Pink Squiggles and Dominoes – How Signs of the Sojourner Simulates Collective Trauma

Sometimes I think about how COVID-19 has impacted not just how we wash our hands and protect our health in public, not just how we work and socialize, but how we communicate. Here in Australia, terminologies like “flattening the curve,” “Stage 4 Restrictions,” “PCRs” and “Rapid Antigen Tests” now roll off our tongues without a moment’s hesitation to betray the fact that these were completely unknown concepts just a few years ago. Even those of us who weren’t hit hard by the pandemic have learned to speak this once-foreign language, peppering our conversations with it so fluidly it feels like second nature: How have you been? Have you gotten COVID yet? How’d you get through lockdown? (A lot of wine and crying, thanks for asking, and you?) For better or worse, COVID-19 has irrevocably altered the way we talk to each other, creating a new global language that both binds and strains our social relationships.

Signs of the Sojourner is a game about relationships – the give-and-take of conversation, the joys and disappointments of making a new friend or letting an old one down, the ways in which world events inevitably make their way into our speech and even our identities. As you journey to neighboring towns and distant lands in search of rare and valuable goods to stock in your struggling shop back home, you’ll encounter a roster of interesting strangers. It’s up to you to interact with them by engaging in conversations via a card game. 

Like a domino, each card has a symbol on its left and right, and each conversation is a string of cards, as both yourself and the character you are talking to take turns placing a card, trying to match the symbol played before it. You need to select a card that will both match the previous card’s symbol, and leave the other person with a symbol they are likely to be able to match. There are only so many mismatches that can happen before the conversation breaks down, but succeeding can fetch you anything from a jar of pickles to a juicy secret that progresses the story.   

Aside from the tantalizing mysteries of its main narrative, Signs of the Sojourner contains a remarkably poignant simulation of real-world dynamics through its card mechanics. It cleverly depicts individual differences in personality – some people are easier to get along with and can handle several failures before they give up on you; with others, you only get one shot to break their stony defenses. At one point you pick up a canine friend, with whom “conversations” always succeed, because of course, a dog’s love transcends words. And by limiting your deck to just ten measly cards, and thus making sure you can only be fluent in a few cultural customs, it simulates the way in which travel can change a person – as you pick up the traits of the creative Easterners (represented by a blue diamond) or the direct and forceful Northerners (purple square), you may end up losing the gentle and empathetic manner native to your hometown (orange circle). 

This would all be fascinating enough on its own, but Sojourner introduces a new mechanic in its middle act that adds a whole new level of emotional resonance. About halfway through the game, there’s a giant earthquake (“the Cataclysm”) that destroys entire towns. Suddenly, refugees start popping up in the less-affected cities, causing the residents to become suspicious and cold towards outsiders. And a new symbol starts appearing in people’s card decks – a pink squiggle depicting the state of being “distressed and grieving”. This squiggle can mess up entire interactions as you try and stay on topic while your partner derails the conversation by playing a squiggle on your triangle, apologizing as they struggle to process their grief (“Sorry, I haven’t been myself lately”, “Now’s not the time”). 

The most heart-wrenching moment comes when you encounter Lars, one of the aforementioned refugees, in a city far from his flooded hometown. Eyes downcast and clothes mudstained, he tries his best to tell you about everything he’s been through. But his deck is chock full of squiggles, and attempts to connect fail again and again as his trauma renders him confused, discombobulated, and eventually frustrated with both himself and you. I played through the game four times, and I never managed to successfully complete a conversation with Lars post-Cataclysm, turning my back and leaving him muttering to himself on the street every time. 

I think about real-life refugees, displaced and scrambled and unable to even communicate their pain to the people around them. I think of my parents when they were freshly immigrated, trying frustratedly to adapt to a culture that didn’t click with the way they spoke and saw the world. And I think about how conversations have become more difficult in the wake of COVID-19, how they’ve become punctuated by jarring intrusions that remind us afresh of the new discombobulated reality we live in. The dinner-table conspiracy theories, the awkward silences, the way my cousin looked at me when I said I was vaccinated. The way I sometimes struggle to put words and thoughts together ever since the stifling mundanity of all those prolonged lockdowns broke my brain and fogged up my cognitive functions.    

But even as the pink squiggles of our collective trauma strain our conversations and fracture our relationships, they’ve also formed a connective tissue. Travel to any country in the world and you’ll encounter similar conversations about restrictions and masks and infection. You’ll find the same kinds of questions and ice breakers: How have you been? Have you gotten COVID yet? How’d you get through lockdown? Catastrophes don’t just break us – they create a shared vocabulary of loss and recovery that allows us to reach out and connect with others who’ve been through more or less the same thing. In Signs of the Sojourner, having conversations with people post-Cataclysm allows you to slowly add more cards with pink squiggles into your deck, turning what was once a communication barrier into an opportunity for connection as you match another person’s squiggle with your own. You took up embroidery and gardening during lockdown? Me too! 

As satisfying as it is to string a chain of pink squiggles together with your partner, creating connection and empathy out of suffering, it’s difficult to pull off. Adding those pink cards to your deck means sacrificing other valuable conversation cards, and something about this too rings true to the social effects of our present cataclysm. Sometimes it seems that the new language of confirmed cases and community spread has not just added to our conversations, but erased something – the ability to carry on a “normal” conversation untouched by the trauma of the past two years, untainted by those pesky pink squiggles. Maybe I’m deluded to still be pining for this version of “normal”, as though the world hasn’t irreversibly changed. When I played Signs of the Sojourner, I shunned those pink symbols and the languages they forced me to give up, just like I find myself avoiding the dreaded “C” word whenever I’m in conversation with a stranger, not knowing if the dominoes are going to stand firm or go tumbling. If I’m being honest, I don’t want to clash or connect over shared suffering; I just want to not suffer. But that’s not an option – in real life or in the game. 

Signs of the Sojourner offers an elegant and touching depiction of the small ways in which collective trauma can transform our perception of reality, and with it our everyday linguistic experience. And in the absence of simple answers to the difficulties of re-building connection with others in the wake of a tragedy, it refuses to push you into any desired solution. You can build your deck any way you want to and still play well – shun the squiggles or fill your deck with them, the game of life progresses regardless. 

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