Week 4

Hey everyone, back again.

This last week, we took some time to meet outside of class, and really figure out from our playtests in the previous week what went on, and what we need to do for the upcoming weeks. Like Tyler said last week, our first playtest went incredibly well, surprisingly so, and so we’re coming up with tweaks to make this game a little less reliant on us (or future GMs) knowing the schtick that we’re running with, and making it a little more information-regulation-y, and therefore a little easier to run with in terms of metaphor, and even making it more widely applicable for other situations – though we still want our iteration to be about gender more than anything.

So, what’re we doing specifically? Well, I’m glad you asked, ever silent, ever watching readers, all underneath the great societal shadow that is the Internet. We’ve decided on a bit of a two pronged approach again. I think in my head, this is still cinematically going to be a first person video game at some point, but for now, our game needs to be accessible, and more importantly, able to be tweaked frequently. Therefore, we’re coming up with two sets of TABLETOP rules – one to be played by three players, and one to be played by any number more than three players. In addition, we’re going to be encouraging use of the X-card mechanic in play. Like we said last week as well, there was a level of frustration that came from playing the game that we liked, but didn’t really expect, and we acknowledge that our game can potentially cause triggering states for players cis and trans alike. The X-card will be especially important for the three player version, since it functions off of the same “ganged up on” feeling that we tapped into for our initial playtests.

Our three player version is essentially the same as how we ran the playtests from two weeks ago, with its tweaks that we made on the fly, but with the X-card, and without us (me and Tyler) as the GMs that run the game. This is a big enough change from what I originally wrote that I’m having to write a new set of rules for this, and unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll have diagrams for this version.

Our three+ player version is almost completely new however, and leans more into the information regulation work that I previously mentioned. While we still use the “Door” system that we’ve struck upon a couple weeks ago, we want to encourage a type of competition between the “door” players and the “trapped” players – we’re essentially getting rid of the GM role for this version. This way, the uncomfortable feeling is shared among all the players, those who pose as the enforcers of the system who are “just doing their job” and those who are the actors in the system, who “just want to get by.”

Hopefully, we’ll be able to figure out the new dynamics of these type of games, where we relinquish more control to the players, rather than having to explain everything, and hover over their shoulders. With luck, we'll also get some good discussion going between the players without too much prompting from us.

Alright, once we playtest this version, I’ll see if I can comment some photos for documentation – maybe even a video! We’ll see.

Thanks for reading,

Team Shapely