Guest Interview: Paul Czege

Note from Paul: This week we have guest writer Slade Stolar’s interview with long-time indie Notable Paul Czege. Czege has a Kickstarter for Inscapes, a zine sequel to The Ink That Bleeds, both about getting the most out of solo journaling games. Slade is no slouch either: he’s the author of The Indie Hack (2016), Dust, Fog and Glowing Embers (2017) and ANNA-X66 (2021). Fun format! Let us know if we should do more of these sort of guest interviews.

I am Slade Stolar, here with Paul Czege talking about Inscapes, his zine about solo journaling games that’s funding right now on Kickstarter. So Paul, tell me a little bit about this. What is a solo journaling game?

Yeah, so, a solo journaling game is a roleplaying activity you play by writing responses to prompts or situations generated for you by game procedures. Sometimes you’re drawing cards that are mapped to pre-written prompts. Sometimes there’s gameplay that you have to interpret with what you write. And a narrative flows from there. The procedures you follow can be pretty different from game to game.

And how many do you think that you’ve played?

I have a collection on itch.io of all the ones that are publicly available that I’ve played and there’s over fifty in that collection. Some I’ve played more than once. I’ve played The Beast more than once. There are some that I’ve designed that I haven’t yet published that I’ve played. I designed one called The Balsam Lake Unmurders that I’m going to publish, and I’ve played that one three times. So, somewhere around sixty probably I’ve played.

So, with in-person, tabletop ttrpgs, people play for three to five hours on an evening and keep doing that with a group until people find that they can’t anymore for a billion personal reasons. What is the duration of some of these solo journaling games?

Yeah, it totally ranges. I think the shortest I’ve ever played is a game called Vampyres Are People Too that I designed with my son. You roll a d6 for a prompt from a list, and write it. You roll for one from a second list, and write it. And then there’s one final prompt. And it took about twenty minutes. Surprisingly it’s pretty deep for twenty minutes of play largely designed by an eleven year old. There’s another one by Elizabeth Mace Giosia called Foam & Fiction I played that was also around twenty minutes. But that’s one end of the range. And others I’ve played for months, from day to day. I love it when I get really caught up in one like that. And there are times I’ve played for two and a half hours of writing for a single session.

So you’ve started writing zines that explicate the immersive journaling experience, with Inscapes as the current one. Have you come to an understanding of the how and the why of the solo-play narratives we author?

Inscapes is a sequel to a zine I published last year called The Ink That Bleeds, which is subtitled “How To Play Immersive Journaling Games”. There are a ton of journaling games available on itch.io, well over a thousand. It’s a really burgeoning form of game. But none of them talk about the practice of playing. They tell you their specific procedures, to track specific numbers, to roll for prompts, to write in your journal, etcetera, but they don’t tell you how to pursue immersion, and how it’s going to affect you when you succeed. And I was seeing a lot of people try games and not have any fun. So The Ink That Bleeds is the things I discovered playing with practices that I sort of fell into from having been doing journaling for twenty four years.

What got me started journaling was The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, which recommends three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing every day. I started doing that and an aspect of it is how you start to get more in touch with your unconscious mind. You’re giving your unconscious mind, for the duration of those three pages, the ability to use your body, to tell you who you are, to tell you what’s important, to tell you what it knows, and I realized that the way I was playing journaling games was informed by that practice. And there’s a lot more in The Ink That Bleeds. I talk about the importance of writing dialogue and other things. And I haven’t enjoyed every game that I’ve played either, but I think there are practices that will help you have a more immersive experience with some games, and get the most out of them — the way you write, the way you choose a game. So yeah, I think I realized it was kind of an unmet need, and I wrote The Ink That Bleeds about how to do it.

And the why — I think we’re drawn to journaling games because they represent an opportunity to hear from our unconscious and be affected by it. That’s what Inscapes is about. It’s what happens to you when you play a couple of dozen journaling games the way I describe.

Inscapes starts with an index with entries like “Being a revolutionary”, “Not wanting to be anywhere else”, and “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”. That was like “bam”. It arrives like a punch in the face. What’s your strategy of starting it like this?

As a sequel to The Ink That Bleeds, I copied the same graphic design, which had on its title page that same thing, a list of the topics within. As somewhat a procedural text, I felt that people reading The Ink That Bleeds were going to need a way to find the different topics in it, to find where it talks about “write to find out” or the importance of writing dialogue or playing as your approximate self, so I put the list with page numbers up front. There are no chapters, so it doesn’t need a table of contents. But then with Inscapes, which is still procedural in some ways, but it’s also about how in our lives we inhabit narratives and those narratives say things about us, by making that same kind of list up front with page references you’re seeing lots of cultural stuff. It’s cultural narratives that we inhabit that vex us, that we contend with in our lives, and so I imagine that’s why it hits you the way it does, because these are definitely things that are an aspect of our cultural lives that are challenging to us.

