Thousand Lives

I like history as a subject, but for a long time I thought I didn’t, because it’s often taught as a zoomed out, big-picture overview with few points of connection to individual human lives. This work illustrates a perfect way to counter that remove, presenting decades of Poland’s history through the lens of how it impacts, and is impacted by, one particular woman.

Thousand Lives has an unusual format for IF, each of its six chapters delivered by email 24 hours after you make the preceding chapter’s choice. A decade can pass in a few hundred words, with events both large- and small-scale described in brief summaries. Every chapter ends with a life-changing choice, establishing the path the PC will take through the next few years.

The story is in second-person, but because of the broad strokes, I didn’t feel immersed in the character; I was picking choices for her rather than as her. I thus found it easy to choose the more noble actions—for instance, when (Spoiler - click to show)I the character was told I was tempted to sleep with my imprisoned friend’s partner (“One warm evening, after a few drinks of moonshine, he kisses you and asks you to stay at his apartment. Your body wants this. Your heart wants this”), I as the player was not actually tempted, because I didn’t want to play out the narrative arc of her betraying her friend.

But while at first that remove led me to easily pick the choices that seemed like “the right thing to do”, on my final choice, in chapter five, I wavered. Here, I had to choose between (Spoiler - click to show)exposing files revealing political corruption that also implicated the PC’s brother, or covering up the story. I hadn’t gotten to know the brother at all; I didn’t particularly care about him as a character. But that didn’t matter, because once again I didn’t want to play out an arc of personal betrayal—even though it probably would have more sense for my heretofore politically-minded PC to make that sacrifice in service of the greater good.

Typically, after finishing a branching work like this, I’d immediately restart and play through again in order to see different outcomes. But Thousand Lives explicitly does not want you to do this—the description says “you have to live with your choices. There’s no do-overs or restarts.” If you return to an email and try clicking the other choice, you’ll get a message saying “You’ve already made your choice for this chapter. Sorry, no do-overs!” The title is "Thousand Lives", but while many different lives are possible, the format impresses on you that everyone only gets one life; that we can wonder about the roads not traveled, but never know where they would have led. This is a work where each reader collaborates with the author to tell a story, and seeing other versions of that story isn’t the point. But, while that's my conclusion about the intention behind this choice of format, I do have to admit that a big part of me would still appreciate the ability to easily replay after doing an initial "six days of emails" round.

Clearly, this work gave me a lot of thoughts about form, point-of-view, branching narratives, and the player’s relationship to the player character. I appreciate all of that, just as I appreciate the look at late-twentieth-century Poland, and the focus on one woman’s life there.

After all this time, I can finally say something about this game. This might be less about the plot and more an unorganized personal talk because, in case you can’t tell by the location I set on this site, I am Polish, born and raised, so this one hits particularly close home, pun perhaps intended.

Growing up in Poland, you can’t help but get tangled in history, whether you like it or not. My Warsaw friends grew up seeing all the plaques about Warsaw Uprising and World War II scattered about the city. I, growing up in the countryside, listened to tales of my grandmother, telling me about the troubles with Nazi soldiers coming to nearby villages, and to tales of my parents who grew up in the turbulent times of economical transformations. I saw my father’s old Russian dictionary, I saw farming machines with Cyrillic writing on them. It wasn’t that long ago since the country had to come out and rebuild itself from ashes of war and it was even less time since first (partially) free elections – to put it into perspective, they were 36 years ago and I’m 25.

There’s a lot of say about the way Polish people still bear the scars of past wars, transformations, and uncertainties, even if they were born long after the time they were over. Ever since I was a little child, I was bombarded with tales of heroism of child soldiers and hardships that people had to endure before me, tying my Polish identity to glorious struggle and suffering. Growing up in the countryside, I was also exposed to some joys of Polish folklore, which somewhat balanced my perception of what it means to be Polish and didn’t create an image of eternal pain and ruin, but my city friends didn’t get the same treatment.

