lpsmith

So as some of you may know, I have greatly enjoyed playing 'tabletop roleplaying games' (i.e. the genre of games that includes D&D) over the years. Since the pandemic, I've been involved in a startling increase in the number of games I've been able to play online: at one point last year, I was in *five* at once! It's dropped back down to three in the past year, but it's still a lot of gaming.

Most of those games are 'traditional', meaning that they have a 'GM' (gamemaster) in charge of the world, every other player controls a player (a 'PC'), and the group of players are generally some sort of heroes, or at least a cohesive group of people wandering around solving problems and levelling up (gaining more abilities, and getting harder to hit).

But another genre of RPGs are sometimes called 'storytelling games', and more generally fall into the category of 'indie rpgs'; games created by one or maybe a handful of people with extremely simple rules that are used to let you play out a specific type of scenario. Some aspects of traditional games are included sometimes, but everything is up for grabs: maybe there's no GM; maybe the players are terrible people; maybe we're telling an emotional story more than an action-oriented one; maybe we're just world-building and not telling a story at all.

Go Play Northwest (http://goplaynw.org) is a 3-day gaming convention here in Seattle that focuses more (but not exclusively) on storytelling and/or indie games. The format is that there's two or three sessions per day, about 3 hours long each, with games you can sign up for beforehand, or games you sign up for on the spot from the options that turn out to be available.

And all that was so that you knew what I was on about when I told you the games I played! So here we go:

• Companions' Tale :  My first game of the convention!  The conceit of this game is that you are telling the story of the Hero of the Realm from the perspective of everyone *else*, their companions in particular.  Everyone takes turns telling stories and adding to a collective map, with no GM, and no resolution mechanic:  every story is true... at least from that person's perspective.  Players are encouraged to tell stories that contradict each other, making the 'truth' of what actually happened subject to interpretation.  The companions are foregrounded a bit (there are rounds specifically about telling stories about them, not the Hero), but you also include stories from witnesses to events, and historians talking about the events.  The companions each get a Role chosen from cards (thing like 'Protege', 'Lover', 'Oracle', or 'Mercenary'), and you also get a beautifully-stylized picture who becomes that Companion.
  
  One thing I particularly liked about this game was that I would have an idea about Something That Happened in the game, but then I had to additionally imagine who was telling the story, and who they were telling it to.  So when I got the Lover, I had an idea about what happened when she and the Hero met, but then additionally decided I was telling this story to our son, years later, which added an interesting dynamic to the story.  It was also fun to come up with further-afield 'documents' to share:  my favorite of mine was probably when I started my 'Historian' bit with, "Thank you for purchasing your '23 and you' genetic information packet!  Before you peruse your results, we would like to remind people that the information herein are for entertainment purposes only.  In particular, Locus 23 (the so-called 'monster gene'), while unusual, in no way proves that you are an actual descendant of the Void Monsters; this is pure speculation. [...]"
  
  Another fun bit: at the beginning, Aaron gave me four pieces of paper to tape together to make our map.  As a joke, I said I would tape them together all skew... and then thought, 'Wait, that could actually be fun," so I taped them together with two big triangular gaps between them, thinking they could be impassable mountains or something.  Those gaps quickly became 'The Void', and were a central theme throughout the story.  It was great!




• The Love-Blind Bird This game is not actually available anywhere, but is 'close' to having a kickstarter for it.  It was cool!  The game setup is that you get a picture of a flying galleon in three different 'seasons', and ask each other questions about the journey of that ship and its crew.  There's also a soundtrack you can play (for each season) as additional inspiration.  We found that both the questions and the answers were sources of worldbuilding, or plot advancement:  'when half the crew left, where did they go?' is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, even if this is the first time we've discovered that half the crew left.  In our story, the ship sang to us, and steering it was a matter of the crew encouraging it to sing particular types of songs by singing themselves, so in addition to 'Captain', 'First Mate' and 'Cabin Boy', we also had the position of 'Chorus Master'.  Who then got eaten by the ship for trying to 'improve' a new song that they didn't understand.  It was a crazy story, alright?  But it was a lot of fun to create together.




