Originally published at PatGames @ PopePat.com. You can comment here or there.
©2011 Ian F.
Players: 1
RULES
Voluntary Amnesia is a game that you can play anywhere, on your own,
without any dice, paper, tools, or props. I usually play while driving.
It works like this:
* Pick a moment in your past. The middle of your high school graduation, the day you started your current job, midnight of New Year’s Eve 2005; anything works as long as you can place it in time, both in the context of your life and on a calendar. For optimum play, it should probably be at least a couple years ago. However, going back all the way to childhood will make the game extremely difficult.
* Pretend that moment is the last thing you remember. Take a moment to put yourself back in that time and place - what were you interested in? Who did you spend most of your time with? What were your hobbies and obsessions? Once you’ve oriented yourself, it’s time to “wake up”. You will abruptly “wake up” wherever you are, doing whatever you’re currently doing, and you cannot recall anything that has occurred since the chosen earlier time in your life. You do, however, know that a significant amount of time has passed.
* Now deduce where you are, when it is, what you’re doing right now, and other important facts about your present life (job, romantic partner, where you live, other important responsibilities, etc.)
* You can look around in your environment, go through your own pockets, and make inferences based on what you find. See what you can figure out
and what you can’t.
* There are certain things you may have to eliminate from consideration to keep the game from being trivial. For example, access to your own e-mail account. I usually play in the car, which eliminates access to my computer, and I pretend my smartphone is password-locked, thus denying me access to that as a resource.
* You can play just as an intellectual exercise, or you can set a victory condition, like figuring out exactly where you’re driving to right now and why. My usual victory condition is finding something or someone that could tell me the rest of what’s happened during my missing time (like the phone number of a family member.)
Here’s an example. Let’s pretend I’m playing in the car while driving to my Tuesday night class in Burbank, and that the moment I’ve chosen is my high school graduation. Here’s how my thought process might go:
* I’m in a car. A Volkswagen, apparently. I’m driving, and I’m alone, so it’s probably my car.
* The car has just over a hundred thousand miles on it, so I’ve probably had it for a while. It doesn’t appear to be a luxury car, so I’m probably not wealthy.
* Checking the mirror, I look substantially older but still more-or-less the same. I don’t appear to have any new scars or other injuries/impairments. I’m wearing glasses, which implies that my vision has gotten substantially worse. Between that and my appearance, I can presume that many years have passed; I’m probably between thirty and forty.
* The registration card in the glove compartment says I’m in a 2000 Jetta, owned by me. (n.b.: I’ll usually “virtually” go through things like this if I’m playing the game while driving, imagining that I’ve chosen to pull over and look at things rather than actually doing so.) More importantly, this card was issued in mid-2010, so now I have a pretty good idea that the current date is late 2010 or early 2011. The car clock says it’s 7:00 and it’s dark outside, so 1) it’s probably evening, not morning and 2) I can probably narrow the time scale a bit further: somewhere between October 2010 and March 2011, because otherwise there’d be some light outside.
* The registration card also has my address. I live in Arcadia, California (where the hell is that?) From the unit number, it must be an apartment, not a house.
* I just passed a sign that said I’m on the 210, and that the next nine exits are for Pasadena. (If I’d had a better mental map of the L.A. area back when I graduated high school, I could now deduce that I’m headed *away* from my home, but I didn’t so I can’t.) I do at least know that I’m still in Southern California.
* Oh my God, gasoline is expensive now.
* Let’s check my pockets. Aha - keys! One of these probably opens up the door to my apartment! (I could declare this a win - within my apartment I could certainly find ways to contact family members, or access the last ten years of my e-mail, or a thousand other clues to my “missing time.” Or I could keep playing…)
* Also in my pockets: a wallet! In addition to evidence that I’m an Auto Club member and have dental insurance, here’s my driver’s license; it confirms my address. Aha - business cards! In fact, here’s *my* business card! (note: upon inspecting my wallet for this example scenario, I found a business card for myself that’s now years out of date, which would lead me to the inaccurate conclusion that I am currently the Chief Technology Officer of a company based in Encino.) Also here are business cards for several other people…I now have phone numbers for several people who know me in some capacity, and could help me figure out what’s happened. (Three of the business cards currently in my wallet are from close friends, so this could be another way to satisfy the victory condition, although I wouldn’t know which people from the business cards are friends and which are acquaintances until I called them.)
* Also in the wallet: a newish-looking receipt from a restaurant in Claremont, dated 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 16th, 2011. I’ve now pinpointed the current date to within a matter of days. The receipt shows two entrees; who did I have dinner with? Could our waitress “Stephanie” tell me more about him or her?
And so on. So far, I’ve figured out when it is, where I am, where I live, what I do for a living (roughly), but not where I’m driving to or why, or who I’m in a relationship with.
It’s not something you can play all the time or it will get repetitive, but it can make for an entertaining diversion if you have ten or fifteen minutes to yourself - on a drive, in the dentist’s waiting room, or almost anywhere. Good luck, voluntary amnesiacs!
Editor’s Note:
What blows me away is the fact that I TOTALLY USED TO PLAY THIS TOO! What are the chances that two people made up the same game? Well, we are both gamers and improv enthusiasts and writers, so I guess it’s not THAT surprising. Perhaps a LOT of people play it and people just don’t talk about it.
Here are a few varieties that I used to play as well:
“3rd Person” version – I often played a version in which I imagined that I was someone else that I knew in present time. A relative or a friend usually. The game works more like a classic “body switch” story in this case. In this version, the victory condition is typically that this friend or relative has to figure out who you are. You sort of have to imagine that you are them and that you only have their age/background/cultural knowledge to go on. Often it’s fun to play this version by imagining that you are a High School teacher that you used to have. Or that you are a cousin you have not seen in a LONG time.
“Choose Which Time to Live In” version – You play this one as Ian describes above where you are yourself from a previous time in life. The nuance here is that once you figure out who and where and when you are, you now have to decide whether you want to stay in this age, or go back to your original time period. The decision is not necessarily academic – it’s an intriguing concept in that you have to decide how tempting it might be to a younger version of yourself to stay in this body and time period.