After playing Silence Keeps Me a Victim, Kevin and Jen have a somewhat heated conversation about the game and the topics is deals with.
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Tags: Clyde Rhoer, Discussion, Jen, Kevin, Silence Keeps Me a Victim
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Kevin doesn’t get it. The child doesn’t need context, because the point was visceral response. You don’t need to stats to get on a rollercoaster or bungie jump. It puts the game at an arms-length emotional distance to create a pre-game trauma set up. Having no context than your immediate surroundings simulates that sense of lawlessness or anomie that comes from shattering trauma. The child has to build from nothing just like the player. The less said about the child’s past the better. Claiming that one has done good work in other games is still avoiding the visceral response in this one.
If it felt random and unconnected, then that’s how it feels. If you can’t create a world from a sentence on a whim without recycling other people’s contexts, then that’s just reshuffling other people’s ideas, not creating your own. Those brief random whims are where the child’s Voice is refined from. To create a “character sheet” beforehand is to destroy that Voice, or diminish that game key element if you have to stop to translate everything into this ersatz trauma like a tourist using a phrasebook. He is too focused on this being about trauma when it sounds more about making sense of a world where old rules no longer apply.
To have clear and constant understanding of what’s going on would render the entire exercise pointless, all responses would be on the intellectual level while the point is to deal with things that you Can’t Deal With on a conscious intellectual level. To guide the advocate by the nose with metaphors that have a single specific meaning is to impinge upon their Voice; which they need to make any headway on any issue that actually means any thing.
It’s interesting how Kevin became obviously upset during the game, seemingly due to lack of greater understanding and lack of control; letting himself be vulnerable without putting a very specific character, another person entirely, in the vulnerable situation in his place.
Anyway, I don’t think you need to have experienced some deep seeded, unmanageable trauma, or to make one up, in order to have something to dredge up for this game; we can’t physically remember very large parts of our lives and it’s inevitable that some of what we cannot recall is unpleasant or unwanted, however mildly. Playing this game “correctly” will certainly dredge up negative, vulnerable, or distressing emotions, and to try to put a layer between yourself and those feelings, a fleshed out character, a fully understood metaphor, a made up trauma, or really anything that will allow you to put extra distance between your conscience and unconscious reactions will impede your ability to do anything with this game at all.
Almost makes me want to study more Psychology instead of Neurology.