#honestly spirit of the law works much better as an rpg concept and I do hope to code it someday!

[incandescent-eden]

She closed her eyes, pressing cold fingers under plastic glasses rims and against warm eyelids. “He says she’s been causing him emotional distress, but given how recently she’s died, a judge would probably give her the benefit of the doubt because think about how emotionally distressed she’d be. Not to mention – we don’t know how bad it is at the Hastings place. And we don’t want Evelyn showing up with any nasty surprises.”

Mori opened her eyes again, adjusting her glasses to the sound of Willow’s laptop being shut and packed away. The gray buildings surrounding the office were now stretches of darkness indistinguishable from the evening, broken only by large windows showing shadows and figures from other offices moving about; the small square of sunlight that lit the city earlier had long since faded, giving way to phosphorescent streetlamps shining blue far below and orange electric lamps that mimicked the glow of flame in the buildings’ interiors.

“I ought to get home,” Willow said, tugging her stylish pea coat closed over her autumn-colored dress. “6 PM. You know how the traffic rush is.”

Want to get dinner? Mori almost asked. Her heart thumped as Willow smoothed her hair back, fussing with the loose strands until she somehow, magically, twisted them back into place. There’s this café just around the corner. I know you’ll love it.

“Sure,” she said instead. “See you tomorrow.”

Spirit of the Law sure is a piece of writing.

#my writing #reevie writes #spirit of the law #I ended up writing over 800 words today and I am really surprised #honestly spirit of the law works much better as an rpg concept and I do hope to code it someday! #gotta look up kruskal's algorithm again hehehe

[consilium-games]

Genresick, or: Six Ways to Heartache

As I discussed allll the way back in this post in March, I've been working busily on the supplement to Lovesick. And at very long last, it's finally, finally done:

Genresick

Go on, click on it, I worked hard on it! I'll wait!

. . .

You're back? You took a look at least? Excellent. Cause I'd like to say a few things about it here.

First, "what could have been": my initial idea was a lot more weird and high-concept. I'll probably realize it in some form later, but it entailed a bigger focus on collaboration in storytelling, and in particular, loosening up the focus on "a few main characters (PCs) in the hands of cooperating players".

Instead, it was going to or will in the future use a whole ensemble of characters that players would make, terse thumbnail sketches at first, and maneuver together and against one another, striving for one of three 'endings' to the shared story. Still centered very much on passion, internal motivations, psychological damages, and unhealthy fixation, and still both very self-aware and very determined to tell its kind of story. But that concept needs to stew more.

I've been thinking a lot lately on some of the more abstract ideas involved in storytelling: how stories about ourselves often define us, how we build ourselves out of these stories, and how dissonance between stories can feel like you've actually entered some other kind of reality, where even the laws of nature don't match what you've grown to trust as much as gravity.

Heady, nerdy stuff, in short, and I think the untitled game I didn't make--because it basically would and should be its own full game--is both a necessary step to getting where I want to work on, and still a bit beyond my reach.

Second, "what is": Genresick is a few things at once. It's a supplement obviously, a pile of toys and backdrops for Lovesick surely, but it's also a kind of reassessment. I think characters by themselves can make for a really compelling story--as long as they want things, for reasons, and do things to get them, you have a story. So people wanting relatable things to an unreasonable degree and doing dramatic things to get them seems like a perfect pitch to me!

Not so much the people who find their way to click on my downloads.

Now, I'm not defeated or even disheartened by this, so much as attentive: "hmm, that didn't work . . ." So, let's see what people make of something packaged more in the traditional trappings and tropes of Geek Culture[tm]: science fiction, unpronounceable names, airbrushed paperback covers, the kind of genre fiction set-dressing that "stories for nerds" often comes with.

Thirdly--let me dig into that a bit.

Still inflamatory after all these books

I could go dig up citations and quotations from better commentators than I, citing the operation of a kind of "low-brow chic" in the many intersecting and overlapping orbits that enclose "people who read, buy, play, and make roleplaying games". I won't though, I trust that it's not a foreign concept, but I'd like to stake out how I see it a bit, and what I think it means.

To put it really briefly and only a little reductively, science fiction and fantasy as we know them today were very strongly influenced by being relegated to the gutters of culture. Most recently as Young Adult[tm] books and over-contracted mandatory-trilogy series and hypercapitalist conventions, but prior to that, low-budget TV series, three-color comic books, and before that, B-movies and 'cult classics'. You can even see a lot of that in the earliest incarnations of Dungeons and Dragons--there's an actual robot wizard in there. An actual robot that is an actual wizard.

