Musing about Death & Danger in Adventure Games

Audio
(like most of my writing, it was done in the dead of night because of insomnia, so I'm not speaking super loud, sorry).

Easy Part - 1 - Immersion & Lethality

Played Boot Hill. Made me re-read Interlock (Friday Night Firefight for CP2013) then Zaibatsu 1e then my own Fast-Forward again to think about how we generally do naturalistic violence. Realized I can use the same method of resolving harm I did in Sellsword for Cyberpunk/Desperados/anything with firearms. I think determining chances to hit etc I'd rather do from context and ad lib rather than cross-referencing charts, I just like to have hit location and injury determination be random because I'm too soft to have the world be as uncaring as I want to convey.

On another note, something amazing I've realized while playing again after mostly running is how easily I get heavily immersed in a character and game world if I'm not playing a dungeoncrawl type game. The game was mostly talking to NPCs and a brutal shootout at the end, and I think now I basically experience what the nordic LARP folks call "bleed", except I didn't need to heavily invest myself in the character (made her up as I went along from some very basic broad strokes and just playing her first-person, doing a voice etc), and felt pretty safe with handling things like character death etc since I expected it was a distinct possibility.

That makes me even more confused as to why some folks seem to have such a hard time around lethality, as if it detracts from the experience from an immersion standpoint. From my POV it feels way more like an indirect way of saying "I'll enjoy the game only if it is a power fantasy type of escapism" than anything, considering that I seem to be able to get in-character and invested just fine while also being OK with "ok my lil' guy just got hurt real bad and another one like that would kill her" and essentially felt the rush of "oh shit, am I dead?!" after the very first hit. I think it's exhilarating and really fun. Not for everyone I suppose, but just, I don't see a dissonance between "drama-heavy, high immersion play" and the classical adventure game framework of "nobody is a main character nor has plot armor". It's pretty much still what makes the game unique to me.

Beyond that point, it can get triggery.

Hard Part - 2 - Trauma, Bleed & Escapism

There's this thing called disempowerment fantasy. I think there is catharsis in experiencing horrible things from the safety of fiction. Not "from a safe distance", mind you. I don't watch a horror movie like Midsommar and focus on distancing myself, I focus on empathizing with the character and her experience, and the experienciation of relating some of her experiences with my own past. In the same manner, I enjoy playing games in which the stakes involve my characters getting seriously hurt, maimed, or killed. It does not make me more detached from them, and instead reinforces a sense of "reality" that provides the escapism element. I don't feel like I'm owed victories, so they feel great too, but it's not even a manner of "avoid the fail-state and it'll be great" - there is a visceral joy in experiencing the bad stuff too. If my PC fails and fucks up, I can appreciate the tragic or comedic or just the drama of the situation, without enduring the lasting pain of actual struggles that will stay with me and stick in real life. If they die, I can embrace the rush of adrenaline and genuine fear that comes with empathizing with that character as the bad stuff happens at the table while safely knowing I can take a break or say "ok hol' up a minute, can this happen like that instead" etc should I need it, which so far, I've never found a need for. I have my hard lines, I don't think I could roleplay a character experiencing sexual assault or rape. Probably not torture either, and then again even that I'm tempted to poke at with a stick, just to see how it feels. And the thing is, I've been through a lot. There's a wide range of experiences of suffering in the human experience, and I seriously have had a very good sampling, from beatings to abuse and am very familiar with both psychological and physical pain and duress. I dunno, maybe it's unhealthy, maybe I've let myself be defined by traumas so much that I can't escape it even as I explore narratives entirely focused on agency and meaningful impact on fictional worlds and people. Or maybe not.

Catharsis - 3 - Agency through Surrender

I think it's the other way around. It's always felt like it and has been a part of my gaming experience since the very start, and I started playing and running adventure games when I was nine years old. And I was already pretty fucked up at that age, children aren't magically safe from harm and that's a reality I've been privy to since before I knew how to express it in words.

I think that having built myself around and through hardships, I cannot dissociate the idea of verisimilitude and of escape into a world that's not just a power fantasy narrative if it doesn't have the very real possibility of failure, catastrophic in scale, of terrible consequences and even unfair outcomes. I can't get attached to a character and love them and treat them as a real human being if I know they will be miraculously shielded from harm when push comes to shove, because that sheltered experience is simply alien to me. I know, on an intellectual basis, that there probably are people who haven't experienced traumatic experiences, or maybe they were minor parts of their lives and so they impacted them differently, but at the end of the day, I think parts of why I seldom relate to people on a deeper level except on rare occasions is in part, that bizarre relationship to pain. The acumen and self-awareness that comes with realizing that this world truly is not for you and I. It is what keeps me up at night, yet it is also what magnifies every victory, every beautiful moment of compassion or beauty, in life. And so in the game, it is that reality of accepting that suffering and hardship are an innate part of the human experience that makes any aspect of the game end up feeling real.

I've mentioend it in Sellswords, but it really do be just like BDSM. Explorations of pain, or loss of agency and control as part of a re-appropriation of one's sensations, body, pleasure. Out of curiosity before anything else. I don't play games to heal, I got therapy and support networks and psychedelic drugs for that. I play to find out what happens next, and I'm robbed of that agency over my own narrative when a game or GM robs me of the consequences for my actions by painting a "kinder" world, because that kindness in a vacuum feels fake if the premise of the game is to experience danger (ie: adventures). Also keep that distinction in mind if you end up mulling over my post and want to discuss it elsewhere. I'm talking about adventure games specifically. There is definitely a space and a purpose for games that focus on providing a different sort of escapism, and I respect that (heck, I even enjoy them on rare occasions). I mostly wanted to get this out to kill that notion that "lethal = de-protagonizing = distance from the play space". Hopefully I've also made it clear that this demands safety tools, which I haven't discussed much in this post becaus I am assuming them to be a given at any table. If they're not at yours, you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by introducing stuff like at least lines & veils to your table.