[Secret Lives of Serial Killers] Yes, a Playtest
Willow:
Saturday I playtested this game.
Shortly after receiving the Ronnie, I was bursting with pride. So of course I told my best friend, Shari, and Tim had been in on it from the start, and I deliberately mentioned the game to a few others so I wouldn't be tempted to run it for them.
But I figured our friend Brendan as the perfect test subject for the game: he's suitably twisted (he's one of my favorite players for Escape from Tentacle City- he came up with Hobart, whom some of you may remember), and he's got an eagerness to playtest new games that the fake game wouldn't be too out of the ordinary to get him to play. Also, he knows how to take a joke. I hope.
The icing on the cake, of course, is my choice of Killer player: Shari, who usually plays sugary-sweet paladins, volunteered, looking for an opportunity to explore her darker side.
We played at Shari's house- Tim wanted none of it, and at Brendan's there would be the chance his wife would decide she wanted to watch, which would 1) probably make her uncomfortable and 2) make it impossible for Brendan to ever run it for her, if he's a sick enough bastard.
The whole game took just under 2 hours, but could go longer depending on how much detail people get into.
Act 1: We meet our Killer, Mary Jane Smith, who has an immaculately clean little house she inherited from her aunt, a cat (Snookie-Wookems), two fridges (one big for her food, one little for the catfood), and a boring job working from home editing technical journals. Foreshadowing involved the making of an omelet, a block of knives, and Mary Jane cutting herself with the knife.
Act 2: We meet our 'sunshine,' Levi, a travelling encyclopedia salesman who has massive enthusiasm, but little sales acumen. We see him doing his pitch for a skeptical housewife who only wants to buy the 'D' volume (so she can read more about the Da Vinci Code), and some bungling of the expensive volumes. Brendan jumped into the role of sunshine with aplomb, perfectly happy to play the cheery fool.
Act 3: Levi stops at Mary Jane's house, who invites him in and listens to his pitch, and agrees to buy the whole set (sans D, which he agrees to get for her.) Some humor: Levi slips in dog doo on the sidewalk not once or twice, but three times, Mary Jane asks him to read aloud the Destiny entry.
Act 4: In brainstorming for the unexpected reunion, we learn that Levi is homeless, and sleeps out of his car in the local supermarket parking lot. Mary Jane, having stalked him there and "recognizing his car" knocks on the window to wake him. There's more humor as he gets out of the car, sans pants, quite shocking Mary Jane, and then they go shopping to convince each other that they're in the supermarket parking lot at 2 in the morning for completely normal reasons.
Act 5: I call act 5 the Turn; after all, it's where the game abandons any real pretense of being a romantic comedy, abandons the script, but yet keeps on going. Levi, having traveled to the resupply depot (6 hours away) and getting there in the dead of night, finishes loading up his car, only to see Mary Jane as soon as he closes his trunk. Brendan nervously laughs "so, is this a horror game now?" I just kind of shrug and glance at Shari, despite having framed the scene myself.
Mary Jane offers to give Levi a ride to her place so he can deliver the volume, and then a ride back, which he for some reason agrees to. On the way, she asks him to read various D entries. Once back, she feeds him dog teriyaki, hits him with a frying pan when he tries to get away, ties him up, cuts off his hand, and finally feeds him a Levi-hand-omelet before finishing the job, meanwhile scolding him for making such a mess.
This is also where the 2 on one nature of the game finally becomes obvious- Brendan remarked to me after the game that for a while he thought Shari had just gone bonkers or something and I was simply humoring her- Levi goes in the bathroom, asks if there's a window, and I say yes, a little tiny one at the top of the wall (and also describe a wastebin containing full prescription bottles of antipsychotics). Brendan tries to leverage his background as encyclopedia guy to say he knows about varying psychoses, and how to react, and I say sure, but really he needs to just get out. When Shari narrates cutting off the hand, he narrates standing up in the chair and swinging it so it hits her- I block it, having him trip up and fall over. Eventually, when I ask him what he does, I get answers like "I say nothing." "I do nothing," and finally, "where is this going?" after which I ask Shari to wrap it up, so she feeds him the hand omelet and kills him already, and I reveal the whole truth.
One of the questions posed as a reaction to the text is, what's stopping people from just getting up and leaving?
Social pressure for one- I mean, you agreed to play this game right? and the other people seem to be having fun, although it's getting kind of weird. If it were one on one, this totally wouldn't be an issue- I think one would just call bullshit, but its harder with a 3 player dynamic.
There's also the issue of commitment and sunk costs: by the time the Turn comes, you've been playing for an hour, and the game's almost over, according to the script. Why not see it through to the end?
Brendan apparently forgave us, since we went on to join some more play boardgames, eat dinner, and get a little drunk. Or perhaps he's plotting his revenge more subtly.
Brendan Day:
The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research
April 18, 1979
AGENCY: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
ACTION: Notice of Report for Public Comment.
