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# First Look: Writing the Strange: An Interview with Elizabeth Little
- URL: https://playtestmaterial.org/first-look-writing-the-strange-an-interview-with-elizabeth-little/
- Published: 2026-09-02T12:41:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-03T23:30:38.000Z
- Description: This interview, with Elizabeth Little, creator of You Will Die In This Place, was conducted for a piece on lyric games for Playtest Material Issue One.
- Author: Laurie O'Connel
- Tags: Interviews, Issue One

> This interview, with Elizabeth Little, creator of **You Will Die In This Place,** was conducted for a piece on lyric games for Playtest Material Issue One. We considered the full interview worthy of publication, but for space reasons can only publish a small part of it in the first issue, therefore we are reproducing it here. The interview was conducted by **Irving Benitez**. Some parts have been cut out for the sake of avoiding repetition. 

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**Irving Benitez:** Hi, welcome.

**Elizabeth Little:** Hello.

**Irving:** I'm Irving Benitez, a TTRPG writer, and I'm recording this for *Playtest Material*, on writing the strange: the connections between hermit crab literature and frame stories, lyric games, and what larger games in the space can take from other parts of the medium. I'm here with Elizabeth Little. Would you like to introduce yourself?

**Elizabeth:** Hello, I'm Elizabeth Little. I'm a full-time secondary school physics teacher, amateur game designer, writer, and sometimes artist. My latest game is *You Will Die in This Place*. But I also make some other weird little games, and I've got some stuff I'm working on at the moment that I'm looking forward to devoting more time to.

**Irving:** Thank you so much. Now how would you describe *You Will Die in This Place*? 

**Elizabeth:** Thank you. This is the hardest thing about *You Will Die in This Place* actually describing it to other people. As we'll probably get to, and I guess part of the reason I've been asked to do this interview about this particular topic, is that I've made something that's quite strange and can potentially be defined and described in a few different ways. Communicating what it is has always been difficult, especially because I'm famously terrible at marketing. I have no brain or care for that whatsoever. So I've sometimes described it as a nihilistic survival horror role-playing game. I've sometimes described it as essentially a post-modern horror novel. The truth is, it's kind of both of those things at once. There are some broader categories we're going to talk about today that could potentially apply to it as well, and there's one particular term I think will be interesting to mention, because I know it's not among the definitions we have here. I think it'll be interesting to talk about the crossover.

**Irving:** Thank you so much, I'm very interested to talk about this. Let's actually discuss *You Will Die in This Place*. Some aspects of this game and horror novel, as you describe it, include a meta-narrative giving insight into two very different game designers in the TTRPG space. Both women; one is a trad TTRPG designer, the other indie; one is cis, the other a trans woman. Were there other versions of this story before you settled on the one written in this book and game? Was there a different point of view at one point or another?

**Elizabeth:** Yes and no. The actual game part of *You Will Die in This Place* originally started as a much smaller indie dungeon-crawl idea. It was very much an exploration of: you start powerful, you become weaker over time. I wanted to explore that design space, this whole question of how it is to play characters, to make characters and interact with each other in a game where you very much know there's only one possible outcome. But by itself it wasn't quite doing it for me, in terms of hooking me into devoting my time to it. I think if I'd stopped there it would have ended up a much smaller game. That's when some of the more layered parts came in. I'd separately had an idea for a game that was kind of about the death of the author, or about the process of making games. So it was: what if I take that, which is sitting on a shelf with some notes, and use it as the actual game part, then integrate these other layers into it?

Originally there were some essays from Charlotte, the one I wrote: the indie developer, the trans woman. That was working for me, in terms of having a developer who's commenting on more than just the game, using the game as a way to explore ideas, as a metaphor. But by itself I still felt there needed to be some external commentary, analysis of these essays, this point of view, these ideas she was exploring. Then the idea of: what if that interpretation is wrong? What if we play around with that space? You have this other person who isn't always getting the whole point. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. That created this interesting playground for me to explore, and that's what really clicked and cemented the whole thing together.

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**Irving:** I often look at the space of misinterpretation in game design, and I call it "playing wrong" — but I don't use "wrong" as a negative descriptor. I use it as an aspect of game design that creates new game designers.

**Elizabeth:** That's interesting. Yeah, it's a very interesting space to explore. I felt that at the time, and a few people have pointed out that one of the themes that comes across in the work is this anxiety about understanding and misunderstanding. I think that's a bit of what you're getting at too. That there's space to interpret things differently, and that can ultimately affect how you view the game.

**Irving:** I also view it as a cis woman imposing her view on a trans woman's own experience and opinions. To me it reads a little like a metaphor for transmisogyny, and I find that really interesting.

