Listen to this episode here.
Last summer a hot new game hit the indie rpg scene: You Will Die In This Place, a surreal and experimental... dungeon crawler? Technically? ...that seems to have more in common with House of Leaves than it does many roleplaying games. And for a couple weeks I saw so many discussions about this game that I eventually broke down and was like, do I need to do an emergency podcast about this?
No. I did not. I was busy with a hundred other things. But past cohosts Merrilee Bufkin and Jay Dragon did. So I invited the two of them to take over the show for a special bonus episode where they talk all things, or at least some things, You Will Die In This Place. It’s a dense text. They get into House of Leaves, gender, autism, misogyny, the state of the games industry, and a ton more. Take a listen.
Further Reading
You Will Die In This Place by Elizabeth Little
Socials
Jay on Bluesky and Possum Creek Games on itch and Warehouse 23
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AP season "reading" list:
My First Dungeon: Orbital Blues, session 1
My First Dungeon: Wildsea, episode 5
Maia's Game Room: Electric State, episode 5 - CW: sexual coercion
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop mechanic and descend with it into an ever shifting basement. My name is Sam Dunna Wald, and today we're not doing that. In fact, this is another episode where I'm not even on the show because over the summer, a hot new game hit the Indy RPG scene: you Will Die In This Place, a surreal and experimental dungeon crawler technically that seems to have more in common with House of Leaves than it does many role-playing games.
And for a couple weeks there, I saw so many discussions about this game that I eventually broke down and was like, do. I need to do an emergency podcast about this game? No. I did not, I was busy with a hundred other things, but past co-hosts, Merrilee Bufkin and Jay Dragon did need to break it all down. So I invited the two of them to take over the show for a special bonus episode where they discuss all things, Or at least some things, you will die in this place. It's a very dense text. They get into House of Leaves, gender, autism, misogyny, the state of the games industry, And a ton more. It's a great episode.
But before I send you into it, heads up that next week I'm kicking off a new series on Dice Exploder, all about actual play. For the five episodes in this series instead of breaking down one mechanic per episode, we're gonna break down one moment from an actual play every episode. It's a good series and if you wanna get ahead on listening to any of the actual plays in that series so you have more context around them as the episodes come out, you can find a link to the full lineup. In the show notes.
Okay. But today here is you will Die in this place with MaryLee Buffin and Jay Dragon.
Merrilee: welcome to Dice Exploder. I
took it over. Sam's not getting it back.
Jay: , thank you Marilee for being Sam and taking over and seizing power.
So we are here to discuss, you will die in this place by. Also, my goodness. Hi, I'm Jay Dragon. , You might know me for my other works.
I write games and I like this one. The game we wanna talk about is you will die in this place by, Elizabeth Little.
Merrilee: I am super psyched about it. I wanna ask, first off, Jay, what is this game and why has your little goblin brain, similar to my little goblin brain, decided to latch onto it so much?
Jay: So explaining you will then this place is kind of tricky. I've definitely like explained it a lot over the past few weeks and I've been faced with that trickiness. Within the fiction of the game, it is a, an asymmetrical dark souls like dungeon crawling heartbreaker written by a 19-year-old trans woman who.
Who , has vanished, maybe is dead, and whose ex-friend is trying to compile that game and make it into something, , marketable. , And it is very house of leaves in the sense that, there is the game and then there are the annotated essays by the designer. And then there are the editorial remarks from the editor.
And then there's an additional set of Adobe Acrobat comments from , the person that, the friend brought in to help tidy it up. And then there are just kind of like, so it's a game that is surrounded by paraphernalia. Elizabeth Little, I got to chat with her a little bit. She is a really remarkable woman.
She. Has been designing games for 10 years now.
Merrilee: Wow.
Jay: and she took a big break, for entirely reasonable reasons and has been getting back into it through war games. So she's been doing some really interesting war gaming and, I think that you will die in this place, is really, compelling because it feels so, it is both, such a, I think that has latched me onto it, right?
Is that it is so deeply, a delight in what RPGs are, right? It is this game that is , it is so anxious about the, , it is so on its face and so anxious and so delighted , in the tenets of the art form, right? Like, if RPGs aren't art, which they are, there are things that many RPGs are concerned about, you know, in the same way that like, paintings are oftentimes concerned with how we see, I think RPGs are oftentimes concerned about how we communicate I think that this is a game about the anxiety of communication.
And also, just like a 10 years worth of game design ideas and just, it's full of this richness and the, you know, it's full of this like brilliant literary stuff. And then at the bottom of it all is an RPG that you can play and that I'm actually really interested in playing. How about you?
Why is it, what is it, what has it done to your terrible g when Brian?
Merrilee: Well, what's interesting
is I generally don't enjoy war games or things that resemble them. I've talked extensively about my issues with combat, While I do think that good combat exists, and it might exist in this game, I always kind of come at it like I'm combat curious, you know, I want to find good combat and I want to fall in love with it and enjoy it. But one thing that we've been talking about on the Discord lately is this idea of combat versus violence. And this is an extremely violent game in like a multitude of different ways. Like it has layers of violence and like layers of nuance to it. I think what initially scratch my brain the right way was the House of Leaves set up, because I've read House of Leaves twice.
