Reading the Wake
A designer's afterword to Neighbors
This is not part of the game. The rules don't need it, and a table that never reads it will play exactly the same game as a table that does. It's here for the curious — an account of where this came from, written after the fact, which is the only honest time to write one.
We did not set out to make a game about xenophobia.
I want to be exact about that, because the alternative — the designer who claims the thesis was the plan all along, drawing a clean arrow from intention to meaning — is a particular kind of lie, and it spoils even the essays whose facts are right. Neighbors started as a foam-padded romp: negotiate with the lonely vending machine, sweep the bridge dandruff east, leave the crackers, close the file. That's still what it is. If you played it for the comedy of a content creator livestreaming an embarrassed viaduct and never thought about anything heavier, the design would not consider itself betrayed. That has to be true, or it isn't a game.
But you can read a wake even if you didn't chart the course, and looking back at this one, the current was there the whole time.
A weekend in Stockholm
It began with a poster. We were wandering the city for a weekend and ducked into the Museum of Ethnography, where there was an exhibition on yokai — the Japanese tradition of the things that live in the margins. What struck me wasn't the spookiness; it was the framing. The museum didn't hang yokai as monsters. It hung them as a cultural technology — a way a society organized its relationship to the unseen — and then it paired the Japanese tradition with Johan Egerkrans' illustrations of Nordic folklore, the näck and the troll and the gast. Two traditions an ocean apart, doing the same civic work: populating the cracks of the world with beings you don't fight but attend to. Leave the offering. Sweep the threshold. Use the name correctly.
That pairing was already an argument, made by curators, before I ever thought about a game. I didn't read depth into a poster. I walked through a building that had done the reading, and it stuck because it was built to stick.
The yokai sensibility is the seed: you don't ghostbust your neighbors. The supernatural can be a nuisance or a threat, but the move isn't extermination — it's negotiation, appeasement, coexistence. A game fell out of that almost immediately. But a game is not why the exhibit stayed with me.
The bus
The same trip, we were on a city bus when a group of African teenagers boarded — loud, doing what kids do, which is be loud and be kids. The other passengers, mostly the blond Nordic stereotype, didn't squirm exactly. But I felt a tension in the bus. And here's the part I have to be honest about: I felt it too. Not as ideology. As nervous system. Any gaggle of loud kids trips my sensors before any politics arrives.
I've thought about that bus more than the museum, because the bus is the truer document. Sweden has its own real strains around immigration, and some of the tension in that vehicle was surely the specific weight of those kids in that nation at that moment. But some of it was just loud kids in a quiet space, and the honest truth is I couldn't fully separate my own strands either. The threat-detector that fires at noise and number and unfamiliarity is doing its ancient job. It doesn't ask permission. It doesn't check its sources. It fired in me on that Sunday with no stakes at all.
That's the thing the game turned out to be about, though I didn't know it on the bus. Not "look at the prejudice in those people." The operation was running in everyone on that bus, me included. It's not that good people don't feel the tingle and bad people do. Everyone's sensors fire. The only move available is the one that comes after — the deliberate, effortful re-seeing of what your nervous system just rounded into a threat-shaped blur. You don't get to not feel it. You get to decide what you do in the half-second after.
What the monsters are made of
Pull the thread and every monster in this kind of story turns out to be made of us.
A zombie can't exist without people — it's a former person, animated entirely by a fear that's ours; strip the humans away and there's just a body. A yokai is subtler and more telling: it doesn't merely need to be feared, it needs to be attended to. Stop believing in a zombie and it still bites. Stop attending to a yokai and it doesn't die — it goes unfed. That's the whole engine of this game: the Stallkeeper and the Third Arch aren't attacking, they're unattended, the residue of a relationship a community let lapse.
Which means the monster is a mirror with a memory. There was never a monster and a human story; there was only ever the human story, wearing a monster so we could stand to look at it. The zombie lets us look at our own capacity to become a faceless mass. The yokai lets us look at what we owe the things we've kept alive by attention. This is why the game refuses to let you win by killing, and why its one hard limit is that a being whose only function is extermination "hasn't earned the noun" — not because it's too frightening, but because it has no human relation in it to examine. It's a hazard, not a mirror. There's nothing of us to see.
Next, consider this: if monsters are made of human relation, then making a monster is something people do to each other, with no supernatural machinery required at all. Collapse the individuals into a category. Deny them an inside. Reframe their need as a threat. That is the zombie-making operation, and it runs in broad daylight.
The cost of losing the muscle
While we were assembling this kit, masked men in Belfast went door to door looking for houses occupied by immigrants and set them alight, driving families into the street — the third time, for one Romani family. The mob behaved like the very horde the genre warns about, except the horror flipped: it wasn't the outsiders who moved like the undead, it was the crowd — faceless behind masks, collapsed into one appetite, converting a neighbor of ten years into prey by sheer assertion. Romero had it right all along. The real monster is rarely the zombie. It's us, turning on our own when the going gets hard.
The same operation runs colder and slower through bureaucracy — an enforcement surge that rounds people into a category at the pace of a quota, the part that keeps grinding after the cameras leave and the headline cycles out. The riot is the spectacle. The paperwork is the river. One stops being news the moment the flames die; the other was never on fire.
I'm not equating a game with any of that. A game is a game. But the muscle the masked mob refused to use, and the muscle the quota is designed to bypass, is the exact muscle this game rehearses: look at the mass, and insist on the faces. Refuse the collapse. Re-person the blur.
Yes, and
So: can't a game just be a game?
Yes. And.
Yes — Neighbors is a light thing you can play for the comedy and the crackers. And — it has legs because it's sitting on a real question about civic attention, and the legs are why it kept generating instead of petering out after the first table. The depth doesn't replace the play. It's what gives the play somewhere to go.
I don't think we made a monument out of a molehill. The molehill was a curated mountain before I got to it; the tradition was always this serious; the genre always smuggled the human trail. All we did was decline to launder the seriousness back out for the sake of seeming relaxed about it.
The game asks players to do one disciplined thing: refuse to flatten the thing across the table into something easier to dismiss. The vending machine is lonely and it's a game. The yokai is folklore and an argument. The loud kids on the bus are loud and they are kids. The "and" is the whole practice — and the reason to rehearse it at a table, at no stakes, with foam on every edge, is so the muscle exists on the day the stakes are real and your sensors are tingling and you have half a second to decide what to do next.
That's not why we built it. It's just what was in the wake.
— for Delia, who got a lot of walks out of this