The Bad
Doctor’s recent post helped me realize something fundamental about how I design
and play. She wrote lovingly about art in games, and beautiful creatures —"Vessels and Hiding
Places" and "Summer Companions"—inspired by the writing of
Colette. It's not about challenge, not really. It’s about encounter. Some Sensory
oddity to feel and grab and wrestle with and relate to. Moments you carry with you.
I think this is an ode to what she writes.
So paraphrased to oblivion (sorry sorry sorry!):
Tigers in teacups, toads in armoires... They cry crystal tears as they are
discovered. These tears scatter into duplicates and flood the clearing. If
caught carefully, the tears remain pure. But in the process, the animal may crawl
into you. Filling you. Not Killing you. And it will jump out when your blood is spilled.
There are
summer companions, trading food for knowledge, each carrying a vessel with an
oversized vessel-animal - do the same rules apply, i don't know, i think they do. These companions happily drown critters and drink their blood-wine
as you do trade with them. The clouds on the plains can maul you and ink
themselves red. If all is red, summer ends. There is only meat and killing and survival. Now the blood wine you have is precious to everyone, and everyone is desperate.
Eep. What does a player do with those moments. Anything, because its no longer about solution, success or failure. OK a little maybe, if you don't want endless night. In any case, you can’t endstate it, You can’t solve it. You can only experience it interactively – changed or not.
That to me is carrier-bag play. It sits right alongside the Cottonmouth Tenor Girlhood Manifesto from The Bad Doctor, which says, better than i ever could:
“That game
we would play when we were young enough to effortlessly change things without
talking about it, and remember only what was important and joyful. Only now we are older, and years
distant from ourselves and each other. and so we have to write down things
about the games we want to play so that we remember them and why we are playing
with each other.”
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES. I played that game too. I don’t have a
cottony mouth, it’s more clown facepaint these days. But I did play that game, and
spit out rad spells...
... From my own
childhood:
We had a game called Hexe-hux—witch-house—in the days before the Harry Potter movies, when it still lived in books. I was maybe 7 or 10. It wasn’t about wizards; we were witches. And at that time, two boys. We cast magic with an old piano and magic was also singing (badly). We used hand-drawn cards as a magic card game to transform the loser into a creature for the rest of the day (I had a favorite card to lose with.) My grandmother cooked all our magic food. She was the kitchen-master, an honourable role for an old witch. Dear cooks are royalty to children, as it should be. Thank you grandma. Some people graduated from Hexe-hux as witches, other as familiars... Thats why they were magic creatures, of course. I had a cat, and cats are cool, y’all. Who doesn't wanna be a magic cat?
It was so silly, it related to our world from a position of sincerity. It involved our emotions, we could walk to and from and into it freely. It did not break when we had to eat pancakes, we elided in and out of it. Games sort of break when stopped. You have to restart it again by looking at the board, getting into the tactical mindset of winning versus losing. Play sort of elides softly, hypnotically. What isn't remembered is not important. Without a point of slippage, it integrates the outside into the inside.
We didn't
call it roleplaying. We just stepped into the magic. We kept only what was fun,
what mattered. We changed it as we needed to, without discussion – and when
there was a discussion, it was probably quick, and it did not need to end up
with a single worldview. One thing it definitely was: Silly. Open. Emotional.
Imaginative. It was... very queer, looking back. And utterly free.
That’s what I’m trying to design back toward, but just with a single shared fictional world. Where the system is just another player and less important to follow than the resulting play. Free-association guided by a tender hand and funnelled into something by a system. A point or jug maybe, a spear, a bag.
In TheCarrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
“It’s hard
to tell a gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and
then another, and another... No, it cannot compare with how I thrust my spear
into the titanic hairy flank...”
Le Guin’s theory is that stories need not be about heroes and conquest, but about gathering. Not the spear, but the bag. A carrier for seeds, memories, containers for food, stories, people. Not villains and heroes and things on pedestals, raised over the rest. Something with you, on-and-in-your person. Your body is a bag, and so is your belly. That's sort-of what i take from it.
“The hero
doesn’t look good in a bag. He looks like a sack of potatoes.”
