Running Games and Metapsychology

I’ve wondered for a long time what kind of a game leader I would be.

I say game leader because all the standard words we use come with connotations of a game system or a game in particular and I don’t really want to highlight one. I’ll be talking about a particular game in a bit, I guess, since I’ve only run two sessions of one system, but this is more of a generic thing that I wanna write about.

When you tell a story with a group of people, who you are as a person factors into a lot more than you think or maybe realise. The kinds of characters I build as a player are constantly informed by - among other things - the amount of responsibility I feel I’m carrying in the rest of my life, and the amount of emotional labour I feel like I’m engaging in outside of game when I create the character. Not something I was really conscious of until recently, but I play a whole lot of different games and I’m lucky enough to play regularly. When I built adolescent Alexandrie (Unlawful Disorder), for example, I was playing a 50 year old firbolg druid whose desire in life was to protect the people she loved - people who seemed to enjoy doing really dangerous things. Meanwhile, I built Dr Ela Malas (The Falkenstein Affair) when my emotional workload felt super manageable and I had a lot of adult energy. All of this is mostly beside the point - but not entirely, and here’s why: We create characters that are accessible to us in some way, and play out our fantasies (or nightmares) through them. It’s a safe space (or should be) to explore some part of ourselves in a new way.

Something I’m noticing as a Master of Ceremonies (we’re playing Monsterhearts) is that the questions I’m asking of the characters (specifically the characters and not the players) are exactly the kinds of questions I ask clients when I’m at work in the clinic. Or at least, there are close similarities. Drama therapy is an established practice, so that’s not new or original, but what I didn’t expect was how much (or how quickly) I’d slip into that thought process and rhythm while engaging in this activity. One of my movement teachers once said “bring everything you are to everything you do” - and while I have been known on several occasions to bring the theatre and game theory into psych sessions, I didn’t necessarily expect everything I am in the therapy room would innately decide to join me at the gaming table.

So where am I now? Two sessions into the game (you can find VoDs here when they get uploaded), and I’m constantly asking the players what their characters are thinking and feeling in response to situations. In this particular game, that makes sense - Monsterhearts revolves around the idea of monstrous adolescents and what their hormones are doing - but I wonder how far that practice will take me. Ultimately, I didn’t expect to be the psychologist for fictional characters, and yet that, to a degree feels like exactly what I am.

It’s important, too, to note that it is about being the psychologist to the characters. Especially in the context of what I said earlier, about how the characters tend to be related to an accessible part of ourselves. I’m of the belief that no matter what we do, when we build a character there is going to be some “bleed” - even if we build a purely mechanically driven character, those mechanics relate to how we strategically think, and so what happens to them reflects on us in some way. And yet I don’t think or feel as though I am in a therapeutic position with my players. If I did, I couldn’t do what the game suggests and “make the character’s lives messy” - because I’d be more concerned about what it would do to the players than their characters. While I’m not the player’s psychologist, I’ve been relieved to find that what I can do is use everything in my psychological wheelhouse to keep my players safe.

To that end, there’s something wonderful about the direction to “address the characters”. As soon as I’m addressing the character, my players know I’m not talking to them personally. They know that what I am about to do is not directed at them. It’s a safety feature. Despite never noticing it myself before as a player, it’s possibly the single most comforting technique I have at my disposal as an MC - the ability to tell them I respect the distinction between them and their character. Because even if there is bleed - even if I tap on the character and the character taps on a part of their being, it’s like there’s a barrier through which they can see me and sidestep the overflow of that force.

It also helps that I’m playing with actors and that they know addressing the character is a way to stay in character and connected to the circumstances I’m offering them. There’s another school of thought where people sidestep the force of the bleed by speaking in third person (“my character does this, my character does that”). And that’s a really interesting way of looking at things too, because it’s an active distancing of the character from the self, and makes a whole lot of sense if you’re used to telling stories through text, among other things. Playing in a Monsterhearts game this week (Gehenna Academy), in our first session I was about to lean in that direction, then switched over to first person. That was a conscious choice. That game is designed to push the horror elements of being a monster, and I know that I personally won’t connect with the situation and enjoy the full extent of that genre unless I sit in it with the character to some extent. Somewhat like how horror movies were of no interest to me until Jordan Peele stepped onto the scene - if the scared people aren’t representative of my own experience, I can’t connect to it. It’s about gaze.

I have so very many thoughts about all this, and my mind is clearly still switching between the awareness I have as a psychologist, an actor, a writer, a player and a human. I’m excited to play more, and hearing that my players are too is so much more relieving than I thought it would be!

At some point I’d like to discuss safety, and connection to character from this perspective. I feel like there are so many aspects to all this and what I’ve written here is just a mess of thoughts. But it’s my mess of thoughts and I’m sure they’ll get clearer the more aware I become of exactly what it is I’m using to storytell from this perspective.

For now, I can’t wait to play again.