Games and Structure
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Since we were talking last time about tricks that help people write, I should mention one other little trick that I enjoy doing. For the past couple of years I've had an account with an online writing game called 4thewords. The premise of this game is that it's structured like an RPG. There are "monsters" you can fight, in order to progress in the main plotline, complete side quests, or collect items that you can craft with - and each one requires you to write a certain amount of words within a certain time limit.
This post isn't an advertisement! It's not even necessarily an "oh, you should try this thing I like." I just want to talk about one of the things 4thewords does for me, because I think it's slightly different for me, compared to what’s advertised and what a neurotypical writer would get out of it.
The main way I see games like 4thewords advertised is that they're about "motivation." If you're having trouble psyching yourself up to write, the saying goes, maybe a game will help. Whether it's something mean like Write Or Die that punishes you to make you keep going, or whether it's a gentler trick. 4thewords offers various incentives to keep writing - from the fact that you can make the plot progress and amass items by writing, to the time limit that comes with each monster (quite a generous one in most cases), to the fact that you get "streak" rewards for writing a certain amount every day.
But to me, I find these incentives are externalities. When I'm really excited about something, the monsters don't make me more excited to write it because the writing is already its own reward. When I'm in a bad space mentally and can't focus enough to write, the thought of keeping my streak up or amassing more items doesn't thrill me enough to change that.
Instead, the really valuable thing that 4thewords offers to me is structure.
This sounds silly, but I suspect it's an autism thing: before I got into this game I used to stress about how much time in the day I should spend writing, how I should measure it, whether it should be an amount of time or an amount of words or an amount of pages, and if so, how much of each. I know a lot of people have different forms of advice about this! I would overthink it and be constantly unsure if the amount I was doing was the right one.
A game like 4thewords abstracts that level of decision making away. The amount of writing I should do in one sitting is fight the next monster. (It's slightly more complicated than that - some of the monsters are very small, for instance, so I put them into groups - but not very.)
It's varied enough, because the monsters are all different sizes, that it doesn't start to feel stultifying and samey; but it's also simple enough that it doesn't take a lot of processing power to plan it out.
Also, each monster comes with a pair of progress bars showing how many of the required words I've written and how much time is left. Being able to see that information graphically takes a cognitive load off, too. Sometimes - not always - if I'm in a headspace where writing feels too hard, and I can't focus on anything, just starting up a monster and watching the timeline tick down will help me to start getting a few words out despite myself.
Anyway. It doesn't fix the problem where fun little projects are more tempting to do than the one that I'm actually getting paid for. (Nobody in 4thewords checks up on what kind of words I'm writing...) But it does make a few things easier. So now "playing a weird cute monster game" is one of the tools in my writer toolbox.
