The Ink That Bleeds by Paul Czege is a 38 page zine about Paul’s experience playing solo journaling RPGs. It’s essentially a long essay on what Paul sees as the point of solo games, how to take that point and approach these games to get the most out of them, and techniques for taking care of yourself along the way. It’s a great read, and it was my gateway into finally understanding the point of solo RPGs, even though I ultimately disagree with many of the assumptions and conclusions Paul puts out there.
(Paul doesn’t sell The Ink That Bleeds as a pdf, but there are 35 physical copies remaining as of this writing, and you can pick one up here. You can also read an excerpt on the Indie Game Reading Club. You don’t have to read it to get the gist of what I have to say here, but it’s still worth reading.)
For the longest time I did not understand solo RPGs.
From my conversations with others, I think this is a very common condition. The thought goes “I play RPGs to tell a story with my friends. If I wanted to tell a story to myself, I’d write a novel.” And for many solo games, the act of playing them can feel this way. I feel obligated to take a game’s prompt and, as instructed in a “typical” journaling solo game, write a proper and thorough response. Maybe I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do, and most of my friends who’ve tried the medium feel similarly.
But I wanted to understand them better, so I invited Seb Pines on the podcast to talk solo games, figuring it’d be a kick in the butt. I picked up a bunch of Seb’s recommendations, and then I discovered The Ink That Bleeds.
Paul Loves His Unconscious Mind
Of the many things Paul has to say about solo games in The Ink That Bleeds, the one I heard loudest is that he believes the point of solo RPGs is less to tell a story and more to be tools for self reflection. They’re guidance for getting in touch with your unconscious mind and hearing what it has to say. He contrasts the temporal world (taking a shower, commuting to work, eating dinner with friends) and your analytic mind that lives in that state with your unconscious mind and unconscious desires.
“Your unconscious mind is perceptive and inspired and it’s on your side,” Paul says. “But for most of us the temporal world and our analytic brain shuts it down, with skepticism and doubt, with gaslighting and self-gaslighting... [My unconscious mind] tells me what it wants me to do with my creativity and talents. It gives me ideas. It’s bolstering and constructing me as who it wants me to be.”
Paul recommends playing solo games as your “approximate self,” a version of you that exists as a time traveler or witch or beast-fucker or whatever is required by the premise of the game, so that your unconscious mind doesn’t have to pretend to be someone else as it tries to come out through play and writing. It can react to the story that emerges more directly, and hopefully it’s easier for you to hear what it has to tell you about yourself. Paul recommends playing several games at once, alternating prompts, so that you have a larger braided narrative for your unconscious mind to react to and speak through. He goes into much more specific (and beautiful) description of this process and how and why it works for him.
This goal, using solo games for self reflection, makes perfect sense to me. It explains how to approach these things - not as “I’m playing a game to make up a story with my friends but without any friends,” but rather “I would like to know more about myself and why I am drawn to the premise of this particular experience.” I write daily - screenplays, RPGs, blog posts, podcast intros - but before reading Paul, I did not experience writing and gaming as something I could do for myself. It was only something to be perfected, something to carefully craft before giving to other people, something to polish and edit, or something that was a transitional document in the way that a screenplay exists only to describe a hypothetical movie.
I wanted to try this. I wanted to write not to be understood by others but to understand myself. I picked up Artefact, Project ECCO, and Void 1680 AM, and I tried to play them like this.
Stream of Consciousness
It was challenging. It has always been true that the activation energy required to get me to pick up a solo game is pretty enormous. When I spend all day working, I want to decompress, and these are experiences that require activity and brain function. They are not passive. Especially when I’ve spent a day writing, often the last thing I want to do is... more writing, even if it’s for myself instead of a client or artistic audience.
But once I open one up, oh boy do I love these things. I love the freedom of “first thought best thought,” of spewing forth whatever immediately comes to mind in reaction to a prompt and seeing where it takes me. There’s a freedom in turning off the part of my brain that is here to critique and simply letting whatever comes come.
Paul’s suggestion to “write to find out” helps with this. Instead of needing every sentence and word to matter, Paul says, you can write down your thoughts as you search for the right idea in the same way that a group might kick around a few options for what an NPC is like the first time they show up on screen. You don’t have to be precious. I could just turn on the faucet of thoughts and let it all out.
After playing some games like this, it occurred to me that many of my favorite pieces of art that I’ve created came about like this in a stream of consciousness. Two of my most personal short films and two of my favorite pieces of game design. In all of these cases, I dumped out a draft and then did some light edits but found there was little I wanted to change. And in each case the resulting work has been something I was extremely nervous to show to anyone (I haven’t even linked the short films here they feel so vulnerable), but they have been among my best-received works of art.
This line of thought feels beautiful and dangerous. Beautiful because it suggests that listening to your gut is a powerful creative tool. Trusting yourself when you can feel you’ve got something right is worth doing. You get a rawness that’s so, so hard to get to if you’re revising and revising and revising (I say this as a professional editor who is extremely in favor of a revision-heavy process).
But also dangerous because this is a thought that immediately pulls the whole activity back towards “writing is for other people. Writing is for creating Great Art™, not for yourself. I’m glad solo games let me practice this process. I’m also glad that every solo game playthrough doesn’t have to live up to such standards, and that I don’t have to share my playthroughs with anyone. They’re just for me and my brain to consider.
The Language of My Unconscious Mind
As I played these games, there were times when I felt like I most entered a flow state, or a moment where I knew I was playing them “right.” I could feel my mind kick into gear, thoughts forming in my head more quickly than I could write them down. It felt like my unconscious mind had opened a door and I could hear it clearly when normally it whispers through the walls. Or at least, it felt like the thing I wanted to be getting out of these games. I think it’s the same thing Paul wants me to get.