• Rebel Squadron:  A mostly-traditional game!  Only with simpler rules, based on a '24xx' system called 'Super Bandit'.  Our GM adapted that system to Star Wars, had a battle mat and a solid basic premise ('escape an Empire prison').  The rules were super simple, and character creation quick and easy.  It was fun, though I found myself wanting a bit more from the game, though I didn't know exactly what.  I felt like if the system was a bit more complex, I could have enjoyed the strategy wargame aspect more, or if the interpersonal dynamics were a bit more foregrounded, I could have enjoyed inhabiting my character more.  Maybe the simple addition of 'describe your attack' more often could have helped?  As it was, there was a lot of simple 'I roll X; I get a succeess; I take out one storm trooper' which was a little dry at the end of the day.  But overall it was still fun, and the ship combat had an interesting rock/paper/scissors mechanic that spiced up the decision-making process a bit... though I ended up being sad that my character's personality (such as it was) wasn't really well-suited for the tactics her skillpoints pushed her towards.  Ah, well.




• Meridian: This slot was the Lottery!  In this setup, everyone who wants to participate puts their badge into a box, groups of four names are drawn out, and they go pick a game to play.  This necessitates people bringing things to play, but this year I was ready and had brought a few.  Between the ones I had and the ones one of the other people in my group had, 'Meridian' sounded the most interesting, so I ran it!
  
  This was a game I had played several years ago at GPNW, had gotten a copy via kickstarter, and then had promptly never played for five years.  So this was the first time I was actually able to play it!  Yay!  Since I had brought it as a 'back pocket' game that could be run in a pinch, I hadn't gone over the rules super carefully, and the result wasn't as smooth as it could have been, but we still had fun.
  
  The conceit of the game is that it basically starts as a multi-GM, one-PC game, and can gradually morph into a one-GM multi-PC game.  The game is set up to model stories like 'Alice in Wonderland' or 'Labyrinth', where one player plays the 'Journier' (the PC), one player runs the world (the GM; me, in this case), and the other players co-GM by playing some of the various denizens of the place.  As the game progresses, the other players can decide that the character they are playing joins the PC on their quest, and become 'Companions', moving through the rest of the story with the PC.
  
  Our game had some rough edges from people (me in particular) not knowing the rules very well, and the game itself used a lot of game-specific lingo in its explanations, which hindered people getting up to speed quickly.  But we had some fun scenes, it was a unique experience, and it was satisfying for me to finally get to run the thing after so long.  I could run it again much better now, I think.




• Monster Hearts: Monster Hearts is clearly inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer:  players are teenage monsters (of various types), all making bad decisions and trying to work through the consequences.  I've been avoiding playing this game for years, as any game with the premise 'angsty people making bad decisions!' is not typically very appealing for me.  But for whatever reason, I felt up to the task that Saturday night, and decided to give it a try.  And it was interesting!  I think part of what made it work better for me might be the fact that the GM ran it with an actual plot/mystery to solve, so the whole game didn't devolve into the PCs sniping at each other.  Another part of it was that I was able to play a character archetype I hadn't ever played before:  I played a 'Hollow':  a 'created' teenage girl (sort of like Frankenstein's monster, or the Buffy-bot) who was searching for her identity.  I played her as a sort of goth naif, intently questioning people to 'explain donuts', or willingly participating in harebrained schemes because she was starved for purpose.  I agreed with anyone's assessment of me, and parlayed that into future scenes:  "Argh; January, you're giving me a headache."  "I give people headaches?" "Yes!"  [later] "OK, you distract Mr. Cooper while I steal the book."  "I will give him a headache."  I ended up with great affection and sympathy for her character, and for the others in the group.  Of all the games I played this weekend, I'd have to say that January was the character I connected to emotionally the most strongly.
  
  Another reason why I think I picked Monster Hearts this round was the fact that my own teenage daughter had been having Big Emotions the previous night, and I felt like actually roleplaying an angsty teen might help me work through and re-surface what that time of life was like for me. I still think this game might not be quite my thing on a different day or with a different set of other people, but it was really solid this time.  Thanks, Jamie-the-GM!  (Amusing side-note:  the four players were Logan, Luke, Lucas, and Lucian).




