When a solo game produces a private archive

Apothecaria asks a solo player to take the role of a village witch and make a journal from potion-making and the stories that develop around it. The publication supplies a setting and procedures. The player’s record becomes a particular account of what happened in that play. The creator’s description

That record is a second object. It may contain drawings, invented recipes and relationships that the published game never specified. A library can provide the game and a place to play while leaving the resulting journal with its maker, who may want to keep the writing private or share only a selected passage.

I am concerned here with how participant-created records are handled in a library activity. The examples come from the games’ stated forms of play. I have not examined private player journals, and fictional narration should not be treated as evidence of a player’s biography or psychological condition.

Different games leave different records

The Wretched describes solo play using cards, a tumbling block tower and a microphone. Its premise places the player in the role of a lone survivor aboard a damaged spacecraft. A spoken record can therefore be part of the designed activity, with the player’s voice giving form to the fiction.

Artefact shifts the perspective to a magical object passing through successive keepers. Its description includes sketching and developing the object’s history. The resulting material can be used as fiction in its own right or carried into another game.

These forms create different practical questions. A notebook can be taken home. An audio file may have been recorded on a shared device. A drawing may be photographed during a workshop. Each route changes who can encounter the record and how easily it can be copied or separated from its original context.

The difference is not a reason to treat solo games as unusually dangerous. It is a reason to make the activity’s handling of records clear. Participants should know whether a device stores their recording, whether staff plan to retain anything and whether sharing is part of the event or an optional later choice.

The player makes meaning through the publication

Louise Rosenblatt’s account of the literary transaction treats reading as an event involving a reader and a text, with attention and response shaped in that encounter. In a journaling game, the player’s written or spoken contribution makes part of that response available as another text. The published prompts do not predetermine every association or narrative decision.

That distinction matters when discussing the resulting journal. A prompt can be identified in the game. A player’s answer belongs to a particular act of interpretation and invention. Another person following the same prompt may produce a different story without either record being a transparent measure of the game’s meaning for everyone.

A workshop can invite discussion of those choices by asking what a prompt made possible and how the participant developed it, without requiring anyone to explain whether the fiction draws on personal experience. Someone may want to discuss sentence rhythm, a drawing or a surprising plot turn while keeping other associations private.

For academic teaching, the journal can support analysis of how rules and prompts shape composition. The analysis should identify what comes from the publication and what the participant supplied. If the journal is being assessed or retained, those conditions need to be established as part of the activity rather than discovered after the writing is complete.

Privacy depends on how information moves

Helen Nissenbaum’s theory of contextual integrity examines informational expectations through context, roles and patterns of distribution. The relevant question is more specific than whether a piece of information has ever been shared. It asks who shares what with whom, under which conditions.

A participant reading one passage to a small workshop has made that passage available in a particular setting. The act does not automatically establish an expectation that a recording will appear on the library website, enter a research collection or be reused in promotional material months later.

Those are separate information flows. I would describe them separately and give the participant a meaningful choice about each proposed use. The discussion can be brief and ordinary. What matters is that the person understands the audience, the material involved and what the library intends to do with it.

The theory does not supply the local answer by itself. Participants’ actual preferences, the institution’s responsibilities and the design of the event still matter. Its value is in making the change of context visible before the library treats a creative output as freely available institutional content.

Design the activity around the participant’s record

For a public-library workshop, I would let participants retain their journals and make sharing optional. If shared recording equipment is used, the event needs a clear way to transfer a participant’s file and handle remaining copies according to the agreed arrangement. The facilitator should explain that process before recording begins.

A participant who wants to donate a journal can have a separate conversation about the collection’s purpose and access arrangements. The donation should not be inferred from attendance or from a casual photograph of the finished pages. A creator’s willingness to show something once is useful information, but it is not a complete description of every future use they welcome.

The Zine Librarians Code of Ethics provides related guidance about context, creator wishes and the difference between access and reproduction. Applied to player-made records, that guidance encourages an account of what the library is collecting and whose contribution it is describing.

A solo game can leave a compelling archive of invented events. Its value does not depend on the library owning that archive. A successful workshop can end with participants taking their work home, knowing how to continue the game and choosing for themselves whether another reader ever encounters the record.