process. When I made a thing in the studio it was a quick, fraught process during which I could ingest or enjoy or experience the thing I was making it as it was made; the actual “artwork” was a shell left behind after this work was done. Game making is different in that you need people or systems to test things; there’s a space of time between the making and the experiencing of it. Because TYOV is a solo game it’s making was a self-contained process, I wrote and played and wrote and played in a closed system. It was fast and amazing and it’s how I want to be.

And it produced a game I am excited for and proud of. I’ve played this game so many times, and the prompts consistently produce a different experience with every go. And at least once during each game something happens that makes my innards churn, something unexpected and awful and it’s like I’m not controlling a character but being betrayed by one. I’m not a “let me tell you about my character” kind of person, but TYOV has gotten me excited enough to write game summaries on the Facebooks.

A journal with leather binding and an abstract pattern, and stickers in various languages on it.
This is the journal in the PDF, which is gorgeous.
What is the motivation for a single-player game like this? As someone who loves lonely games and making them, I must ask: why is this game good alone?
I love your phrasing of “lonely games”! It’s perfect. For me, there were a couple of reasons to make a solo game. Maybe more than a couple.

Solo games are a weird design space. I have a print out of A Real Game by Aura Belle that I’ve been sitting on for a year, I’m so excited about it I can’t bear to play it. Every game I make is about communication and bodies in space; a framework for people pushing at each other to find play. Other players change the game space for each other with a constant barrage of gentle tugs which keep each other engaged and off-center—this is awesome and good but what if we didn’t do that?

A non-social game is tricksy and strange. How can you operate in the “story game” space and not have it be a choose your own adventure book? The game prompts in Thousand Year Old Vampire make you look inward for responses, you are building something between you and the machine of the game without any other conscious actors in the room. There’s no “yes and” here, oh mortal. And without other people in the room watching I can do things that I might not do otherwise when I ask questions and give horrific answers.

And the solo play echoes the subject of the game itself. You play a vampire who sees everything they love turn to dust. Your character is alone, you are alone, the two states echo each other. One play option is to keep a diary as you play. Journaling is a usually a thing you do alone. One of my objectives as a designer is to have the system and the setting inextricably bound together, so solo play works.

That said, I don’t see any reason that a person can’t play it with others. Why not share a pool of Characters and let the prompt reactions affect the world that the players occupy? The system is simple enough that players can do this if they want, and I’m sure some will—there’s been a remarkable amount of pushback over the idea of a solo game being a thing at all.

And practically speaking: I’m a lonely guy. Making a game I can play and iterate on my own is helpful. It echoes the prevalence of solo rules in wargame design—I’m the kind of person that can’t get people together to play things, so I’ll make the sort of things I can enjoy on my own.

Finally: I had a conversation with Jackson Tegu, who has a solo experience called I Was Once Like You, that helped me think about the solo play-ness of TYOV. In the friendly discussion-like thing we were doing I came up with “Petit Guignol” as a term that I thought fit TYOV. It literally means “tiny puppet” in French and has a direct connection to the “Grand Guignol” which was a style of bloody, horrifying, naturalist theater developed in the 1890s. As I play TYOV I sometimes play with scale in my mind, imagining the scenes happen in the space between my arms as I update the character sheet on a keyboard. It’s a play space I don’t think I can imagine with other people in the room, it’s tiny and close and personal. Anyways, there’s that.

A vintage style illustration person with an octopus arm for a head getting attacked by someone with a sword.
Tell me about the design process. The way you handle moving through the prompts is simple but clever, and you have these memories and experiences that are created. How did you develop these aspects of the game? 
My design process is a sham. I stare into space until my unconscious gets bored and gives me something that I can think about, and then maybe that becomes a game, or a joke, or an artwork. My games are not the product of rigorous engagement with discourse, they are random stuff that vaguely imitates a category of thing which I understand exists in the world. These are the “Sunday painter” equivalent of game design, if that Sunday painter just really liked wearing smocks and berets but never bothered to go to a museum.

I don’t design these games so much as find them laying around my brain-house. I pick them up and wipe the muck off, maybe paint them a different color to assuage a conscience that demands at least a semblance of effort, then I scribble my name on them and puff up with self-satisfaction.

