Field Guide to Memory

Role: Contributing Writer

What do we leave behind when we’re gone? How do those things tell our story? Who’s left behind to tell it?

Field Guide to Memory (an IndieCade Award-winning game), created and written by Jeeyon Shim and Shing Yin Khor, seeks to answer those questions in a unique form: the keepsake game. Participants delve into the life and times of Dr. Elizabeth Lee’s wonderful and complicated journey via the artifacts she’s left behind following her disappearance. They do so by writing a daily journal recounting their day-to-day discoveries — the game is played one real-time day at a time.

In-world, they are assistants of Dr. Lee’s, and as such, become something of a point person for Dr. Lee’s colleagues and fans. Contributing writers like myself were responsible for the creation of a few characters and their stories.

I created the story of Katarina Arda, a fan of Dr. Lee’s from childhood who sought to follow in her footsteps but fell short as a result of the inequities and marginalization that run rampant in academia. Creating a character whose only interaction with the participant was through epistolary means is its own fun challenge. I believe that I was able to create a character who delivered a satisfying (and poignant) narrative arc, played out over two simple letters.

Players received the first letter from a young Katarina, an archived bit of ephemera that Dr. Lee held on to. The next day, they received another letter from Katarina in the present day — older, wiser, and perhaps a bit more jaded. The players were tasked with responding to one of three other letters from Dr. Lee’s admirers or colleagues, and that included Katarina. Players connected to Katarina and her struggles, and wrote beautiful, reassuring messages to her in response.