You say “A world is a context that unlocks life and being in a person, and we all inhabit dozens and dozens that make us who we are.” What are some of the worlds that people might not normally think about?

In The Ink That Bleeds I talk about how we inhabit the temporal world, which is all of the aspects of the natural world we live in — the Rocky Mountains, the human gut biome — plus the contrived world, or I call it the inimical world sometimes in Inscapes. It’s all the cultural stuff we were just talking about. It’s credit ratings, and the Supreme Court, and having a second home in the country. It’s all the things that create context around us, and tell us who we are and what we want — all the cultural narratives that define and affect us. It’s rom-coms and copaganda and Marvel movies. And I talk about relationships as worlds. All our relationships have their own beliefs about us and morality and sense of justice that make us who we are.

But ones people probably don’t think about? Early on in Inscapes I give an example of seeing a photo and whole narrative happens in me in a flash. And I think it’s journaling games that caused me to be aware of it when it happened, because playing them strengthens our relationship with our unconscious. But I think it happens to everybody — that as you go through the world you see a photo or you see something play out between strangers and your unconscious casts you into a role relative to what’s going on. It interprets the situation and who you would be relative to it and tells you a narrative, and that world exists in a flash and it tells you who your unconscious mind thinks you should be and the things it believes about you. When I was talking with Jay Springett about Inscapes he used the word psychotechnology — and I think it’s the right word. Worlds are this sort of psychological mechanism that our unconscious uses to construct us and tell us who we are.

At one point, you present a really detailed narrative, then say, “Playing journaling games develops how you listen to your unconscious. Previously [this narrative] would have been so fast and unconscious I would not have noticed it.” You’ve always been an advocate of the Daily Pages. Is the physical act of writing, slowing us down, helping us to appreciate internal narratives in a more profound way?

Yeah, you’re talking about what happened with the photo. And I think so. I think we are so surrounded by narratives telling us who we are, like I said, credit ratings, which are a creation of the contrived world that tells you how worthy you are to have money, and your salary, which is an evaluation of you made by a company within the contrived world that’s telling you what your worth is to them. We’re surrounded by these narratives. If you go on Instagram or other social media there is a conception of what beauty is, and we all know that narrative and what it says about us. The narratives of the contrived world are toxic and they are strong and present. They are reaffirmed constantly in movies and in fiction that tell us how the world works and tell us our value and your unconscious mind doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to really be heard. And I think journaling  games are a way that you’re giving your unconscious mind the opportunity to tell you what it knows about you, what’s true about you, what’s truer than the narratives of the contrived world. Your unconscious knows who it wants you to be and when you listen it will tell you.

You talk a lot about “playing as your approximate self” when playing solo journaling games. Why do we (or might we need to) do that?

Right, so, in The Ink That Bleeds I describe the approximate self. It’s one of those topics on the title page. I describe it as playing as who you basically are, but just changed in ways that are necessary for the game. So if you’re playing a game where you’re in a band then maybe you need to know how to play guitar, if in fact in your temporal life you don’t how to play guitar, or maybe you need to know how to cast spells if you’re playing in a game where you’re a village witch or you need to know necromancy or whatever, but otherwise you’re yourself. And I realized by playing like this that it’s a powerful way for your unconscious mind to tell who you are, because as your approximate self you’re not Legolas. You are yourself, just in a different cultural context of the game, and so the actions you take are relevant to who you really are. The choices that you make when you are your approximate self are things you can believe about yourself. You can believe that you really would have done what you do in the game and that relationships you enter into with people in it are the kinds of relationships that are reflective of who you really are.

So you’ve got enough scaffolding that you can participate in the game world in a realistic way, but you’re not being untrue to yourself.

Yes. It’s super fun too. Because, y’know, if you ask people, one of the most compelling aspects of Dungeons & Dragons or MMOs is the development of the character over time, the advancement, the changes to the avatar. And I think it’s because we want to feel like we have a trajectory in life. And when you play as your approximate self you can play from game to game to game, with a trajectory that feels true and inherent to you. I played a game called It Is Written where you’re a cartomancer, and you have this oracle deck that’s a numbered list of cards with no canonical interpretations, and you roll on the list and journal out the card reading you’re doing for someone. Well in a subsequent game I played as my same approximate self I still had that deck of cards and they came into play. Over the course of multiple games I’ve been a cartomancer, and I’ve learned shapeshifting, and I’ve had friendships and relationships that persist from game to game, and it’s super immersive, and really fun.

