inlooking #018: Love & Darkness

20240721: families, dragons, satellites

I wish I had some upcoming classes to tell you about, but I do not, at the moment. That said. I will probably have a few things like that to tell you about soon.

1. families

2. teenage monsters

3. your malleable brain

4. southern soul original

5. remembering the 1990s

6. pretty deep in the territory

In play

Most readers of this newsletter probably aren’t aware that I have a history in games. I wrote a book about them, in fact, and there were a number of years in which most of the journalism I did revolved around them. I have, from time to time, also designed them, though precious few of those designs have made their way to the public. Here and there they have, but not for a while. Now here’s a new one:

I released a game the other day on itch.io, one of the top marketplaces / communities for indie games. (And that’s an interesting animal, isn’t it, the marketplace-community.) The game is called Love & Darkness, and you can have it for free just by clicking. It’s a storytelling game about families, in which, basically, you create a family and talk about it. Your family could be anything: an oil dynasty, a fantasy kingdom, a found family of post-apocalyptic survivors, a band of refugees, or your suburban neighbors. Or anything else, as long as you can imagine a rich constellation of people and relationships in and around it. Then you start drawing cards (just regular playing cards), and the cards guide you in talking about what’s going on with the family you’re getting to know. You draw a family tree as you go, as well, and mark on it relationships, desires, and other things that are important to the family. It takes an hour or two, sometimes more, depending on how much you talk. I think it works pretty well. If you check it out, let me know how it goes.

Messy lives

I’ve been thinking about games quite a bit again lately, in particular about the capacity of certain kinds of games to liberate and empower (if those words aren’t too strong). Love & Darkness isn’t a game like this, or anyway it isn’t meant to be. But I am very interested in games that do play in this space, whether intentionally or not.

To most people, the phrase “tabletop roleplaying game” means Dungeons & Dragons. D&D is, of course, the granddaddy of them all, and turns 50 this year. But there are many thousands of “indie” roleplaying games, including a number of notable ones that, explicitly or not, get into issues and ideas we don’t normally associate with this space.

Just to name a few:

• Monsterhearts is a game about “the messy lives of teenagers who are secretly monsters,” and bills itself as explicitly queer, “meaning that it pushes back against the heterosexist framework that underlies so many of our culture’s stories.”

• Wanderhome is “a pastoral fantasy role-playing game about traveling animal-folk,” and it really is just that: a game about wandering around, but one that leads you into really interesting stories that are very much “pastoral” and can be very personal, and are in any case very far away from the fantasy adventure mode that is D&D.

• In My Life With Master, a roleplaying game of "villainy, self-loathing, and unrequited love,” you play as minions serving an overbearing master, and struggle to escape a deeply dysfunctional and codependent relationship by trying to minimize character traits like “Weariness” and “Self-Loathing” and increase the “Love” you have access to.

There are more like these, and many more which, even if they don’t plumb challenging spaces within us, explore modes of play and collaborative storytelling that are a world away from D&D’s tight loop of killing things in order to get better at killing things. And of course there are a whole lot of very interesting variations on D&D’s mode of adventuring toward a more or less traditional tale. Many ring the changes on theme and setting — from fantasy realms to sci-fi space operas to cyberpunk dystopias to haunted hamlets and much more — and many others cover a spectrum of different kinds of gameplay, mixing numbers and narrative to various degrees, the structure of the games guiding their players toward certain kinds of interactions.

Emancipatory bleed

The interesting thing is that games like these (yes, even D&D) can have a positive impact on the lives of the people who play them. I’ve spoken with a number of researchers lately who are looking at this phenomenon, and they seem to agree: the kind of collaborative storytelling that happens in tabletop roleplaying games — in which a player is responsible for guiding their made-up character through a series of challenges and other interactions in a made-up world — can translate to players’ lives away from the table. In other words, slaying fantasy dragons can help you slay the metaphorical dragons in your everyday life.

A fantastic description of this can be read in a long blog post from writer, designer, educator, and games scholar Jonaya Kemper. In the piece, The Battle of Primrose Park: Playing for Emancipatory Bleed in Fortune & Felicity, Kemper describes how “exploring oppression through play” (in a live-action roleplaying game, in this case) led to positive changes in how she thought about herself and interacted with the world around her, once the game had ended.

This is a not uncommon phenomenon, according to “the literature.” Which doesn’t really surprise me, both as a gamesperson and simply as a citizen of the world, one who’s aware that behaviors become ingrained in us the more we practice them, and that both habits of action and habits of thought leave their marks — on our bodies, on our minds (in the sense of our consciousness), and even on the physical makeup of our brains, where repeating a behavior changes the strength of neural pathways, and so makes it easier for us to do those things next time. The interesting thing is that these neural pathways can be strengthened by simply imagining positive change as well as by practicing it. All this is made possible a process known as neuroplasticity, which is really just a word that describes the malleability of your brain.

Kemper calls this, in the context of play, “emancipatory bleed.” Bleed is a word used to describe the way experiences of play can carry over to and echo in one’s life outside a game. (This idea is what my book and most of my games journalism was about.) Kemper attaches it to the idea that game experiences can have a liberating and empowering effect in one’s “real” life, that they can be emancipatory in some way.

I love all this. I have a couple of projects in mind around it, so expect to hear more. And, with any luck, expect more games.

Getting mighty crowded

In other news, I had a good time writing this piece for Alta Journal about the satellites and other volumes of space junk that are causing dangerous overcrowding in orbit around Earth. Why dangerous? Because of course, when you stop to think about it, much of our communications infrastructure is located up there, around 1,200 miles above the surface of the planet, in what’s known as Low Earth Orbit. Should a piece of space junk collide with a communications satellite, it could potentially wreak havoc on anything from the cellular network to location-based services, monitoring of ports, traffic, wildlife, weather, or the environment, internet services, or a range of other things we take for granted. There’s even a nifty science fiction scenario that gets mentioned in connection with satellite collisions, the Kessler Syndrome. This is what (presumably) could occur should a collision happen in the wrong place: a spreading debris field could cause a cascade of additional collisions, which in turn would cause yet more collisions, and so on, until whole swaths of orbit would become so crowded with dangerous debris that they’d be unusable by satellites, potentially hampering even our ability to launch new rockets into space. Fortunately, people are working on clearing this up. Unfortunately, it’s slow going, and not terribly well aligned with near-term profits, which is what most companies find most motivating when it comes to choosing problems to solve. So enjoy your internet while it’s still here. Getting Mighty Crowded isn’t just a great Elvis Costello song.

In fact, it’s a great Betty Everett number, which if you’ve never heard the 1965 southern soul original, is well worth the listen.

Everett, of course, is best known for her huge hit of the year before, The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss). And that’s not even the real digression, which appears below.

Back in the day

Thinking about satellites reminds me of the mid-90s, when I lived in what was even then no longer really called Alphabet City by too many people, at least not if you lived there. You’d occasionally see Lou Reed stalking around, or going in and out of the Christadora on Avenue A near 10th, where I think Iggy Pop lived. I lived around the corner on 10th between C and D — a block that was still pretty deep in the territory, although peaceable enough. Now the neighborhood is fancy groceries, Waldorf Schools, and pricey condos. It’s just like Lou says:

Satellite’s gone way up to Mars

Soon it will be filled with parking cars

Til next time,

Wallace

As always, find me on Bluesky at @markwallace.bsky.social