I had the pleasure to chat with Emily Zhu 朱保敬. What follows is a truncated and edited transcript of the strangest interview I have ever, and likely will ever, conduct. It covered topics ranging from Hamlet and Hofstadter to horses and hentai, Dark Souls and dark pacts. We brushed upon Norse poems and pyramid texts. I only wish we’d had more time.
“Do I have to keep this family friendly?” Emily, whose username implies that they are either a dragon who fornicates, or one who fornicates with dragons, asks. The question would arise multiple times.
As they joined the call, a chorus of music announced their presence. I laughed.
Alex: Oh, you have walk-up music!
Emily: Yeah, I have walk-up music. I forgot that would happen.
No further explanation was sought or offered.
Alex: What is your role in the RPG space?
Emily: Starting off with a great question! To be honest, that’s a question that I’ve given quite a lot of thought to because I think of myself as less of a presence in the space than a lot of others. I’ve got a very demanding day job at the moment, and so I haven’t been able to be as present as I would have liked to in the past. I haven’t been as able to keep up with conversations and various iterations and really be part of the conversation. But so far as I see it, my sort of spot in the space is I support a lot of people, a lot of really cool people I’m lucky to be friends with. So I get to engage in a lot of really interesting discussions. And then sometimes someone will produce a game or an idea or object that I just have to respond to, and then I will end up making some manner of game about that.
Alex: Anything lately?
Emily: For example, Jay Dragon [of Possum Creek Games] currently has a game jam on about silence in games. And I saw that and immediately went, well, you know what I’ve got to do for that. So I’ve got a game that I’m making for it, which I hope to have done by the time, which is sort of a punchline all in all, which I think is part of a conversation as well.
Alex: What do you mean by a punchline? Can you elaborate on that?
Emily: Well, sure, not to spoil for, you know, whenever this game comes out, but—
Alex: If it’s a spoiler, you can keep your peace.
Emily: Well, I’ll talk around it a little bit. Silence as a mechanic in games is something that you can do a ton with. And there are many interesting, on a purely technical sort of craft, formal systems sort of level, tons that you can do with it.
Emily: But immediately my first thought was, well, there’s also a silence in the text. So we can leave a lacuna in a text here. We can maybe just leave a page or two blank.
Alex: I like that a lot. I’m already laughing just at the thought of unexpected silences in the text.
Emily: I think I’m going to really have fun with it.
Alex:You mentioned stepping away, being less active because of a day job. I will say, you were rather hard to track down! I couldn’t find you on Bluesky, for example.
Emily: When Twitter was around, it was sort of my professional presence.[Now defunct] Co-host, I considered using briefly. I have a Bluesky, but I don’t really use it much. Let me have a peek… yeah, the lats thing I re-skeeted was I think three days, ago, and it’s a riff on a Hamlet / Dark Souls joke. So I don’t really use it too much. I have a Tumblr, which I use, but, mostly I use these for very personal, you know, passing shitposts around type purposes. And there’s not really anywhere that I have a good professional presence anymore, unfortunately.
Alex: That makes sense. I first came across you on Tumblr, I believe, with a text from Ten Thousand Days For the Sword, which is not actually out. I believe that’s an upcoming tactical game, right?
Emily: Yes, I would say so.
Alex: The intro to that is very different.
Emily: (laughter). It was one of those things, which is pretty funny, because another portion of the professional presence that I’m awful at is marketing. And anytime I put something out, I go, well, shit, I’ve got to write some ad copy now. So it absolutely was not meant to be that.
Alex: It’s one of my favorite pieces of writing. Yu open with this incredible scene of someone filling up their horse with gasoline.
Emily: It was just something that I sort of came up with off the dome. I had this vision of a horse drinking gasoline in service of Gasoline Fist, which is a martial arts style in Ten Thousand Days for the Sword. And I was like, I have to put these words onto the screen right now. I think there’s like three typos in there. You know, it’s horrible grammar or whatever. And I hit post, and I came back, you know, it was at like one in the morning or something. And I woke up the next morning, and I was like, oh, okay, people like that one.
Alex: I’m not very active on Tumblr, but whenever that comes across my timeline I have to pass it on. There’s one line I love in particular where you say something like “She gives you a look like you know oh you know how it is. You don’t.” Just no, not a clue.
Emily: You know how it is.
