Fenrir Cerebellion

one of the really troubling memory issues that I have is when not remembering if something has happened in the past creates an error with generalization.

Generalization is when, upon experiencing or learning a thing, new information gets applied too broadly. I forget what it's like to not have known the new information but also generalization can cause a sort of... timestamp problem. Along with or perhaps because of the never not knowing rewrite, I can lose when I gained the information (and a lot of memory indexing has to happen to figure out when I actually learned something that has generalized super hard).

So this means I can experience something entirely new, know in the moment that it's entirely new to me, and then my brain goes "what if you forgot this happened before" while also losing the timestamp and suddenly I'm dealing with multiple mental realities:

1. You just learned the thing, try to hold onto the timestamp
2. You've always known this from this source, this new memory is misplaced temporally
3. You knew this already from something else, you forgot and have been reminded (sometimes true!)
4. You've learned this thing (multiple times) before now, you forgot and you still don't remember past learning it (also sometimes true!)

That last one sure is a kicker. Any given day, every one of these comes up, plus some that I'm failing to think of right now. Anyway, I try not to beat myself up too much about not being able to figure out which reality is real (after a decent attempt), and just live with several potential realities that are simultaneously treated as real until proven otherwise.

(And then the kicker there is forgetting some of the potential realities, only thinking whatever happened only happened one to many but not all potential ways, then finding out it happened one of the forgotten ways-- and once again coming to terms with the whole memory thing. I come to terms with the memory thing a lot. It's exhausting)

me: now how do I turn this into a game mechanic?

very belatedly realizing that being able to figure out chords on mandolin means I can do chords on fiddle

sometimes being very intensely classically trained has benefits (nothing like years of harmony to get ya naming the chord any bundle of notes make) ... (I should finish the solo ttrpg about studying western classical music)

Alter

a game about grappling with the way memory changes, how your memory affects who you are, and how it can be okay if you're different because your memory doesn't reflect reality, that your memory no matter how different from reality is your reality

Some time just before 2020, I started thinking about this game. In early 2020, I was hiking a mountain with my dog when I started drafting it using speech-to-text, unsure if the cell reception would cut out. For my birthday in 2021, I made a single page version. It's kind of a shitty alpha, playtestable but missing clarification and better words.

I keep failing to write the reflection bit in a way that communicates to players the whole bit about memory changing changing you, changing your reality, your reality is just as real as anyone else's, your reality is just as real as what actually physically happened. Alter is about faulty memory, like most of my games. It's particularly focused on grappling with memory as reality and learning to accept that—so maybe you can better understand or be understood when reality, memory, and others' memories don't line up.

Anyways, here's the single page version of Alter

I should probably publish the other three games about memory before writing this one. I keep getting stuck on making the PDFs screenreader accessible

there's a single page version of Alter out there, a game about grappling with the way memory changes, how your memory affects who you are, and how it can be okay if you're different because your memory doesn't reflect reality, that your memory no matter how different from reality is your reality

It's my first game, I thought about it for weeks (maybe months) and then drafted it using speech-to-text while hiking a mountain with my dog. I keep failing to write the reflection bit in a way that communicates to players the whole bit about memory changing changing you, changing your reality, your reality is just as real as anyone else's, your reality is just as real as what actually physically happened