I really like it. And also the language stuff is really cool too, because, I was shocked that T Stein was not brought up once in this document.
Jay: Re, in my opinion, to not bring.
Merrilee: True, true. But I do like it. It's broaching on a lot of language philosophy that I really enjoy these questions of like, how do we communicate and what is language, how do we use it, et cetera. Even if Elizabeth Little is like working a little bit on a higher level than just those base philosophical questions, you can dig pretty easily to get to them and to see where this game is like going with it. But I think also the fact that it is very referential to a lot of works that I enjoy, not just House of Leaves, but I've mentioned this before in the Beginner's Guide as well, which is a video game that has a very similar concept.
It is a dude who is taking his friends video games and making them playable. And the whole time you understand and know that. The original creator of those video games does not want their work shared. They make their work for themselves to work through things, to work through ideas. They don't care about the concept of playable. They care about getting creativity out. And like that struggle is really interesting. I also talked about, , big Joel video on, grizzly Man and Hertzog and how like Hertzog is, like, the film is pretty much about how Hertzog feels about the grizzly man.
Jay: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: , Like you, you see that married in this, like the documentarian is really the one who is being vulnerable in this, even if they can't admit that they're being vulnerable.
And like that's how the secondary designer Samantha is
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: I mean, she's just got so many layers.
Jay: And so to, for the audience, just so you can understand some of the words we're about to say, right? We're gonna talk about a lot of things. A big thing to know is Charlotte is , the trans woman who made the game, right? So, Charlotte is our first author, Samantha Little, who shares the last name with the outside author of the game.
Liz Little. Samantha Little is the friend, a cis woman who has now, who has become a game designer due to Charlotte's inspirations. Charlotte and Samantha played a lot of games when they were younger, really inspired Samantha. They had a falling out. They don't talk. And now Samantha has kind of taken on a lot of that game design mantle.
And was really inspired and is jealous with Charlotte. And then there's Casey. And Casey is just someone who works in the industry. We don't know anything more about them, but they are commenting on Samantha's thoughts. , I say all that because I think one of the things I think is really interesting in this is that, , Samantha is trying so hard to make something marketable, but she can't, there's, she's not succeeding at it.
She is actually making something deeply raw and vulnerable. And KC as this super ego is kind of constantly intervening to be like, Samantha, you've gone too far this time. This thing is not, isn't sellable. You've brought me in to police you. Right. There's some interesting, like I ego, super ego thing where it's like , the super ego is coming in as being like, you can't, like, I need to police you and you're being too vulnerable.
You've gone too far, you can't say this. And yet Samantha says all this. Right? Um, there's something really interesting to me about that and the choice that Liz made to give. Samantha, her last name, right? What does it mean that Samantha, , the cis woman, the a character who like, certainly as you read the story, you get more and more the story, the game, the what.
It's also a story, right? But the object, as you engage with the object more and more, you get really frustrated with Samantha. I don't know if you had that experience. I found Samantha really frustrating.
Merrilee: I kept going, honey,
take a gender studies class
Think
about it. Think about one thing related to gender.
Jay: She's constantly, like Charlotte will bring up a point or make an articulation and then Samantha will misunderstand it or kind of misrepresent it or like, we'll miss, like kind of miss what Charlotte's going for.
But then through all that, right, Samantha is still making something that is really weird, right? Like, there's a level where Samantha can't extricate the weirdness from her work in the way Casey wants her to. There was a review of this game. I'm gonna get right into , the hot takes of the game.
I think you and I have talked, you're more of a, coming at this from more of a literary perspective. Is that right?
Merrilee: I think so. , Yeah. that's what I studied in high school. Went to a weird high school. I studied, , writing and poetry, , and then didn't do it again until game design really. And, , so like for me it's about the prose of the piece, which really is the game. I mean, like, that's what's so cool about it, is that you get to read this incredibly written text that's very thoughtful and has a lot of nuance.
And while you're doing it, you are engaging with the object that is the game itself. , And every part of the game kind of feeds back into that prose that you get to read. ,
Jay: Yeah.
Merrilee: so I would say yes more towards the literary side of things, but I also, some of the game design aspects are very interesting as well..
Jay: Like, here's a cool thing I to do with it, but here you go.
Merrilee: I also, wanted, just for context, in case people haven't read it, most of this game text is written truly like House of Leaves. It is a lot of commentary on an original artifact. So in House of Leaves, you have the Davidson tape, which is the tape of these guys going into their ever expanding home.
And all of the other texts are commenting on that. And in this, the heart of it are these weird little mechanics that Samantha found in a shoebox made by, , And there's just like layers coming out from that. But , the mechanics themselves, we have this weird question of like, who created what, unless Samantha chooses to comment on it.
So I think that's also an interesting angle.
Jay: I have a very strong opinion on this, which is actually, there's a review of this game from Split Party, which I think, is a good review. It's certainly very positive.
Merrilee: Yeah.
Jay: I think Riga and I rarely see eye to eye, but , I'm grateful when we do, because I think that she's someone who really thinks very deeply about this.