I reflected on these moments in relation to The Ink That Bleeds, and I found there was a particular enormous difference. Paul recommends strongly writing in dialog with characters, that your unconscious mind will most easily speak to you through the voice of others, and writing dialog is a great way to dig to there as quickly as you can.
But in my experience, these moments were always iconic visuals. A lone bard playing the fiddle at a funeral, surrounded by people who no longer wanted her there, but no one having the courage to interrupt the piece. Getting time-mugged by myself and left alone in the rain feeling betrayed by my own future. A grove of trees all turning their leaves from green to orange simultaneously. A dead man on the road, a threat to my companion and myself.
I think my brain has always worked like this. In college, my filmmaking clique and I had a mantra: pictures not words. One of those short films I’m not going to link is basically a progression from awkward conversation to a single striking visual moment that changes everything.
I’m not a writer, not a really. I’m a transcriber of visual iconography.
This is the language my unconscious mind speaks to me, and I love that about it. It’s where I’m comfortable. It’s what I’m fluent in more than English or some other flimsy bundle of “words.” Writing dialog in these games was nice at times, a good tool in the toolbox, but it didn’t get me to the beating heart of anything in the way it seems to for Paul.
Did I Play the Right Games for This?
It is entirely possible that the games I’ve played do not lend themselves naturally to the kind of play Paul advocates for, and as a result this whole response I’ve written is out of context.
Artefact is a game about being a sentient magical item passed from owner to owner over generations. For that reason it’s not a game that lends itself to dialog particularly well, nor playing as your approximate self.
Project ECCO is a time travel game played in a year planner that intentionally limits how much space you have to journal your prompts via the medium in which it’s played. This makes the kind of writing Paul advocates for harder than ever.
Void 1680 AM never even asks you to write or journal. It’s a game about being a radio DJ, and you play it by making a playlist, imagining callers, and speaking into a microphone while in character. Is there a place in it for Paul’s writing process?
But I loved these games, and The Ink That Bleeds still felt relevant to the way I played them. Artefact gave me so many visuals that I feel came straight from my unconscious mind. I fucked up my playthrough of Project ECCO immediately by listening to my gut and writing to find out the way Paul suggested, and it lead to an incredible experience even if it was wildly different from what I’d have predicted The Ink That Bleeds (or Project ECCO) would lead me to.
Even Void was a place I could bring these lessons. Playing as my approximate self was wildly more fun and meaningful to me than when I played as a character from an old campaign. And once I started journaling the parts where I was supposed to speak into a mic, they felt so much more authentic and exciting. For me, the act of thinking about my relationship to music and remembering my past felt at least as effective as tapping into my unconscious mind as journaling, and combining the two was more effective yet.
Bypassing the verbal part of my brain entirely is the key to accessing my subconscious. For games that seek to do this, I think asking players to use verbs other than “write” is a boon. Sharang Biswas turned me on to this concept on our Year End Bonanza episode of Dice Exploder, of thinking about what verbs a game is asking of you as a player. I’m enamored with it at large, but especially in this context, I think there’s a lot of meat to be found on bones other than “write.” For solo games in particular, I think other verbs would lower the activation energy required to play the game for a lot of people and might help slip past people’s conscious minds. I’d be curious what Paul thinks of such games, where “writing to find out” might not be an option but the end goal of the game may still be a similar delve into the unconscious mind to the kind he’s pulling for.
No Medium Is This Narrow
The other solo game I’ve spent a lot of time with is Thousand Year Old Vampire, a game in which you are a vampire who loses your memory again and again over your long lifespan. It’s a challenging game, not just in activation energy, but in the content it asks you to engage with. The game will simply state that you commit a horrible atrocity and then expect you to move on. The experience of playing it is distinctly not about getting in touch with your unconscious mind, but to sit with the jarring emotional experience of having everyone and everything you’ve ever loved pulled out from under you at a moment’s notice, lost to the sands of time. Every bit of story and continuity you might have begun to construct can be ripped away like it’s nothing. This is not how you do the thing Paul talks about in The Ink That Bleeds. It’s the opposite, in fact, and Paul writes about his dissatisfaction with it.
But I don’t think that doesn’t make it a bad solo game. My experience playing Thousand Year Old Vampire was not unlike watching a harrowing movie, or playing a video game like Pentiment or Disco Elysium. This is an authored, intentional, interactive experience that the artist(s) has laid out before me. It’s not offering a trip into my unconscious mind, it’s offering a trip in its designer’s mind, conscious and I believe unconscious alike.
When I watched Mulholland Drive for the first time, it fucked me right up. It dragged me into the supremely distressing dream it wanted me to engage with and demanded I respond. It slipped straight past my conscious mind and attached a live wire to my unconscious. That’s what good art does. Thousand Year Old Vampire did something similar: it set out a fucked up experience and challenged me to deal with it, and deal with it I did.
This is all to say: I love the method that The Ink That Bleeds lays out for playing and engaging with solo games. But I don’t believe this is the only means by which to get in touch with your unconscious mind, and I don’t believe that listening to your unconscious mind is the only thing that solo games are good for. Sometimes I want my unconscious to listen to someone else’s. That’s just as beautiful and valuable a goal.
A Final Aside
Paul has some brilliant, brilliant safety tool minigames that he lays out in The Ink That Bleeds. They are so good. I can’t imagine playing more solo games without them. I hope he publishes them separately on their own and that they become as ubiquitous as the x-card. Amazing stuff.
Conclusion
This zine rules. Pick it up if you can. It’s an inspiring way to think about solo games, and I have had a blast playing them. I like so much of what Paul has to say, I disagree with him some, but there’s one thing we are both completely agree on. The words he ends with:
Pick a game. Start playing.