All Eyes on Me

I am fascinated by a game series called Five Nights at Freddy's. For those of you who don't know, this is a series of indie survival horror games where, basically, you must keep a bunch of murderous Chuck-E-Cheese-style animatronics from catching and killing you. I'm not really a fan of that kind of gameplay, I find it too stressful, but the underlying backstory of the games, seeded very subtly in environmental details, clues in off-hand remarks, and the subtext of not-explicitly-explained events, is RICH AND FASCINATING. I watched a series of excellent videos by Matpat, who meticulously analyzed all these little details to discern what the story was. He really does some amazing analytical work, and the amount of narrative that's ALMOST ENTIRELY SUBTEXT AND BACKGROUND DETAIL is so amazing. I'm really impressed that the designer could include it all that way, and that this Matpat guy could find it.

It makes me want to design a game where you get the story through subtext and environmental clues. I always like the idea of a game like, say, Gone Home, where you figure things out based on examining the the artifacts of a family's life in their house. I wasn't particularly impressed by the main story in Gone Home-- other than some minimal freshness imparted by the LGBT themes, it was about as basic and predictable as you can get --while being slightly annoyed at how it had a respectful and loving daughter digging through her family's private things for the sake of functional convenience.

Given that, plus my love for period pieces and mysteries, I was imagining a piece-together-the-clues-type game where you played a maid girl in a big house. I like the idea that a maid is allowed in the personal things of a house, so she would have a reason to see intimate effects and secrets, plus a good maid is practically invisible as she goes about her work, so no one would notice her as she investigated. She could realize there's something fishy going on and start piecing together the clues to figure out who committed a crime, or what dark secrets lurked within the house and history. That could be really cool. Maybe I could do it as like a Twine game or something. I hear Twine is easy for novices to work in, since I'm not a programmer, and that might suit the format.

As I've mentioned, I costumed a production of She Kills Monsters at Dana Hall this semester. One of the coolest set properties in the show were the heads of the Tiamat, the final boss in the story of the play, made by Mr. Peter Watson, the technical director at Dana Hall. They were dragon heads on long poles, each individually operated by actors.



As they didn't see the need to keep all five, Mr. Watson very kindly gave me one of the heads after the show. They were so cool-looking I really wanted to keep one. I thought maybe I could find a use for a dragon head prop, given all the theater and gaming stuff I do. I chose the silver one-- nicknamed "Ben" by Eva, the girl who operated it --because I thought it might take best to repainting if I ever wanted to alter it to another color or look.



It's currently sitting in the trunk of my car, like a grisly dragonslayer's trophy. :-) At some point I'll need to write a game I can use it in. I don't know what it might be or how it might be used-- now is certainly not the time to be thinking about such things --but I think it's too cool a prop not to reuse.

OF COURSE I would be overrun with ideas for other projects right when I'm just on the heels of being free of the obligation to write for a while. I should be getting my focus on editing Mrs. Hawking, I only have to do it for one more day, but OF COURSE my brain would become suffused with notions for unrelated projects exactly at this crucial moment.

Being at SLAW whetted my hunger for larp yet again. And now all my ideas for future larps are rising up again, begging for attention. I am currently listed as author for seven larps, which are chronologically Alice, Oz, Paranoia, The Labor Wars, Resonance, The Stand, and Break a Leg, but I have nearly as many again brewing in my head. And I've just been struck by ideas for several more.

I've been watching the second season of American Horror Story, which is set in a Catholic mental institution in sixties New England. It is the larpiest show I have seen in a long time. It has a large cast of main characters, each with their own individual but interlocking goals and journeys, all locked within the setting of the asylum-- a perfect premise for a larp. I would love to write such a game, though I would have to take care not to draw too much from the TV show, or from Jesriah, the excellent mental institution game from Happier Far that debuted earlier this year.

I also want to write a larp set in a circus. Just thinking of the figures one could expect in a setting like that seems fascinating to write about-- the ringmaster, the lion tamer, the acrobats, the clowns, the freaks. A perfect milieu for things not being quite what they seem. I've never played Colonel Sebastian T. Rawhide, which is the only other circus game I know, so I wouldn't have to worry about emulating that too closely. I've heard it's a good game, though.

And I've gotten one more idea that I don't want to talk about yet. But it's been punching through my brain with great insistence recently, so you may hear more of this once I have real time to devote to it.

Okay, so I'm not quite at forty yet. According to my calendar, last night marked my thirty-ninth ballet class since I started in September. I have missed classes here and there for other commitments, but by and large I have made it a point to go to every Tuesday and Thursday nights for the beginner course, and I have been enjoying it.

