The Joy of Solo Gaming

"Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine."

Honoré de Balzac

Let me establish my pedigree on the topic of playing games by myself; it is a legacy handed to me from my very own father.

My father had the kind of childhood that would inspire jealously in any well-adjusted aspiring comedian. It's often best when hearing about this kind of childhood to breathlessly say 'ha ha what' in a careful neutral tone. That said, it's not really my story to tell. 

(Except, okay, just this one bit: when my father was in military school they would have snowball fights except instead of snowballs they used rocks and there wasn't any snow.)

But also, it's the kind of childhood that left him with a lot of free time on his hands and not always a surfeit of friends with which to take advantage of that free time. 

(My father once wistfully reminisced to me about how he'd play football behind his parents' property. If you ran hard enough and recklessly enough, clipping off a tree was very much like being tackled by someone)

I don't know if I'd have had the creativity to figure out how get beat up by trees rather than people. But then my father is an intelligent and successful man with his own business and (presumably, by now) friends, while I have this blog so what the fuck do I know.

It didn't stop there, though. In Avalon Hill's World War 2 boardgames--Jutland & PanzerBlitz, among others--my father found a way for dead trees to also brutalize him.

This is the lineage from which I descend, this is the inheritance I have been given. Some nights I wake up in a cold sweat, my heart pounding as I try to squash the urge to hurl myself face-first into a nearby oak.

 The sins of the father shall be visited on the son

Joking aside, playing games by yourself need not be as weird as it sounds off-hand. Especially with a heady, intellectualized boardgame the central appeal may exist regardless of an opponent. The puzzle may yet remain; your opponent then is yourself, or your own expectations. In a historical wargame, it might be the historical result-- there are few joys as sweet to a grognard as the smug satisfaction of outperforming Napoleon from the comforting dimness of your basement or garage.

I think we often think of authorship as two ships passing in the night. The game's author disappears, and the player's authorship begins. In RPGs, people talk at length about their stories at the table. They talk about the collaboration necessary to create those stories with other players. And yet, the game itself is there. Its authorship remains long after the designer has gone home with their small paycheck and large growler of bathtub-hooch.

Even if you repudiate that--and you shouldn't, because I'm handsome--a game system nonetheless represents a complicating factor in your own authorship. Mere engagement with these systems can tilt and nudge you out of your own biases, quirks, habits, foibles, and so on. They can help develop your bicameral mind-- switching between sides in a boardgame, viewpoints and perspectives in an RPG.

Anyway, if you've been to my Twitter (you should go make that mistake) you've undoubtedly seen the occasional battle-report (for example, Captain Finlay Stuart's naval adventures). Maybe you've seen me champion one of my favorite RPGs, Ironsworn by Shawn Tomkin. Maybe you've seen me and my friend Eric play a homebrew Fantasy Classic Mediterranean version of it, The Wine Sea Sagas as a GMless cooperative game.

You might rightly come to the conclusion that I carry on the legacy handed to me, and you can expect to see more of that legacy enshrined here.