, There was one thing in particular about, , game mechanics where I think that there's, , an easy impulse to try to, , simplify this game., The mechanical part of this came down saying like, okay, well, you know, Charlotte did all the good stuff and Samantha did all the stuff I don't like.
Right. It's really easy to say, well, you know, clearly if I don't like that, there's six stats that are obviously a play on the DD stats. Clearly that was Samantha's intervention into the game. , And I really disagree with that. I do think that in the text there are two kinds of information being delivered.
I think that game mechanics themselves, Samantha says when she, this is my opinion, and if you disagree with me, please hit me with your thoughts. But Samantha says, when she changes the game mechanics, the game mechanics as they are, are the ones designed by Charlotte. And I do think that like the six stats, there's a lot of little jokes in this game, by the way.
There's a, , but yeah, I think, I think that the six stats are, you know, the initiative system are coming from Charlotte. , I do think Samantha tells us when she changes things, and then I think there's a lot of clarifying information around the mechanics,, that is more ambiguously written by Charlotte or Samantha.
So when there's an introduction to a section or like how the rules are explained, I think is maybe more Samantha potentially. Right? Like, I think certainly like there are certain rules that are really like, is this Charlotte being overly cautious or is this Samantha applying her process?
, But , I do think that Samantha tells us , and she seems to feel almost ashamed about it , when she deviates from Charlotte's, , design. And so I don't think that it is so easy to say, well, the parts of the game that I like are from Charlotte and the parts I don't like are from Samantha.
Because I think it's really important for understanding the game that Samantha fails to make a marketable object at the end of it. Right?
Merrilee: I think I agree.
With your take that if Samantha,
changes it, she says
it. I think,
like you said, I don't
know if she
ne necessarily.
if like it's coming off as shame to me,
Jay: I think there's a sense of discomfort that Samantha articulates
Merrilee: Yeah.
Jay: just like an uneasiness. I think there's a, there's, this entire game is pervaded by unease, right? Like, if you were to describe a single dominant emotion of the text, there would be unease. And that, that I think, hits very early on when the first two pages of the game, after the first page is, a note about Samantha, little Samantha Little introducing herself and literally foregrounding herself before Charlotte, right?
Like completely, this is very kind of narcissistic first page. And then the second page is a giant black, a red on black. You will die in this place, done in the style of a cross, like you will die. And it's a big, it's a big cross. And then page three is labeled table of contents, and it's a black page with nothing written on it.
And so immediately, right, it's dizzying, right? Your dissent into this is a, like the text changes formatting pretty fundamentally.. It is not until pages 14 and 15 are two halves of the same art spread before that point.
Every single page is doing something different layout wise and structurally, right? So the game, it's like you just, you're going down a goddamn slide. It just immediately sends you into a tailspin , of different things. It bombards you with all of these perspectives. There's a great joke, by the way, this game us a lot of jokes in it, which I don't think everyone necessarily notices.
I'm aware of them because so many of the jokes rely on familiarity with the structure of tabletop games where there's like interesting echoes and mirrors of that. But there's a funny joke in the inspiration section where it says. , The inspiration for this game. There's a bunch of books that inspired it, and then I don't know any, Samantha doesn't know any of them, and so Samantha's like, I don't know it, I couldn't find any of the particular inspirations, but that , page eight is by far the most blatantly House of Leaves page
right. So the joke of it, if you've read House of Leaves, is that there's a page that says, I have no clue what is in, like, what the inspirations are for this and that it is just transparently house of leaves. Right. Which is a really, it's a little bit like saying like, I've written a game about a big red dog.
I don't know what inspired this. And having a giant picture of Clifford, you know, having your words form Clifford. It's a really, it's a really fantastic joke.
Merrilee: I, I think , whole piece is very clever in a lot of ways. , Also wanted to like, talk specifically about the really interesting, specifically we kind of brought this up, but there are two strange and interesting topics that are talked about but not talked about, can't be talked about, et
Jay: Mm-hmm.,
Merrilee: One of them being Samantha's autism and
Jay: Yeah.
Merrilee: being gender and like, they kind of coexist
Jay: Yes.
Merrilee: strange, interesting
Jay: Mm-hmm.,
Merrilee: I am autistic and I definitely felt for Samantha in a really interesting way. Because I think, I know that maybe this is a very common thing, but like if I've never experienced an emotion, it is not just difficult for me to understand.
It is not impossible for me to understand what someone is feeling And so for Samantha to be like, I don't understand, this is both deeply vulnerable and just like really autistic coded
Jay: No. So, absolutely. Yeah,
it's so, I mean like, oh my God, so much of trying to talk about this game is like a character study, right? Because the author does such a fantastic job characterizing all of the narrators throughout this text. And so like everything we're gonna, like we could talk about the game itself, but that it does, in some ways, it's almost hard to talk about the game without thinking about the characters that are the narrative voices for this.
And Samantha's autism, or as she calls it, her Asperger's, right? , Which like extremely loaded in specific word for her to use, in my opinion, right? Mm-hmm. We talked about this a little bit on the discord, but it's a thing where she is capable of, like Samantha is a character who both I deeply, deeply sympathize with, but is also, she's so.
