thread: 2011-05-11 : The Un-frickin-welcome
On 2011-05-12, Josh W wrote:
Ok Ben, consequences:
I'm going to spout like I know what you're game is all about even though I've never played it! (It's just easier that way) I hope you don't mind.
The game has consequences realised for certain kinds of interactions, it makes them get remembered, it makes people react to them now knowing they will stick.
The kind of things people get into affect loads of stuff, and the game depends on making things depend on each other and inter-relate in a way they normally don't do, through a kind of activity your interested in;
love, sex and relationships, (that whole bundle)
have consequences on life and death
via mecha battles
the mecha battles mediate between those two spheres, so the love/relationship stuff that guy was interested in had to relate to life and death, because the game mechanic was there to do that.
In another game he would have been able to still try to get married in a post apocolyptic world, and maybe would have succeeded. But in this game strategic pressure was put on his relationships, and if he avoided that, or chose to sacrifice utalising/exploiting his relationships to their fullest extent, there would probably be consequences.
So you were risking a stall by playing the core of your character that close to the games pattern of consequences, and that potentiality materialised.
Now if I'm right on that (and I could easily not be), it seems like you could have had a game where the connection between relationships and life and death has more advanced warning, say by having collateral damage precede personal consequences. In that way, the core character of the game could present itself to all the players (and importantly, the characters) in real events before it goes so far as to collapse a character. Now you probably didn't need any warning that this was risking death, you know the game, but perhaps your character did? Then you could have in character had exposure to the posibility and so time to work your way towards dealing with it.
On the other hand maybe he had all the warning, was fully in the shadow of potential disaster, and was just taking that edge consiously (as an in character decision) or ignoring it. In that case the existential powercut he went through is sort of implicit in the character, in your decision to play this guy in this game. Hard to resolve, but neccesary to preserve the weight of the risk he took. It's sort of paying a price in current gameplay difficulty to support the quality of previous play, and maybe make it even more memorable.
(it does the same for the play in other plays of the same game too)
