Well, we saw how long daily posting lasted once I had a girlfriend back in the house and a con to go to (Gamestorm, in Portland.) And that’s with a buffer: all I had to do was log in and hit “post.” Hah. Stupid me.
I want to talk about two things at GameStorm.
First, Bliss Stage. I ran the Final Act scenario for Willem, a friend of his whose name I don’t remember, Mike Sugarbaker, Jake Richmond, and James Brown. If you’re counting up, you realize that’s one too many people. James, graciously, volunteered to just be an anchor.
What a wonderful idea that was! James is a fantastic anchor, and Jake is as well, although in very different styles. James speaks in a very deep, calm voice, slowly walking things through step by step, telling the pilot it’s all okay, even when it isn’t. Jake has a constant patter, telling the pilot that they’re great, that they’re awesome, that they’re beautiful. (Names of the anchors with-held to protect privacy of crushes. They were both female characters.)
Throughout the game, James came time and again back to the refrain of “I’m your anchor, your my pilot, it’s okay.” Willem’s character Josh, in particular, took these to mean “everything is fine,” even as their relationship got beaten, blasted, and fucked up beyond recognition.
At the end of the session, James picks up a book, turns it to the “this is what it’s like to be an anchor” page, and shows it to Willem. “That’s what I meant,” he said. Willem’s face just drops. “Oh my God.”
It was a really touching moment, for me at least.
Also James and Jake and I played an off-the-books (just in the hallway of the con late at night) session of Death’s Door, James’ game about people who know that they’re going to die. I have so much to say about this game, but it’s difficult to talk about. Even typing this right now I run up against the social taboos against talking about death seriously at all.
The game is not hard, but it is tough. It puts you through a ringer but the entire time I felt supported — buoyed, really — by both the system and my fellow players. The idea of death, the idea of my own death, is a stormy sea, and the game and the other players were my life preserver. Imminent death casts issues about life and priorities, and that’s really what play of the game is about.
What do I mean by “the game is not hard, but it is tough?” I mean that at no point in the game did I feel that things were difficult in any way. There was no chance of me failing to do the tasks set out to me (not mechanically — in fact the mechanics of the game are quite unforgiving — but me as a player.) But playing the game is harrowing in the most literal sense of the word.
With other games that deal with supposedly “tough” subject matter, there is often a pattern I’ve observed amongst indie gamers where they want to be “tougher than thou.” Basically it’s a competition for “I can go deeper, be harsher, be ‘edgier’ than you can.” Someone who has something that they don’t want to do, or even want to veil, is being “weak” and loses social cred. Etc. Death’s Door is totally unlike this experience. It isn’t “edgy” in any significant way: it would not be at home on HBO. But further, the idea of showing more guts doesn’t figure into it. We all help each other. We must all help each other, because the place that we are going is so dangerous that if we don’t cooperate instantly and intuitively we will be destroyed by it.
It was a great game. I feel like it’s been overlooked because the book design is very plain and the sales have not been good (our community, conflating sales with success, tends to attribute cred and influence to the designers who sell the most copies.) I want to play it again soon.
If anyone is interested, let me know.
In summary of this post: James Brown is fantastic.