SUMMARY: On July 12, 1974, the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93-348) was signed into law, there-by creating the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. One of the charges to the Commission was to identify the basic ethical principles that should underlie the conduct of biomedical and behavioral research involving human subjects and to develop guidelines which should be followed to assure that such research is conducted in accordance with those principles. In carrying out the above, the Commission was directed to consider: (i) the boundaries between biomedical and behavioral research and the accepted and routine practice of medicine, (ii) the role of assessment of risk-benefit criteria in the determination of the appropriateness of research involving human subjects, (iii) appropriate guidelines for the selection of human subjects for participation in such research and (iv) the nature and definition of informed consent in various research settings.
The Belmont Report attempts to summarize the basic ethical principles identified by the Commission in the course of its deliberations. It is the outgrowth of an intensive four-day period of discussions that were held in February 1976 at the Smithsonian Institution's Belmont Conference Center supplemented by the monthly deliberations of the Commission that were held over a period of nearly four years. It is a statement of basic ethical principles and guidelines that should assist in resolving the ethical problems that surround the conduct of research with human subjects. By publishing the Report in the Federal Register, and providing reprints upon request, the Secretary intends that it may be made readily available to scientists, members of Institutional Review Boards, and Federal employees. The two-volume Appendix, containing the lengthy reports of experts and specialists who assisted the Commission in fulfillingthis part of its charge, is available as DHEW Publication No. (OS) 78-0013 and No. (OS) 78-0014, for sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402.
Unlike most other reports of the Commission, the Belmont Report does not make specific recommendations for administrative action by the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Rather, the Commission recommended that the Belmont Report be adopted in its entirety, as a statement of the Department's policy. The Department requests public comment on this recommendation.
National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects
of Biomedical and Behavioral Research
Members of the Commission
Kenneth John Ryan, M.D., Chairman, Chief of Staff, Boston Hospital for Women.
Joseph V. Brady, Ph.D., Professor of Behavioral Biology, Johns Hopkins University.
Robert E. Cooke, M.D., President, Medical College of Pennsylvania.
Dorothy I. Height, President, National Council of Negro Women, Inc.
Albert R. Jonsen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Bioethics, University of California at San Francisco.
Patricia King, J.D., Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center.
Karen Lebacqz, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of Religion.
*** David W. Louisell, J.D., Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley.
Donald W. Seldin, M.D., Professor and Chairman, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Texas at Dallas.
Eliot Stellar, Ph.D., Provost of the University and Professor of Physiological Psychology, University of Pennsylvania.
*** Robert H. Turtle, LL.B., Attorney, VomBaur, Coburn, Simmons & Turtle, Washington, D.C.
*** Deceased.
http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/belmont.html
Brendan Day:
I appreciate that you submitted your work for peer review. I seem to have suffered no lasting harm, and was properly debriefed.
I'll post my observations later this week.
happysmellyfish:
I personally found the set up more interesting and fresh than the twist here. How many ways are there to tie and cut somebody up, anyway? Don't answer that question. If you role-played in high school, you know the answer - a heap. Which might be why I found the established world more interesting: romance in the suburban village from Edward Scissorhands. That's cool.
It seems like you were really building to something great, but all of that was pushed aside by this freight train. It may just have been a one-off, to do with this particular session, but it might not be. Am I making sense? Reminds me of some films, where you've got this interesting world and you really want to stick around for a while and see just what's going on here, but inevitably the director decides to throw in a bizarre history lesson or whatever. (I'm looking at you, Hancock)
Maybe if the stuff going on in the first half was a little more connected to the stuff going on in the second half, it wouldn't feel like all those great ideas were wasted.
Or did the session not feel like this at all? I could be way off base.
Baxil:
Happysmellyfish,
If you weren't watching the February Ronnies, this game is a deliberately broken exploration of that "freight train" you mention. Willow didn't link the rules, but it's been discussed here before.
Specifically I'll echo Ron's caution in the other playtest thread:
Quote
This is kind of a different game which may exist more as a thought-piece than as a game to be played.
For reference: [The Secret Lives of Serial Killers] Ronnies feedback, which includes a link to the text.
Devon is quite brave and/or ... well, I dunno and/or what, for playing it, and the experience is definitely interesting to read about. However, I think people reading this should know that the game text itself explicitly acknowledges that the game is not socially functional. Whether and how it might be, or whether the dysfunction can operate as its own productive form of satire, is currently under debate.
New subject: I'd like to note that in both of the playtests so far, given a mixed-gender pool of potential playtesters, the organizer has selected male players as victims and female players as killers/facilitators. I suspect that this arrangement is the optimum "safe" venue for playtesting, and that certainly seems to raise gender questions. (Note: I want to carefully avoid the suggestion that this game could be useful as a commentary on gender privilege issues.) Willow, if and only if you're comfortable opening that can of worms, any thoughts on that?
Bax
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