Alex: Ten Thousand Days for the Sword is a tactical game. The Itch page for it is blank, but I did find a playtest packet somewhere else. After I found the horse text, I said, “I need more of this!”
Emily: Yes, there’s a sort of secret playtest version around. It’s password protected, and the password is sword. In fact, the play for Ten Thousand days, unfortunately, is a little bit shorter than my original ambitions for it. I’ll give you the history behind that, it’s a bit of fun.
Alex: Please.
Emily: So, I am prone to taking a game concept and just sort of whittling away at it forever and ever and ever. I found recently the doc where I first started writing that game, I started five years ago. And then the first version of it, I published a couple years ago and, you know, trickling updates into it ever since. But knowing this tendency in myself, I often engage in a pact with my friends — Do I have to be family-friendly on this interview?
Alex: Not at all.
Emily: Okay. It’s the Hentai Dollars pact. And the rules of the Hentai Dollars Pact are: I will choose, for example, you may arbitrate the pact for me and I will say I am signing this dark and foul pact. I pledge to have something released or finished or whatever by such and such a date. And if I don’t have it done by that date, I will forfeit $10 to you and you will take my $10 and go on Steam and Itch and wherever you like and buy $10 worth of the worst Hentai games that you can find with my money and I am required to then play those on stream for everyone’s pleasure and my humiliation.
Alex: That’s strong motivation!
Emily: It’s terrifically powerful. I have yet to fail the pact. It’s very effective.
Alex: Shifting gears, the other work of yours that I’m most familiar with is Houses of the Sun by Night which is, if anything, the opposite of a tactical game. It’s a collection of mini games with just some of the most poetic language used to describe them. Can you talk about how that came about?
Emily: Sun by Night is really one of those that I polished for ages. I spent two years on that, just slowly polishing away little bits. The original was a couple of various concepts. There’s a big pot of ideas bubbling in my head all the time. And anything that I’m reading or watching or hearing about goes into this big pot. And then sometimes it’ll sort of curdle like cheese and a lump will float up that’s combined a few different ideas. I was watching a playthrough of Dark Souls at the time, and thinking about this dichotomy of darkness and light and death and hollowness and reincarnation and refilling and so forth.
Emily: There is an Egyptian story about the sun every night entering the underworld. It’s the various sun gods on the barque, the solar barque. And they enter the underworld and they pass through the gates of the underworld on the duat, which is, you know, sort of an underworld mirror of the Nile River, and every night he’s got to fight off demons and the great serpent, Apep, which is trying to eat him and also the entire world. And so, when an Egyptian dies, they sort of mimic this passage through the underworld. You’ve got to have the various spells in the pyramid text and you’ve got to have a heart which is lighter than a feather and so on and so forth. But this idea that the sun dies every evening and is reborn every morning, that resonated with me. I suppose it’s a theme that I keep coming back to.
Alex: The idea of reincarnation?
Emily: Right, and sort of passing through the underworld, as a mirror to life. Your journey through death being a mirror of your journey through life. And then it started accreting on these different ideas. I was reading Mobile Firebrand Zero at the time, which is a collection of mini-games in the same vein. It has Shall We Dance, a mini game about a dance, which I think Friends at the Table famously used to model a fight. Or maybe it was the other way, I forget. Afterwards, I read Stewpot by Takuma Okada and said to myself, “Well you’ve done it far better than I have, so there goes my feather in my hat.”
Emily: Something must have hit me with this idea of mini games that are separate but connected. I like to present a modular experience, so that you could pick out this portion and use it in some other game. I have some philosophical thoughts on that, but it really comes out of the fact that my first gaming group was and still is wedded to 5th edition D&D, the world’s unfortunately greatest role-playing game.
Emily: In order to take all these other hot, hot ideas from different games I was reading and talking about, I would just sort of slip it into D&D, like smuggling medicine into a little peanut butter ball, and come up with these bizarro mini-games and settings and so forth.
Alex: You’ve mentioned Dark Souls now twice in the time we’ve been talking here. Is that something that is a perpetual source of inspiration for you?
Emily: I hadn’t thought of it that way until recently. I’ve never actually even played the Dark Souls games.
Alex: Really?
Emily: I played Elden Ring, and I watched Dark Souls. There are concepts in it which speak very deeply to me, and so perhaps it’s not really Dark Souls itself, it’s just that it’s a place, you know, whoever’s working on Dark Souls has hit a lot of the same stuff that I love to hit on.
