[Beloved] [Solo RPG] In a dream ...
David Berg:
My reactions to reading the game:
Quote from: Ben Lehman on March 02, 2011, 02:40:12 PM
Imagine your beloved. She is, to you, perfect in every way. Think on it. Know her.
Okay, so now I'm imagining play as a sort of daydream, combining vague impressions, sensory details, feelings, and abstract criteria. I might imagine pale skin, feel enthused, and think the word "honor" or something.
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draw a small picture of your beloved.
Seems more of a thinky game than an art project, so a non-literal symbol should suffice. Stick figure, smiley face, whatever.
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But it isn't really her. It's some other girl that the monsters kidnapped. She is like your beloved in one way, and that confused you. Is she good enough? Do you give up and live and love with her? If so, you live ever after together.
Oh. Wait. My beloved was this vague confluence of things. Now I need to pick an attribute of her. Okay, maybe "sense of humor". So now I've got a girl with a sense of humor.
Is that the only thing she has in common with my ideal woman? Is she necessarily, like, an ugly, cheating, neurotic sadist? Of course I won't settle for that, and I'm not playing this game 50 million times to weed out all the negative qualities I can imagine.
So I'll assume the girl with a sense of humor is undefined on the other fronts. Which means, I guess I'm supposed to not think about them before deciding if I stick with her. So it's an exercise in uncertainty; the longer I play this game, the more certainty I get to have.
Quote from: Ben Lehman on March 04, 2011, 07:38:23 PM
you should "take time to know" the other girls, as well.
Oh. Okay, nix "undefined" as well. Um. What's the limit on getting to know her as my Beloved? What's to stop me from making her equally perfect but with, like, different color hair or something? Having no limits, or having to make up limits and enforce them on myself, would seem to make it not a game anymore.
So, uh, there's one data point for ya, Ben. I hope there's something useful in there.
Ps,
-Dave
lumpley:
Shall I keep posting mini-AP here?
I'm completely stalled out on my current threesome of monsters. I've gotten one of them to kill another, in a head-slap moment of "of course," but that leaves the two, and they're just owning me.
No help, please! That's why I'm not saying what the monsters are.
I've learned a couple of interesting personal things from this game. It's potent and good.
-Vincent
Gregor Hutton:
I'm still stuck on my first monster. I wrote down that it was fearsome and I've drawn a big serpent thing with a huge dragon's head. The wall's of the prison look pretty thick too and I forgot to draw a window or door. My little dude with his shield and sword is having big trouble with it.
Roger:
Hmmm. Well, I can give you my reaction to the text.
I think this might be the most Buddhist game I've seen to date. By that I mean it seems specifically crafted to teach the player the first and greatest noble truth of Buddha: all desire leads to suffering.
I hate to drag religion and philosophy and everything else into this, but I don't think there's any way around it. That's the real beauty and elegance of this game, I think -- it seductively invites the player to follow a path to an inevitable conclusion, without getting all hamfisted and preachy about it. Not many games have been able to pull that off.
What's the deal with dreaming? My sense is that dreams and the dreaming mind here provide a counterpoint to the player's conscious ego. It is the ego alone, of course, which produces all obstacles to one's desire, as well as producing the object of desire itself. The resolution of those obstacles must come from somewhere outside the ego, and dreams are a convenient, if not strictly necessary, resource.
All post-rescued not-quite-Beloveds share at least one quality which differentiates them from the true unattained Beloved: They are all free. Unlike the Beloved who, by definition, is imprisoned. It is a necessary quality of the Beloved that she is unattained, and hence there is a requisite fall from grace when she is attained. This may invite the reflective player to ponder why a nice sane person would consistently define his Beloved as being imprisoned.
Does the game change significantly if the player is the one inside the prison, waiting for his Beloved to finally overcome the monsters and rescue him? I'm not sure. It feels slightly different, but perhaps it's purely superficial. Such distinctions may be purely illusory.
I apologize again if this was all far too rambling and too removed from play. The line between thinking about playing this game and 'actually' playing this game is a little narrower than usual.
Cheers,
Roger
Ben Lehman:
Quote from: lumpley on March 07, 2011, 10:07:13 AM
Shall I keep posting mini-AP here?
I'm completely stalled out on my current threesome of monsters. I've gotten one of them to kill another, in a head-slap moment of "of course," but that leaves the two, and they're just owning me.
No help, please! That's why I'm not saying what the monsters are.
I've learned a couple of interesting personal things from this game. It's potent and good.
-Vincent
Please do.
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