This influence isn't any weaker today, it's just weirder: genre mashups and "what even is genre, really" sensibilities, and the slow dissolution of previously-stable subcultural boundaries mean that the idea of a "space western" isn't a radical new thing--it's Firefly. But, what hasn't left? The genre fiction domain, and the tendency to live entirely inside it.

When a piece of Geek Culture[tm] tries to articulate itself, to position itself and give itself context, to say what it's about and what it's doing, the points of reference are always firmly inside the spheres of genre fiction, the low-budget, the literarily maligned, the 'nerdy' rather than 'intellectual'. This has to include my own work, too--RPGs as an artistic medium live more or less entirely inside the geekosphere, and I credit FROM Software in my first book--a video-game company, who made the sword-and-sorcery game that inspired Succession. Good work can come out of the genre fiction ecosystem, but . . .

But. The fact that anyone needs to point that out, even as a defensive disclaimer, is not a very healthy sign. A story set in the future exploring the possible effects of technology on society can be a true work of art--just look at Mary Shelley. But when the wealthy and lettered at some point decided that the only good stories, worth studying, involve wealthy and lettered literature professors contemplating an affair--well. Two things happened:

Firstly the academics set the standard for Good Art[tm], which you've probably seen some reaction against, say, Duchamp's 'Fountain'. But standard it remained and to a large degree remains: severe attitudes, reserved speech, refined vocabulary, abstract and sometimes even indiscernible stakes and ideas and goals, when it comes to stories and how they're conveyed. The groove carved into (white Western anglophonic) culture's psyche at large is "this is what Good Art is, and if you wish to be a Good Artist, you must aspire to this; if you cannot appreciate this Good Art, you are no artist or intellectual at all!"

Secondly they deprived the rest of us of a vocabulary, half by claiming it themselves and using it only for their kind of "Good Art", half by everyone else identifying even trying to form such a vocabulary as one of those effete ivory-tower intellectuals here only to sneer on Bad Art or even Non-Art. So weirdos like me have to travel far and dig deep to piece together analytical tools to understand how "Bad Art" stories work, what they do, how they function, what makes them work and what makes them fail.

But, as a consequence of that second thing, in Geek Culture people kept making art! But they didn't have a vocabulary for the many new concepts they kept forming and inventing independently and from scratch, and then borrowing and elaborating from one another. I think this is both why application of basic storytelling techniques like foreshadowing and mixed motivations can be so captivating for a nerd-as-a-first-language audience even when bungled: they're the same techniques refined over centuries over there in "Good Art", good techniques that work--but that don't work without adjustment. Adjustment that outsiders lack the vocabulary to discuss, and thus can't really derive for their own needs.

All this boils down to Geek Culture more often than not tending to shy away from something that looks "intellectual" unless it first looks "sci-fi" or "fantasy" or some other identifiable public forswearing of the scary ivory tower. You can see a lot of this in video-games' audience: "it's just video-games, don't put politics in my video-games, can't it just be a video-game?!" Of course it can. There will always be games for the sake of games (Chess), and songs for the sake of songs (most any pop song), and now video-games and movies just for the sake of something flashy to look at and something to do for awhile after earning a daily wage. That's not what bothers a person making that kind of complaint.

What bothers them is a lot more complicated than I have the energy left to get into, but hey, I think if I can develop and popularize and expand that vocabulary we've been denied (and denied ourselves), we can use it to make some really wicked cool things. I'm not about to tell anyone to toss out their Dragonlance and instead read Dante's Inferno--honestly, I'd have to rate them on a par if you look at the work and not at the reception. Both are fantastical fan-fiction, though Dante's is a lot meaner in spirit and departs more from the source material, though it certainly has more technical execution on its side.

Instead what I want is for us to have, as a "Geek Culture", a way to understand something like Dragonlance as thoroughly as Dante's Inferno. And we're getting there! Meanwhile, if the only way to sell people on "intense character-study and focus on relationships" is to put on a space-suit, then suit me up.

So what's up next?

Aside from stirring the new pot bubbling over on r/consilium_games, and hopefully starting some form of discourse, next is a full RPG in its own right, in keeping with my self-appointed schedule of "full game and supplement"! And since I've implicitly asked my readers and/or the RPG community at large to stretch so much in looking at Lovesick, it's only fair that I stretch myself too.

Specifically, I'm working now on a very mechanics-heavy, combat-oriented game, applying the same mechanical components I've used since Succession and especially some of the ideas in Substitute Reagents, but building them around concrete, reified, 'gamey' interactions rather than purely narrative beats and character-focused stakes.

I also intend it to dig into identity formation, structures and systems of power, how people 'cast' themselves and one another, and a few other themes very close to my heart. Come for the crunchy cinematic action, stay for the pensive meditation on selfhood!

#lovesick #genresick #rpgs #books #commentary