• Crash Pandas: This was a Sunday morning goofy game, and was one of those games that knows exactly what it is, and exactly how to pull that off.  You play one of four racoons, collectively driving a car in an LA street race.  The map is drawn on a large piece of paper, and you're controlling a HotWheels car vs. other HotWheels cars.  You have some basic stats, some sort of motivation, and every round, you each individually decide whether to accelerate, brake, go right, go left, or do some special action.  This means that everyone might decide to go right, whipping the car into a tailspin, or everyone might assume someone else will turn, accelerating your car into a wall.  Or, in our case, our players literally got right and left mixed up from the perspective of the car (several times!  From different people!) and canceled out each other's actions.  It was hilarious, zany, and delightful.




• Spindlewheel: The first thing to say about this game is that it's gorgeous.  It's a short set of rules and a large deck of gilt cards, each with a name ('Revolution', 'Infection', 'Princess') and two lists of associations with that name, one vaguely positive and one vaguely negative. (So 'Princess' had 'sheltered' on one side, and 'diplomat' on the other, for example.) We played the initial bits, going through world creation and character creation.  The full game would be too long for a 3-hour slot, but would have consisted of actually playing out the characters' stories in the world you've created.  The two people I played with had actually used the game before just for world and character creation, and were now playing through the story with a completely different system (Dungeon World, IIRC), which seemed to me like a perfectly reasonably way to use this game.
  
  World creation comes first, and we added a Microscope-like step of listing things we wanted to see and things we didn't want to see in the world, which ended up pushing us in a semi-sci-fi non-Galilean setting with space junks (partly inspired by Heaven's Vault).  Then we started drawing cards, each being placed in a Tarot-like spread with each card representing a particular truth about the setting.  We ended up with a post-revolution world, finally freed from oppression, but now exposed to unforseen dangers that the previous royal lineage had protected them against.  New technology was developed to allow anyone to launch a junk into the space aether, and one group in particular was making a giant generation ship, designed to go out and greet the very things that could bring doom to the world.
  
  After collectively creating the world, we each created our own characters in much the same way; drawing cards to place in particular spots in our lives.  I drew 'deposed prince' and 'princess' as my two core cards, so clearly my character was going to be the last of the royal line, who stepped down for the revolution, but now sought out a way to restore the one good thing her family had done, and protect her people from the dangers from beyond.  Similarly, my fellow players ended up creating the lead revolutionary, now conflicted because he wasn't sure he went far enough in breaking the world, and the industrialist in charge of the generation ship, who had grown to hate his sycophants.  Spindlewheel itself could handle a game with those characters, we speculated (the main movers and shakers of the word)--perusing the rules, it seemed like even if those three people didn't spend a ton of time together, they could still meet up and interact at times and places over the years.  It wouldn't work quite as well to try to cram those three into a DungeonWorld campaign, of course, but that wasn't what we were aiming for, so it's not particularly surprising we didn't land there. Overall, I felt this was a solid, solid piece of world inspiration.  Of the worlds I helped create during this con, this was the one that's stuck with me the strongest, so kudos to Spindlewheel.




• Illimat: I ended the con with a board game!  This was another beautiful game, and was designed as a prop in a music video before the band eventually decided to hire a game designer to build a game around it.  And the game was interesting!  The video featured groups of mysterious individuals, meeting in strange places to play this game, and it kept that vibe:  the cards are basically your standard playing cards, but with four different base suits representing the four seasons, and one new 'wild' suit for the 'stars'.  Each round, people try to collect as many cards from the board as they can, or try to set themselves up to collect them more easily later.  As you pull cards from the board, you reveal 'illuminaries' from a different set of fanciful cards that change the rules of the game slightly while they're in play.  The game has a pretty good combination of luck and strategy, where sometimes you just get the perfect cards for the situation, and sometimes you have to play a bad hand as best you can.  I stumbled my way to victory in our first game, and after my son joined us for a second game, he won that one.  Would recommend!

So that was my Go Play Northwest, 2023!  Overall it was a lovely experience, and great to be able to game with people in person once more, after a long pandemic hiatus.  I mean, I've been playing more RPGs online during the pandemic than I ever have in my life), but there's nothing quite like gaming in person.  I'm glad I'm finally able to do both once more.

(Continued from part one and part two, which reveals that I played in a LARP called 'Storm Cellar' at Go Play Northwest, as the character Emily Rayne.)

