I find that bottle episodes or films are very useful sources of inspiration for running live-action games. Almost all LARP organisers have to think about the limits to the amount of space that they have, and so bottle stories can teach us a lot about getting entertainment value out of a confined environment.
Sure, a storyteller could ask his players to imagine new locations, but the more that players have to pretend that their characters are in different places without leaving a room, the more a LARP defeats the point of being live-action.
In television, a bottle episode can be described as "the sad little stepchild whose allowance is docked in order to buy big brother a new pair of sneaks". The above quotation is from Scott Brazil, an executive producer on The Shield, pointing out that the practical purpose of a bottle episode is change how costs are distributed during a series - to save some budget for use in finale episodes or cliffhangers. Most LARPs, on the other hand, have nothing even close to the production capabilities of television, and so - especially if you are planning a small game for a group of friends - researching bottle concepts is a great way to find ideas for reasonable, achievable but also fun stories that would work for a LARP.
I can think of a few good examples:
John Carpenter seems to have a good grasp of bottle concepts in his films; The Thing and Assault on Precinct 13 are both solid examples. On that note, Ice - the X-Files' season 1 tribute to The Thing - is also an excellent bottle episode - perhaps one of the best in the recent history of television.
One episode of Community called Remedial Chaos Theory is also an interesting example. It takes place entirely in one room, but shows the stories of seven different timelines originating from a single point - consequences that depended on which member of the study group left the room to collect the pizzas.
Being stuck together on a spaceship is a common way to create a bottle concept; it is frequently blended with horror (e.g. Alien, Event Horizon), but not exclusively so. The Firefly episodes Our Mrs Reynolds and Objects in Space takes place almost entirely on board the Serenity.
The best bottle episodes for LARPs are usually ones that make full use of an ensemble cast, since they often help storytellers to figure out how to treat multiple players as protagonists in their own right.
I write all these thoughts down, because a bottle film that Shawn recently showed to me has given me an idea for my next LARP - something that we could perhaps do after Paul's angel game. I'll say more about the idea in a separate post, or in a message to the Egham LARP group, but I'll also be looking for a co-storyteller if I can get interested players. I tend to get very excited for an idea once I have figured out how it can work in the limited space of the Englefield Green social hall, without asking players to imagine much that is not actually in the rooms.
Thursday 27 November 2014
Tuesday 11 November 2014
When all roads lead to sexism
I created this blog with the intention of using it to write about my nerdy hobbies instead of my social or political views. Recently however, I have not been able to turn my mind to my gaming interests without also reading and thinking about the topic of feminism.
Gamergate obviously has some responsibility for this. In recent months, media coverage has brought to the fore the abuse that some male gamers have heaped on women simply for speaking their minds. From friends whose writing I follow, like Steve and Pam, to online celebrities like Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day, numerous people of interest have been providing social commentary on misogynist trolls.
However, Gamergate has not been the only source; my other hobbies have been intersecting with the issue of gender discrimination. Most recently, role-playing has provided me with food for thought on feminism and gender. What started as research for gaming purposes led to some very educational reading on topical issues.
I'm very keen on Leverage - both as a television series and as a role-playing game. Part of the appeal is that Leverage is basically neo-pulp; it is about people with extraordinary skills taking on bad guys and making it look fun. Yet the other part of Leverage's appeal is its basis in reality. The writers for both the television series and the game books did a lot of research on real abuses of power; behind every fantasy about a group of outlaw heroes bringing a villain to justice is a true story - sadly, it is usually a story about someone rich and powerful getting away with something horrible.
I thought that - if I want to play the game one day - I should conduct some research too. So I started to look into real abuses of power. I can't remember how my research started, but I soon found myself reading about harassment of abortion providers and Crisis Pregnancy Centres. My research went from a relatively-idle curiosity for gaming purposes to more serious interest in short order.
Part of my research included watching the documentary After Tiller, which is about the four doctors that are able to conduct late-term abortions in the United States; a pro-life supporter murdered the fifth. It certainly shed a lot of light on the people that seek abortions at a late stage. One example in the film was a rape victim, who had waited a long time to seek an abortion because she had been in denial about the pregnancy. Her denial was entirely understandable, considering what a terrible thing a rape-induced pregnancy must be to acknowledge, especially while likely traumatised.
Inside the clinics were doctors that cared considerably for their patients, while outside pro-life demonstrators were praying and picketing the facilities. I can't think of any more powerful way to challenge pro-life attitudes than the footage, which showed a priest telling his congregation that "pure evil" was going on inside a clinic, while inside a doctor listened patiently to a couple explaining that they had wanted to have a baby, and had already built the nursery and got supplies, but then learnt that the baby had a medical condition so severe that it would last just days outside the womb (on life support) before dying.
