The above graphic shows the games I played during the Happening, whether organized by me or by someone else. The total games played by everyone there approximately doubled that number of titles.
This post is about the two I’ve circled, which are part of my Cantos set of four games. They are weird, arty, intimate things.
Estimated Prophet
So, this one is about visionary experiences and the resulting curious mix of confirmation and questing. Or if you prefer, people who mutter into the middle distance about how meaningful their dream was. It has several specific inspirations, but none more so than Phlip K. Dick’s Valis.
I played with Daniel (who requested doing so as he had been excited by teh text), Bea, and Filip.
Similar to Polaris, its speaking-rules are built for four people and rotate around the table, although exactly what constitutes each role is different. It’s also absurdly arty as people add weird things to their character sheets, based on a common image and available materials from an arts and crafts supply. It wasn’t a planned game, so we were under-stocked and had to make do mostly with colored pencils.
My hope for play, and it works pretty well, is that these features swiftly become non-exotic and play becomes rather comfortable and rhythmic, rather than experimental in a forced way.
Our characters included a tightly-wrapped pleaser with too many half-finished fantasy novels on hand, a failing-out aging guy on the verge of deportation and losing everything else, a cheerful neurotic dance theater person, and a tough-minded yard-and-patio repairman. Here are our sheets at the point of closing out my character’s conclusion (I just realized Filip’s character isn’t included; I’ll find and add it later). Items which are fully covered are obliterated, painlessly, from the characters’ lives; items which are overlapped are altered in some odd but benign way.
As for play-practice, I should reconsider instigating character conflict, or making it more clear how that’s done. At one point, I basically just invaded Filip’s turn, when it should have been up to him.
Shine a Light
This one’s about a group of young friends, 19 or 20 years old … or maybe not friends in any other context, but whatever you call a certain kind of socializing that people in a transitional phase of life may do. Rather than being rendered freaky by visions, as in Estimated Prophet, play is quite ordinary, although rich in inner lives and interactions.
I played with David and Ross; our characters included Mackenzie, who sang with kids in the Liberal Religous Youth (kid section of the Universal Unitarian Church); Trent, somewhat uncomfortably associated with his ex’s dad’s Methodist Church; and Richard, non-observant but uncritically still thinking in terms of a controversial franchise church. They hung out at the coffee place where Mackenzie worked, or rather, feuded with her worm of a manager, and basically just chatted.
As I’ve seen before in playing this game, about when everyone is used to casual, sputtering, rambling, often over-revealing rhythm of play, the hammer comes down. Anyone who’s familiar with the inspirational material (comics like Minimum Wage, Dykes to Watch For, Alec, Box Office Poison, Hate, and many more) knows that the casual, irresponsible, hipster, angst-y, occasionally brutal-truth social soap is anchored by the solid hand of death … and that in that moment, people reveal their values through their assumptions and practices of early life.
Three people is the bare minimum for play, and I think I’m going to push for more, the next time.
2 responses to “Ecstasy and mortality”
I’m particularly curious about the Shine A Light session. How long did you play? From the description it sounds like at least one Angel was drawn. Did playing through that wrap the session and if not, I’m curious what moment brought things to a close.
We played for about an hour and a half, I think, or … maybe more like two and a half, because my experience of time was curiously suspended. A lot happened in play – Alanis Morisette came to the coffee shop, for instance, and Mackenzie lost her cool (“My mom plays all your songs!!”) – and thinking back, more time seemed to have passed than I realized.
Raphael was the Angel card, so play concerned unequivocal murder. The card was clearly close to the top of the deck once past the buffer zone, so our point totals were totally inadequate (and the other players were still getting used to drawing cards ad lib). It didn’t finish the session, but its consequences through all the characters did, on my call at a particularly strong one.
At that point in play, we had five characters, having added Edward, Richard’s roommate; and Tracie, Trent’s ex. Tracie had been featured since the beginning as she tied into Trent’s religious perspective, as also being the Methodist pastor’s daughter. The original three characters were well-established and the most story-ish or conflict-ish one so far was Trent.
I was playing Tracie, and so far she and Trent had repeatedly butchered “being exes in the friend circle,” despite no malice on either’s part. One of the other players tagged her as the focus for Raphael. Briefly, and played through in some detail, since I think the other players took a bit to realize there was no way out, she was stabbed by her ex-once-removed boyfriend, who cornered her at the entrance to her apartment building.
As I implied above, this acted as a turning point in a lot of ways, while Tracie was in the hospital and thought unlikely to survive. We played for a while through multiple situations, including at least two other characters’ strikingly contrasted views on the event and its “why.” Tracie did recover, and the moment where I decided to wrap play concerned her and Trent actually handling their post-partner relationship really well.
As for what it was like in play, different takes are probably guaranteed for this game, about what it felt like and what it meant. In play, I was relieved when Ross said Tracie lived, and touched enough by Trent’s and Tracie’s wordless comfort with one another to wrap play … but now, I look back and think about how in movies, something like this is a big stealth positive, in a squicky, sacrificial way that people rarely process. You know, “Oh, it’s so terrible that mom died, but it also means she accepted dad’s new girlfriend, because cancer = sainthood, plus it means she’s finally out of the way and the whole conflict (TM) just vanishes, so Julia Roberts can be our new mom.” “Poor Kuzokowski, he was just a geeky kid who didn’t even know what the war was about, but now that he’s a mangled sack of bullets, we aren’t recruits any more but actually real men, so let’s go win the war.” Mackenzie did not look at it that way, and that is particularly satisfying for me in retrospect.