Invested in not understanding Charlotte. Right. The fact that Charlotte is absolutely also autistic, right? Like that is so crucial to, , and Samantha just will not get there. And Samantha will not,, Samantha, will define herself through Asperger's, which is like a very, , a way of self-diagnosis that I think a lot of is popular in certain circles, I think, because effectively, right, what you're saying is, I'm not like the other ones, right?
Like, it's a way of separating yourself from the autistic community, right? So Samantha is not really well equipped to self identify, right? Her identities are continuously pushing her away because, she's not willing to come forward herself.
Merrilee: Yeah, I think it's really interesting to watch her kind of bump up against all of these ideas and then be like, Nope, I talked about this in my review of the game. But like the concept of the other big o as it's talked about in like sociology, anthropology, et cetera, it looms
Jay: Yeah,
Merrilee: A lot of things loom in this game, but the concept of the other, Samantha does so much to distance herself from being the other, because in her head it's not marketable, right? You can't be marketed if you are the other big O
Jay: you can't, if you're a trans woman, you just gotta be a woman. You have to make that really simple and easy. You can't make that complicated. 'cause when you make it complicated,
Merrilee: nuance.
Jay: nuance, right? It's not relevant that Charlotte is a trans woman, right? So we don't learn Charlotte as trans till 50 pages in.
And Samantha explains it in a very, oh, and by the way, I didn't think this was relevant, but maybe I should mention it if you've read the game, you know, Charlotte is trans, right? Like, there's a real sense of it throughout it, , but it's like, oh, it's not relevant. , But Samantha's really concerned with relevance, right?
She hires Casey to be concerned with relevance.
Merrilee: Yeah, and I do, I just, when I read the page where she just says, yeah, Charlotte told me she's trans, but I just didn't think, , it had any sway on this game or on her design.
Jay: Yeah.
Merrilee: I cackled out loud. I was like, girl.
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: How can you put the little stories, like, just as context, Charlotte writes multiple little scenes, I guess is the best way to describe them that are in the text itself that I guess like technically aren't relevant to the game gameplay itself, but are very relevant to her ideas about what this game represents and is and what this dungeon that you're delving into.
I just realized 20 ish minutes in, we have only now said that it is truly a dungeon delving game and there is a dungeon to get into.
Jay: There is a dungeon we have to talk about. Yes. I mean, the truth is that we will not even hope to cover this game. This game is actually being, , will be crowdfunded on game found in the next few months. Wow.
Merrilee: Wow.
Jay: it's going to be a very interesting book.
Object. I got a little bit of a sneak peek on , the layout of the game found page and I think it's very delightful that there's gonna be imitations that the game found page is also not exactly striving for legibility. So that's awesome.
Merrilee: Oh,
Jay: Do check it out. Do pick up this book. Do you pick up this game? , Because I think that we can talk about this for an hour, but we still will not get at scratch surface. We're not gonna scale scratch surface this game. This is the kind of game that, that people will write masters about. Right? Like, this is a game you could do a dissertation on.
I think.
Merrilee: There any particular, I guess since I'm not as well versed in the mechanics, the only one that really I. My eye in particular was the Zabar headhunter and the use of poker hands. But was there a mechanic or multiple that stood out to
Jay: so, There's a great bit with the classes. The first two classes, the mercenary , who uses worker placement, , like placing dice across his body to model physical fortitude. And like stamina is like a worker replacement game. And the Ari head hunter makes poker hands to assassinate people.
Both really good, solid, compelling mechanics. The third class, the corps engineer is to me the Rosetta Stone for understanding the rest of the text. And at least maybe for you it's different, but for me, reading the corps engineer was like, oh, I understand what this is a game about. So for context, the corps engineer is where you play as this necromancer and you have a zombie.
And the zombie follows this kind of very simple stack input. So you kinda load the zombie up with a set of commands and then it executes those commands one after the other. And the zombie , is a composite object, right? It's a simulacra composed of various different body parts which granted various different properties.
There's a few things that really catch me with it. One of them is, there's a short story that accompanies the corp engineer in which it's a story of a dad grieving his daughter and a Neri Maner is convinced to bring his daughter back to life. And the Neri Maner warns, I cannot bring the dead back to life.
Truly, I can only make a doll of them, a model of them, right? I create an illusion of, of life. And the response is, well, he doesn't need his daughter. He just needs something he could say goodbye to. And he's so happy when his daughter arrives, even though she's a dissociative fake, right? And to me, there's a tremendous amount there , with being trans, right?
, And parents grieving you while you're still alive, which is a very common trans thing. And then to be like, well, my parents don't need a son. They just need the simulacra of a son, right? I was never their son. I was never their daughter. I just need to be. The illusion of their son or their daughter long enough to make them happy.
So the other thing about the corps engineer is that, this is a game about engineering corpses. That is what Samantha is doing to Charlotte. She is reanimating Charlotte and composing Charlotte into something new.