But a serious aside: I don’t read a lot of games, and I do this on purpose. I’m more likely to solve a problem in a useful way if I’m not clouded up with other people’s solutions for similar issues. This is a good methodology unless you’re building bridges or stuff where people can die. This builds on my greatest strength, which is that I’m pretty dumb.

Occasionally these magical brain-gift games might need some rough corners polished up. With TYOV I had to figure out a way to progress through the prompt sequence so as to maximize replayability. (You, dear reader, haven’t played this game, so super quick summary: You roll some dice and slowly advance along a list of prompts which you answer about how your vampire continues its existence. If you land on the same prompt number more than once, there are second and third tier prompts you encounter. The game ends when you reach the end of the list.) By using a d6 subtracted from a d10, it created the possibility of skipping entries, of going backwards, and of landing on the same entry number more than once. This meant that rare and super rare results could easily be baked into the chart structure—you have the same chance of landing on any given number as you progress through the prompts, but there are diminished chances of landing on a number twice and getting the second-tier prompt. Landing on a number a third time usually happens once per game, and those rare third-tier prompts can be world-changing.

The tiered prompt system naturally evolved into a mini-story arc system. I can make the player introduce a self-contained Character or situation with a first-tier prompt, and in the second-tier prompt them interact with what they created in a new way. It’s perfectly fine if they never hit that second tier prompt, they won’t for most entries, but if they do it will naturally make a little story. It’s so satisfying and it’s all part of the same system, no additional rules are needed to support it.

One aspect of TYOV I’ve been thinking hard about is player safety. What are appropriate safety tools for solo play? What tools allow us to think terrible, soul souring thoughts but then put them behind us? I’m a fan of X-card-like thinking, and was around Portland while Jay Sylvano and Tayler Stokes were working on their own support signals systems. Stokes later developed the affirmative consent-based support flower, and is giving me guidance on my solo safety thinking.

One of my imperatives as a designer is getting rid of non-vital things. This is practical because additional complexity usually makes a game less fluid and harder to learn. If I can get by with three rules that’s great, but if I’m going to have eight then I might as well have a hundred. Not that there’s much wrong with games that have a hundred rules, I like those too. I’ve recently been converted to Combat Commander, of all things.

Something I threw out of TYOV are rules about tracking time. At one point I had a system in place for tracking the date. I mean, if the game is called Thousand Year Old Vampire then you want to know when a thousand years go by, right? But there was no benefit to tracking the actual year, it was easier to allow the player to just let the passage of time be loosely tracked in their answers to the prompts. Maybe an arc of prompts happens over a year in your head, maybe a whole generation goes by—the game works regardless. The only rule about time is “every once in a while strike out mortal Characters who have probably died of old age.”

Finally, I should acknowledge the importance of Burning Wheel and Freemarket to Thousand Year Old Vampire. Writing good Beliefs in Burning Wheel is a skill, and the idea of tying character goals mechanically to the game was mind-blowing. Freemarket has Belief-like-ish Memories, which are something that have game mechanical effects AND can be manipulated as part of play. Both of these mechanics had outsized influence on the way I thought about Memories in TYOV.

Memories in TYOV are everything that your vampire is. You have a limited number of Memories, and every Memory is made up of a limited number of Experiences. Every Prompt you encounter generates a new Experience which is tagged onto the end of a new Memory. Eventually you run out of space for Memories, so you older Memories to a Diary. You can and will lose our Diary, along with all the Memories in it, and it’s awful. But the Diary is just a stopgap anyways, as you are forced to forget things to make room for new Experiences.

Eventually you have an ancient, creaky vampire who doesn’t remember that he was once a Roman emperor, or that they used to live on a glacier, or that he fell in love two hundred years ago. But they at least know how to use a computer and are wrestling with the fact that the hook-up site they used to find victims was just shut down and how will they eat now? This design goal was crystallized when I read “The Vampire” by Ben Passmore in Now 3 put out by Fantagraphic Books. It’s a heartbreaking, sad story in which you see the vampire as a deprotagonized system of habits. It’s great.