Part Three: Aftermath

After the game that night, I had a warm glow that lasted all night and well into the next day. I even had a positive dream about Donald Trump--he managed to escape his secret service detail by fooling an elevator into thinking he was Tom Selleck, and it took him to the roof, where he then had to evade the Secretary of Water, who was flying after him wearing a complicated personalized kite/glider powered by handheld water jets.

Sunday morning, I played in my second-ever LARP about kids learning sign language, which was also fantastic in an entirely different way. But somewhere around Sunday evening before the final slot, my emotions started to crash. And it was a highly specific feeling that I had no words to describe, so I’m using this space to try to package it all up, in the hopes that it can crystallize the feeling for other people who’ve felt the same way. Assuming I’m not the only one who’s felt this way. I’m not the only one who’s felt this way, right? Right?

I’ve felt this way at other times in my life, as well. The closest, though not as intense, is the feeling I get at the end of performing in a really good play. You work with other people for weeks to capture a setting and a group of characters, then finally get to show it off to others, and then it’s the final performance, and you’re saying your lines for the last time. I sometimes get a feeling of urgent desperation on that final performance day: every time I enter the stage, I’m reminded, “This is the last time I get to perform this bit; better make it good,” and as I exit the stage, I’m thinking, “Well, that was the last time my character will ever say those lines.”

There’s a vaguely similar feeling I get when friends or family move away, but usually the relationship isn’t as focused: friends are often friends in a variety of situations, so when they leave, the loss can be profound, but isn’t usually acute, per se. A lot of the intensity of the emotions I felt had to do with the fact that the timeframe was so short! I had gamed before with at least one other person there, but everyone else was new to me. So, we met, introduced ourselves, immediately dived into intense emotional scenes, talked about it a bit afterwards, then went our separate ways, all within the space of a few hours. A friend moving away can be as intense, but at least usually has a little more space to breathe.

I did some web searches, and managed to find a few different things that all manage to capture at least part of the emotional roil inside me. One is a phenomenon known as “Post-project depression”. It’s the let-down you feel after having worked on something intensively after it’s suddenly finished and out of your life. There’s an aspect to post-project depression that involves the sudden loss of a routine, which of course I didn’t have here. But the feeling of getting together with other people to make something happen, then being done and feeling the loss, is definitely a big part of what I was (/am) feeling.

A related-though-different emotion is what the Japanese call ‘mono no aware’: an awareness of the transience of things, which heightens one’s appreciation of their beauty, but evokes ‘gentle sadness’ that they are gone. Mono no aware seems to be more focused on things than people or performances (‘mono’ just means ‘thing’ in Japanese), but it seems particularly applicable to a improvised performance that by necessity will only exist in its moment. It’s transient. And that’s beautiful, but sad.

Also related is a feeling that doesn’t seem to have its own term, but many people share it: the feeling of emptiness or grief when you finish a good book. (‘Book hangover’ is sometimes used this way, but has other meanings as well.) As you read, you share in the lives of the characters, and when the book ends, you have to say goodbye to them. As one person put it:

“I cried because I knew that no matter what I could never read that book the same way. I would never wonder what was about to happen, never truly fear for the characters or the world. I could return, pay my friends a visit, but I could never share their feelings of tension and camaraderie. I cried because it was such a powerful connection, so wonderful and exhilarating.” --ancientvoices, on reddit

But perhaps the closest word I could find to describe how I felt was created by the Baining people of Papua New Guinea: Awumbuk, or, “the feeling of emptiness after visitors depart.” The Baining are apparently highly social, and notice when connections are made and broken very acutely:

“Visits are social occasions during which people share food, shelter, and friendship. The shared experiences erase the barriers between individuals and connect them to one another. When the social group disbands, these connections are severed. The socially extended persona is destroyed and individuals must reconstitute their boundaries. They experience this loss in the form of awumbuk. [...] Activities in which sociality is esteemed, for example, hunting and gardening, suffer most acutely from awumbuk.“ --from Person, Self and Experience, p380, Jane Fajans

‘Awumbuk’ seems particularly salient in this particular context, because it describes not only the loss I experienced from the fictional world of Emily’s farm when the story ended, but also the loss of connection to my fellow players, with whom I had worked intensely over a three-hour period to collectively create a beautiful thing. It was great, but the awumbuk is intense.

