We Are But Worms

Post-Forge (the forum was placed in read-only mode in 2010), many of the 2010s indie TTRPG community gathered on Google Plus, Google's failed attempt to compete with Facebook. (I never really made it to Google Plus, as it had the blood of Google Reader on its hands.) Like all Google projects, Google Plus' death was inevitable; it was killed in 2018. Many of these TTRPG designers and critics made their way to itch.io, whose "Physical Games" category at that point mostly housed print-and-play board games.

As a digital distribution marketplace with an even lower barrier to entry than RPG-focused sites, itch enabled the publication of smaller and weirder role-playing games than ever before. In 2019, Riverhouse Games published the "one word RPG" We Are But Worms, challenging the boundaries of TTRPG discourse. It was emblematic (if not parodic) of an itch-enabled movement that designer John R. Harness called lyric games, after many games' poetry-like attention to the language and syntax of their often-brief rules.

We Are But Worms is a game that challenges students but also, for some of them, explodes in their brains like a kind of big bang, expanding their sense of what games and role-play can be, or what the text of a game can be like. Running it in class should be approached with a sense of absurdity but also a deep sincerity. It is important to take it at face value, and to challenge students to consider what taking it at face value means.

In my class, I ran it as a larp.

Prep:

• First, buy the game from Riverhouse Games. This is the most important step.
• Second, give students a heads up – at least a week – that the class will be running We Are But Worms on a given date. Read through the rules together, as a class. I printed out copies and handed them out to my students to take home.
• Tell students that we're going to be spending part of class time playing the game as a larp. It is up to them individually to decide what it means to larp the game. They are encouraged to bring in any props or costumes they might decide they need; they can get out of their chairs or stay seated or make noise.
• I also made sure to fully outline what the structure of the activity would be (see below).

Running:

• Feel free to adapt this to your class, your time, your space. But here's what I did (and what I explained to them would happen, a week in advance): I turned off the lights, and then turned them back on to signal that play would start. During that period (which I kept going for only a few minutes – you can vibe it out), students should be prepared to perform the game's rules in whatever way they choose. When I shut off the lights a second time, the game ended, we returned to normal, and continued to a discussion.

Discussion:

• Kick off discussion by asking students to talk about how they decided to larp the game and why.
• What does it mean to call this game a "one word RPG?" Is it a one-word RPG?
• In 2020, Riverhouse Games released GURPS: The Treachery of Images, a game design anti-manifesto that shares its name with a 1985 (and still published!) rules-heavy TTRPG. I highly recommend incorporating this zine into discussion and perhaps having students read it in advance of the class. One of the ideas Riverhouse returns to again and again is the idea of "mechanics" (rules that prescribe what should happen in play). What does it mean, after playing AD&D and Apocalypse World, to design and play a game without mechanics?
• Artists connected to the Fluxus movement of the 1960s wrote "event scores" for performances – loose descriptions of activities that could then be adapted and performed by individual performers, as musicians may perform the same musical score. In these event scores, the words left out are as important as the ones included. For example, Alison Knowles' 1962 event score Proposition reads, "Make a salad." Because the score omits exact instructions on the salad-making, however, it allows interpretations like the ones Knowles herself has run at galleries and museums, where a group of people construct and eat a gigantic salad. What is being left out of We Are But Worms, and what does that allow for?
• If you search "we are but worms" on itch, you will find at least fourteen translation, hacks or direct response games to the original. To what degree is We Are But Worms the product of itch as a platform and of the larger community in which it is provoking conversation and play?

Exercise:

1. Identify an evocative phrase, activity or mechanic. Consider something familiar that might be ripe for subversion.
2. Write a small game, one word minimum, one paragraph maximum, around the concept. Pay attention to word choice. Try to create something that is impactful to read, regardless of whether it’s played.