Samantha is a corpse engineer, and she is engineering Charlotte's corpse.
one way we can understand the game is by thinking of a class of one of the, play any of the classes as a mode of relation between yourself and the world, right? What is your toolkit for engaging with the world? And I don't think it is so easy to say. Oh, well, you know, Charlotte is a headhunter and Samantha is a corpse engineer, right?
That would be, I think, a misreading of the text because I do so that Samantha is a headhunter later in the book as well, right? But we can all kind of understand these classes as ways that someone does something to someone else. And that to me feels really important for understanding the relationship between Charlotte and Samantha.
And Casey.
Merrilee: What do you think KC is in terms of class?
Jay: I don't think Casey is a specific class, but I do think that there are times when Casey has a lot in common with the mosaic mercenary, right? The kind of like that structural fortitude. Sometimes Casey is the blight channeler, right? Sometimes Samantha is the blight channeler. , I think that, like, I don't think it's one-to-one. I'm not saying that we should read this game as, , figure out each narrator's class. I think instead we can think about classes as a thing we do to other
Merrilee: As like modes of
Jay: Modes of meaning. Exactly. Where it's like, one way you can produce meaning, right, is by seeking identity through the arrangement of random patterns. One way you can produce meaning is through rigorous self fortitude. One way you can produce meaning is by taking a corpse , and returning it to life.
Right? One way you can produce meaning is by taking a detailed account of your life and removing words from it. Right? You can produce meaning by, just constructing a thing that completely surrounds you until you yourself are forgotten, right? Like you can, there's a lot of different ways to build meaning.
, And , to interface with other people and to commit violence against other people. And we can find that instead these are, for me, the corpse engineer was a key into thinking about how these characters interface with what the text is doing outside of them.
You look skeptical. That's fine. That's why I'm,
Merrilee: I gotta think about that for a second. You said it was the Rosetta Stone and I was like, okay, I'm with you,
Jay: mm-hmm.
Merrilee: And then I don't know if it had quite clicked. I do wanna talk about the Fox story
Jay: Let's talk about the Fox story.
Merrilee: yeah. So very early on, on like page 12, we get a story from Charlotte called Unsafe Locations
Jay: Which notably, this is the game stand in for safety tools, right? This game does not have a section on safety mechanics. This is what the game has to say about safety.
Merrilee: She recounts this story of finding, a dying fox on a bridge and. Just her kind of morbid, I don't even know if I'd call it fascination, but like she was transfixed by it and the ideas that she has about it. I find the last paragraph to be really interesting.
Jay: Yes,
Merrilee: it
Jay: I think so.
Merrilee: I think it's this whole game encapsulated a
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: opinion. these days I have a different fear. I no longer choose the quiet and the secluded. My pace quickens when I hear someone behind me. I judge people in places based on ephemeral vibes. A disarming feeling of relief creeps in when ahead. I spot a couple walking my way, a feeling of cold dread wells inside when a dark alley appears on my path. The nightmarish fears of my youth have given way to the reality of my daily life. I walk home as the misunderstood the other. I don't fear finding that fox anymore. I fear being found like, oh,
Jay: Yeah. So fucking amazing.
Merrilee: number one. It is incredibly, incredibly written. And number two, it's just like, what do you mean her being trans doesn't anything to do
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: Like that's, and what do you mean you can't tell she's
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: There's just like bit of it steeps out of Charlotte and her writing. And I think you talked about like me looking at this through a literary lens and I do agree that this is essentially just a character study of Charlotte and
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: and as the
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: continuously coming in.
Jay: I have more thoughts on that, but yeah.
Merrilee: Charlotte says the quiet part out loud.
Jay: Oh, totally.
Merrilee: and then. Samantha just keeps
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: trying to make
Jay: Because Samantha then is like, well, clearly now we need to talk about safety tools. Right? But Samantha also doesn't really know how to talk about safety tools.
Merrilee: No.
Jay: But I've never liked them, but I feel obligated to have them anyway. Isn't that interesting?
I don't know what Charlotte meant when she was talking about safe places, though. I don't understand her feelings at all. Oh, well. , The thing I wanna mention about Casey, I find Casey to be a very sympathetic figure, and I think maybe that's because Casey is not quite the industry.
I actually wanna push back on that very slightly because Casey, it's important to remember Samantha has hired Casey, right? So Casey is an employee of Samantha. Samantha and Casey have a bourgeois proletariat relationship, right? Samantha is presumably petite bourgeois as a small publisher, and she's hired Casey.
Casey is just doing their job, is the thing that I really appreciate about Casey. Every time I read Casey being like, whoa, Samantha, dial it down. Casey doesn't necessarily, Casey is not necessarily saying, you know, like, Samantha, you're doing something wrong, right? Casey is saying, Hey, you've hired me to do my job and to do my job.
you want me to tell you when you fucked up, right? So in that sense, I have a lot of sympathy for Casey. 'cause I think that Casey is not, Casey's not dictatorial. Casey is in fact, , Casey is kind of a Smithers, you know what I mean? Like Casey is someone who Samantha has hired to correct her wrongness.
And that wrongness is something that Samantha has imposed through the industry. Samantha has built this model of wrongness and has taken on Casey to impose that correction onto her.
Merrilee: Wow. She's my internal editor.