So I suppose that I could have skipped this whole essay in favor of a “Hey, I miss you guys and the story we created!”

But where’s the fun in that?

(Continued from part one, which reveals that I played in a LARP called 'Storm Cellar' at Go Play Northwest, as the character Emily Rayne.)

Part Two: Wherein Our Hero Reveals More Details Of The Happenings From Part One, Of An Even More Personal Nature

Spoilers. Big ones. I can’t write about this without ‘em; sorry.
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There’s one other big aspect of Emily’s backstory that made it very personal to me: unbeknownst to him, Emily’s son Theo is adopted. And knownst to her, my own daughter is also adopted. And for both, birth mom has… issues.

In “Storm Cellar”, Theo’s mom is Emily’s half-sister Mira. Bitter after inheriting our dad’s ‘meager savings’, while I got the farm itself, she cut herself out of my life, got a job at the bank, and started working her way up in the world. Then she got pregnant, and had no idea what to do with a child until she thought of me. Showing up on my doorstep with a newborn one night, she shoved him in my arms and paced the room, until finally, with a “I’m sure father would have wanted it this way anyway,” she left. From there, I never saw her much, but eventually, through shrewd (and, as I found out after the game was done, underhanded) business deals, she became a very powerful and rich figure in the town. But I could tell from a distance that all of her actions were entirely selfish, and mourned her from the sidelines.

My daughter’s birth mother doesn’t have those kinds of problems, but she definitely has problems. She loved my daughter in her own way, but the decisions she made will affect her for the rest of her life. Ever since she’s lived with us, the two of them have never seen each other. Eight years on, the situation is no longer as unsafe as it was in the beginning, but we know through an older sibling that the mom is not doing well.

So, each lost in their own way, my heart ached as Emily for Mira as my own heart aches for my own child’s birth mom. And similarly, my heart ached for Theo having to deal with a broken Mira, in much the same way my heart aches for my own daughter having to deal with her broken past.

There’s an interesting and sad fact about adoption that didn’t really crystallize for me until I heard it from a fellow adoptive parent: “There is no successful adoption apart from someone else’s failure or loss.” Adoption is a step towards healing, but there’s only one reason something needs to be healed. And with wounds like these, there is rarely a quick fix available.

Mira had her own ridiculous ideas about how to reconnect with her son, that were all thinly-veiled attempts to separate her son from me. Theo saw right through them and made a beautiful speech about how he wasn’t some sort of piece of land, to be traded and bartered: he was her son, and if she wanted to be in his life, great, but they needed to treat each other as people. As a parent, I will tell you right now that moments like that in your child’s life are what you live for: when you realize they’re growing up, and you can step back and just be proud of them for a little bit, before going back to worrying again. For Emily to have that with Theo was a highlight of the evening for me.

Throughout the evening, Theo and I made various overtures to Mira, all of which were summarily rejected. And it saddened me every time. Mira was set up to be the principal antagonist of the night, and indeed went so far as to get the bank manager to foreclose on my farm so that she could swoop in and buy the water rights it sat on (a ploy that, as discussed in part one, ultimately failed). But I (and Emily, by proxy) was literally never angry at her, nor even scared of her very real power over me and the farm. I was just sad and disappointed.

I should probably mention that the woman playing Mira had a much harder role than I did, but did an absolutely bang-up job of it. At our post-game decompression session, everyone agreed about how impressive and imposing Mira was. And she told Theo and I how much she had wanted to take us up on our various offers, but couldn’t, because that’s not who Mira was.

At the end of the night, the was storm was over and the GM opened the door. Mira, still standing proud despite her plans failing, strode out. Theo ran to the door, and called after her. “You’ll always be family,” she said. Somewhere out there is another woman whose beautiful voice my daughter inherited. I’ve seen her in person twice, and have never spoken to her. But she’ll always be family.

(Continues in part three.)

I was able to play the “Storm Cellar” LARP at Go Play Northwest this year, and it was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had. To all the people I played with: thank you for your portrayal of your characters, and to the authors: thank you for creating such an amazing world.

I have a lot to say about the game, and by necessity, some of it will contain spoilers. Part One is as spoiler-free as I could make it and still tell the story I wanted to tell, but if I was thinking about playing it myself, I wouldn’t want to even know that much--just believe me when I tell you it was excellent, have fun doing it yourself, and then come back if you want to hear my take on it. Part Two has huge spoilers, and is very personal. Part Three has no spoilers at all, and is only tangentially related to Parts One And Two, but will make a bit more sense in that context.

