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Experience-First Approach to Marginalia, the Excel Spreadsheet Game of Totally Under-Control Demonology

You know what I’ve got an idea for a Mechanic Monday I can post tomorrow but I’m staring down the end of a long post-less week and I don’t know if I’ve ever posted about the game idea I had last Christmas for a game that takes place in an Excel spreadsheet, I probably did but it’s been a damn while, so why don’t I take today to apply the Experience-First lens to that design? No dissent? Off I go then!

Marginalia (named for the little scribbled words and images readers and authors alike enjoy making in the margins of texts) is a spreadsheet game about letting a demon tempt you with shortcuts.  Inspired by literary-tinged demonology, like in Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, Clive Barker’s Mister B. Gone, Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, or even C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, as well as the black magic betting game Cordial Minuet by Jason Rohrer, and my own experience doing some very repetitive work as a student librarian’s assistant; the feeling I enjoy and want to emulate and evoke is that of something erudite and parchment-y, full of rabbit holes to tumble into, and shot through with a hint of Temptation that SURELY can’t be as bad as all that.  Libraries and academia conveniently carry with them the shining brittle image of an ivory tower; meanwhile my student days remind me of a hardscrabble desperate experience where there’s never enough time NOR money, and everything you give to your employment is dear, begrudged, and likely counterfeit.

I want the player to feel the drudgery of the pointless basic task, and to experience the moment of False Free Lunch when some of that work is done for them, seemingly for nothing.  I want the player to assess risk incorrectly; I want them to watch as something so profoundly mundane and impersonal as a spreadsheet produces something as magical and harrowingly targeted as a hex on their enemy flashing suddenly into existence.  I want to harness the way MUDs made me feel like rudimentary coding was a kind of spellcasting, syntax as Creation.  I want the player to feel the trap of an old, eldritch thing closing in around them as the plot progresses and their destiny feels tied ever tighter to that of the characters; I want the feeling of an alternate reality game that could just possibly be real, as the game is distributed Jumanji-like by word of mouth or by old, nearly-obsolete media.

Yeah.  I think that’s the ingredients, and the mouth-watering picture that the recipe should produce.  I think that should help with alchemizing the one into the other.  Not sure where I’ll fit this into my schedule, considering how much else there already is (BTW if I get a FGM^2 prototype made in the next three days it’ll be a miracle, I really over-ambitiously front-loaded the scant few remaining weeks of September when I made my three-month plan lol) but honestly my dayjob will likely keep building the skills I need to build this, so maybe I revisit in December, at the one-year mark.

Anyhow, that’s enough for tonight.  Til next time.

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