I gathered information on Crisis Pregnancy Centres (CPCs) from a variety of sources, and they are certainly unsettling.
From reading about social engineering and life hacks, I had already learnt about "round-the-corner" tricks. Imagine a hustler positioning himself close to a corner shop, and - when the store's owner isn't looking - puts a "deliveries around the corner" sign in front of the shop. When the postal worker or courier arrives, the hustler meets the delivery man at the side of the property, receives the delivery and subsequently makes off with the goods. Well, CPCs in the United States are basically a "round-the-corner" trick that religious groups play on pregnant women.
The groups set up "health centres" in close proximity to abortion clinics (to increase the chance that women seeking abortions will enter their centres by mistake), and the centres also have well-designed websites that are intended to make them appear to be medical providers. However, CPCs do not perform any procedures - the most that they provide is usually an ultrasound. Their staff are mostly church volunteers, and they use the centres to facilitate meeting women that are seeking abortion. The purpose of any CPC is to persuade women to bring a baby to term. By persuade, I mean apply pressure and spread misinformation about the medical implications. A much more effective explanation than anything I could say can be found here.
What I found most disturbing was the effort and subtlety that goes into making CPCs appear as friendly and professional as possible. I have visited the actual website of a CPC, and the attention to detail and style is very carefully tailored.
Thanks to the joys of the Internet, I have seen friends and total strangers alike expressing opinions on abortion; some with thought and nuance - others disastrously.
I tend to get frustrated with the idea that "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are the two defining sides of this issue, as if they are two internally-unified movements. As far as I can tell, "pro-life" in particular tends to include people with a range of different opinions, some of them contradicting others.
Some pro-life commentators just seem to have the notion that ready access to abortion leads to women using it casually, as if it were a form of retroactive contraception. They may not be able to point to any woman who takes a casual view of such an invasive procedure, but they tend to take issue with the numbers of elective procedures. As presumptuous as such an opinion may be, at least it implies that the commentator accepts that circumstances - especially medical ones - can make abortion necessary in some cases. Such pro-lifers also tend to be in favour of contraception, believing that if people took proper precautions then elective procedures would not be occurring for socio-economic reasons.
Such views may be naive, but they do not cause me to fume inwardly - that reaction tends to be reserved for the pro-life activists that are anti-abortion and anti-contraception, and consider that the only safeguard against complications from sex should be abstinence and saving it for marriage. The moment anyone suggests that people should only be having sex for the purpose of procreation, I feel my blood pressure rising. This is only compounded when I note that the advocates of this position are usually the religious right, who have in the past supplied the most intimidating and violent harassers of abortion providers.
My anger stems not from research into religion or feminism, but from personal experience - of something that is easier to write about now that I have some distance from it, both in terms of time and emotion.
Until the age of 34, I was a virgin. I realise that - as an age to first have a sexual relationship - that's actually older than some of my long-term friends are now. I was not asexual, eschewing sex or maintaining a religious vow. In fact, if I was to lie and claim that I had been consciously avoiding sex, it would undermine the point that I have in mind. I wasn't averse to sex, I just did not have sexual relations.
What I can say is that - when you're a man, being a virgin is easy; being perceived as a virgin is hard. I've seen plenty of fiction that raises the idea that guys need to get laid, but the idea is itself entirely fictional. It doesn't "straighten you out" or "make a man of you". If a man goes without it, it does not make him desperate, or scared of women. In my history of mental health issues, lack of sex was not a contributor and was not conflated with loneliness.
Although not having a sexual relationship was not a cause for concern, I was acutely aware of society's expectations and presumptions about men that don't have sex. The reason I raise the issue is because men are expected to be having sex long before society puts any pressure on them to be fathers. Hence my ire towards the religious right on the topic of abortion, because abstinence is simply not a safety net, in the face of all the other pressures put on men to be sexually active. Even in conservative families and communities that pressure is there, often rendering right-wing groups' reliance on abstinence hypocritical as well as naive.
Initially, the religious right seems to encourage both men and women to abstain, but once an unwanted pregnancy occurs, the role of the man in causing it seems to become almost invisible - and all of the social consequences - particularly censure - fall on the woman. I can see how church group's behaviour lends a lot of credibility to the notion that pro-life is about controlling women's bodies rather than principle.