Why am I telling you all of this? It’s because this need for glorifying suffering and leveraging it against others runs very deep in the way Polish history is treated, and it certainly makes its way into the historical genre of works. It’s one of the reasons why I simply can’t read it most of the time. I know we suffered because it’s written in every inch of the dirt I walk on, in the very flag that I keep on the display in my room at all times: white and red, with red being the symbol of bravery and blood spilled in all the struggles that we had to endure. There tends to be a lot of pathos and moralization involved in historical fiction (and non-fiction) that I just can’t handle anymore and I was afraid that Thousand Lives might be one of those works that I’ll have to just power through. Fortunately, I was wrong.

The premise of Thousand Lives is simple: you are a woman, living in the incredibly uncertain times of a variety of Polish transformations. You take this woman through decades of her life in a series of six short e-mails, sent daily, ending always with a binary choice which shifts the events. Things are written in a very matter-of-fact tone: this happens. Then this happens. It feels like reading someone’s life summary from the perspective of an objective observer. The choices themselves, for me at least, weren’t always easy, and I can’t help but wonder if this is because I have the necessary cultural context to fully grasp how hard they truly were. This isn’t to discredit any non-Polish readers, of course, but when you grew up listening to people talk about all of this, when you know the actual moral and social weight of those choices, it feels more real. This could’ve easily been a story of any other lady I once passed by on the street. I tried my best to go on the “revolutionary” path, imagining my character to be one of the more hopeful people in the times of terrible transformations, and I ended up going on a pretty revolutionary/radical path, taking that “high ground” where truth and freedom were supposed to prevail, but I still “broke” and buried the story that could incriminate my brother. I can’t even tell you why. It’s just a story, after all, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even then, I didn’t feel judged by the text for my choices: they simply summarized what happened, and I can’t be more grateful for it. There is recognition in it: times were hard and everyone did what they could to survive.

Every day, I waited for another e-mail to come, sometimes sitting and refreshing my inbox when time came for it. With the real historical postage stamps attached, it felt like getting a post card with pieces of the story on them, and it does a lot to create a certain kind of atmosphere. In every e-mail, the footer says clearly that it’s all in memory of Bogumiła Borowicz, who was, as the site for the game says, a genocide survivor, one of the first female engineers in post-war Poland, an activist, and the most fun grandma anyone could ever ask for. For me, it's pretty obvious that Thousand Lives wasn’t meant to be yet another historical Polish project of the “we suffered sooo much and that’s why we’re great” variety. It’s a project made out of passion and love, acknowledging the complicated nature of the mess that Poland was (I mean, it still is, but y’know, a bit less). I don’t know which paths that I chose were inspired by Bogumiła Borowicz’s own life – there could be an overlap – but there was authenticity in what I read. I’m not going to go for another round of playing as I think that the purpose is to live your life once, then never again, but if I didn’t think that, I’d check other possibilities.

Maybe my opinion is biased due to my own life and upbringing but frankly, I don’t necessarily care in this case. This might be one of the only historical Polish works which I actually enjoyed reading, so of course I’ll recommend it. And if you’ll excuse my Polish: dziękuję panu, panie Borowicz, to była naprawdę piękna rzecz.

For all that we are changeable creatures, most of the poignancy of our temporary lives comes from their implacable, irrevocable permanence. As the poet says:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

One of the pleasures of games is the escape-hatch they offer from the tyranny of causality: feel free to move that Moving Finger back a ways, thanks to omnipresent save/load functionality, no tears – much less piety or wit! – required. The ability to explore what might have been is incredibly potent, but the tradeoff is that it’s also inhuman; there’s nothing in anyone’s lived experience remotely like thinking “nah, I didn’t like how that played out” and pushing rewind. So it’s perhaps no surprise that some designers perversely constrain the play of contingency in their games, in search of immediacy or meaning. Permadeath is one key strategy these folks pursue, forcing a player to slow down and consider the consequences of their actions – but this approach isn’t as powerful in narrative-focused games, as most stories don’t hinge on the extended moment-by-moment drama of “is the main character going to die now? How about now? How about now?” No, for narrative games the mechanic of choice is the Game You Can Only Play Once: by forcing you to live with your choices, removing easy options like reload and undo, and sometimes even preventing the player from restarting from a blank slate, you create a game that’s like, well, life: no do-overs.

