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radiantfractureI’ve been thinking about how much I like question-and-answer as a game mechanic. It’s a gentle yet powerful way to get deep into story without the players having to perform actions that feel more like performance or improvisation, things that might feel difficult or vulnerable, a barrier to play or story.
By question-and-answer mechanic I just mean that the game is written as a series of questions. That mini-game I made is a very simple example. The games that inspired it, In the Air Tonight and Big Fight Feel, are more developed versions. Pull Me From the Earth, the game I'm talking about here, is one layer more complex.
But in essence, all these games are just sets of questions. On the page, they hardly seem like games at all, and yet they work.
If you and I enter into the contract that we will ask and answer these questions with sincerity and attention, magic happens.
To get granular, we could notice different ways the questions can be offered to the players: in a prescribed order, in an order chosen by the players, or randomized using a tool like dice or cards. Each of those methods will create different affordances. Randomness allows the most player surrender, which can give a sense of safety; a prescribed order imposes a certain narrative; a flexible order lets players adapt the flow of questions to the story they're telling.
(Do you have a preference, or an intuition about your possible preference?)
Working on that solo journalling game has made me notice how a question makes a strong prompt. I think a good prompt offers just enough specificity to start the imagination going, and then as little as possible that blocks that momentum. For example, say I write this:
You meet six moon fairies. They take you on a journey down the river.
That’s a pretty good prompt, but by the end of the sentence the event's already over. What about this:
The second prompt is a little more vulnerable because it’s less defined, but I think it's also more likely to spur something really rich for the player.
I think letting in metaphor and meaning slippage is important, too, because that's invention happening before you consciously invoke it. So
--Fun, but what about
Speaking of deep, let me tell you about this game where you play a bog body in love.
Q&A really comes to life in a two-player game, particularly when the players ask each other the questions in turn (rather than pulling the card and answering for themselves). Something about invoking the cross-exchange, the formalities of real conversation, gives another layer of momentum, and almost always careens you towards some kind of intimacy.
Review: Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game for Two
Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game for Two
Inspired by the music of Andrew Hozier-Byrne
Written by Corvyn Appleby for #QueerUndeadJam
Note: I have not played this game, just heard it played beautifully on the podcast Party of One.
The first thing to tell you is that this is a game where you fall in love with an animate bog body. Or play one.
The second thing to tell you is that it’s beautiful.
This is a body horror romance game. Therefore, it is gross. However, it achieves that kind of transcendent beauty that body horror can, when the idea of the body is pushed past the boundaries we like to pretend it has. And intimacy has no limit.
That said, this is also a gentle game that thinks carefully about consent.
In this game, one player plays the Preserved, the bog body, and the other the Excavator, who has come to the bog to bury something and discovered the Preserved by accident.
I think what makes this game so powerful is the way it uses these figures to think about big yet intimate questions – but, like a good horror, is also always in excess of any specific question, generating more meanings and feelings than can be gathered back in.
Pull Me From the Earth has a beautiful introduction, setting out its themes, including “trauma and recovery,” so that we know we are in no mere game. It is played as a conversation between the Preserved and the Excavator. Each asks and answers questions about the past and the present. Because the questions assume intimacy, intimacy arises.
The game ends when the two characters kiss. There are different endings depending on how this final exchange goes.
For the Preserved, Appleby writes that they “[play] to find out the answers to these questions: what does it mean to be a real person? Can I come back into the world after being harmed by it? How do I relate to the strangeness of my body?”
And if that seems like a sublime use of the idea of a bog body, I agree.
The Excavator, in contrast, “has come to this bog to bury something they’d prefer to keep hidden,” and their questions are “what do our secrets do to us? Do our truths reside in our intentions or our actions? Can a stranger see us in a way that familiar faces aren’t able to?”
Optionally, in an in-person game, you can choose to play out the prologue, where the two players prepare a bowl of cold water covered with “leaves, dirt, and grass,” and their hands first touch under the water.
(Shiver. Shudder. Marvel.)
Gameplay
The gameplay is simple. The game runs on the Q&A structure we’ve been talking about. Players pull cards from an ordinary deck. Based on the suit, either the Excavator or the Preserved asks the question and the other answers. The answer might be a few words, or the player might describe a scene, with the other player helping to develop it.
This is a pretty standard structure, so the power of the game rests on using that structure well, and on the way the questions are crafted. Here are a few examples:
Hearts and Diamonds (Questions asked of the Excavator)
Q of Hearts: How do you want me to love you right now? Will you let me if I try?
4 of Diamonds: What guilt writhes in your conscience like the tendril of some terrible beast, threatening to choke you, or to pull you apart?
A of Diamonds: I’m offering you my own deepest secret. Would you like me to share this with you, or is there no room in your body to hold another secret?
Spades and Clubs (Questions asked of the Preserved)
Q of Clubs: Did you see anything in the time between then and now? Feel anything? Can you remember it all?
2 of Spades: What parts of your body have fallen away? Do you miss them?
8 of Spades: Is your skin hardened and stiff, or soft and almost melting?