You’ve talked previously about your texts needing to be inspirational, that a reader should be ‘moved to action’ by the text. I was moved to read Inscapes in a single sitting. I was moved to google up the photos and poems you reference, to try some of the solo journaling games you talk about in the future. In the sense of moved-to-action, how are you trying to move people with Inscapes?

The way I wrote Inscapes and The Ink That Bleeds is, woven throughout everything about the procedures of playing — immersion, and bleed, and self care, and write to find out, and playing as your approximate self — are excerpts from my own actual play that I hope are compelling to readers and show I know what I’m talking about with what I recommend, and so also they feel they want to have experiences like them. 

One thing I’ve learned as a game designer is that talking about your real play experience is compelling. But RPG texts almost never do it. They just give instructions and rules. And you see this in occult writings too. They give instructions, but never tell how they’ve applied it in their own life. It’s always, “well, this is the practice,” “this is the traditional practice,” “this is the method,” but they don’t tell the choices they’ve made in their own life and the effect it’s had. I think when you show your own play experience it is a truer kind of text than a purely instructional text. It’s a more motivating text.

You talk about how the contrived world is, essentially, materialist. So, this is something that kind of comes out of various play experiences. It always kind of hit me… it seemed very sincere and very intense in reading Inscapes. The contrived world believes that there’s this physical stuff and that’s what constitutes the world. Is this part of the immune system, if we can use that metaphor, of the contrived world? Is the contrived world protecting itself from other things, like ideas, like justice and compassion, by insisting on “no, this is physical”? And conversely, are our inscapes our kind of immune system protecting us from what you call the lies of the inimical world?

I think that’s true. I think there’s a reason the contrived world is constantly reiterating the same narratives at us again and again. The same narratives about beauty. The same narratives that run through rom-coms and police dramas. That the police solve crimes. And that run through the Marvel universe. That there are always powerful good guys opposing the forces that aren’t in our interests in the world.

There are tons of these narratives that we hear over and over again that aren’t true but by telling them to us again and again the contrived world keeps us from expressing other narratives in our lives. I think the narratives of the contrived world are absolutely its immune system, its armor. I think that’s the essence of Inscapes. It’s me writing about how the narratives that our unconscious wants for us are the ones that are going to enliven us in the temporal world and allow us to contend with the narratives of the contrived world that are holding us back, that are keeping us in situations that don’t enliven us.

So, I also noticed several, and I think this feeds into that, anti-capitalist messages in the text. Capitalism says that it creates growth through “market forces and competition” whereas, over generations, it “creates death through heritance”. And the idea I take away from that is that capitalism is about hoarding and monopolies, and not about creating a healthy system of exchange (although that is what is constantly brought up as the defense of it). Does that seem to be what you’re noticing as well?

I use the phrase “deathly world” probably quite a few times in Inscapes. And that’s definitely an aspect of it. I think it’s broader than that. I think the idea of linear time is a deathly narrative in a way. In life we are progressing from where we are to a point of death. In another game that I wrote called Traverser, that I haven’t published yet, there’s a scene that happens in the fiction. There’s a woman character who had a doctorate in physics who is running a tea plantation and fixing an outboard boat motor that’s all seized up. Somebody asks her if she missed out on so much in not having the physics degree play out for her. Traverser is a quantum reality game, and her response is that in all of these other realities she’s doing so many other things. And she feels like she’s infinite across parallel realities. And so, she has satisfaction in life because of who she is and who she knows she is across other realities. I think there’s an aspect of that to our inscapes, to the worlds we make that make us who we are. If we’re true to ourselves with them, then we are the people who did those things, who made those choices, who had those relationships. And so, the worlds of our inscapes are not deathly worlds, they’re not worlds of linear time, they‘re worlds of horizontal time. When I started to think of how enlivening that is, it made me see how deathly the contrived world is, and that’s why I started calling it the deathly world and the inimical world in Inscapes. I’m not sure I used those same phrases in The Ink that Bleeds.

That seems a bit counter to our ingrained cultural narratives of, “well, if I didn’t become this, that’s a mark against me, that’s something that I failed to do, that’s something that I couldn’t achieve”.

I think what you realize playing immersive journaling games is that there is a core of you, a core of who you are, and that your potential of that core is greater than the resistance and the doubt of the contrived world. Another aspect of the deathliness is the doubt, the skepticism of the contrived world that can’t truly see, that uses credit ratings as a shorthand for its lack of ability to perceive that you are someone that’s worth its investment, and of the things you would do if it was less deathly. I think you start to realize that these narratives that have played out for you in your inscape, in immersive journaling games, that they’re true and they feel like a part of who you are. You embody them. And you start to realize that even though they happened in other worlds, they are a part of you in this world, and they are a part of who you are in your interactions, out and about, at the bus stop, or with your family. You contain more self than the inimical world says you do.

