Thousand Lives

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.

This is a series of short snapshots (about 400 words each) of a Polish woman's life from age 19-ish in 1965 to her death in 2019, with most chapters encompassing about a decade. So it's necessarily sparse, but it paints an effectively personal portrait of Poland's history. Despite the viewpoint, the long time spans and short length of each chapter (and possibly the no-nonsense reporting of the writing style?) kept me at a little distance from the character. We're not living these years with her: we're dropping into her life occasionally to make a choice. The once a decade Christmas lettter, if you will. But I found it an interesting series of snapshots.

I wasn't entirely sold on the daily delivery by e-mail: it does force you to take a little time with it rather than clicking through the whole thing in 15-20 minutes, but I'm not sure how much difference that made to me. And it's implemented so that you get the next e-mail 24 hours after you respond to the last one. So it'll be later each day (possibly much later, if you don't get to the e-mail right away) and that was a nuisance: I ended up skipping days twice on my first playthrough. It would have been nicer to have it at the same time every day.

It's very branchy; I'd guess that it's nearly a full time cave. All the chapters seem to be binary choices about how you respond to some critical event. The first choice felt wildly unbalanced, which is unfortunate because most of the others feel much more natural and less forced, not so "well, I guess we need a choice here."

I enjoyed my time with it: I played it once in April and then again this month, and I might well go back and do it again sometime. It's a nice viewpoint on the history and it's not a big time commitment: it's just spread out over a week.

A touching story experienced through the unique format of receiving a chapter by e-mail daily. After I made my choice, I would look forward to the new chapter in my inbox!
I really enjoyed navigating Poland's economic and political changes from the 1940s to 2000s. Facing emotionally difficult choices helped me learn more about my values and reflect on my family's history with immigration and communism.
It reminds us how the personal journey through swaths of history can contain heartbreak and reconciliation. History is not just known but felt.
The quotes and postage stamps are thoughtful portals in time. We thread them into narratives of who we are and who we've been.