magistrate

LUDO-NARRATIVE DISSONANCE.

...part of the reason (not all of the reason) it's taken me so long to get around to this is that I don't really know what point I'm trying to make. None of this is intended as a criticism of Blood on the Clocktower; I don't think that a cohesive internal narrative would make the game better at what it's trying to be, and I don't think it suffers from not leaning into a narrative aspect.

That said, my confusion about where the narrative balance lay was one of the things that frustrated me and turned me off of the game when I first encountered it. Is that a problem, per se?

( Thinking about thinking about the topic. )

( Are were there? Have we arrived? Have we finally reached... THE POINT? )

In conclusion, I suppose, I hope that if any of you choose to check out the game, you do so with some understanding of what it is and isn't trying to accomplish. And if you want to start watching other people play, in the name of comprehension please start watching a session from the beginning.

As part of my ongoing brain lows, I seem to have two creative modes I'm resting in: I only want to re-read novels and not start reading anything new, and I want to worldbuild all the things and write scenes for absolutely nothing.

In my meanderings through all the random strange assortment of ebooks, I found myself reading two books very close back to back: Earthrise, by M.C.A. Hogarth, and The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers. These kinda form a genre in my head, of "human women from Mars having episodic adventures on a scrappy freelance ship with an interspecies crew, and also the books are very fandom-flavored, for lack of a better term". And I thought, hey, I wonder if I could take a stab at that?

One of my gripes regarding both books – which I do enjoy, in a popcorn sort of way: they're very satisfying at scratching a very particular itch, but also I don't get much more than that satisfaction out of them, and the skins get stuck in my teeth – is that the aliens never really feel properly alien to me. In Hogarth's universe, there's a reason; most of the species in her Alliance are essentially vanity genetic engineering projects that humans made, which slipped their leashes and ran off into the stars to become much more successful than humans did. So they're humanlike because they're explicitly gene-modded human/terrestrial stock. In Chambers' book, the species felt like aliens from Star Control II or Master Of Orion or something: kinda funny-hat aliens who operate mostly like humans do, except with some cosmetic cultural quirks.

(This isn't necessarily a critique. I grew up on SCII and MOO, and still love games like Stellaris, in which all the different alien species pretty much operate on the same principles with a few perks or handicaps. Also, keep reading.)

If I want to take a swing at doing a multispecies ship, I want aliens to be proper aliens! I started spinning out plans for a symbiotic plant-creature which lived in the ship's ventilation and air-processing, with whom granular communication isn't possible! I have a small cluster of psychic squirrel centipedes who only achieve human-level intelligence when there are multiple specimens in proximity, and whose homeworld population is one massive composite consciousness across which ideas pass like weather phenomena! I want Sol-system humans who are markedly different from other human stock which flung itself across the galaxy and dove headlong into gene-modding and nanite augmentation which eventually exceeded their ability to sustain! I want species to have such different nutritional needs that it makes having a shared meal difficult! I want them to cognize differently! I want them to have outlooks and ethics and visceral reactions to things which are even less mutually intelligible than American liberals and conservatives!

And I flung myself into worldbuilding, and then I thought about what actual scenes would look like, and I hit upon a truth I perhaps should have considered earlier:

If your whole genre is about a scrappy found family traveling the stars, relentlessly pounding the "aliens should be alien and difficult to relate to" button works counter to your stated goals. Also, I feel like this genre is supposed to be fun, not strenuous mental exercise or a Crossfit to train your empathy.

Humans like breaking bread together, and if you're writing for a human audience, it's nice to give them a crew that can break bread together. Sure, you can find new modes of intimacy which can cross species gaps – we do that, even today, when we're dealing with nonhuman intelligences which share our evolutionary context (see also: dogs, cats, parakeets), and I love me some good xenofiction which explores this sort of thing. But I'm not sure that sort of keenly-observed xenofiction is a great taste which tastes great with the fun easy rollicking adventure of an Earthrise or a Star Control II.

I dunno. Maybe someone will, or already has, proved that they meld exquisitely well. In the mean time, though, I need to go re-think the underlying ethos of this space opera I will probably not actually write.

• Singing sand dunes (YouTube link; auto-sound)
• Ringing rocks
• Cave chimes (MyNoise link; auto-sound)
• Liar Rocks

On the topic of not-rocks, when I was growing up, I had a cassette tape that had a bunch of folk tales on it. One of them (if I remember correctly, which I very well may not) had to do with a king who was sick, and sent his three sons out looking for a magical cure. Two of the sons get bored of the quest and quit; the third actually found the cure and was bringing it back when his brothers found him, killed him, buried him, and took the cure home to claim the reward. But reeds grew where the good son had been buried, and someone cut the reeds and made a pan flute, and when the pan flute was played, it sang about the brother's death in his voice.

I mostly remember it because the song was creepy and got stuck in my head a lot.  I have never been able to successfully Google the story or its audio.  I really wish I could find it again, though, because nostalgia.

I want to see a dense-packed dystopian urban setting... surrounded by incredibly lush, dense wilderness. As in, the reason that everything is piled up on top of everything else and people are living stacked like cords of wood isn't because they've destroyed everything and their cities have taken over the world like a bacterial culture, it's that the rest of the world is too damn poisonous and too fast-growing and too interested in cracking open your buggies and eating the nummy human interiors for anything to survive outside of these narrow strips of otherwise-dead land. (I imagine that'd be the way you'd answer the question of how you'd get enough resources in the first place to build a dense urban setting: you're in the equivalent of the Atacama or the Dry Valleys or something, only with bonus high concentrations of minable minerals.)

I have not thought through the logistics, here. I came up with this idea about two minutes ago.

In other news, I recently learned that the Sahara was a fertile region up until about 3000 BCE, and that is immensely cool.