Letters from strangers

The expansion came out two weeks ago, and with it the quest I wrote about in May, the one about a man looking for his brother's grave. I said I'd tell you a little more when it was out. What I want to tell you about, though, isn't the quest. It's the letters.

I've had mail from players before. A few times a year someone finds the studio's address and writes to say they liked a character, or hated one, or found a typo, which is fair. The mailroom keeps a tray for those, and every couple of months someone drops two or three envelopes on my desk.

This month it was a stack held together with a rubber band. Then another. The email that comes through the studio has been forwarded to me in batches with subject lines like "more for Tess." People are writing about the brother's grave quest. Not about the reward, or the fight at the end, or whether it's a bug that the lantern goes out. About their brothers. Their sisters, their fathers, a friend who drowned, a grandmother they never got to say goodbye to. A woman in Texas wrote four pages about her twin. A teenager wrote to ask whether I'd made it up or whether it happened to me, and then, in a postscript, said it didn't matter, and I think he was right.

One letter I've read more times than the others. It's from a man whose brother died a long way from home, years ago, and whose family never found out where he was buried. He said he'd played the quest at two in the morning, after everyone in his house was asleep, and that when he reached the end he sat at the computer for an hour without moving. He said he wasn't writing to thank me, exactly. He wanted somebody to know he'd been there.

I won't tell you any more of what he wrote, because it's his. But I wrote back to him on Thursday night, by hand, on the good paper, and it took me three drafts and most of a box of tissues.

My mother brought me up to answer every letter, and to answer it by hand. Her rules are simple: you write back within a week, you answer what was asked, and you say one true thing about yourself, so it isn't only an answer. I've kept to them since I was nine. I didn't expect to be keeping to them for strangers, at this rate, in July. I'm answering every one. The emails too: I write those out by hand first and then type them, which is slow and makes no sense, and which I'm going to keep doing, because it's the only way I know how to say anything that matters.

I've written hundreds of quests. Most of them people play and forget, and that's fine, that's the job. I've never had one come back to me like this. I don't quite know what to do with it, except answer.

If you've ever written to a stranger about something they made, did they write back?