One consequence of being a virgin for what my sister once unflatteringly described as a "long, long, long, long time" is that I know that virginity isn't magical (I didn't get to tame any unicorns); it neither emasculates men nor sanctifies women. This just gives me ample reason to hate this madonna-whore attitude that is threaded through society - that men are expected to be getting laid, and so sexually-available women are needed, but they also have to be demeaned as part of the arrangement, so that the idea of abstinence can keep its respectability for women. I imagine that feminists would point out to me that this is a defining feature of patriarchy.
I've noticed that I never refer to myself as a feminist - not because I want to distance myself from the term; feminism is not a dirty word. I can never tell whether I would meet someone else's definition of one, regardless of what I believe. Some people have very inclusive definitions of feminism, while others don't... and the examples that I have seen go back to what I was saying about "pro-life" and "pro-choice" not being internally-unified as movements.
On Thursday, Rosamund Urwin's article in the Evening Standard was about sex-selective abortion (article here). I found a sad irony in the news that some commentators had told Urwin that she was not a true feminist, just because she had expressed a nuanced view on the topic of abortion. This mindset of excluding someone for not adhering to a "party line" - for want of a better term - may not be representative of many feminists, but it must be hard to stomach even from a select few. One of the more abhorrent aspects of Gamergate is that it represents a club of male gamers that clearly wish to exclude women; what could cause more chagrin than to experience marginalisation from some of the people that are supposed to be fighting against such attitudes?
I say "sad irony", because in another context qualifying as a feminist is apparently simple. As Anita Sarkeesian recently explained to Stephen Colbert, if he believes in standing up for equality between men and women, then he's a feminist. The behaviour of certain public figures would suggest that some regard acquiring the identity of a feminist to be as easy as putting on a Fawcett Society t-shirt.
David Cameron got a lot of stick in the press for refusing to wear one, after saying that he did not believe in labels. I'm no fan of Cameron, but I felt that he should not have been criticised for refusing to wear the "This is what a feminist looks like" slogan. He should be criticised when he actually does something manifestly sexist, like calling a female MP "dear", for example. However, being skeptical about labels is fair. As if helping to make this point, a news story came out shortly after the criticisms of Cameron, reporting that Nigel Farage had apparently sent out his wife to buy a Fawcett Society t-shirt for him. Even if this story was exaggerating or twisting the events, it still reinforced the point that donning a cause's identity and living its values are not the same thing.
One thought that troubles me is the idea that parts of society can be so obsessed with appearances that some people will assume that individuals have values just because they wear certain labels, and vice versa - people will fail to recognise values unless those labels are present.
I recently saw comments on the idea of the UK withdrawing from the European Convention of Human Rights. One commentator pointed out that ECHR was created after World War II to prevent the values of Nazis from re-emerging; true enough. He then wrote that we don't need ECHR anymore, because there's no danger of a return to Nazi thinking. It was just a stunningly misguided comment; evidently the commentator has not heard about Greece's Golden Dawn party, or any of the other far-right groups gaining prominence in Europe.
But is part of the problem that people would have trouble recognising today's fascists, just because they don't helpfully wear skulls and swastikas? I would hope that such clear visual clues are only needed to identify the bad guys in a Mitchell & Webb sketch....
I think that I should finish this post now. In truth, it's a mess, but that's what I get for trying to map some of my thoughts on a webpage. I don't think that I was trying to write about any single issue or particular concern; perhaps I'm just keeping track of the things that influence me, whether by inspiring or disgusting me.
Until next time, yes? Oh, and hail Hydra.
Gamergate obviously has some responsibility for this. In recent months, media coverage has brought to the fore the abuse that some male gamers have heaped on women simply for speaking their minds. From friends whose writing I follow, like Steve and Pam, to online celebrities like Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day, numerous people of interest have been providing social commentary on misogynist trolls.
However, Gamergate has not been the only source; my other hobbies have been intersecting with the issue of gender discrimination. Most recently, role-playing has provided me with food for thought on feminism and gender. What started as research for gaming purposes led to some very educational reading on topical issues.
I'm very keen on Leverage - both as a television series and as a role-playing game. Part of the appeal is that Leverage is basically neo-pulp; it is about people with extraordinary skills taking on bad guys and making it look fun. Yet the other part of Leverage's appeal is its basis in reality. The writers for both the television series and the game books did a lot of research on real abuses of power; behind every fantasy about a group of outlaw heroes bringing a villain to justice is a true story - sadly, it is usually a story about someone rich and powerful getting away with something horrible.