Emily: If you’d like the little postcard, writer’s history blurb, I had a pretty terrible time in high school. I often conceptualized it at the time, and I still sort of think of it that way, like I was pretty much dead, and I came back to life, but I’m still kind of dead. Which is a very Dark Souls vibe, and lends itself as a metaphor that can be applied to very many things.
Alex: I really love that you’re taking inspiration from the vibes rather than, you know, from the specific. A lot of adaptations, I feel, are direct, you know, it’s people saying, oh, I’m going to take this thing and I’m going to just turn it into a TTRPG.
Emily: I think that very often someone will write a game which is an attempt to translate very straightforwardly a piece of media. And really this is how I got into games when I was a kid, when I was in middle school, high school, I would encounter some piece of media, some book or some movie, and I would be obsessed with it and have not really anything to do with that obsession, no way to process that, except to I would write a game and be like, okay, if this was a tabletop game, what would it be and what would I be doing and how could I make that character, like writing fanfiction but in the format of a game rather than a story.
Emily: But you know as time goes on and I go forward, there comes a point where I would look back at that and go, well, okay, that has satisfied me in the making of it, but this game is just the original slightly worse. It’s not like a piece of fanfiction where you can extend on a bit of characterization or you can interpolate a missing scene. It was really just recreating the original and, you know, a copy of a copy is only ever a little bit worse. Well, not necessarily worse, but you’ve cut down. Sometimes you cut down and just cut down to the absolute heart of it and that’s really sharp and clear. But more often I would go, well, this feels like it’s half a game. This feels like it’s 60 or 70 percent of a game and at some point I was like, I’ve got a whole bunch of these half games. I’m just going to start crossbreeding them and go, all right, well, here’s a thought about Star Wars and I’m going to crossbreed it with a thought about, um, oh lord, what else? Probably Eragon or something. And then they start playing off each other and new tensions are formed.
Alex: There’s a lot of Star Wars in Eragon!
Emily: I was an incredible Eragon fan. I have so many thoughts on Eragon. I do think that this is sort of a pitfall that I’ve seen, you know, some games where they’re just trying to be like, you can play as the guys in Final Fantasy or you can play as Star Trek or whatever.
Alex: Right, right.
Emily: And there’s a great place for that and I really think that is very valuable and a lot of those games are brilliant at it. But more often I find myself like, okay, I’ve watched Star Trek, what else could we do with it? And some games are sharp and really looking within themselves and saying like, okay, yeah, I know that, like, what else do we do beyond Star Wars? I would encourage many to continue looking into that and going, you know, what else can I bring in that is new and strange, some new inspiration to crossbreed that is unexpected here?
Alex: Instead of making, as you put it, the same game but worse, you put a twist on it. If you could distill your process, what is the unique vibe that you bring to your works?
Emily: In many cases there’s a level of formalist, systemist, twists by which I mean, — my background is in math and in physics and in, you know, sort of arcane structures of logic and as a kid, I was quite obsessed with, Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.
Alex: I’m familiar with it, I actually have an unread copy on my nightstand.
Emily:It’s a big old chunker of a book and he had Metamagical Themas, which was small enough to actually, fit on a Kindle. I read it all the time, rereading it over and over. It’s about playing with structures To speak of Godel, Escher, and Bach is to say these mathematical structures in music, in art, in math are really the same thing. They twist around into the strange little braid that is our experience and our consciousness and our descriptions of reality and reality itself and the way that we think of things. So, okay, so put one pin in that for the moment, this idea of very abstract systems which we play with.
Alex: Okay.
Emily: Secondarily, I quite enjoyed Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities is the most famous, but you will also maybe have heard of If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler.
Alex: I’ve read that, and Baron in the Trees.
Emily: He’s got a few, including Six Memos for the Next Millennium. And you know, I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ve read the first two of those memos a jillion times now. First one’s on lightness, the second one on quickness. I think his memo on quickness is fantastically valuable. I cannot make heads or tails of lightness. There’s a portion where he says, “Have I now collected a great deal of threads in my hand? I have this thread on architecture, this thread on the moon, this thread on language and lightness, and this thread on, Roman mausoleums, and these all tie together”. And I’m like, Calvino, what are you talking about? I don’t understand. Speak clearly. Say a normal sentence.
Alex: Speak plainly, man!
