Blood on the Clocktower: Thoughts, and still not getting to the point I set out to make. (part 2)

[magistrate]

Good Twin: It's okay. See... we can do this. We can just be buds.

Evil Twin: Yeah. We can be buds. Buds who want each other dead.

Good Twin: Yeah. Exactly.

Some initial notes before I get into my next Blood on the Clocktower ramble (see Part 1 here for context):

1. It didn't occur to me on the first few videos I watched, nor do I know if this is an actual part of the game's progression or just an extra bonus thing the No Rolls Barred folk do, but at the end of every episode of BotC, they have a Roll Call: the Storyteller goes through and tells all the players exactly who each person was, and recaps the major inflection points, who got what information when, and why that information was false, if it was false.

This is a debriefing. It's the kind of thing you do at the end of a psychological experiment.

This game. This game! (Is a common thing players scream to the almighty while playing.)

2. I've been going back and forth on whether or not I'd like to try playing a game. On the one hand, it's so fascinating! ...from the perspective of someone who spectates from the Storyteller's position, where you can see what's going on and how and why things are unraveling. I haven't actually watched a recording from a player-only perspective, aside from the very first partial stream that bucked me. On the other hand, it combines high-stakes on-the-spot multi-factor logic puzzles with a whole lot of social interaction, both of which are things which are extremely stressful! A game which relies on one's ability to read the bluffs of other players and to bluff to other players is not my natural habitat. ...but, you know, it could be a useful engine to drive my growth as a person.

There are apparently some in-person games of BotC going on in San Francisco. (For the officially-linked regional Discord tells me so!) Some of those take place at game stores; some at private residences. Which means I had a moment yesterday when I thought, "If I go to a game party with 6-20 people I do not know, organized online, at a private home I've never been to, what are my odds of either being axe-murdered or catching every COVID?" (When consulting a friend, my friend helpfully added, "Or Monkeypox!" Friend, it's not that kind of a party.)

I need to figure out where people go to organize online sessions.

3. The No Rolls Barred folk are running a Kickstarter to produce in-person episodes of Blood on the Clocktower, which are halfway to being full dramatic productions. (Halfway because there's lighting and set design and a limited amount of roleplay, but no costumes or scripts and the roleplay is limited. In fairness, if there were costume design, it would give the game away real quick.) One of the backer tiers gets you an invitation to play a game with other backers and the NRB crew!

This is a terrible idea for me for so many reasons – they're in London, eight hours offset from me; I really shouldn't be spending that money; see above re: all my social awkwardness and the fact that I have never played this game before and don't know if it would even be an enjoyable experience – but I do have to admit that I'm tempted.

4. The ship I started shipping in We Are Legion also has an incredible arc in Catfishing. If I'd seen Catfishing first, I would have simply regarded it as very high-octane gen. Big risks! Vulnerabilty! Characters who might not be able to trust each other! Characters who might not be able to trust themselves! Dark secrets and fears coming to light! Having each others' backs in a dark and confusing place! Tenderness and comfort and solidarity! It's just the kind of high-octane gen that I love; the kind which tends to be confabulated with romantic or sexual intimacy by, you know, fandom in general. That always makes it both delightful and fraught for my hungry, embittered aroace gaze. But in We Are Legion by the time the episode ends at least one of the pair is proudly proclaiming to the town that they're married, so, you know, what can you do?

I should note that there's no in-universe continuity from game to game. The character a player plays in one game doesn't influence the character they play in another, even if it were to be the same role, which I don't think I've seen happen yet. (There are so many roles to choose amongst.) And it's also not exactly a role-playing game; the characters are more like logical constructs than characters from a fiction lens.

But there is some degree to which role-playing plays a part in communication in the game, and players do use their meta-knowledge of previous games ("Here's how I played when I was that role; can I use that to understand the play of someone else claiming to be this role?" "I know that Player Name tends to go aggressive when evil, but they're being very silent this game..." "When I played as X Role, I wish I knew this information, and now I think I'm supporting someone with X Role, so I want to give them this information...")

And further to that, the players are playing roles. They're not exactly playing as themselves, the way a player in Chess or Go is simply playing a logical game.

For example:

Say you have a Sage: a powerful role who, if killed by the Demon, learns who the Demon is (which is game-winning information) with 50% accuracy. The Sage has to construct a world in which the Demon wants to kill them, because that's the only way their ability procs. But no Demon wants to kill any Good character who wants to be killed by the Demon, because a Good character wishes the Demon only ill. So the Sage needs to get information back to the Demon somehow which suggests that they're someone the Demon should kill.

At the same time, any character who needs not to be killed by the Demon is going to do everything they can not to bring their identity to the Demon's attention. If you're the Slayer, the Demon wants to get rid of you as soon as possible because you can insta-win the game for Good, but you want to stay alive as long as possible, because you have one shot and the fewer players you have to choose between, the higher the probability that you'll choose the right one. So the people who the Demon wants to kill will jump through hoops to keep the Demon from sniffing out who they are.

So a Sage can't really let it get out that they're the Sage, because then the Demon won't kill them, and will probably try to arrange their death or disablement in some other way. They also can't bluff too publicly as Demon-bait like the Slayer, because Demon-bait characters don't do that. They have to finesse what they say and how they act so that the right balance of people become suspicious of them in the right way, and that, my friends, requires acting.

Which is all to say... the idea of shipping "characters" is deeply weird in this space. You're (by which I mean, I'm) not shipping the players, because while I enjoy a bunch of these players as YouTube personalities, those aren't the dynamics which are getting me by the viscera. And you're (by which I mean, I'm) not shipping characters as the characters they're given in the Script (the game's list of potential roles), because if there's a Sweetheart on the script, what you key to emotionally is not "someone with a relationship that carries emotional weight, into which you can become invested"; what you key to emotionally is "someone on the good team who will cause a big problem for (almost certainly) the good team if they die, so your investment is in whether or not they live or die".

The Sailor will never have a tender moment waxing rhapsodic about the solitude of the water, unless they're doing a bit. The King will make no decrees, can mobilize no armies, and only gets a single vote in the democratic process of choosing who to execute that day.

The "characters" are not characters. They're game mechanics. So who the fuck am I shipping?

It's the weird confluence of these particular motive forces, brought to life by these particular actors, with the light, flavorful glaze of the named character roles when used as a framing device. It's a weird abstract meta-textual ship, which is perfect for me. It's all I ever wanted.

I don't even play this game, and it's kicking my ass.

ANYWAY. I had thoughts about ludo-narrative dissonance, and I was going to type up thoughts about ludo-narrative dissonance, but now I'm almost two thousand words into a post AGAIN and I have yet to define even the term! So that post is still going to wait for another day!

But ludo-narrative dissonance is when your game mechanics or gameplay work counter to the story you're trying to tell in the narrative component of a game, which I feel like I flirted with in the fourth point anyway. So there's your definition. You're welcome.