(During the game, Appleby explained a bit about the different ways bog bodies are preserved. Fascinating, and yergh.)
This game turns its simple structure into a devastating series of revelations – sort of like if you do that questionnaire that makes you fall in love with someone, but they’re a bog body and you’re maybe a murderer, or vice versa. I found in listening I experienced a kind of emotional and somatic shifting through the questions that felt like shape-changing – not always pleasant, but always enthralling.
As you can see, sometimes the questions are graphic about decay and preservation, but that’s part of the beauty, transgressing in the most absolute way the boundaries of what we think of as a good, desirable, desiring bodies.
By the time they reached the kiss in the episode, it felt right. It felt like the natural culmination of the game. It felt beautiful.
{rf}
All quotations taken from Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game by Corvyn Appleby, copyright 2020, downloaded from https://corvynappleby.itch.io/pull-me-from-the-earth in January 2022.
By question-and-answer mechanic I just mean that the game is written as a series of questions. That mini-game I made is a very simple example. The games that inspired it, In the Air Tonight and Big Fight Feel, are more developed versions. Pull Me From the Earth, the game I'm talking about here, is one layer more complex.
But in essence, all these games are just sets of questions. On the page, they hardly seem like games at all, and yet they work.
If you and I enter into the contract that we will ask and answer these questions with sincerity and attention, magic happens.
To get granular, we could notice different ways the questions can be offered to the players: in a prescribed order, in an order chosen by the players, or randomized using a tool like dice or cards. Each of those methods will create different affordances. Randomness allows the most player surrender, which can give a sense of safety; a prescribed order imposes a certain narrative; a flexible order lets players adapt the flow of questions to the story they're telling.
(Do you have a preference, or an intuition about your possible preference?)
Working on that solo journalling game has made me notice how a question makes a strong prompt. I think a good prompt offers just enough specificity to start the imagination going, and then as little as possible that blocks that momentum. For example, say I write this:
You meet six moon fairies. They take you on a journey down the river.
That’s a pretty good prompt, but by the end of the sentence the event's already over. What about this:
You meet six moon fairies. Where do they take you? Do you ever get home?
Just that question mark pushes the energy beyond the end of the sentence, whereas the period stops it. The second prompt is a little more vulnerable because it’s less defined, but I think it's also more likely to spur something really rich for the player.
I think letting in metaphor and meaning slippage is important, too, because that's invention happening before you consciously invoke it. So
A ghost overturns your car. What do you do?
--Fun, but what about
A ghost upsets something essential. How do you recover?
It's potent to add a slightly unexpected second question, one that swerves a little or raises the stakes, like “do you ever get home?” That invites the player to think about a story that's less safe, and therefore more vulnerable and with more possibility of going somewhere deep.Speaking of deep, let me tell you about this game where you play a bog body in love.
Q&A really comes to life in a two-player game, particularly when the players ask each other the questions in turn (rather than pulling the card and answering for themselves). Something about invoking the cross-exchange, the formalities of real conversation, gives another layer of momentum, and almost always careens you towards some kind of intimacy.
Review: Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game for Two
Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game for Two
Inspired by the music of Andrew Hozier-Byrne
Written by Corvyn Appleby for #QueerUndeadJam
Note: I have not played this game, just heard it played beautifully on the podcast Party of One.
The first thing to tell you is that this is a game where you fall in love with an animate bog body. Or play one.
The second thing to tell you is that it’s beautiful.
This is a body horror romance game. Therefore, it is gross. However, it achieves that kind of transcendent beauty that body horror can, when the idea of the body is pushed past the boundaries we like to pretend it has. And intimacy has no limit.
That said, this is also a gentle game that thinks carefully about consent.
In this game, one player plays the Preserved, the bog body, and the other the Excavator, who has come to the bog to bury something and discovered the Preserved by accident.
I think what makes this game so powerful is the way it uses these figures to think about big yet intimate questions – but, like a good horror, is also always in excess of any specific question, generating more meanings and feelings than can be gathered back in.
Pull Me From the Earth has a beautiful introduction, setting out its themes, including “trauma and recovery,” so that we know we are in no mere game. It is played as a conversation between the Preserved and the Excavator. Each asks and answers questions about the past and the present. Because the questions assume intimacy, intimacy arises.
The game ends when the two characters kiss. There are different endings depending on how this final exchange goes.
For the Preserved, Appleby writes that they “[play] to find out the answers to these questions: what does it mean to be a real person? Can I come back into the world after being harmed by it? How do I relate to the strangeness of my body?”
And if that seems like a sublime use of the idea of a bog body, I agree.
The Excavator, in contrast, “has come to this bog to bury something they’d prefer to keep hidden,” and their questions are “what do our secrets do to us? Do our truths reside in our intentions or our actions? Can a stranger see us in a way that familiar faces aren’t able to?”
Optionally, in an in-person game, you can choose to play out the prologue, where the two players prepare a bowl of cold water covered with “leaves, dirt, and grass,” and their hands first touch under the water.
(Shiver. Shudder. Marvel.)
