The carrier bag
Le Guin rescued the shape of my game before I knew it needed rescuing. Her argument: the first human tool was not the spear, it was the bag — the thing that carries. But we told ourselves the spear story instead, the hero-with-a-weapon story, the single straight line of conflict to climax to kill. She offers the other story: the container, the gatherer, the many small things brought home.
My game is a bag, not a spear
There is no hero in Saltwater Almanac, no weapon, no boss, no straight line to a victory. There is Wren with a bag — an almanac — walking the shore and gathering: this tide, that weather, the name of a pool, who left this week. The play is collection, not conquest. The drama is what you chose to carry, not what you managed to kill. See The Almanac Mechanic — the whole system is a bag you fill, and the fullness is the story.
Why it matters past craft
Because the spear story insists the point of a life is to win, and the sea will not let you win — that is The sea rises regardless. The bag story does not need you to win. It needs you to gather well. Le Guin calls the novel a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another. So is an almanac. So, I think, is a life you have paid attention to — a bag of noticed things, carried out of a place that is going under.
The spear ends the story. The bag continues it. I am making a bag.