Signs of the Sojourner piece for Buttonhook
This was originally written for the first and only installment of Buttonhook, a digital zine that sought to publish small 300-word pieces about games. The website went down at some point, so I'm hosting the piece here again so it has a place to live.
This piece was one I'd meant to write ever first playing Signs of the Sojourner back around release. It's a game I deeply admire. It's really cool and I'm so glad it exists! Highly recommended.
Iāve always had difficulty speaking clearly. I stumble over words, and sentences come out jumbled sometimes. Words are misheard, or ideas are not communicated clearly. Everyone around me looks confused as I try again and again to say what I mean to say. This makes it uncomfortable almost anytime I need to speak out loud, with every moment underpinned by constant anxiety.
Signs of the Sojourner, a 2020 game about conversations, captures this experience well -- too well. In it, you have a small deck of cards, each one marked with a different symbol or combination of symbols. These indicate different kinds of tone (you start with ālogical and diplomaticā and āempathetic and observantā). The idea is to play cards and match symbols to form a chain. When successful, the conversation progresses until it ends on a positive note. If unsuccessful, it begins to sputter and eventually ends on a sour or uncomfortable note. Itās a clever system. Itās clear and precise, capturing the unpredictable nature of conversation.
After every chat, you must swap one card in your deck for a new one. The more your deck changes, the more you must adapt; and for me, the more likely conversations are to falter as the deck changes shape. Itās here where the unpredictability of the card system became a source of anxiety rather than just clever design. Every time I āfailed,ā I couldnāt help but think of my own experiences and imprint them upon the game. Because the player character does not speak directly, it invites that sort of projection.
I knew going in that this was inevitable: a game about conversations always has the potential to be too real for me. But even so, the game affected me all the same.