The Memory Game Rulebook

An adventure of sensorial recollection awaits!

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

Game overview.

The rules of the memory game are simple. You pick a target memory to find, something you know you’ve experienced, but haven’t recalled in a long time. You must, after all, have had a first kiss, or a great-grandmother, or a childhood friend not seen in decades. The easiest difficulty setting is to target a location. Higher difficulty settings are more specific, like that illicit first cigarette and the dampness of the backyard it was smoked in. If the memory comes immediately, then you can't play the game, because you've already won. You can only play the memory game with things you know you know, somewhere.

Places to play.

In the bath, especially with the shower curtain drawn or the lights turned off, or on long walks, or during airplane flights when you grow bored of your media toys, or at the end of hard days. Better than a place is a specific mood (surely there’s a German word for it): the feeling you have lived a very long time and so possess your own story, one that belongs to you alone. Do not play the memory game while driving or operating heavy machinery.

Game mechanics.

Within you lies a personal sensorium, an extensive web of memories. The difficulty of the game is that they have no order. To trawl the network you can search only by context and similarity, not by labels or tags. Therefore, you must start the search by inhabiting a memory you suspect is “nearby” the target, and then follow where it goes, for each contains hints of others around it. After all, you cannot immediately summon everything about your past. What were the names of your teachers in the 8th grade? Gun to your head, you're mute. And yet you may remember the bluish color of the paper your course schedules were printed on. So to find the pre-selected target memory, you must begin somewhere close to it, and then tug on leads. Follow no organizing principles. Rely on arcane associations.

Ruleset and win conditions.

Note: Homebrew rules are encouraged. With the brain as dungeon master, cheating is impossible, since players share an identity function with their brain.

The curse of being a human is that what we don't remember, we forget, and what we remember, we change. Therefore, the important part of the memory game is distinguishing between memories that are real and memories that are fabrications, fill-ins, decayed engrams. If there are no conscious experiences associated with a memory, just the semantic knowledge of its occurrence, then you’ve lost the memory game. Third-person memories, like of seeing yourself doing something from the outside, offer fewer points, since by definition you could not have experienced it that way. Only first-person memories count as a total win condition.

This increased challenge, unique to the 3rd edition, represents an update to earlier rulesets. In the 1st edition of the memory game, established shortly after the Cambrian explosion, no episodic memories existed, so the game could be played via semantic memory only. In the first few hundred million years, that original edition was played only twice with anything like intent: once by a large-brained dinosaur called a troodon as she lay on her eggs, daydreaming about where her mate might be, and once by an especially-advanced nautiloid, who died from a squid while doing so. Meanwhile, the 2nd edition—laid out 260,000 years ago, following the development of autonoetic consciousness in humans—had no penalty for third-person memories. This is because third-person memories didn’t exist yet, being a function of modern prefrontal meta-representation and improved (but here, deleterious) abstraction abilities.

Multiplayer in 3rd edition.

This edition features a new multiplayer option. To play, write down six potential target memories you expect another player to have memories of. The better your personal knowledge of the other players, the more specific and enjoyable the game will be. Each player roles a six-sided die to respectively determine which on their given list is their target. If the roll indicates something the player either immediately remembers, or is sure they never experienced, roll again. Once target memories have been assigned, set a five-minute timer and sit together in the dark silently. Afterward, declare your results, win and lose, via a detailed phenomenological report. Questions from other players are encouraged. Share these reports in order of the closest birthday.

Example single-player game.

The Player’s real body lies in bed, unable to sleep. But inside he’s searching for the memory of her face.

How old had he been? High school age, so that’s the first stop. All the math classes of which have been consigned to oblivion, the Player notes. Instead, high school brings to mind the time he saw, with his friends, that one moonrise on the beach. As a red bulb coming out of the black ocean the moon had looked like a nuclear explosion off the coast. And, as silly teens drunk at night, that’s even what someone thought it was, and rest ran around yelling “nuuuucleeearrrr booooommmb” and jokingly clutching each other in the sand, until the crimson moon cleared the horizon. Then he remembers making Jell-O shots in the freezer. Then the old computer games they’d all play. He could draw detailed maps of the cities of his favorite teenage RPGs even now. But these are a false path. No, he has to back out and restart.

The farmhouse where he grew up is a better lead. A structure dilapidated, with entire sections closed off by plastic sheets stapled over the doorframes to save money on heat. In the winter, the sheets protruded obscenely with an outside chill. “Pregnant ghosts” had been the in-joke of the family, who lived on what was a farm in name only, with few animals left. What activities there? Perhaps carrying water out to the horses. For in winter, horses will want warm water, impatiently shifting their bulk and blowing steam from their nostrils. He would unhook the buckets from each stall, then trek to the house, where hot water from the bathtub faucet would melt the frozen jagged ice at their bottoms. He’d scoop out the bits of hay and horse-food gunk before filling the buckets and trekking back. Which all meant he first had to shovel a path through the snow. So much of it. We don't get snow like that. Not anymore. Snow up to his waist in thick drifts. The feeling of snow pants sliding over jeans, the ability to fall harmlessly into the embrace of fine powder. The earliest story he’d ever written was about shoveling snow, at 15. His first girlfriend had read it and liked it, because it had been romantic and poetic and actually not bad at all. He’d shared the printed pages with her, and after they’d walked downtown to the restaurant they frequented. A strange place for teens, there he recalls the ritual of being led to their table, their careful menu decisions, their joint pretending (learning?) to be an adult. He jumps to another memory of snow, but this time it’s falling outside the windows, while inside the same girl is lounging naked on a couch, lit only by Christmas tree lights, and then [REDACTED—inappropriate ideation for rulebook].

Another false path. She’s not who he’s been looking for. But the girlfriend had been sad too, that day.

So then: that day. A car door is opened, and finally there she is, his childhood dog curled up in the backseat under a blanket. Dead. Her yellow fur had already lost its luster on the way back from the vet. It was like touching something stuffed. He remembers digging her grave. After that, only a fragment of an image: her headstone in the far backyard, and his other dog a silhouette sitting on the grave, refusing to leave.

But what about her face? That had been his target: her simple droopy look and her kind eyes. Yet when he tries to imagine it, he sees only an average of other dogs. Like some platonic representation of the breed. Did she have white in her fur at the end? Did she limp? Or did she bear it all without complaint, as was her way? It’s impossible to say.

At least he's found something. It’s not enough for a win, as it’s not the visual memory he was looking for. Instead, he remembers the tactile feeling of the contours of her head, as if he were blind and possessed only touch. There it is, below the soft fur of her ears, going down—the satisfying looseness of her neck. For when he was sad or lonely as a young boy, he would lie beside her and pinch at her saggy neck and rub her folds between his fingers meditatively, and be calmed. A strange service she’d offered, compliantly, in her motherly way.

He only realizes now that this sensory habit is shared: his one-year-old daughter also cannot fall asleep unless she is fondling his hand in the dark, clutching at it, pinching at it. So at night he kneels beside her bed, and lets her tiny hands map the reassuring folds of his giant fingers, until she is soothed enough to dream.