**Elizabeth:** There's definitely an element of that to it. I've sometimes felt, following other people's reviews and comments on *You Will Die in This Place*, that Samantha is unfairly villainized for it, but at the same time, it is very much a thing she's doing, sometimes by accident. She admits herself that she's doing something terribly wrong: taking this person's work without their permission and exposing quite personal thoughts about them. So yes, that's one of the many layers to it. And sometimes the transmisogyny isn't coming from an intentionally negative place, she very much clearly loved Charlotte, but it's still there.

**Irving:** Let's switch to lyric games and frame stories. I view *You Will Die in This Place* as a game you build from what's within the frame story; a story whose delivery method couldn't just be a plain book. Think of stories told through journal entries or emails. Would you say that's accurate, in some ways?

**Elizabeth:** Yes, I would. I think "frame story" is quite an effective description of what's going on. The other term I alluded to earlier is "ergodic literature," which comes at this from a slightly different angle — the idea of a work of literature as something challenging to engage with, inviting an almost game-like experience of trying to put things together, decipher things, make notes. Things might be in order, or there might be layers intended to work together, but you have to put in the work to make those connections or find them. That was very much a space I ended up playing with. There have been comparisons to *House of Leaves*, probably one of the better-known works of ergodic literature. 

**Irving:** I want to take a bit of an aside to read part of *The Shell Game*, a book about lyric essays where the term "hermit crab" or "hermit crab fiction" comes from. Hermit crab essays are a type of personal essay that grew into another form, and I see frame stories doing something similar — really pushing what we consider a form of a book, because you sometimes see entire stories put onto pill-bottle labels and things like that. I find that really interesting, and I want to read a short section on why it's important for hermit crab fiction not to sit within a regular story format.

**Elizabeth:** Right, yeah.

**Irving:** *"A hermit crab is a strange animal, born without the armor to protect its soft, exposed abdomen, and so it spends its life occupying the empty, often beautiful shells left by snails or other mollusks. It reanimates these shells, making of them a strange new hybrid creature that has its own particular beauty, its own way of moving through the tide pools and among the rocks — each one slightly different depending on the type of shell it inhabits."*

And continuing from the introduction, on size with and without a shell: *"Without its shell, the contents of the hermit crab essay are often absurdly diffuse, and in this sense can be considered large, even enormous, as their authors frequently attempt to cram complex love affairs, whole childhoods, decades-long warring processes, devastating war stories, entire lifetimes, and stubbornly thorny existential and/or political and/or anatomical and/or cultural and/or spiritual investigations into a single shell."*

A little further down: *"Its remarkable ability to contain emotional, spiritual, and intellectual sprawl is due in part to its intra-shell divisions, which neatly sidestep the need for conventional transitions. Wild digressions within such a structure appear perfectly natural, so that even terribly rambling trains of thought are able to achieve not only coherence but, on occasion, astonishing elegance as well."* 

There's another book I think would be important to mention here, Asa Donald's *Spine*.

**Elizabeth:** Ah, yes.

**Irving:** There's that game, not even really a game, more a book, told through blank pages, where the story itself is told entirely through footnotes.

**Elizabeth:** Yes, *Spine*. That was an interesting one, because Asa was working on it around the same time I was working on *You Will Die in This Place*. We corresponded a fair amount during that process. I was doing a series of interviews at the time on ergodic literature and related concepts to the development of *Spine*, which was happening simultaneously, and gave an interview with them. It's interesting, I don't think *You Will Die in This Place* influenced *Spine*, and by the time I'd properly looked at *Spine*, I'd already pretty much solidified what my game was. But it was interesting that these two conceptually similar games, or at least ones covering similar ideas, both examples of what I'd consider ergodic material, were being developed at the same time, and we found each other. That was nice.

**Elizabeth:** *Spine* is much more of a journaling game, which is also something I'm interested in, just not what *You Will Die in This Place* was. So the fact that we had different games but a similar approach, a similar concept, was fun. But going back to hermit crab fiction — I hadn't really come across that term before being invited to this interview, so I had a little look at it. Conceptually, it's an evocative term. I can imagine what hermit crab fiction is quite well just from the name, and it appeals to me in a couple of ways. One is simply that hermit crabs are really cool little creatures and I like them. But also: you have the shell, the structure, and you have the thing providing structure to the essence, the emotional core, the little creature living within it. But the shell itself is still an object. It might have been repurposed, might now serve a different function than originally intended, but it still exists as a complete, functional object. Retroactively, I quite like this term for *You Will Die in This Place*, because I'm not even sure which part of the game is the shell and which is the crab, but it was important to me that all the parts of it were functional. For me, the game would have been a failure if the game part wasn't playable.

**Irving:** Yeah.

**Elizabeth:** It had to be real. It had to be functional. It had to be interesting. When Samantha talks about how much she appreciates Charlotte's game design, how talented and unique it is, I had to really push myself to make a game that felt like that person could have made it. You had to believe Samantha would actually gush over it.