Without further ado, I give you:

Part One: Wherein Our Hero Recounts The Events Of And Leading Up To A Saturday Night In July.

To back up a bit for those who might not be familiar with Go Play Northwest, LARPs, or storm cellars: Go Play Northwest is an annual roleplaying convention that is completely focused on getting together and playing various roleplaying games. This year, there were eight different time slots over three days in roughly 3-hour windows each, with breaks for lunch and dinner. There were games to sign up for beforehand, and games you could choose to join at the beginning of each slot. LARP stands for “Live Action Role-Playing”, which is basically long-form improv where the players themselves are the intended audience. A given LARP might have lots of rules or almost none, or lots of pre-defined characters to play or let you make up your own, or might have a tight pre-defined structure or let the players do whatever they want--it’s a very generic term that can encompass a wide variety of experiences.

A storm cellar is an outdoor bunker designed to protect people from the weather, particularly tornadoes.

In this particular LARP (“Storm Cellar”, by Kathleen De Smet and Eva Schiffer), I signed up in advance basically knowing nothing about either the LARP itself or even LARPing in general: while I have acted in many plays and musicals, performed in an improv troupe for ten years, and played and GMed numerous roleplaying games, this would be my very first actual LARP. The person running the slot asked for people’s contact information so that he could send them a character survey: I did so, and in a couple days, I got a form back, asking questions about the kind of person I would feel most comfortable playing. A couple days later, I got another email with the backstory of Emily Rayne, the person I would be playing for three hours that Saturday night.

In general, I had claimed on the character survey that I would be most comfortable playing someone a lot like me, and Emily was a lot like me. Or, perhaps, a lot like *how I perceive myself*, which is a more idealized version of the actual me. But either way, I poured myself into that character, and she fit like an old sweater. Her circumstances and relationships were almost completely different than mine (with one huge overlap--more in the more spoiler-y part two), but if I was granted a stronger work ethic, transported to Kansas in 1939, and given Emily’s circumstances, I could see the two of us making largely congruent choices, on the whole.

The LARP itself was amazing, for so many reasons. There were no mechanics, just our backgrounds, goals, and the premise that we had all been around Emily’s farm when a tornado hit, and we all took shelter in her storm cellar. As players, we gathered in a room in the basement, set out a bunch of LED candles, introduced ourselves to each other, turned off the lights, and started. I kicked things off by standing up, distressed, asking if everyone was OK and that nobody had seen anyone else outside that might need to join us. From there, people gathered in small groups and just… started talking.

Emily was at the center of two major plot threads, one centering on her son, and the other centering on money. The son thread kicked in right away, and led to some very, very powerful and emotional scenes right at the top. From there, it mostly moved to financial struggles, with the son thread continuing to weave its way through the story. There was breathing room here and there, and occasionally I was pulled into other people’s stories and dramas, but by and large, it was three hours of me talking to people, trying to keep my life intact.

And what made the whole scenario the most interesting for me was that if you just tallied up my worldly assets, and compared them to the forces arrayed against me, you’d pretty much assume that I was destined to be screwed over: I had zero political influence or power, a struggling farm that I owed a significant mortgage on, and meager savings. Against this, there were people in the room with ready access to tons of cash, who could casually promise influence and plum positions to people who had the ability to wreck my life.

But I had other assets, that weren’t quite as obvious. I had healthy relationships, a moral center, and the ability to believe the best about people while still retaining a clear head. And if this was a novel, there would be no doubt as to the outcome--obviously, it was going to work out for me, as my assets were things we tell people to value, and the stories we write about. But here, we just had people who were all supposed to make decisions that were best for their own character, not decisions that were best for the story! I honestly had no idea what would happen.

And as a result, I just went with my gut, sinking even more of myself into dear Emily, making her live up to my own ideals, and behave the way I would hope I would behave in her situation. I trusted people, but let actions speak louder than promises. I loved my son, tried to help him through an emotionally difficult time, and invested myself in the people around me; both friends and rivals. I offered forgiveness to those that wronged me, and was sad, but not angry, when it was rejected. At the crux of the night, when it was clear that the rich and powerful were conspiring to try to ruin me for reasons of their own, I was saddened and a little frustrated, but content: I had people that loved me; I had lived by my principles; and if more powerful people than I were going to screw with me, well, that was their choice, not mine.

