Elegies is a game I wrote as the 5th Entry in my Alphabet Superset project. Almost every one of these, surprisingly, has been a different genre of tabletop game, with Elegies as no exception. It's sort of a creative writing exercise framed as a game, where the objective is to have a think for a bit and then produce a short poem. It's not so heavy on the "game" part. It has fairly limited ludic content, really this is an exercise in roleplaying as someone who has been tasked with thinking about these things and carrying out these tasks.
More than anything, the aim of Elegies is to get the player to think. Producing a piece of writing may be the stated objective, but what I want from them is to engage with the concept. Elegies is a game about writing but ultimately it's a game about confronting the idea of Climate Grief, the sense of loss and horror and the impending effects of the climate crisis we see unfolding before us. (Philosophy Tube, Climate Grief- 2019)
In the shared setting I'm using for these games they're already living many years ahead of where we are now. There's no clear story or narrative thread, no throughline, and not even a specific timeline. Things jump around as required for me to produce whatever I'm pulling from the well of creativity at the time. But they're almost entirely set in a theoretical future where things are worse than they are now - often as a result of contemporary trends and failure to effectively solve the problems of today. Elegies has to be set in the future (at time of its writing, late 2023) because a significant conceit is that several dozen presently endangered species are now fully exctinct, and you are being asked to memorialise them.
There's a reasonable chance that several of the species mentioned in the game (sometimes I had to be vague or state a generic species for the sake of expedience, but the current list of seriously endangered species is much longer than I could possible cover here) will be lost within out lifetimes. Every one of them is currently at risk. In some cases very little is being done, or they're effectively doomed due to prevailing and challenging problems such as habitat destruction or poaching. Isn't that awful? So many of these creatures we at best might see in a zoo someday, but within ten, maybe twenty years, will be lost from their natural environment. What kind of hole does that leave in the heart of our world? Doesn't it just make you want to scream? To weep?
I think about that a lot. Writing this game was part of trying to come to terms with that, to get to grips with that grief at what we're about to lose, to try and communicate these feelings in some way. To try and help someone else... well, see the horrors, but also help them think through them a bit. To explore it through a potential (currently fictional) future to understand their own feelings on the matter a bit better. But mainly to express my own feelings on the matter.
The first page of research and writing questions are relatively straightforward, just asking the player to think about their selected species, to consider what they already know, where there might be gaps in their knowledge. The second page is far more emotive and opinionated, more directly infused with my own energy on the matter. In particular Prompts 8 and 10 are deliberately quite leading because I want people to think about this! A game is a form of art and if art doesn't make you think or feel something then what is the point in it?
- What would you give to bring them back? What would you tell them if you could?
- How would you rather things had gone for them? How will you carry their memory forward into our own future? Will you avenge them?
What I want to try and convey here is the scale of the loss. That we absolutely should be grieving and mourning the loss of species, of biodiversity, of habitat, of the natural world. Because it's absolutely criminal. I'm an atheist but would still describe this reckless extinction of non-human animals in the pursuit of anything a crime against god. It's awful. And we should remember. And we should fight to stop any more loss. And maybe we should avenge those we've lost.
The images I used to illustrate this game were attempts to find evocative material to get across the emotional distress the game is based around. The animals are iconic creatures, all famous predators, in positions of precarity. The environments are ruined, spaces symptomatic of destruction. Instead of splitting them evenly across the work as is my usual approach, they are all on the second page, a cascade that builds as you work your way through the document to the more charged material of the later writing.
As a note, I don't even cover the full range of threatened species categories in my listings. There are two columns for birds and mammals, because those are the traditionally most easily "sellable" animals for preservation. We are familiar with mammals in our everyday life- we are mammals, most pets are mammals, as is most livestock. Followed by this is birds- birds are also popular and often extremely aesthetically pleasing creatures. Followed by this is one column each for fish and reptiles. People often find it harder to empathise with these, but they still need saving. Completely absent are insects and plants. Insects are things most people simply don't think about as in need of conservation (except for perhaps bees, which to be fair are wonderful) but I have limited space to work with and as such had to prioritise what would have the best impact in the game for the few people I expected to see it. This does the less popular animals a disservice, something they've consistently been subjected to, but I can only optimise so far, and this is a game about climate grief and extinction in a more broad sense, and not the threat of insect population collapse in specific. Go read about bugs and plants. They're amazing and so important to our world.
On a lighter note, I thought it might be interesting to write about the shared universe these all take place in for a bit. As noted, it's a future setting, of varying distance from our own epoch (save in some odd cases where the timeline is irrelevant). Up to the point of release for Elegies, I've also introduced multiple Orgs within the setting, and wanted to format the games vaguely like they're internal documents for these Orgs. So far we have Mulligan Institute, Division 7, Failsafe Rookery, and Hope Camp. There are more down the line as well, but I wanted to try and have each possess a different vibe to them, as they're all involved in different things, and have differing ideologies.
Some of them are in competition, some work together. They're each able to do different things, which influences the games they show up in. Initially all the games were linked to one or more of the Orgs, but as that become restrictive I started to ease up on it. They'll show up again though.
Thematically, some differences can be seen with each:
In a broad sense they're all offering solutions to the project's theme of "Surviving The Future." The futures envisioned within are sometimes realistic, often not. They're exaggerations, strange sidesteps, or impossibly fantastical futures, to allow for less literal thought and more interesting interpretations of response to the challenge. I doubt you really can see the future using crows, or devise a power system that can be represented through a new version of solitaire, and of course the amount of time travel we've seen so far isn't very plausible. But these fictionalised versions of the future allow us different ways to think about the potential of our own, so they can still be useful beyond offering various conceits required to make games make sense.
Elegies is the closest so far to our own future, and contains the most content likely to become reality. I don't expect a rampage of relentlessly reproducing butter (Gold Goo Scenario), that's rather silly, despite being tangentially related to a proposed real-world apocalypse scenario. I do expect many beautiful and valuable species to be destroyed senselessly within my lifetime. Plenty of non-aesthetically pleasing ones too. It's happening already, which is perhaps why Elegies is such a sad game.
I made three consecutive depressing games over a fairly short period (outside of the ABSS I also created Extremis Exhibit, which is its own thing worth writing about individually), and so I promised to do something a bit more energetic and exciting instead of just sad next time around. My follow up was therefore FIRE SEASON, which is a board game about fighting forest fires. I guess the environmentalism is still there but the theming is less bleak. Oh well, I'll write that one up too soon.
(ORIGINALLY POSTED 24/04/2024)