Some assembly required

After nearly a month of tossing ideas into the WIP Pile of Doom™ for One Page RPG Jam 2025, WORKING TITLE sprung forth during a slow morning at work as a way to express some creative frustration. The (meta) commentary on genre is neither novel nor is it particularly observant; that's fine. I'm not here to break new ground.

WORKING TITLE was, for me, an exercise in editing. I love cutting text, refining it, rearranging it, considering it's a help or a hinderance. I love walking away for a week and returning, eyes anew, to overanalyze what I was doing, what I was trying to say, and if I was successful at saying it. WORKING TITLE was originally chock-full of playful, intended-to-be-satirical jargon that, the longer I sat with it, the more it felt like insubstantial noise trying only to fill the silence, or to make itself look more important. 

When I start a writing project, I look for my guiding star—the single question that the writing is trying to answer. With WORKING TITLE, it was how can I say as much as possible, in as few words as possible, and still create something with substance? The game itself is sparse. The "reviews" are only slightly more substantial. The project description is is five times as long as the core game text. The idea here traces back to my joy (and occasional disdain) for undergrad literature courses where 100-word poems became the basis for 1,200-word analytical essays.

WORKING TITLE remindes me that absence often invites projection: the less I write, the more space I leave for others to fill. The game asks three questions in just 12 words. This postmortem is my 300-word answer to a fourth. Did I actually make something, or did I just make an excuse? 

Both. Definitely both.

Onward,
S.