And then, the instant the opposition made their move, an ally, already worried for me and by my side, stepped in to help. Then someone else, not even aware of my new difficulties, stepped in to help with what they could. And then at the climax of the evening, yet another person, nominally on the side of the opposition, crossed the aisle, and asked me how much I needed. And at that point, I didn’t need anything! I was overflowing in abundance. It was literally overwhelming.

I’m not sure if it’s really possible to convey how the whole evening made me feel. If I had read Emily’s story as a novel, it would have been nice, if perhaps a bit predictable; a bit reminiscent of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. If I was cast as Emily in a play, I would have understood her a bit better--as an actor, it’s possible to really throw yourself into your character, and see the world through their eyes a little more clearly. But in the end, it’s still a script, and you know the ending--if my character is overwhelmed, I work at portraying their overwhelmedness accurately and believably to the audience; I’m not literally overwhelmed myself. If my life was actually like Emily’s, I would obviously feel that quite acutely! But while I have amazing friends and family who I absolutely know would come to my aid in the event of a catastrophe, in my own life, catastrophes have been pretty thin on the ground (fortunately!) so while I’ve definitely had times where people have come to my aid, it’s never happened in quite so dramatic a fashion.

But here, walking around as Emily, with no script, only knowing what Emily knew, filling in details from my own life at every turn, everything was so stark and so compressed and so unpredictable that it felt like I might as well have been Emily herself: taking uncertain steps of faith to just treat people kindly in the face of adversity and see what happened.


And what happened was that people embraced me and told me they loved and supported me. It was more than just emotionally gratifying. It was a validation of Emily’s character; of her purpose and her choices. Of me. Well; idealized me, at any rate. I do try to live my own life as I lived Emily’s life that night. At times, I’ve succeeded. I hope people forgive me for the times I’ve failed.

(Continue in part two and part three.)

Right now the annual IF Competition is going on, with an unusually high number of games this year. So much so that, worried about the corresponding burden on judges writing reviews, Emily Short asked some people who don't usually write IF reviews (or haven't recently) to review some. I asked her if there was a game she thought I might be uniquely suited for, and it turned out there was a game ('Switcheroo') about a foster kid! So, naturally, I was intrigued.

The upshot is that I played the game, found it kind of clunky but sweet, and ultimately very insightful about what it means to be a foster child who might have found an adoptive family. The full review is up at:

https://emshort.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/if-comp-2015-guest-post-lucian-smith-on-switcheroo/

If you want to play the game itself (and it's not at all a puzzle game--the basic format is a 'choice' game, where you select from a few options and click which one you want, and there are no wrong choices, as far as I could tell), you can get play it online at the ifcomp site: Switcheroo.

Thanks for the heads-up and the prompt, Emily!

If anyone reading this has a paid account, there's a couple more rss feeds I wouldn't mind being added to lj. There's one from a guy who's just started watching geek iconic movies (http://somewonderfulkindofnoise.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default) and there's maga's other blog (http://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/feed/). Thanks!

So, in this year's play at our church ('The Comic-Con Caper'), I'm playing Francis Reynolds, a single mother of five, who goes to this Comic Con every year dressed as Princess Leia. I've been dressing as and trying to act like a woman for several weeks of rehearsals now, and I've learned a lot! I now know how to take off a bra without taking off your shirt. I discovered that it's much easier to file your nails on your left hand than your right (assuming you're right-handed). Through a lot of trial and error, I finally worked out that since men's waists are a generally lower than women's, and since I'm tall to begin with, breasts look a lot more normal on me several centimeters lower than my bra wants to let me have them--I'm going to have to add more elastic to the straps, because they're too short, even at maximum extension. I've discovered that stores like Payless don't even stock shoes or boots for women with my-sized feet. I now know that you can feel fingernail polish through your nails, and that I make a lot more typos with long fingernails. I found that the most helpful videos online that tell you how to walk and talk like a woman are created for the transgendered.

I've also found out what it feels like to be called ugly. And I have to tell you, it stone-cold sucks.