Thousand Lives takes things one step further: this biographical game about a woman navigating the ebbs and flows of life in postwar Poland plays out in real time, forcing you to wait a day to see the consequences of your actions. Structurally, it hearkens back play-by-post games of the 80s and 90s (heck, the game’s main visual motif is a series of historical postage stamps); after you sign up to play, you get an email each day, laying out a bit of story and then prompting you for a choice that determines which bit of narrative you’ll get on the morrow. If you get buyer’s remorse half a second after clicking submit – which happened to me more than once in the week it took me to play – well, that’s just how it is, presumably you can relate!

There are dangers to this approach – most notably, each of the vignettes is relatively short, perhaps a thousand words or so, and a day in 2025 can feel very, very long. Fortunately, Thousand Lives does a good job of recapping the previous day’s action at the top of each email, re-grounding the player in the story before pushing it ahead.

And it’s a story I was very interested in. I’m by no means deeply versed in this era, but as a child in the 80s, I knew about the Polish pope, heard dockworkers chanting “Lech Walesa!” on the TV – I learned the word “solidarity” from the name of the union. I’m a sucker for a historical game, and the history Thousand Lives has to relate, of Poland’s suffering under and then emergence from the Iron Curtain, is dramatic – plus, it’s got a unique viewpoint character. The protagonist is a woman based on the author’s grandmother, and while her biography will vary depending on your decisions, she’s got a compelling personality: smart, caring, and willing to make tough choices to protect her dreams and her family (though of course she might not be able to do both).

Those choices are a high point of the game, as well they should be. They all feel impactful, and I agonized over most of them. Reflecting societal constraints under Communism (and capitalism, once it arrives!), only a few are about expressing a preference for what the protagonist wants their life to look like – most are about trade-offs, asking you what you’re willing to give up for one thing you want. I think you can play the game to create a version of the protagonist who’s completely uncompromising, but while I can see the temptations of that path, I wasn’t confident enough to take it, instead tacking back and forth with circumstances, sometimes pushing for my ambitions, sometimes settling for less when the cost to me or my loved ones felt like it would be too dear.

So this is a successful game, I think, but I admit my admiration is a bit chillier than I’d prefer. Partially this is because of how zoomed-out it is – Thousand Lives covers 75 years in the course of six chapters, none of which are especially long. Trying to cover a decade in a thousand words inevitably means that there’s not much texture; situations are described, but not events, trends, but not moments. While the writing successfully conveys some of the personality of the various people in the protagonist’s family, they never truly came alive for me. As a result, while the dilemmas the game regularly threw up were intellectually engaging – I didn’t want any of my loved ones to be imprisoned by the army! – they lacked the emotional heft that comes with specificity.

Paradoxically, the time lag and no-backsies mechanics might have also drained some of my choices of their impact. Given that it took some time and effort to get myself back in the cultural space of Communist Poland each time I got one of the game’s emails, I can’t help wondering whether longer, more intense engagement would have made it more memorable. But more significantly, in a game like this, there are no right answers, no wizard at the bottom of the dungeon who throws up a “you won!” sign upon his death. Navigating this kind of story isn’t a puzzle, it’s a journey, and I think I would have better appreciated my decisions if I’d had the opportunity to see the alternatives, and commit to my story. Life is one damned thing after another, as they say; if art lets us see all the different places that Moving Finger could move, before finally coming to rest in the place it does, well, there’s a poignancy in that, too.