Dear all,

Just a little bit of fun this week - not that I claim to manage profundity on the reg, but that this one doesn’t even make the attempt.

Like many nerds, I was always interested in this whole role-playing game thing. Dungeons & Dragons has such a grasp on the western sci-fi/fantasy imagination. But pretending to be someone called Gorbulax who has a big axe always made me feel a bit like a clown with a red nose. I read about other games, and I tried a little to play with my family, but it didn’t really go anywhere.

Covid really changed this.

For one thing, I was stuck at home for hours together with people I did not have the capacity to be around constantly. No need for any gory details but like many others I too have close relations whom I wish were a little further away. The ongoing risk of death did not help, either.

Given that the screen was the only thing that gave me a way to access the wider world, I jumped headfirst into trying ways to escape. This meant pretending to be people - occasionally called things like Gorbulax - doing unreal things - like wield large axes.

I think this had a few important effects on me. The first was that I was talking to people quite different to me, in quite different parts of the world. I love the friends I have dearly, but I became quite disconnected to many of them in that time. How many times can one have the same conversation, and how much of one’s depression can you hold back or permit to flow outward before it becomes too much? I don’t know.

But I do know that the strangers - who are now of course my friends - who I spent time with were people who in their own ways also wanted community that was interested in the same hobby. I was lucky in some ways. I fell in with a group, purely by chance, that happened to not just be international to me but to each other. I played with people in the U.S., Russia, Sweden, Belgium, Singapore. In playing, I became able also to look away from the seemingly unending misery that was otherwise emanating from the screens of my laptop and phone.

Role-playing is of course a kind of improvisational acting, but it’s also a willingness to adhere to fundamentally made-up rules. Rules like “roll dice when these specific things happen”, or “let your character die when their hit-points reach zero”. Being willing to adhere to these rules makes the endeavour more constricted, but it also allows you to be surprised more easily within those boundaries. Dice are a way of introducing randomness to an otherwise directed story - a way of letting the world surprise us instead of us surprising each other.

I played many strange games in those months. We were scavengers living in a post-apocalyptic world, a ragtag crew of mercenaries in space, smugglers attempting to rob a university blind of its money and gear. We imagined we were members of a circus troupe, villagers in an Iron Age settlement, helium-3 miners in Jupiter (no comment about whether helium-3 is real or whether it exists in Jupiter).

What I found most interesting, however, was the ability of this kind of play-acting to permit me to have real feelings. By wearing a mask, I could experience joy, jealousy, sadness, abandonment in ways I couldn’t in my own self.

I had a breakthrough regarding this during one specific game in which the person I was playing succeeded zero times. Every time she tried to do something, she failed. So I found myself making her do more and more weird things, until someone made her sit down and asked her - Are you okay?

At which point I realised I’d been waiting for someone to ask her this the whole time. Because she’d been through such a terrible set of experiences and all she wanted was a bit of care, and I hadn’t even realised I was playing her that way until it happened.

I needed a way to have those emotions without needing to have them in myself. The lockdown was very clear about one thing - to exit myself from my space was to risk myself and more importantly the people I lived with. I was haunted by one thought - that I’d get Covid, recover, and kill someone else who was older and more at risk than me.

Playing at being Gorbulax the Axe Man gave me a way to escape this. I could feel all those things without having to push them at the people in my life (not that this meant I never ended up having a mental health crisis, of course). It’s the reason I started recording the podcast that ended up defining a lot of my creative efforts in those years.

Next week, something much heavier - why I think about India and Pakistan every time I see the border between Israel and Palestine.

Cheers,

mvs