Now, the entire *point* of me being cast as this character was that our writer/director created Francis to be not very attractive, but felt it would be kind of mean to make a woman intentionally ugly, even on stage. But, she thought, if you had a *guy* dressed as a woman, that would be unattractive by default! So I walked into the roll prepared to not be a beautiful woman.

But what I was unprepared for was my reaction to my own appearance. After I got my bra and Leia dress, I would wear them during rehearsals, and started trying to stay in-character (or at least in-gender) the entire time, even when not on stage. I walked around the rehearsal space with my feet pacing an invisible straight line so my hips would sway slightly. I sat with my legs crossed demurely with my hands on my knees. And I realized: I wanted to be pretty! And more subtly (and, upon reflection, erroneously) I felt that in order to be a good woman, I had to be a beautiful woman.

But of course, Francis does not have very good material to work with, and despite my and her best efforts, she looks like a guy in drag. Some of my fellow actors at rehearsal made a few offhand comments along those lines. "Man, you look terrible." "The years have not been kind to 'Princess Leia'." And remember: this is the whole point of me being this role! I'm supposed to look unattractive! But guys, I am here to tell you (because the women already know): having my looks disparaged as a woman made me feel horrible.

There were a few things going on there, I think. At the most basic level, this was the first time in my entire life that anyone had ever called me unattractive, so it was kind of a shock. This is not because I'm some Adonis (far from it), but because I don't have any obvious deformities, and because I'm a guy, and calling guys ugly is not really something our culture ever does. It has been a serious struggle for people in my life who care about my appearance (read 'my mom and my wife') to get me to put any effort at all into looking presentable, because I have never really believed that there was any real benefit to be gained by it.

At another level, dressing as a woman woke me up to something I guess I must have known, but never really realized: there is intense pressure on women in our society to look good. I mean, I knew that, but I kind of imagined it was overblown. It couldn't be *that* bad, could it? But stepping into Francis's life, and seeing the same world through her eyes let me see that pressure in a suddenly personal way. Suddenly, the apparent 'normal' level of beauty in TV and movies and commercials and magazine covers wasn't some scale set up to measure other people: I was suddenly on that scale myself. And on that scale, I was a failure.

But mostly, what it made me realize was that without even knowing I had done it, I had bought into the hype. The main person who was judging Francis by her ability to look good... was me. Before that moment, I would have told you, with a certain amount of superiority, that *of course* I didn't care about what women looked like. How superficial! Sure, some women are more attractive than others, but that's not what matters about them! But... no. Francis is an interesting woman, with strengths and weaknesses and quirks and skills, but the #1 feature that I instinctively cared about was her looks. Do I do that to other women? I think I might. And that makes me feel worse than being called ugly did. I think somewhere along the way, I became part of the problem.

And I don't know what to do to fix it, either. It's an attitude I've had for a long time without realizing it: it's not going to evaporate instantly in the sunny light of realization. I'm really really hoping that this is one of those cases where 'knowing is half the battle', because then I'd at least be 50% of the way there. But even if I'm that far along, I have no idea what the next step is. Pay attention, I guess? Try to at least not lose ground, by finding a way to remind myself periodically that this is something I want to change?

I guess one obvious first step is for me to cut Francis some slack. She may look ridiculous, but I don't have to let that define her, at least for me. I can do what I can for her as far as makeup and hair and gait (and she does care about all of that), but beyond that, I can let it go, and focus on all the lovely things I've discovered about her over the course of doing this play. And to Cristie, our director: thank you so much for believing in me, and giving me this role. It's been an honor.

Now we get to the post I actually meant to make in the first place ;-)

( A friend posted this picture on Facebook...Collapse )

Thanks again to [friend] and [friend's friends] for listening to me rant about this, and for providing some of the references I used above. The full list is:

http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Apostle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript
http://av1611.com/kjbp/faq/holland_joh1_18.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon

I went to go post something, and when I did, livejournal asked me, "Do you want to restore from a saved draft?" Surprised, I clicked 'yes', and got the following unfinished post, from maybe a year ago:

( Two books, one by a New York Jew and the other by his Quaker slaveCollapse )

In brief: Oh, yeah! Those were pretty interesting books! You should check them out if you're interested in the borderlands between secularism and Christianity.