Jay: yeah.
Merrilee: sense.
Jay: absolutely.
Merrilee: I've hired this little part of my brain to make sure that I don't appear too neurodivergent in front of most people. And when I get mad about her yelling at me, she's like, you taught
Jay: You want me to do? Yeah. I'm, I'm your employee right now, right? It's like if Casey didn't do this, Casey would be doing a bad job by Samantha's standards. Right. Ultimately, Casey is under Samantha's control. Samantha did not need to hire Casey.
Samantha chose to, Samantha wanted this feedback, which I think a lot about writing in the context of like, you know, I hire developmental editors, I hire layout editors. I hire people whose job it , is to tell me that I've deviated and of course write like, you know, I think even my sub write, like I write a game and then afterwards I revisit the game and I think about my impulses and whether or not something's actually feeding those impulses or whether or not it's extravagant or self-indulgent.
I think that, I can afford. To give into those ex those extravagant, self-indulgent impulses. I really understand when other people can't. So like I can, I'm kind of someone who like a, sometimes a dev editor will be like, Hey, you could do this so much more efficiently, or readably or legibly.
And I'm like, no, screw that. I don't wanna do those things, but I can afford to make that call. Samantha can't. Right. Samantha is the subject of an industry that she is very vulnerable with, and I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for that, even as she completely fucking misunderstands the art that Charlotte has made.
Merrilee: I also, going back to what I said earlier about if I've never had an emotion, can't understand it, I don't live in a world where the industry quote unquote, exists in the way that Samantha
Jay: Yeah.
Merrilee: it, I, it's difficult for me to understand that pressure. Right? I came into indie tabletop games with everyone saying, make weird games, do weird stuff.
Do whatever you want. If you don't, that's fine, but please do. It's
Jay: The way. Yeah,
Merrilee: there's
Jay: this aggressiveness almost about doing your own thing and finding your own way, The way the Rrp G industry works is I oftentimes think about like an ocean. And at the top of the ocean there's a tremendous amount of activity. There's a lot of small fish doing a lot of things. There's a lot of movement. Not a lot of power, right?
And then the deeper you go into the ocean, the slower and more sedentary and more ancient and more monstrous, the things you find down there are. So it's like you go, you know, you go to big bad con, right? And it's very queer, very lots of POC. Lots of interesting new stuff. Lots of cool energy. And then you go to Gamma or you go to Origins, which are these cons that are first and foremost,
Gamma is an expo hall, right? it's the place you go when you need to sell your games to Target or to Barnes and Noble. Last time I went, there were two like visibly, openly queer, tabletop people at Gamma. There was me and Ma from Rowan R and Deckard.
we were the two weird new ones, the entire time I was there, people were like, what is this nonsense that you're pedaling, The industry is a real powerful coercive force. It's just that there's also the hobby.
And the hobby is very freeing. I think you are, correct me if I'm wrong, I would personally perhaps describe you as more invested in the hobby. Right. I would not describe you as being like, especially active in the industry, if I'm not mistaken.
Merrilee: listen, I'd love to be in the industry, but I don't
Jay: Yeah.
Merrilee: That's the thing is that I would legitimately need
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: person who would tell
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: going on because I think I've been offered chances in the industry and I did not understand them.
People talk cryptically when it comes to
business and money and I just need someone to go, we would like for you to make something for us, in something you're doing.
it's this weird communication game you're playing that I don't quite
understand,
which is
Jay: and to be fair, right on the flip side, you go to somewhere like Gamma, you go to one of these big industries, these like industry places, people speak very bluntly there and they speak like horrifically, bluntly. They talk about games. Like, you know, there's a guy who one time told me that he's in the boxes moving business, right?
He doesn't care what's in the boxes, he's in the boxes moving business. That's the industry, right? there's a craven harshness to it. a very kind of monetary transactional demand.
That is what you see when you go deeper and deeper. and I think that a lot of the anxiety that Charlotte and Samantha is facing and Samantha is in a position that you're articulating, right? Where Samantha is aware there's an industry, she doesn't know what she's supposed to do to fit in. She's the kid at school who knows that there's the quote unquote cool kids.
She knows that there's a way. She can maneuver this to make a lot of money, and she doesn't know how to, and so she's playing a game almost of her own invention, right? she doesn't know what she actually needs to do to get out of the labyrinth. She has just put herself in the labyrinth and is kind of just making wild stabs in the dark.
Charlotte understands very clearly she doesn't want to be playing the game. She does not want to be in the industry. She, once out and so she's just not even touching the industry's expectations. Samantha doesn't understand the industry's expectations, and so she is doing the thing.
She's self-policing in the way that I think a lot of autistic folks do.
Merrilee: I mean, it's just, it is so autistic to stand outside in a playground and go, I would like to play with these kids.
Jay: Yeah, that's Samantha's struggle, right? Samantha? is saying, right? I want to make a game that is marketable. I want to make a dungeon crawler that has the juice, but she doesn't know how to, right? She doesn't know. So she's hired someone to yell at her when she does it wrong, right?
