Game Ideas Un limited: Relocated

  It was a dream, and in many ways it was filled with those odd things that make dreams so dream-like:  people you don't really know who seem like close friends, who are doing completely absurd things for no apparent reason which are never questioned or challenged by you or anyone else in the dream.  Yet it contained one of those moments that resounds as very realistic, even after awakening.

  For reasons that would only make sense in the dream, I had determined that a bunch of people I knew had just rushed off to the apartment of someone else I knew, named Tom.  (Since my father, an emergency medical technician, was driving the lead car, it was obviously an emergency, and they were taking someone to the hospital, but would of course stop at this apartment on the way.  No, I have no idea why; I don't think my father has so much as met Tom.)  I hitched a ride with someone (who looked a lot like a diminutive version of Drew Carey but apparently was someone I knew, who had left the house in such a hurry that he was wearing boxer shorts under a sky blue thin cotton robe with royal blue piping on the lapels--yes, very like a dream) to get there.  I knocked on the door, and someone answered; yet it was the wrong person.  It was someone I did not know, even in the dream.  I knew at once that I'd made a mistake, as Tom hasn't lived in that apartment for close to twenty years (really, it was nothing like his old apartment, being more like the apartments on campus at my college), and I don't even know where he lives now.  I still rather foolishly asked--but then, when you've knocked on the wrong door, and you realize it's the wrong door, what are you going to do but ask whether it might somehow actually be the right door, or they might know where you're supposed to be?  Tom doesn't live here anymore, does he?  You don't know where they moved, do you?  If you think it's awkward to have dialed the wrong phone number, you should try getting the wrong apartment sometime.

  As the sleep cleared from my brain, I realized I had several ideas for articles coming from that dream, and this was one of them.  I know where Tom used to live when I met him when he was assistant manager of the toy store, and later when he bought a house and was raising his children.  I know where his mother lived when he moved in with her after his father died.  I don't know where he lives now, but I heard he left the state.

  The last time I saw him, he had taken a job as manager of a restaurant less than a mile from here.  The toy store where he had been so long ago is a hardware store, and he's held a number of jobs since then.  He had his own business for a while, but sold it for personal reasons.  We spotted him at the restaurant on the corner, and had coffee with him a couple times before he left that.

  That restaurant didn't last long after he left, although I gather from signs in the windows someone else is going to reopen it under new name and new management.  The building itself was once part of the local Richman's™ chain that once dotted three or four counties in southern New Jersey, a smaller version of the Friendly™ Restaurants chain, specializing in ice cream in many flavors and selling food from a menu that was once small and inexpensive but over the years grew to overwhelm the original focus on ice cream and cheap family lunches.  (Howard Johnson's™ is another example of this, but you'd have to be as old as my mother to remember when it was primarily an ice cream parlor, and at least older than my children to remember it as a major restaurant chain.)

  The Channel Lumber store where I used to buy most of my hardware is now a Best Buys electronics outlet.  The Hechinger's to which I turned when Channel vanished is now an A. C. Moore craft store.  Hopewell Auto Repair and Custard still sells ice cream in the summer, but they don't fix cars anymore.

  On the street where my parents have lived since I entered seventh grade most of the families have left and been replaced; the parents of most of my high school friends have left town by now.  My favorite high school teacher has been replaced by the guy who sang bass to my tenor (the Haberer brothers on lead and baritone between us) in the barbershop quartet which that teacher created and coached, and although the former teacher often had dinner with my parents even after I had moved away I have not been able to discover where he went.

  All her life, my wife came from her childhood home out Smith Lane to the light on the Black Horse Pike.  That traffic signal is no longer there.  The redesign of the ball fields and adjacent public parking areas and the addition of several new municipal buildings including a new library led to installing a new light a block away, and the removal of the one which had been access and landmark for several neighborhoods for a generation.  It is very confusing even to me when we visit, as I expect the light that is no longer there and often find myself looking for a break in the very busy traffic that formerly had to stop for the light, or missing the turn no longer so evident when coming up the pike to visit.

  Not everything has changed.  My parents have been in the same house for about thirty-five years, and my wife's mother has been where she is for perhaps sixty.  The high school I attended is still across the street from the police station and emergency services, at least one more visible addition to the familiar Works Projects Administration design since I attended, but still recognizably one of those depression-era constructions.  Yet many things have changed.  Stores I frequented even a few years ago have closed; neighbors have moved and new ones arrived.  Roads have been built or rebuilt or closed, intersections redesigned, buildings torn down or rebuilt, names changed.

  I have an excellent sense of direction.  Generally, if I have been somewhere before, I can get there again, even years later.  Yet this dream has reminded me that just because I can find a place doesn't mean the place is still there.  Even if it is, the landmark that told me where to turn in order to get there might be gone, or the people I expected to find may have left.  The world changes.

  Not everything does, obviously.  Farms and castles are often in the same family for generations or even centuries, even as the members of the families come and go.  Major corporations can dominate an industry or an area through many lives; and governments, although they constantly change in some ways, can have the same essential form long enough to define an era, or even to span several eras.  Yet one cannot know what will remain after even a few years.  The old mill that everyone expected would be a mainstay of the local economy as long as there was a town may have burned to the ground, or gone out of business as farmers shifted from wheat to soy or found other markets for their crops.  The White House almost burned down once, and Europe is dotted with piles of stone which were once castles.  I once stood on the rubble of the ancient home of Vlad the Impaler; it was very different from the way Bram Stoker had described it.

  I don't think I capture this well in my games.  If I create a city, or a countryside, or a village, I somehow think my job is done in that regard; I know where everything is.  Yet such a map is a mere snapshot, a record of an instant in time.  There will be new houses next year, and some of the buildings on my map will have decayed and been condemned.  The shortcut will be a corn field, the meadow a bog, the south wood a charred remnant with some early regrowth.  The little-used road to another town will have deteriorated, whether overgrown by the forest, or sunken deeper into the mire of the swamp, or having its bridges collapse into streams and gorges.  Even modern roads begin to vanish once they are no longer maintained, lost to gaping potholes, cracked pavements, opportunistic plant life, and other forces and evidences of erosion.  Meanwhile, men are always attempting to make that which was barely satisfactory into something better.  The first time I rode on the New Jersey Turnpike, it was a four lane highway with New Jersey dividers separating northbound from southbound traffic.  (I think it was their use on the Turnpike that gave those frightening concrete structures, designed to push an errant vehicle back into traffic, their name.)  The last time I was on it there were twelve lanes divided into sets of three by wide grassy medians.  As one of the characters in my favorite movie says, "Things change.  Always do."  I need to let the world change more, for change is what the world does.

  I've said before not to be locked into your story as a referee.  Now let me say don't be locked into your maps.  Accept that what you put on paper was the world as it existed at a particular moment, but that very little in the world is writ in stone, and even that which is writ in stone is passing and may be replaced by new stone and new writ given enough time.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.