Treasure Shrines
Created: 2021-12-22 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-10 (19:13:10)Status: completed
I’ve managed to make two games titled Treasure Shrine, both of which involve travelling into the forest to leave or look at offerings. Something about this theme really stuck with me for a period, thinking about the way material things and fragments of poetry drift though our lives, from person to person, and are usually eventually forgotten or lost.
There were plans for a third game in which you would descend into the basement of your apartment building to drop things down the ancient well, and bring either good fortune or unhappiness to yourself and your neighbours. One day.
Treasure Shrine I
Visit a shrine in the woods, and note down what you find in its pigeonholes each day. Try befriend the cats and other things that live in the vicinity.
This game was made as a gift for someone, a way of stuffing a whole bunch of shared memories and artefacts and lines out of books and musicals and poems into a single compact space. A goofy way of telling them how much they meant to me. It may not be that interesting to anyone else.
Treasure Shrine II
Wander about the neighborhood of your city. Visit different places at different times of day. Collect weird objects. Leave them in the shrine in the forest.
I was thinking about Taipei when I made this game. Garbage trucks playing Fur Elise will be familiar to anyone else who has visited that city and wandered its streets just before evening.
A lot of objects you can collect are based on things I found or collected in the month I was there. At the time, 7-11 was running a promotion where with every purchase you were given Snoopy stickers. I think the idea was to collect enough to redeem them for prizes. I stuck them in my sketchbooks and journals and over everything else I’d taken with me, and redeemed none of them.
The streets and places of interest are half-Taipei, half-nowhere. The treasure shrine is purely imaginary. Even though there were lots of shrines and temples, I didn’t come across any tiny rooms in the woods.
I’ve always wanted to explore further the mechanic of relinquishing your items to a shrine, or down a well, or to someone, and having it alter the world in subtle ways. Night Garden, a later gift to the same friend, worked out to be another version of this.
Spoiler alert. Leaving things in the treasure shrine may do nothing. I peversely rather like that this component of the game is totally useless, that you get no clear reward for relinquishing your items to it. A line from John Ashbery’s prose-poem The New Spirit:
“How like children in the way of thinking that some beatific scrap may always fall and as time goes by and nothing ever happens one is not disappointed but secretly pleased and confirmed in one’s superstition: the magic world really does exist. Its dumbness is the proof of this. Indeed any sign of activity on its part would be cause for alarm, since it does not need us, need not signal its clarion certainties into our abashed, timid, half-make-believe commerce of everyday” (317).
See also
References
- Ashbery, John, 1997, The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry, Ecco Press
Endmatter
Tags: @completed @my-games @twine @virtual-spaces
Return to: Ormulum