This is old, but I felt like posting it.
When I was a little girl, we lived in a small, blue-gray village by the sea. Siren’s Point was once a fishing town, I think, but the ocean slowly froze up, and the nets crumbled and sank beneath the icy waves. By the time we moved there, the town was living on tourists
alone.
There is a camaraderie in shared alienation. Nobody gives a shit about any of us, so we’re all in it together. We have weapons, we have violence in our hands, there are more of us than there are of them, but what can we do?
Stop. Change the circumstances.
Now, some of them are collaborators. They are loved and wanted, and their futures are shining brightly ahead of them, like those blue xenon headlights on some godforsaken SUV. We’re just problems. Speed bumps. So maybe a few of us will make the ride as uncomfortable as possible.
~
This is what I know: The characters are students at a suburban high school. The game session concludes in an act of violence.
This isn’t Touch, though it’s related (I don’t think it’s Vesperteen, either, but I don’t fully understand Vesp, and the page for it seems to be down at the moment, and Jonathan and I need to talk about it more, at any rate). Where as Touch hits its high notes being Buffy or Lost and Delirious, this game is Elephant through and through.
I’m not sure how I feel about playing that, but I’m damn sure I want to write it.
I don’t know what they are—and even in saying that, I get a sense that I do, actually, know what they are. There are some things that will make me just leave. Stand up from the table and walk away.
The table in question is not necessarily a gaming table. Empirically, it isn’t; I have walked away from conversations, but never any games.
My question to you is: what will make you leave? What sort of game would push the boundaries that you don’t want pushed?
This is relevant with regards to a game I’m working on called Touch. It’s set in high school, and it is explicitly sexual—although it does not necessarily involve explicit sex, if that makes sense. It’s Sugar Rush. It’s Cruel Intentions. And whenever I’ve talked about it with people, I’ve come away with the sense that only people really, really on the same page, who really trust each other, could possibly play it.
Maybe that’s true. I’m not sure yet, but I’d like to know.
Back from Comic con, with a bunch of stuff, including five comics, three t-shirts (Slusho-what?), and a cold, the last of which I am attempting to return, with some success.
The con was brilliant, and also strange in a way that I’ll likely write about when I’ve had a chance to process it a bit more. We saw Stardust (the film), which is lovely in a rather different way than Stardust (the book). I went to the Alison Bechtel spotlight, where she read from Fun Home, which it turns out that I must read, if only I can find a copy of it. Sugar Shock is a lot of fun, Beowulf looks pretty, and I actually have hope that I might see a Death film in my lifetime. Also, many more tidbits, which I’ll probably mention as I remember them.
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming. Or will, as soon as a fresh post precipitates out of the ether.