She's brought in her fucking a, b, a therapist, right? And that doesn't work. It just doesn't work at the end of the day, which is like the point of the game, right? The point of the game is that Samantha doesn't understand how to get there , which is like really important I think to understand right, is that Samantha is not as successful, is not successfully producing normalcy.
Samantha is not successfully producing marketability. Samantha is producing an object, which is really weird.
Merrilee: is so funny to me is that as a consumer of this object, I am sitting here going
Jay: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Well, and also like, we wouldn't be talking about this game if it was more marketable, right? Like that's, that's the thing also, right, is there's a level of like, Hey, if Samantha had succeeded, this would be a really boring object. This is in fact mainly interesting because Samantha has failed.
Which is part of what makes it really compelling and beautiful art is the, which is part of the joy also of the theme of the failure to communicate or to be understood, is to make a work of art that leaves you, that is Samantha trying to communicate something and just utterly failing to,
Samantha is trying to communicate these norms of marketability and is just failing to, in the same way that Charlotte fails to communicate with Samantha.
Merrilee: yeah,
what strange to me too is that Samantha has marketability and we don't like seem to understand where she's getting them from. Samantha has been in the hobby, at least for a little while.
She understands things about the hobby, but what games is she consuming? What industry is she creating out of thin air in which, because to me, right, this game is highly marketable
because it's so weird. Like there are so many people who will enjoy it and consume it because of that disconnect with marketability, right? And so I'm sitting here going, okay, so you didn't crack the industry, but you did kind of crack the indie darling
thing.
you've
Jay: I mean, that's the thing that makes the game good, right? Is that like we like it. I think part of why we like it is because Elizabeth made it. If we were one level deeper of the fiction, right? We're like, as a trans woman engaging with Samantha Little, being a cis woman, making this about a trans woman, I'd feel really complicated about that, right?
This would be a really weird object
Merrilee: yeah.
Jay: for me to engage with if it was, if the fiction of it was true. So, you know, pulling back into the actual framing of it all, I am extremely resistant to trying to pick apart or think about the authors, the, even though I think that the game really kind of begs you to start thinking about like, well, what's the role of the author in all this?
Like, what's Liz's place? I don't want to do that because it feels really invasive. It just feels like a little. Too far, you know, on a public podcast, but it's one of those games that provokes those questions. It makes you think about, well, you know, where's this, how do these pressures?
How do these pressures operate on us? Right? This is a game that I'm really reluctant to stake anything down authoritatively, partially because this is a game that warns you, that this is a game that cannot be like that. There is no reliable narrator. Nothing can be. Truly, you can't.
What is it? , There's a line in here on page 89, , at the end of one of Charlotte's many essays where she says, The point I'm trying to make here is that we often believe that we understand each other because we believe that we speak the same language, use the same words and understand what they mean.
Reality is messier than that. You can no more truly understand what I've written here than if I had told you to Flemish the cydal before it FLOMs away. It is inherently impossible for me to help you understand myself or other people better. Instead, I offer this advice. Try not to assume that you've understood what someone means simply because you've read or listened to their words,
Right? Like just this kind of like mass blanket. Just like, do not think you, like, yes, you've read this whole game. Don't think you have any special insight into me. Right. And that's, in some ways, that's Liz speaking in some ways that's Charlotte speaking in some ways that's just the truth of language.
Right? That's, , and it's really arresting. I am, I'm part of me, like I, I'm trying to articulate these themes that I see President Newark, but I'm also aware that there's so much we haven't talked about. Hey, we haven't talked about the bridge.
There's a lot talking about the library bridge. We talked about the library with the name.
I have a lot of feelings about the library with the name. we haven't talked about the choice where there's two choices and one of them doesn't exist because it's just presumed everyone will make the other one. we talked about the fox.
Okay. We talked about the fox at least, thank God.
Merrilee: the box.
Jay: but like there's a lot. It's 200 pages and it's packed and it is a thing that you can sit down and read to be clear, this is a game that is built to be read through. It is a work of web fiction as much as it is in RRP G. So I really recommend just getting it and just reading it because we haven't talked about the, the alignment grid or the hierarchy of needs.
Merrilee: grid is so
Jay: I'm just scrolling through this and I'm just in awe at the number of jokes and meanings and symbols that are throughout here. We have not talked about the goblins, the goblin den or the repressed memories room, you know?
Merrilee: Well, we haven't talked about the fact that, Samantha posted a picture of Charlotte in the
Jay: Yeah,
Merrilee: There's just, there are
Jay: We haven't talked about the bridge. Incredible that we have discussed this game for almost an hour, and we just have not talked about one of the things like page one 50, where the game just says, here's the game. Where there's a, one of the rooms of the dungeon is a, is a room with a bridge, and the bridge is one square wide, but very long.
in Charlotte's original conception of the room, the thing on the bridge is this horrible entity. And nothing happens to you when you cross the bridge. You just cross it. But it's very scary and stressful. And Samantha added, wind effects and turned the shadow thing into a Paladin.
And it's like, this makes the room better, right? Has made it worse, has stripped away the art, but has made it better. And Samantha tells us where Samantha is like, and by the way, I did this to the room, but you could play it with the original version if you wanted. That's so fucking crucial to understand the game, the game's of references to bridges and thinking about bridges and the act of Charlotte and Samantha just failing to build a bridge to each other, them trying to build bridges with us.
