Forget Me Before You Go
The Game
The people closest to you have started to go missing. Not just moving away or ghosting you - no one remembers they ever existed. And it seems to be tied directly to you. If someone loves you, they're just... erased. Now, you're caught between the human need for love and community and togetherness and the need to protect those people who are most precious to you. You're forcing people to forget you, but... Can you?
Forget Me Before You Go is a solo journaling role-playing game.
What I Like About This One:
This is my first attempt at a solo journaling game, and I'm not as familiar with that genre as I am with other role-playing games. So this one's kind of raw, probably probably amateur hour, but it's fun to try and encapsulate an idea into a new framework.
I have a weird obsession with epistemological philosophy. How do we know that we know something? If memory can be manipulated, how can we ever be sure of anything? If the memories of our most important pillars in life were to disappear, how would we know what was missing? And there's something about epistemology that I find incredibly lonely. Like, what you know is what you know. Nobody else knows what you know, how you think, what goes on in your head. But part of the human condition is striving for connection with others, and I wanted to put together a game that evoked that, a bit. Did I succeed? I have no idea. People who are more familiar with journaling games will need to let me know.
What I Would Do Differently:
Again, we come to the problem of pens. The randomizer system should not contain the words 'succeed' or 'fail.' Those are so subjective in a game like this, and the terminology really matters. It do think it creates an interesting ambiguity and dissonance, but at the cost of a more crystalized version of the idea. But I wrote 'success' before I realized that wasn't ideal, and was already on the next sentence, so it stayed 'success' and 'failure' for this version. If I go back and re-do this one, I'd replace those with more evocative terms like Episteme for 'rememberance' and 'amathia' for forgetting.
Come to think of it, Amathia could have made a better title for this game...