Remember August is an experimental immersive live keepsake game, about old forgotten friendships and lost memories, played to the ritual and cadence of sending and receiving mail. Remember August is played by writing and mailing one half of a letter correspondence to your childhood friend, who is lost in time.
In February 2022, players received the letters via postal mail, and were asked to respond to their friend August. There were eight letters in total, approximately two a week. Players were encouraged to use the hashtag #rememberaugust when posting their letters on social media.
Remember August won the 2022 Indiecade Tabletop Game Award.
writing Letters
This game is born out of my love of mail art and epistolary narrative forms, the United States Postal Service, and collaborative storytelling. It draws inspiration from Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine series, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s incredible queer time travel novella This is How You Lose The Time War, and Space Gnome Space, a casual mail LARP that I began at the beginning of 2020. It is designed at the intersection of experimenting with direct mail as a venue for art instead of spam mail, ruminating on long lost and once-beloved friendships, spending time in historical letter archives, and a burgeoning relationship with a beautiful typewriter(all of the game's letters were typed on a 1955 Olivetti Lettera 22).
Six thousand letters
I sent over 6400+ letters in one month as the primary game mechanic of this game - an experiment in harnessing direct mail infrastructure to make art, instead of sending spam and political mail.
It was a one-time event, but all assets are available for anyone who would like to mount this game again. An archive booklet of all letters, and all files, can be downloaded on itch.io.