I thought that - if I want to play the game one day - I should conduct some research too. So I started to look into real abuses of power. I can't remember how my research started, but I soon found myself reading about harassment of abortion providers and Crisis Pregnancy Centres. My research went from a relatively-idle curiosity for gaming purposes to more serious interest in short order.
Part of my research included watching the documentary After Tiller, which is about the four doctors that are able to conduct late-term abortions in the United States; a pro-life supporter murdered the fifth. It certainly shed a lot of light on the people that seek abortions at a late stage. One example in the film was a rape victim, who had waited a long time to seek an abortion because she had been in denial about the pregnancy. Her denial was entirely understandable, considering what a terrible thing a rape-induced pregnancy must be to acknowledge, especially while likely traumatised.
Inside the clinics were doctors that cared considerably for their patients, while outside pro-life demonstrators were praying and picketing the facilities. I can't think of any more powerful way to challenge pro-life attitudes than the footage, which showed a priest telling his congregation that "pure evil" was going on inside a clinic, while inside a doctor listened patiently to a couple explaining that they had wanted to have a baby, and had already built the nursery and got supplies, but then learnt that the baby had a medical condition so severe that it would last just days outside the womb (on life support) before dying.
I gathered information on Crisis Pregnancy Centres (CPCs) from a variety of sources, and they are certainly unsettling.
From reading about social engineering and life hacks, I had already learnt about "round-the-corner" tricks. Imagine a hustler positioning himself close to a corner shop, and - when the store's owner isn't looking - puts a "deliveries around the corner" sign in front of the shop. When the postal worker or courier arrives, the hustler meets the delivery man at the side of the property, receives the delivery and subsequently makes off with the goods. Well, CPCs in the United States are basically a "round-the-corner" trick that religious groups play on pregnant women.
The groups set up "health centres" in close proximity to abortion clinics (to increase the chance that women seeking abortions will enter their centres by mistake), and the centres also have well-designed websites that are intended to make them appear to be medical providers. However, CPCs do not perform any procedures - the most that they provide is usually an ultrasound. Their staff are mostly church volunteers, and they use the centres to facilitate meeting women that are seeking abortion. The purpose of any CPC is to persuade women to bring a baby to term. By persuade, I mean apply pressure and spread misinformation about the medical implications. A much more effective explanation than anything I could say can be found here.
What I found most disturbing was the effort and subtlety that goes into making CPCs appear as friendly and professional as possible. I have visited the actual website of a CPC, and the attention to detail and style is very carefully tailored.
Thanks to the joys of the Internet, I have seen friends and total strangers alike expressing opinions on abortion; some with thought and nuance - others disastrously.
I tend to get frustrated with the idea that "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are the two defining sides of this issue, as if they are two internally-unified movements. As far as I can tell, "pro-life" in particular tends to include people with a range of different opinions, some of them contradicting others.
Some pro-life commentators just seem to have the notion that ready access to abortion leads to women using it casually, as if it were a form of retroactive contraception. They may not be able to point to any woman who takes a casual view of such an invasive procedure, but they tend to take issue with the numbers of elective procedures. As presumptuous as such an opinion may be, at least it implies that the commentator accepts that circumstances - especially medical ones - can make abortion necessary in some cases. Such pro-lifers also tend to be in favour of contraception, believing that if people took proper precautions then elective procedures would not be occurring for socio-economic reasons.
Such views may be naive, but they do not cause me to fume inwardly - that reaction tends to be reserved for the pro-life activists that are anti-abortion and anti-contraception, and consider that the only safeguard against complications from sex should be abstinence and saving it for marriage. The moment anyone suggests that people should only be having sex for the purpose of procreation, I feel my blood pressure rising. This is only compounded when I note that the advocates of this position are usually the religious right, who have in the past supplied the most intimidating and violent harassers of abortion providers.
My anger stems not from research into religion or feminism, but from personal experience - of something that is easier to write about now that I have some distance from it, both in terms of time and emotion.
Until the age of 34, I was a virgin. I realise that - as an age to first have a sexual relationship - that's actually older than some of my long-term friends are now. I was not asexual, eschewing sex or maintaining a religious vow. In fact, if I was to lie and claim that I had been consciously avoiding sex, it would undermine the point that I have in mind. I wasn't averse to sex, I just did not have sexual relations.
What I can say is that - when you're a man, being a virgin is easy; being perceived as a virgin is hard. I've seen plenty of fiction that raises the idea that guys need to get laid, but the idea is itself entirely fictional. It doesn't "straighten you out" or "make a man of you". If a man goes without it, it does not make him desperate, or scared of women. In my history of mental health issues, lack of sex was not a contributor and was not conflated with loneliness.