Gameplay
The gameplay is simple. The game runs on the Q&A structure we’ve been talking about. Players pull cards from an ordinary deck. Based on the suit, either the Excavator or the Preserved asks the question and the other answers. The answer might be a few words, or the player might describe a scene, with the other player helping to develop it.
This is a pretty standard structure, so the power of the game rests on using that structure well, and on the way the questions are crafted. Here are a few examples:
Hearts and Diamonds (Questions asked of the Excavator)
Q of Hearts: How do you want me to love you right now? Will you let me if I try?
4 of Diamonds: What guilt writhes in your conscience like the tendril of some terrible beast, threatening to choke you, or to pull you apart?
A of Diamonds: I’m offering you my own deepest secret. Would you like me to share this with you, or is there no room in your body to hold another secret?
Spades and Clubs (Questions asked of the Preserved)
Q of Clubs: Did you see anything in the time between then and now? Feel anything? Can you remember it all?
2 of Spades: What parts of your body have fallen away? Do you miss them?
8 of Spades: Is your skin hardened and stiff, or soft and almost melting?
(During the game, Appleby explained a bit about the different ways bog bodies are preserved. Fascinating, and yergh.)
This game turns its simple structure into a devastating series of revelations – sort of like if you do that questionnaire that makes you fall in love with someone, but they’re a bog body and you’re maybe a murderer, or vice versa. I found in listening I experienced a kind of emotional and somatic shifting through the questions that felt like shape-changing – not always pleasant, but always enthralling.
As you can see, sometimes the questions are graphic about decay and preservation, but that’s part of the beauty, transgressing in the most absolute way the boundaries of what we think of as a good, desirable, desiring bodies.
By the time they reached the kiss in the episode, it felt right. It felt like the natural culmination of the game. It felt beautiful.
{rf}
All quotations taken from Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game by Corvyn Appleby, copyright 2020, downloaded from https://corvynappleby.itch.io/pull-me-from-the-earth in January 2022.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-12 08:26 am (UTC)I do not really play games, but I may have a moral obligation at least to read this one. I do enjoy that. And it sounds wonderful.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-17 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-17 07:21 am (UTC)I didn't hear Hozier's "Like Real People Do" until after I had written "The Creeping Influences," but I loved finding out that it was inspired by the same cycle of poems by Seamus Heaney. (So was at least one other piece of falling-in-love-with-a-bog-body fiction that I know about, although I am perhaps pettily bitter about it.) I love that the song is generating its own genealogy of archaeological romance. I hope it keeps on branching.
(I am glad that you like that story very much.)
no subject
Date: 2022-01-12 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-12 04:39 pm (UTC)Yeah! The first time I saw one, I thought "Wait, how does this work? There are no rules."
But of course language has rules, and conversations have rules, and even memory, and those can be the game.
Do you have a favorite Q&A game to recommend? I think I want to try writing one of those next. It may involve a tumbling block tower.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-12 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-12 04:40 pm (UTC)I'm a big fan of constraint as a fuel for creativity. Constraint can be thematic (something to include or exclude) or structural (as in limericks or sonnets or acrostics), and too much constraint does block momentum, I guess, but not enough constraint just leaves me staring bewildered at the prompt. So I personally prefer to start with because the fact of the car gives me something more to start with; faced with I will spend too much time trying to figure out what is essential to me that could be upset by a ghost, and never get out of the starting blocks.
(I agree that the question is necessary. really requires do you ever get home? or another question at the end. I'm okay with the open-ended where do they take you? here because there's a lot that can be extracted from moon fairies and the implicit idea of taking you somewhere, and to me it seems like more guidance than the ghosts upsetting something.)
no subject
Date: 2022-01-12 04:57 pm (UTC)I think you're right that there needs to be some kind of anchor in the question so that there isn't too *much* possibility.
How do you think the placement of the question in the game (at the beginning, in the middle, random) would affect the need for specificity (if it would)?
In slight advocacy for the more open question (lol), I think there is a way in which that structure has, for me, inspired a trust in my instincts, to grab the first thing that comes up and instead of going "nah that doesn't make sense," just running with it, and feeling really excited about the results. Because things do come up -- trusting them is the hard part for me, and taking that little leap has been really productive. But I can see that's definitely a YMMV factor.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-12 05:12 pm (UTC)Like, for example, if it were established that I was in a small cabin in the woods that I had wandered into while hiking, or in my kitchen making a cup of tea, or trying to land my spaceship on a new planet, the question has more context - "something essential" is constrained by the setting to a smaller universe of possibilities (or likelihoods, at least, depending on my imagination).
And actually your last paragraph is interesting to me, because my immediate reaction is, huh, I think that grabbing the first thing that comes up, for me, would tend to trap me in cliche instead of letting me take the leap. But really I think my brain would just go around in circles, confused. And I also expect that practice helps - that your experience with what happens when you trust your story-instincts has shaped your ability to do so, that you see multiple fairy bridges across the chasm while I'm searching for a tree or something I can knock down to cross on.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-17 07:22 am (UTC)I am just drive-by appreciating this line.