In her telling, the novel is a bag. And it holds not victory or defeat, but process. Change. Things unfinished. Transformation without resolution. That’s what I borrow. A seed in my bag of tools. And each world i create strive to be a bag.
But That’s also the extent to which her theory is true to me in play. It is where I differ. I ain’t no author. I am a conductor among shamans. I do play
and I do love. My words are bags and spears.
Le Guin banishes the hero. She makes room for the weirdo, the cook, the caretaker, the gatherer.
Me? I still
want the heroine sometimes. Or at least her armour-dress, red-maned mask and a shorn head, her body glass-inlaid with the tattoo-moving filigree of newts in shallow
pools, Iron-boots that wade through blood that pools all by itself around her.
I still want her to cry and feel and hug and hold dear. I want her to…
Where was I… I want moments of action and awe to emerge not from narrative architecture (I actively reject it), but from emotion acted on. From transformation accepted or rejected. From when things do come to a point, when the spear is raised. So I want, I need, the spear in the bag. Not dominant, not central—but there, sharp, and maybe dripping. A sword to raise when love turns tragic. A moment of glory that ends not in victory or reckoning - but just as a memento in the bag.
I want my
worlds to be bags that hold Monsters. Witches. Wimps. Weirdos. Fae and tricksters. And all these
are people.
Because I
still like to play red-fay warrior’esses who serve cunt and dole out death as
eagerly as they kiss and cry and protect. Le Guin might say such a character is
too much Hero. Too spear.
But I’m not
Le Guin. I’m me.
I don’t
want arcs, but I do want transformation. And transformation hurts and heals and
satisfies and disappoints. Broken backs, a willow-witch dancing with scoliosis
unhindered, moon-kissed and poison-laden, with her self-chosen thralls,
each more treasured than her own life.
Where was I?..
When I say
“carrier-bag play,” I don’t mean slice of life. I mean play that
collects big moments and turns them into precious gemstones. Play that recognizes that scars are the ugly kiss of healing. Play that lets
contradiction be a fact, not a conflict.
It’s an
approach that holds...
- A tiger in a teacup. RUN!?
- A frog in your stomach. What do
you do about it?
- A witch turned into a golem
because they lost a card game. How do they feel about that?
It holds challenges, not as puzzles, but as things to feel something about. And to do something about. It’s that inner and outer interactivity that is fun. It needs all the other players, including whatever you deem 'system'. Else we would be authors, writing books, or engineers or mathematicians. I want things to take with me both as a character or as a player. Or to leave behind. And sometimes not out of your own choice. I want us tossed in a dance by one another. I want a bag that bleeds all over the fucking place.
It’s a way of making game moments not about winning or failing, but about deciding what they mean and how that meaning expresses itself, in a fun way.
And that is a flying castle. Franklin Booth.
Each maybe
a future blog post - maybe yours.
Do take them, steal them, they are free!
A rhizome of trees within spear-tipped-seeds within bags.
Included
emotions or senses.
Play happens in your feelings, and in your body. Fear matters. The interior matters to the exterior.
Juicy
contradictions.
Tigers in teacups. A funeral-feast, where effigies of the dead are danced with, then eaten. It should perplex, be unique, be most onto itself. Specific and comparative. and the weirdness, while sometimes poetic, should always be real.
Responsive
weirdness.
Things change depending on how the character relates-and-acts towards them. The chest opensin awe. It shatters in silence. It's true loves kiss that unlocks (Pandora's) box.
Interactive
installations, not traps
But the same principles
apply: A telegraphed trigger and concrete consequences.
Gifts to
carry.
A witch kissed you. You’re in love. Put it on your sheet. Or what other emotion
she stirs in you.
Things
that take.
The fae took your sorrow. Limerence fades. Erase it. How do you let her take it?
NPCs
with their own gravity.
Not your plot points. Not questgivers. Just people in the world, like you. When
summer ends and blood wine is precious, they will respond to their need in many
different ways. There will be blood.
Things
that refuse to be resolved.
In summer, outside or inside, this happens. That’s it. Deal with it.
Things
that invite a return.
In summer, that happened. It’s winter now. Deal with it.
No clear
failure. Or success.
You have a tiger in you. That’s not failure or success. That’s a tiger in you.
my carrier-bag heart is more full than my cottonmouth tongue can say <3 <3 <3
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