Shoot Club: Sanity Check
TomChick - Columns - Comments - 08/17/06
I'll give Trevor this: it's a pretty creative story. We're investigating a collapsed coal mine in the Appalachians. We believe the cave-in occurred during a summoning ritual. We had a gun battle against strike breakers from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. During the rescue operation, we explored some ruins that had been unearthed by the cave-in and discovered an Old One. Peter failed his sanity check. We ran, like you do when you see an Old One. We suspect the main company man is the priest in a cult dedicated to Shudde M’ell, a cthonian god. We also think the union agitator is really here to recover a powerful artifact that was used in a summoning ritual in the underground temple.
I'm a hot female reporter from the Arkham Times. Peter is a cab driver from Providence, Rhode Island. Douglas, who's in the other room because his character is trapped with the miners now, is an occult scholar from the Miskatonic University. Trevor never really established why the three of us are working together, and I didn't bother to ask. That's just the way it happens in tabletop RPGs, I suppose.
And so now I'm supposed to distract the head of the mining company, who's probably the main villain, so that we can search his house tonight. I've got a high social skill, so I don't know why we couldn't have just skipped ahead to my comeliness check and moved on to having me explore the house.
"'My dear lady, I hope you'll be joining me for dinner,' he says. 'Private dinner. I have a gramophone and fine wines and some Caruso records.' He's stroking your hand. What are you going to say?"
Trevor's looking through the tapes he brought. He pops out the one playing the Re-Animator soundtrack. He puts in a tape of an aria by Enrico Caruso.
I suspect there's a fundamental disconnect between me and a lot of people who are into gaming. I like playing games, but I'm not really into pretending. I like rules, I like puzzles, I like imaginative artwork and clever writing. I'm even okay with the occasional well-done dialogue tree. But the pretending thing doesn’t do it for me so much.
Not that I'm above looking foolish. I go to town in Guitar Hero. My knees bend and my pelvis thrusts and my head bobs and without that plastic guitar in my hands, I'd look like I was having some sort of seizure. I swung a Wii around with the best of them at E3, and probably giggled all the while. I don't really remember because I was too busy having fun to pay attention.
But it was still me all along, a thirty-four-year-old games writer who hasn't had sex since he broke up with his girlfriend over a year ago, who has a car payment every month, who frets because he's gained too much weight to tuck his shirt in anymore, who imagines one day he might write a novel about his father who was killed in Vietnam but knows he probably won't, who loves sitting in a movie theatre and just forgetting it all for a few hours, whose closest friend may or may not be imaginary. That's me. Even when I'm playing Baldur's Gate or World of Warcraft, that's still me behind Minsc or the Gnome Illusionist. This is my skin. I live here. The best I can do is forget it from time to time, and for a little while. I long ago lost the ability to truly leave it.
So when I'm supposed to imagine some social interaction on the fly, without rules and without any sense of how it's supposed to work until Trevor decides to roll a die, at which point my reaction is 'Phew, a number, something tangible that hopefully means we can stop improving dialogue', I feel absurd and out of place. What the hell am I doing here, with Caruso crooning in the background and Trevor hunched over behind a stand-up cardboard shield with a tentacle-faced monster on the front that cost $20 at a ComiCon two years ago?
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