A vintage illustration of a man in period clothing with a white curled wig, standing under an eclipse and a hillside with Egyptian-appearing monuments, while corpses lie on the ground.
What has the development of this game been like, from original inspiration to the speed of production?
This game flowed out quickly and mostly easily. My pal Jessie Rainbow I were playtesting and iterating the game over weeks instead of months. The game is built from a story games mindset and there aren’t any ridiculously novel mechanics that need to be explained; I hand the rules over to a playtester and they understand them immediately and the game works.

The game works and a year of refinement to get it five percent better isn’t worth it. It’s done, and like an artwork it might be slightly flawed but that’s part of the thing itself. I don’t necessarily want an extruded, sanitized perfect thing; instead I have, like an artwork, a piece that becomes a record of it’s own making. If I work on this game another year it won’t get better, it’ll just get different—2019 Tim will have different priorities than I do right now and all that’s going to happen is that TYOV will torque around to reflect that. I might as well let 2018 Tim have his moment and give 2019 Tim new things to worry over.

In regards to the themes of mortality and memory, as well as with aspects of queerness in some of the prompts, how do you relate to TYOV? How is it meaningful to you?

This is hard to talk about. I think I need to break this question down into three very separate categories: My understanding of evil, personas shifting over time, and a vampire-shaped momento mori.
The game is twined up in my own ideas of person-scaled evil which is based on my experience of social predators, thoughtlessly selfish idiots, and rich people exerting power over others. This evil is written into the “Why did you do that awful thing you did?” type prompts, which assign an evil deed which must be justified. There’s an important subtext in the game which I never say out loud: As the vampire is writing in their diary are they telling the truth? But the evil is about the wickedness that people do to each other, and this is my chance to pick out a version of it that I seldom see represented.

Completely unrelated to the themes around evil are the ideas of shifting identities. Over the centuries the vampire will be reinventing themselves so they can fit in with the societies shifting around them. As a cishet white guy I’m outside of the dialogues that happen around LGBTQA+ folks, but I see folks change over time and it’s exciting. A related prompt might draw attention to ingrained societal mores that can now be abandoned because the culture of your mortal years is centuries dead. I can gently make a space for this even if I don’t have that experience, with the understanding that my understanding isn’t necessarily another’s understanding of the space that needs to be made. Like I said before, this becomes a portrait of 2018 Tim thinking through difficult issues using creative work—this isn’t Truth with a capital T.

The shifting personas of the vampire are probably the most personally resonant aspect of the game for me. I have some pretty distinct phases in my life where I was having to be markedly different people. In NYC I used to exhibit art with a gallery owned by the son of billionaires. I’d get taken to a dinner that might cost more than I made in a week then go back to my home which had holes in the floor which I could see my neighbors through. I remember hanging drywall in the morning and meeting a Rockefeller descendant later that night; he got noticeably upset that I had a scratch on the back of my hand then shut me out when I said it happened “at work.” I learned that I had to keep these worlds very, very separate. And it went both ways, I found myself being reminded of the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas telling a story about how no one in his Brooklyn neighborhood believed him when he told them he was teaching at NYU.

Now I’m a guy with a kid living in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. I’m not the same person that I was five years ago in New York. I can’t be the same person, that guy couldn’t live this life.

Which leads me to my final bit: I did things that sound wonderful and which I can’t remember, I apparently did things that are terrible which I am glad I forgot. These moments are lost until someone else remembers them for me or I happen upon some chance evidence. My memory is going, and it’s awful—there’s a much more exciting version of me which is being forgotten. I can see my brain failing in other ways; sometimes I leave out a word when I’m writing now. I bet I did it within the text of this interview.

This loss of skill, of memory, of personality are reflected in the way the game has you lose or edit memories. Eventually I’ll die and be forgotten in turn, but at least I’ll have this self-reflection on mortality outlive me for a bit.

A vintage style illustration of a man tied down onto a wooden structure of some kind, bound.

Thanks so much, Tim, for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out Thousand Year Old Vampire on Kickstarter when it’s live! In the meantime, you can RSVP on the Facebook event here.


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