I hope you enjoyed Inkstatic, an artifact of game history, game play, and high art created for or during actual game play, either group or solo. Used character sheets, game maps, notes and scribbles: any mark made on paper made it in. The conceit of the artifact is that google drive has become a sort of ephemera archive, and has optimizable, compressible storage for things i’d otherwise be watching turn back into steam. You can see the items growing mold, bit by slugs, and waterlogged, but energy-hungry data servers have come to interrupt that process and preserve these items for a rights-forfieted, non-descript, non-committal and vague future. The Jam Without Numbers has organized a exhibition of such materials from itch developers.

Jam Without Numbers’ success depends on submissions of ephemera from people like you, and people like your old gaming buddies who don’t play anymore. Rather than throw something away, archive it for this jam. The link below contains a mishmash of stuff: dungeon maps, Pathfinder pets, notes from computer science lectures, and some 450ml ink which you now host in your cache. Inkstatic occupies a curious place. While it is clearly the work of someone not a good cultural fit for the design space of role-playing games, it also displays some of the iconic memes one suffers as old hand. Rather than the clean execution for which a world java containers, vector illustrations, machine readability, auto-translatablility, universality and hamburger trays frame today, inkstatic offers decoration by erosion.

As a role-playing artifact analogue of native art, the visuals appearing in this book are defined as much as they are inspired by climbing trees and walking branch to branch and road to road and hobby to hobby, and swaying with them until here and still teaching myself as you watch. Where i feel excitement and the enthusiasm of discovery. My hope is that this artifact measures up to some version of play for any one other with play crystalizing into ink.