Although not having a sexual relationship was not a cause for concern, I was acutely aware of society's expectations and presumptions about men that don't have sex. The reason I raise the issue is because men are expected to be having sex long before society puts any pressure on them to be fathers. Hence my ire towards the religious right on the topic of abortion, because abstinence is simply not a safety net, in the face of all the other pressures put on men to be sexually active. Even in conservative families and communities that pressure is there, often rendering right-wing groups' reliance on abstinence hypocritical as well as naive.
Initially, the religious right seems to encourage both men and women to abstain, but once an unwanted pregnancy occurs, the role of the man in causing it seems to become almost invisible - and all of the social consequences - particularly censure - fall on the woman. I can see how church group's behaviour lends a lot of credibility to the notion that pro-life is about controlling women's bodies rather than principle.
One consequence of being a virgin for what my sister once unflatteringly described as a "long, long, long, long time" is that I know that virginity isn't magical (I didn't get to tame any unicorns); it neither emasculates men nor sanctifies women. This just gives me ample reason to hate this madonna-whore attitude that is threaded through society - that men are expected to be getting laid, and so sexually-available women are needed, but they also have to be demeaned as part of the arrangement, so that the idea of abstinence can keep its respectability for women. I imagine that feminists would point out to me that this is a defining feature of patriarchy.
I've noticed that I never refer to myself as a feminist - not because I want to distance myself from the term; feminism is not a dirty word. I can never tell whether I would meet someone else's definition of one, regardless of what I believe. Some people have very inclusive definitions of feminism, while others don't... and the examples that I have seen go back to what I was saying about "pro-life" and "pro-choice" not being internally-unified as movements.
On Thursday, Rosamund Urwin's article in the Evening Standard was about sex-selective abortion (article here). I found a sad irony in the news that some commentators had told Urwin that she was not a true feminist, just because she had expressed a nuanced view on the topic of abortion. This mindset of excluding someone for not adhering to a "party line" - for want of a better term - may not be representative of many feminists, but it must be hard to stomach even from a select few. One of the more abhorrent aspects of Gamergate is that it represents a club of male gamers that clearly wish to exclude women; what could cause more chagrin than to experience marginalisation from some of the people that are supposed to be fighting against such attitudes?
I say "sad irony", because in another context qualifying as a feminist is apparently simple. As Anita Sarkeesian recently explained to Stephen Colbert, if he believes in standing up for equality between men and women, then he's a feminist. The behaviour of certain public figures would suggest that some regard acquiring the identity of a feminist to be as easy as putting on a Fawcett Society t-shirt.
David Cameron got a lot of stick in the press for refusing to wear one, after saying that he did not believe in labels. I'm no fan of Cameron, but I felt that he should not have been criticised for refusing to wear the "This is what a feminist looks like" slogan. He should be criticised when he actually does something manifestly sexist, like calling a female MP "dear", for example. However, being skeptical about labels is fair. As if helping to make this point, a news story came out shortly after the criticisms of Cameron, reporting that Nigel Farage had apparently sent out his wife to buy a Fawcett Society t-shirt for him. Even if this story was exaggerating or twisting the events, it still reinforced the point that donning a cause's identity and living its values are not the same thing.
One thought that troubles me is the idea that parts of society can be so obsessed with appearances that some people will assume that individuals have values just because they wear certain labels, and vice versa - people will fail to recognise values unless those labels are present.
I recently saw comments on the idea of the UK withdrawing from the European Convention of Human Rights. One commentator pointed out that ECHR was created after World War II to prevent the values of Nazis from re-emerging; true enough. He then wrote that we don't need ECHR anymore, because there's no danger of a return to Nazi thinking. It was just a stunningly misguided comment; evidently the commentator has not heard about Greece's Golden Dawn party, or any of the other far-right groups gaining prominence in Europe.
But is part of the problem that people would have trouble recognising today's fascists, just because they don't helpfully wear skulls and swastikas? I would hope that such clear visual clues are only needed to identify the bad guys in a Mitchell & Webb sketch....
I think that I should finish this post now. In truth, it's a mess, but that's what I get for trying to map some of my thoughts on a webpage. I don't think that I was trying to write about any single issue or particular concern; perhaps I'm just keeping track of the things that influence me, whether by inspiring or disgusting me.
Until next time, yes? Oh, and hail Hydra.
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