thread: 2005-05-16 : Violence
On 2005-05-18, Ninja Hunter J wrote:
I don't think anyone's even called anyone else a Nazi yet! Sweet!
Meg, I wasn't quite sure what to do with 8 when we were out with the boffers, and I'm glad to hear that you approved (not that I knew you were watching). My thoughts went like this:
Playing hit-the-sword means that you've got this tool for competition, and you're trying to use it to tell a story about competition, but you don't get to resolve any of the story conflicts using it; you're carrying it around like a prop, and if you get really angry, you hit your brother in the face with it (not that "you" have the aim to succeed, fortunately). So what I was doing was giving him a way to have the stakes be there ("if you hit my legs, you killed the ogre!") but not have it be actually dangerous ("if you hit me in the eye, you killed the ogre!"). It also means, and I think this is significant, that there's a level of violence that shows him what his body can do.
I was telling V this story the other day: when I was a teenager, we played with pretty serious boffer weapons - rattan wrapped in pipe insulation. We had to replace the insulation after every few days of fighting. They were about as heavy as steel and balanced pretty well. We played more or less to submission, which was usually one good hit. I got pretty good at it and found myself hurting my friends, which was mostly OK and on one or two occasions, not, when I found myself actually in a fight. I found some people at Hampshire to play with and we played at about the same speed with shinai (busted knuckles abounded!). I decided that I had to stop when a bunch of my fellow geeks invited me to play and I realized that a) they didn't have any attack or defense, never mind strategy or sense of what hurt and what wounded; they just did stuff that looked like swordplay and b) it took me too long to realize that's the game they were playing and I was hitting them too hard (well, hitting them at all, really).
So I stopped because I couldn't figure out how to play the game they were playing. I'd rather see 8 holding back from a fight because someone might get hurt, than getting into a fight and not knowing that he, or someone else, could.