Emily: In Invisible Cities, there’s a very particular structure. He’s got several categories of cities in memory or cities in the dead. And out of each, I think, 11 categories. Each category has five cities corresponding, but they are offset by one every time the category resets. And so if you look at the chapter list, you know, it looks sort of like sheet music in that you could see visually the pattern of what is going on, the sort of twisting around spiral. Which is fantastically hot to do in a book! So again, another pin in this idea of I am playing with the language, but I am playing with the structure in it. And so to return to the original question, I’m often playing with games and saying, well, what can I do here? What is the funniest way I could make this system? Could I make a game which has no concrete rules except for things the narrator has asked you to do or not do?
Emily: Could I make a game which is phrased entirely in terms of in-game rules or phrased entirely in terms of promises? Let’s return to Sun by Night. So the structure of Sun by Night, very secretly, is built on portions from a game called Chubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine by Jenna Moran, of whom I am an incredible, enormous fan, supporter, devotee. And Chubo’s sort of says there are eight, we’ll call them colors, eight genres, eight versions of a character’s story, eight moods. And so every character is on a character arc which follows one of these eight patterns of a particular story. And a silver arc is about a sort of, you’ve got this curse, you’ve got something heavy weighing on you, how do you progress through life and absorb it and digest it very slowly and eventually come to epiphany? Versus a black arc is about some mystic power in your life, some revelation outside your control and how that reaches into your life and transforms you and transforms those around you. And so in Sun by Night, my secret little game that I played with myself as I was writing the game is can I do that? The first half of Sun by Night, the houses of evening, all the way up until midnight, are a silver arc. They’re the story of first being dead and learning to process that and then being dead and being obsessed with it and then being dead and giving up about it and then you reach midnight.
Emily: And the second half is the houses of mourning which are a black arc about this new possibility of being reborn and therefore in those houses of mourning I’m also playing with this idea of oracles. So in the second half, every game after midnight, I forbid myself to roll dice normally. I have to use some other oracle though. I can play spin the bottle, I can draw cards, I can read tea leaves, whatever, but I was not allowed to play with formal dice. And so, you know, some strange restraint.
Alex: And that’s a restriction you chose to put on yourself.
Emily: Exactly so. And, you know, it was not chosen arbitrarily to come with this idea. When I call it an oracle, I mean that there’s a, oh lordy, I can never cite where I’m drawing ideas from, but I’m certain it was a Possum Creek blog, I’m reasonably sure, where they talk about oracles, the purpose of dice in games, when you roll the dice you don’t know what’s going to happen, and the purpose of this in a game to give you a third party arbiter, something you can blame if you roll badly, something to introduce uncertainty into the game, I thought was very interesting. Stranger Kings covers many of the same ideas. And so I said let’s play with oracles a little bit.And so I picked a lot that were based on ancient divination methods, you know, reading ink blots, and playing spin the bottle. I had one that I did cut out, originally I was going to ask you to read the entrails of a chicken, I was going to ask you to buy some chicken livers.
Alex: Chicken entrails?
Emily: Yes.
Alex: Wow! I can see how that would get cut.
Emily: Casting lots for the farming game, you know. So it’s a process of play with myself and seeing what can I do.
Alex: You say you come from a math and physics background, but what struck me about you, and what I’ve seen other designers, like Aaron Voigt, praise you for is your writing, it’s very evocative! You mentioned that House of the Sun took you two years, that Ten Thousand Days of the Sword is going on five years. What is your process to create such poetic language in your works?
Emily: I have to admit it’s a little funny because it’s rarely on the first thing on my mind. I’m always preoccupied with these systems and these funny little mechanical tricks I’m doing. The prose sort of happens by accident. It’s sort of a background process, a mystic process. It’s not conscious or deliberate. Okay to say mystic sounds it makes it sound like I’m really pretentious and fancy about it, but I just mean that it is a product of the way I think about language or about — A little bit further background: I am Chinese–American, my very first language was Cantonese but I picked up English from a pretty young age as soon as I was in school. So all my life I’ve been reading translations — my Chinese is terrible, to be clear. I can barely read. It’s a little better now, I’m working quite hard on it, but my reading is like a fifth, maybe sixth grade level in Hong Kong. So I’m reading Chinese in translation all the time, and when I was young reading C.S. Lewis, and a lot of British books, admittedly because I was sort of a teaboo at the time—
Alex: A teaboo, is that like a weeabo… for England?
