Wondering about False Machine's 'On Guard' as a solo set-up

On the day I am writing this, which should be about a month before I post this, False Machine posted blog entry called 'On Guard'.

The tl;dr version is that the "game" is a set of guards simply guarding the back entrance of a magical academy. They cannot leave the post — per se — and therefore the game is mostly played out in the construct of "doing nothing." The four pillars, as laid out by False Machines, are "Stay in Place," "No Drama," "Long Term Awareness," and "Minor Situations." The post then goes on to discuss visual and other sensory elements, structures, questions about how this could played.

It sounds, to my ears, like something you might see in the Nordic LARPing community. In that context, it is easy to imagine a game where everyone stands around an actual door and then various things occur when a Greek Chorus of sorts suggests intrusions into the calm.

Nowadays, I do very little of that type of game and focus nearly entirely solo play. And that game idea very much triggers something from the tail end of my GM-less experimental game days. I had a concept I was calling Jeremiad. A jeremiad is a long listing of woes. A mournful whine. I had the idea that players would all be folks in a bar, at their job but on lunch/smoke breaks, bus stop, or wherever. Somewhere in-between where they had a moment outside the world at large to discuss the world at large. Then they would complain about the game world and, entirely through complaints, create it. As the complaints went on, more details would be added. There was a basic mechanic for adding details and assigning those details a potential weight. It was never finished but the gameplay loop might go like this:

• One of the players complains about some detail and establishes a couple of related facts to back that up. "The buses are taking too long since the war started."
• That player would write a couple of facts down — "Bus Delays," "Ongoing War," — and then put them side by side to show they are related.
• At this point, the player would put a couple of tokens down based on which "off the cuff" detail they would like to explore more as a group. A fact might be given no tokens and be at least temporarily "complete" or might be given multiple. No one is required to ever explore those tokens: they are permission, only. A symbol of interest.
• The next player either creates a new fact that agrees — or at least does not disagree — with the established fiction. If it is entirely new, it also goes in a similar pair/three of facts. Early on, the first couple of rounds, it is likely best that all facts be entirely new with the idea of finding out how they are connected later.
• If, however, a later player wishes to revisit a fact, they can remove a token and add another detail.
• Then, like the first, they assign a couple of tokens to things they would like others — or themselves — to revisit.

I have wondered about setting up something like in a solo play sense but the notion of such weights means that it is dangerously close to a simple creative writing mechanic. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

However, False Machine's game idea makes me think about returning to such a notion. You would be a lonely person in a lonely place. Each day, between zero and a couple of events might occur. People who pass near your place, if such people exist, might pass a single time such as a tourist or regularly such as a person going to the shops. The conditions around you would change. As you build up patterns — let's say something like the sink stops working — that particular playthrough becomes — at least for a while — about the way those patterns develop. Generally, though, the idea would be a lot of very little occurring. Think maybe a deck of playing cards in which only the face cards, jokers, and aces mean anything. You draw 2-3 a day — in game — and chances are nothing occurs. Then those cards get reshuffled. Face cards might represent people and environmental and mechanical notes. Jokers could be "twists". Whatever. As you build up certain patterns it begins to inform about the world.

I don't know. It's something for me to think about, at least.

All I know is that I would want something simple, focused mostly on symbolic/broad-prompts rather than specific ones, and one that emphasizes describing a whole world from a single viewpoint. In the same way that Jeremiad was about finding out a whole history of a world — geography, art, leisure, politics, economics — through the repetitive complaints of a group of people in a liminal space then this would be something similar: what does a rainy day mean for the world of this lonesome guard? Is it just weather or something more?