Games for the Mind

As I think about what it might look like to play Uns, I keep wondering about this issue of character ownership.  Superficially, the game is all about the character ownership.  There is one player, one main character, and everything basically happens for the sake of them.

But that really doesn’t capture what the game is about.  The rigid constraints of the module system (here are the places you can go, period) makes any sense of ownership more limited.  The character serves as a screen to be drawn through the setting, an organizing element that structures play, helps narrow down what can or ought to happen where.

This really isn’t so different from what happens in an old fashioned D&D module, except that the modules I would like to author aren’t about the dungeon crawl or the violence.  How much did I own ‘Rojo the Monk’?  As a character, he was just a list of interactions I could have with a fairly stable setting.

Sure, there was probably some window-dressing that gave him the appearance of independence, but if I wasn’t going to have him wander through the strange abandoned house up on the hill, I wasn’t really playing the game.  Because Rojo was designed for the module, designed to pummel monsters and pirates, to avoid damage from that pit trap, and so on.

I identified with him because his position (and history of positions) in the module determined what information about the setting was available to me, in a way that mimics a real dimension of my experience: limited access and control.

It also reproduces, in miniature, the anxieties of that situation.  The very same anxieties that I suspect result in really desperate expressions of character ownership, where the character must be a hero, their actions must have a profound impact, must draw together the disparate elements of the module into a coherent, understandable thread.

I am thinking about this, because I wonder how to write a module to alleviate that anxiety, but on a much smaller scale, where things come together for a character without thereby making it about the character in toto.  That, too, seems tied to being able to realize a comic form for the story.

That is one of the delights of a good comedy (again, dramatic sense here, not comedy as in humor-driven), it is light, things come together, but there are not the pretensions of epic or tragedy.  The world of comedy stretches almost to infinity, but it does not break or dissolve or get remade.  The comic form may have a certain gravitas, a reflectiveness, in fact works best with reflection, illuminating what is more clearly, gently.

It is the return to the beginning without the confusion and fear of beginning.

(That’s my current thought, at least)

ETA: These sorts of game bring actor and author stance into close proximity sort of as a matter of course.  What you have access to as a player and a character are remarkably similar, though not quite identical.  I wonder how many badness happened as a result of exporting this peculiarity outside of its original context, into games without such strict setting determinations…hmm.