Emily: Exactly so. And so I would read these, and not really understanding that there was a difference between British English and American English just saying well, I really perk up when I read this. The rhythm of this language is different, the way that they phrase these… like holding a knife backhand instead of front hand. It works just the same but it works very differently in the way that it does it. I perk up, I pay attention to it and so you know earlier I mentioned Italo Calvino, of course I haven’t read in the original I believe Le Città Invisibilii, in Italian was the original, and so a good portion of my admiration of that book is really owed to the translator who did an incredible job rendering this beautiful, beautiful, very light and airy English. So having read translation all my life and having dabbled, you know I played with, read a little bit of Egyptian pyramid text when I was in high school. Or I would play with old Norse poetry, which works totally differently! They do not worry about rhyme, they worry about rhythm and about alliteration, so you’d say, oh what’s that bit from Tolkien, “The days are gone down to darkness, now the mountain alone remains”? You’re interested in the syllables of stress and you break it up into little legs and each stressed portion alliterates the same. So I read that and immediately, although I am speaking English you understand that I am speaking a translation, that I have some other idea which is coming through.
Emily: And so all the time when I am writing I am translating a thought into writing. My first language really is thought and is a synesthetic little soup of what does this really mean to me? So I am always interested in interesting prose and I’m absorbing it and kind of soaking it up and playing with it. For example as I was working on Houses of the Sun By Night I was reading these Egyptian spells, and I was reading translations of the Descent of Inanna, and I was reading [The Odyssey], the Greek about when they go down into the underworld to talk to Tiresias and Achilles, and the way that these things are rendered, it gives a little bit of room to play with it at the same time.
Emily: I wrote much of the text for Sun by Night pretty early on and a few pieces were out of place and I kept going back to try and chip away at them chip away at them and every every pass through I’d read it and go, “I could fix up this sentence I could clean up this sentence I could sharpen this.” There’s this book, The Annals of the Parrigues by Emily Short. It is machine generated. To my understanding, Dr. Short1curated it. It’s a travelogue through like 1100s Europe, through the islands of the Parrigues. Each entry says, “We stopped at such-and-such town at the tavern with the goat’s skull for a sign, and there is a hill outside, and to sell flowers is illegal in this place. Try the mushroom soup.” But much of it is machine generated. Dr. Short collated a whole bunch of like actual entries of such medieval travelogues and then fired up a random generator and connected up sentences for much of it, and some portion of it she hand wrote. There is a little bit of a plot that unfolds in slowly throughout the especially the later chapters. Tt’s a beautiful book, but the important part to me is the appendix to Annals of the Parrigues where she talks about her methodology and she lays out this philosophy of there are five elements to the way that this book was written.
Emily: You can speak of venom versus salt you can speak of mushrooms versus beeswax and you can speak about an egg and depending on which lens you are viewing it through, you would have to speak differently about who wrote the book. If I say to speak of beeswax — which she says is something carefully gathered and then carefully made into candles — handwritten, hand–curated, handmade, well she decided which entries to collect to put into the machine, so it is Dr. Emily Short who wrote this book. But the mushroom is to say, “Well things pop up sometimes unexpectedly”, coincidence is what decided which, to put in but it is the machine that put, “Bribery is prohibited” next to this entry that says “All the guards must be bribed to enter the town.” That happened all on its own, and it’s this new coincidence which no one was looking for, so we should say the machine wrote the book. And salt is to talk about the grammar of the machine purely as a systematic functional thing, and venom is to say, “Yes but what really matters is the sentence that hits you like a punchline, to have a list that says it is illegal in this town to commit murder, arson, or pickpocketing, fine.” A venomous sentence is to say, “It is illegal in this town to commit murder, arson, or fornication with a priest.” Oh that one tells you a story! And so now I am thinking always about this idea of how venomous is this sentence? How short, punchy, sharp is it, and do I need a little bit of a longer run-up sentence to wind you up to it, or am I too long and do I need to cut down to a punchline?
Alex: Wow, thank you for this glimpse into your process!
Emily: It’s a very meandering one I’m afraid.
Alex: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Emily: A game is a conversation between all players, but secondly between the players’ table and the designer. The game is made of language and the game is a language for that conversation. The purpose of that language, then, is to invite players into the conversation, to provoke, to incite, to inspire. That is the law and the whole of the law.
You can find the work and games of Emily Zhu 朱保敬 on itch.io.
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At the time of publication, it appears that Emily Short has a Masters of education, and not a doctorate. ↩