**Irving:** Absolutely, I see the shell of *You Will Die in This Place* as the book itself, the container, which gives it the structure it needs to function the way it does.

**Elizabeth:** Very much so. I think that description you read alludes to how *You Will Die in This Place* is, in a way, a fictionalized version of my own life story. Some of the anecdotes either character shares are things I've experienced, or modified versions of things I've experienced, alongside fictionalized events to flesh the characters out or give them more direction. But there's so much in it that would just be a mess of loose strands that don't pull together, if it didn't have this structure underpinning everything.

**Irving:** So — looking at *You Will Die in This Place*, the game, the story, the book as containers and as a medium, what were the most influential pieces or styles?

**Elizabeth:** In terms of media that did influence *You Will Die in This Place*, I can't remember where I first got this idea, maybe an English teacher in school, but there's this idea that if I'm making something, I try very deliberately not to take inspiration from the same medium. I try to take influence from other things. As a simple example: I ran a campaign of *Vampire: The Masquerade* for a group of friends, running just over a year. It was one of the biggest, most successful campaigns I've run for players in a while. But pretty much none of my influence for it came from watching *Blade* or reading vampire fiction. It came from gangster movies, mafia stories, organized crime, how different hierarchical structures interact with each other. I did a load of research on the gay scene in Soho, because my game was set in Soho, London.

So for *You Will Die in This Place*, there are four key pieces of media that were influential. The most obvious one, which people often point out, is *House of Leaves* —

**Irving:** — another frame story.

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**Elizabeth:** Yeah. I'd read *House of Leaves* and thought, "this is really cool, I like what it's doing, I'll keep this in mind for the future, for if I'm working on something." Another is the video game *The Beginner's Guide*, very much an exploration of death of the author, with a different but broadly similar structure: it's framed as one person presenting another person's work, though in that case it's more like them trying to diagnose this person, or comment on their mental wellbeing. There are some twists and turns in it, but it's a really cool game, and certainly an influence. And then the other two are both horror films — which are: *Lake Mungo*, a really effective ghost story done as mockumentary. And the other is a Japanese horror film called *Noroi: The Curse*. That is kind of a mockumentary too, but more of a found-footage kind of thing. When some people were looking at the early version of *You Will Die in This Place*, a couple of reactions were along the lines of, "oh, it's like a found-footage horror film, but it's a book". And yes, it's not unlike that, because I did pull from that space while making it. So those were the four biggest influences, none of which are games themselves. It was very much a question of how I could take these ideas and apply them to a game.

Annoyingly, I suppose if there's one game it's influenced by to some extent, it's Dungeons & Dragons, because it's also me doing a bit of literary criticism of D&D. Dismantling the class structure, exploring that space, things like the alignment grid. People often point out that in *You Will Die in This Place* I have an alignment grid of my own, linguistic on one axis, cultural on the other, which creates a grid of nine spaces with nine different things. That's very obviously a jab at Dungeons & Dragons.

It was also very important to me that my game had a lot of dungeons, and no dragons, in it.

**Irving:** Dungeons and dungeons.

**Elizabeth:** Dungeons and dungeons and dungeons and dungeons, all the way down. And I suppose the actual abyssal labyrinth itself, the dungeon — I don't think it's that hidden in the text, honestly, though I haven't seen anyone particularly point it out — it's literally the tower block I used to live in. There are twenty-one floors to the dungeon, and I used to live in a twenty-one-story tower block, an apartment building. Floor eighteen, room four, is literally my old apartment. The map is literally my old apartment, or the floor my apartment was on.

That building got demolished back in the early 2000s, and I went and found an old floor plan, and one of the maps, floor eighteen, room four, I think, since I lived in apartment four on floor eighteen, that map isn't just my apartment, it's the whole floor my apartment was on.

**Irving:** Incredible. Is there anything else you'd like to touch on about the relationships between these artistic mediums? Any other pieces you've seen that interest you, that you feel would be remiss not to mention here?

**Elizabeth:** This is a difficult one, because there are so many people I've now been exposed to doing cool things, but between the crowdfunding and the delivery of *You Will Die in This Place*, I haven't had the time to sit down and really digest and explore their work. From what I've seen, it looks really cool. Of the ones we've talked about, I read *Spine* end to end, because I was talking to Asa at the time and was given an early preview to look at and give feedback on, and it was in a similar space. But otherwise, I just appreciate that more people are doing these kinds of things. A lot of the time these games tend to be smaller, a lot more digestible, but I've made this weird, sprawling behemoth of a lyric game that's the size of a D&D player's manual. But it's nice to see people doing all these different, weird little things. I'd like to have the time to sit down and look through some of them properly.  
  
*End of Interview.*