There's a lot of bridge in this. There's a word arc, there's a lot of bridges. There's a lot of things to say about bridges. You know, this is a game about bridges.
Merrilee: a
Jay: corpses. This is a game about foxes.
Merrilee: I think this is a game about looking on something and quite understanding how to feel about it at all times, and also how to communicate how you feel.
Jay: This is a game about feeling uneasy. This is a game about the sense of unease. it's an almost, it's really a game that I, oh, it has a book in it, by the way. It has a several pages from another different book inserted into it.
Merrilee: hanging
Jay: a, it's a pro, it's an object. I think this is gonna be one of those things that, it's gonna be one of those bizarre art objects that it's gonna be a little bit like Wisher Theater, just fatalist is, my guess is that this is gonna be a game, which for the next decade, every single game designer is gonna be referencing this game.
Just, it will slowly infiltrate its way through spaces. And I don't think, I don't think this is a game that exists for a mass market. This is not a game that should be sold atBarnes and Noble or at Target. This is not a game that should have to prove its worth on the field of Gamma.
Merrilee: Yeah.
Jay: and weird and treasured because I think that it being bizarre and weird is so much better than being a game that can be marketed. Um, but it is a game that is going to infiltrate just kind of how we think about games very fundamentally.
Merrilee: Well, I find that statement very interesting, both you and Split party. that article stated that, and like to me, I do think it's an incredible game. I know what I, as a designer will take
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: if that makes any sense. Because as cool as it is, it doesn't speak to a lot of the, I am so entrenched in the references or the things that are being referenced within the text, and I was entrenched in them in high school and college, and I majored in philosophy. So like, not to say
Jay: Mm-hmm.
Merrilee: old hat, but
Jay: There's a lot. I actually found a little bit of frustration because the game sometimes gets a bit didactic where it just kind of explains to you what its themes are in a way that, I think that a passive editing can help kind of tidy that up a little bit.
But I think that there's a lot of moments when the game kind of just explains it to you instead of trusting that you know about it. And I'm kinda like, I know about Ws already. I don't need half a page on Ws. I would rather that page be used to learn more about Charlotte.
but I, here's the thing. I think that is a takeaway from this game, right? when you are reading a rule book. That those rules have been written by somebody and they're trying to communicate with you and like, are they successful? Have they communicated? When you're writing a game, you're taking on the form of somebody trying to communicate what is that communication act mean?
What does it mean for the game itself that there is, that this game does not stand X in a Hilo, but instead has someone explaining it lingering like there's a ghost in every single game book that is the designer hope, trying to be understood. What does that do to your games? You know,
i'mI'm gonna drop one last thought because I know we're closing in on the hour mark. So I'm gonna drop a thought that I've been having a lot to do with, and I think that for me is my final thought on this game. Ben Rosenbaum, the designer of Dream Park and the ghost in the Goum and a fantastic sci-fi fantasy author was staying over at my house this weekend for narrow scope.
He was crash on my couch. He was lovely. and we talked, we stayed up late every single night talking about games. And very early on in the conversation, I made the comment that thing that I often point out, which is that game texts are separate from the game, right? That a game text is a description of the game, but it doesn't, it doesn't create a game.
The game is realized through the people playing it, and they're interpreting the game text into the production of their game. And Ben Rosenbaum goes, yes. And that's also true about a novel. A novel is a pile of pages with words on it. The reader transforms that into a novel when they, when they read it.
so that's exciting, right? Because it's, when we look at, you will die in this place. It's a novel, right? we read it and we transform it. it's a game. We read it and we transform it, we appropriate it, right? we come in, we change its meaning, and we try our best to understand and make a whole podcast trying our best to understand something which we.
Can't. And when you ask what does the game believe, you know, I think I've got thoughts, I've got suspicions, I've got ideas. but I also think that this is a game that believes that I will never truly understand. and in some ways that feels kind of liberating.
Merrilee: Wow, I've got the blind confidence of Samantha. I'm coming in here. I'm like, buddy. I understand it. I know this game, but like there's a part of me that totally accepts and understands that like I will only ever have an interpretation of it. I cannot overcome Seism in any meaningful way and truly. she wants. And even if she were to attempt to communicate it to me directly, there
Jay: Yes.
Merrilee: You know?
Jay: Yeah. What a good game. Hey Sam, thanks for letting us hijack your podcast. Marilee. Thank you so much. This was such a blast.
Merrilee: Yeah. It was so fun.
Sam: Thanks again to Merrilee and Jay for recording this, and especially to Merrilee for editing it. Oh my God. Thank you for editing it. You can find Jay on Blue Sky at J Drag Sky thanks to everyone who supports Dice Exploder on Patreon. As always, you can find me on Blue Sky at Dice Exploder, or on the dice Exploder discord.
And you can find my games@tonal.it io. Our logo is designed by Sporgory. Our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray. And our ad music is Lily Pads by my boy Travis Tesser. And thanks to you for listening. See you next time.