In the last couple of weeks, I think I can finally say I have observed real improvement. For one thing, my teachers do not automatically say "Drop your shoulders," every time they look at me, which was a real problem I'd been having. My ballet arms struck me as incredibly ugly for the longest time, but now when I look at myself in the mirror they seem to look a lot more like they're supposed to. Also, the nature of the critiques I've been getting has grown more particular. You know when your teacher's comments get increasingly nitpicky that you're making forward progress and doing a better job. I am really pleased by this, as this is something I would really love to develop proficiency in. Especially since when I started I had a hard time feeling how the way my body was working didn't conform to what it was supposed to be doing.

Here's an example. I have always had good turnout, apparently, as I received several compliments on it right away and continue to do so. I suspect it has to do with the fact that turnout comes from the outward rotation of the hips, and my hips are far and away the most flexible part of my body. The only factor limiting my turnout is, no surprise, my knees, which are conversely the tightest and least flexible. Still, I'd been feeling slightly off, especially since I think that even though I can do turnout right, it was making my feet become pronated. Nobody's said anything about it, so maybe it's not that bad, but I can feel my feet slightly rolling towards my ankle. But recently something clicked for me that I think helped me do better. We had a substitute teacher one week from another studio, and I don't remember exactly what it was that she said, but with her I suddenly grasped that if I made a point of lifting my hips, I would bring my weight more directly over my legs rather than allowing it to pull back against them. That lack of pulling back took a lot of the pressure off my knees when turned out, which caused my feet to pronate in order to maintain balance. Making that posture change helped enormously, soothing my knees and easing the pronation, and I am working to maintain it as I dance.

Of course my technique is still beginner-baby-lame. My biggest challenges now mostly boil down to the fact that while I'm relatively fit, I am just not strong enough to always manipulate my muscles properly. Ballet takes an enormous amount of strength to constantly maintain correct position and balance as you go through the movements, and I'm just not there yet. I often end up with twitchy muscles the next day, like the maddening little flurry that won't get out of my kneecap right now. At least it's encouraging me to stretch more, and that not only helps my dancing but also my daily comfort; my tight knees really do plague me. But the more tired I get, the more wobbly or floppy I become. I should be practicing more. To that end, I have a weird idea that I'm going to see if I can put into action.

One problem with practicing ballet is that you need the right surface to do it on so your shoes slide right over it. I try to go to the dance studio in Gosman when I can, but it's usually occupied. So I have a weird little idea that I'm not sure is going to work but I kind of want to try it anyway. I noticed in the dollar store that you can buy cheap, approximately one foot square linoleum tiles that you can lay on your own. I think they're self-adhesive. Probably not the best thing you can use for flooring, but designed for a budget, and smooth enough to slide over. I want to buy a bunch of them, stick them to a big sturdy piece of cloth, and see if I can make a smooth mini-ballet surface I can lay out when I want to practice and fold up like a game board when I want to put it away. It would have to be small, which means I would only be able to do stationary stuff on it, but that's better than no practice at all, and I could use it whenever I felt like practicing. Again, who knows if that will work, but it wouldn't be a big investment of time or resources, so it's worth a try. It would likely encourage me to work at ballet more.

This is my current favorite image of ballet. You go, bear. Best pas de deux ever.

Someday I want to write something that pointedly subverts all the male-female courtship tropes. I want to reverse all the things we tend to expect for people's behavior during the building of a romantic relationship, having the man inhabit the woman's traditional role and vice versa. And I want to do it in a way in which they both come off as otherwise totally normative examples of their gender. I'm not talking about writing a butch woman and a feminine man. I'm talking about two people who are in every way cisgendered and even "normal" for their gender, but do not conform to the traditionally assigned roles that people expect to be filled for two straight people in a romantic relationship, because these things come from society, not anything in our nature.

Once I had an idea for something in which the protagonist was a sort of knight-errant figure who devotedly served and fought to save the kindgom of the beautiful, virtuous royal they loved from afar, in sort of the kind of relationship that Link and Zelda have in the Legend of Zelda video games. Only in this version, the knight would be the woman, and the object of the courtly love would be a wise and beautiful prince. I love that idea. I'd like to explore the notion that our traditional courtship roles are one of the most artificially constructed aspect of our gender norms. There's so much that we've settled on as the model for how these things works. Who is the pursuer and who is the pursued. What qualities make which partner "attractive." The things we're expected to want out relationships. Et cetera. I want to mess with all of those tropes, show that they're external to our expression of our gender and it doesn't change who we are based on what expected behaviors we express.

*Shifts uncomfortably*

See, I have this little problem. Maybe you've heard of it, or experienced it yourself. It's the problem where all my ideas are awesome until I tell them to somebody.

I have one of those ideas right now.

It's a fantastic idea. It would be awesome if I did it. The thing is, the minute I tell somebody, they're totally going to laugh at me. 'Cause it's so unbelievably lame and dorky, there could be no other outcome.

....but it's so awesome!!!!! Ahhhh!

A coyote loved a jackrabbit, but the world would not let them live in love. So they chase, always chase, never close enough to catch, never far enough to be apart, the only way they can be together.