Summary

Chapter 3 – Sean describes how, in the long days and weeks of his recovery in hospital and afterwards, he created the game Trace Italian. He starts by describing how he became obsessed with its name, an adaptation of a term for a particular kind of star-shaped series of walls surrounding and defending medieval castles. He then describes how, while lying in his hospital bed, he developed a story to go with this idea: of a nuclear apocalypse, of survivors building a Trace Italian over the course of several centuries, of how the fortress became both a real and a mythic goal for other “hominid” survivors, and how a layered city and sequence of dungeons came to be formed beneath it. He goes on to describe how game play originated, and continues to work even in the age of the internet: players express interest...