I like that. That’s what I felt the morning after reading Inscapes, when all the synthesis happened over night. That’s where I got to.

As you’re tying things together in the end of the book, you talk a little bit about this human propensity, in specific, in relationships, to re-fight the battles we lost as children. Is that the kernel of… in the inscape, this is telling you something true about yourself. Is it that you want to keep fighting (or re-fighting) those battles?

That’s something I learned from a book called Getting the Love You Want, by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt. I think that the reason that that book is true about that observation is that that activity of using our relationships to try and work our way through our childhood traumas, the things that we didn’t succeed at, emotionally, is because our unconscious latches onto it as a needful way of dealing with that stuff because it doesn’t feel like it has any other options. For me, what I’ve realized from journaling games, is that you can spend your whole life doing the things that they describe in Getting the Love You Want. And then you’ve used your whole life to do that. You’ve never become the person your unconscious wants you to be.

What I’ve realized from playing journaling games is, when your unconscious mind has its inscape as an alternative to the relationship practices Getting the Love You Want describes, it doesn’t need those practices. It can use your inscape, and the narratives that you have within it, to construct you as who it wants you to be. And so you don’t spend your whole life having relationships that are all about this other thing. You can have, in your life, relationships that aren’t about that, that are about both of you being who you should be.

That’s a mic drop moment.

So, what will (or do) people misunderstand about Inscapes? Is there anything that they just completely get wrong?

That’s a tough question. Only a handful of people have read it at this point. I don’t have a good answer to that. Do you have an answer?

I think there will be some sort of, maybe, confusion about, “what is the power fantasy of the solo journaling game?” Because I think some of what you’re saying here is very ‘looking inwards’ and ‘finding truth’. I don’t know if people are going to latch onto that power fantasy. I mean, I’ve read it and I think people should, but I don’t know too many people who step out the door in the morning and say, “when I get back home I’m wanna dig deep and find truth”, they say, “I wanna kill some orcs and save the princess from the castle.”

I have found that there are really two kinds of journaling games. One kind is, like you describe, pretty adventurous. You’re given a quest and you’ve gotta go off and do some bloody and dangerous work to defend the kingdom, or retrieve something, or whatever. And then there are others that are about having some experience in a world. You’re traveling a lonely road and you’re going to encounter people and have conversations. You’re John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, and you’re discovering America. I’ve played some of both of those games and what I’ve found is that the adventure type games, they become super exhausting. They are emotionally exhausting. You are fighting for your life. There’s one that I describe playing in Inscapes. It’s called Where Mystery Dwells, and in it I was one of three people who was hired to retrieve a live specimen of an underwater, aquatic, humanoid species in an underground lake. And it’s exhausting because you’re in this dangerous situation, and another person I was with got shot, another one ends up dying. When a game is that immersive, when you’re playing it the way I describe in Inscapes and The Ink that Bleeds, you write to find out. And when your unconscious mind is calling up the sensations of the experience you feel it in your body. You feel the effects. There’s sweat rolling down my ribs while I am fighting a duel with someone. It’s a lot more pronounced than when I’m sitting around the table playing D&D. Sitting around the table playing D&D, there’s this whole other social context. It has almost a board game social context. But when you’re writing in your journal and your unconscious mind is telling you how things are playing out, you can feel your heart beating. I had a really good time playing Where Mystery Dwells, but at the same time I’m not sure the designers of more adventurous journaling games realize how potentially overwhelming those experiences that they are translating from a D&D context into a journaling game context can be if someone is having a really immersive experience.

Every time afterwards I need the next game I play to be one that’s not as adventurous.

You say, “we play out narratives in ourselves that make us who we are.” Is that the core message? Is that Paul Czege’s final word on the subject?

Yeah, that is basically the whole message of Inscapes. Inscape is a word the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins used for the inner aspects of a person or a thing that cohere to make them what they are. And I think that it’s the perfect word for what I’m describing. The narratives we play out in these worlds (and we do it all the time, unconsciously, even if we’re not playing journaling games), they are your unconscious mind working to create this inscape for you, to create you as who it knows it wants you to be.

We don’t have the benefit of inviting everyone over to play at the table the way that we do with more traditional board-game-like RPGs. So, we just gotta keep telling people we’re playing journaling games. Get them involved.

I absolutely agree. I think people get excited about games when they hear people talk about playing them. That’s an aspect of both Inscapes and The Ink that Bleeds. I include so much of my own play, that I hope it’s inspiring people to want to do it.

That’s a great spot to call it. Thanks so much for sitting down with me and talking about Inscapes. 

Thanks for doing it.