Saturday, April 22, 2023

Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life

 

Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny LifePuppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth Gross
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Puppets and I go way back. I want to say that the Muppets and Sid and Marty Kroft shows (HR Pufnstuf, Far Out Space Nuts), though the latter was more costumed humans than puppets, I admit, introduced me to bodies animated by unseen humans. But, outside of television (and that P movie by that D company), I quite fondly recall my mother making little puppets out of felt and doing little puppet shows for me. She was a drama-girl all the way. Furthermore, I remember seeing street puppets when I lived in Italy as a boy and at least one Punch & Judy show in Brighton, England, when I lived in the UK as a teenager.

But it was later in life that I learned to appreciate the uncanny nature of puppets. In the early 90s I discovered the movies of Jan Svankmajer, which sometimes featured marionettes, then, in the early 2000s, I discovered the stop motion films of The Brothers Quay, which have become an obsession of mine. Back in 2003, I believe it was, I saw another Punch and Judy show (this one in Minneapolis, of all places), I took my kids to a live puppet show (with puppets more reminiscent of Frank Oz's early creations, than anything else) not many years after. Then, in 2019, while on vacation in Europe, my wife and I visited Salzburg, Austria and attended the Salzburg Marionetten Theatre. And just tonight, I signed up for a Domestika course on making wooden marionettes.

I think I'm becoming a little obsessed. Maybe I was obsessed all along and am just now admitting it.

Back in 2021 (it feels strange to say that - has it really been that long?), I read and reviewed Victoria Nelson's outstanding book The Secret Life of Puppets, which I had stumbled on at Goodreads, if I remember correctly. Then, my favorite podcast, Weird Studies, did an episode on this same book in November of 2022. They followed this with an episode about the movie Evil Dead II, which also dipped into the uncanny nature of puppets. This is where I first saw reference to the book being reviewed presently.

It is this uncanny aspect of puppets that Kenneth Gross examines in Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. All the while I was reading, I felt as if I had the voice of Mark Fischer whispering in my ear. His book/essay on The Weird and the Eerie could have formed the skeleton for Gross's essay, though Gross's work preceded Fisher's by five years. So, perhaps it is the other way around? However, I find no reference to Gross's work in Fischer's bibliography. Maybe this is just another magical synergy that seems to happen so often with these sorts of confluences.

The movement and intelligence that are apparent in a puppet is "weird" (in Fisher's sense) because there should be no movement or intelligence or intention in unliving material, yet that intent seems to come through the unliving (perhaps undead?) material of the puppet. There is movement in what there ought not to be. This offends our logic while simultaneously spiking our curiosity, a morbid curiosity for that which is incapable of morbidity, strangely enough.

It feels quite natural for humans to view these artificial beings as artifacts with some connection to the past. I've seen countless cast off dolls in the mud, for example, and it piques my sense of wonder. How did this get here? Who lost it? Is there some latent connection with a past owner? This begs the further question: Are puppets, dolls, and marionettes some sort of mana batteries, storing energy from some past life force? Perhaps the mystery of these unseen lives that live behind the figures is what we hope to see through to, with the "little people" serving as scrying devices into past lives, their joys, and tragedies. But are our visions clouded and warped by looking through these anthropomorphic lenses? Could some malevolent spirit twist or visions of the past if we are not careful? Do we dare look into their eyes?

Puppets and the stages on which they come "alive" ae not like us. They are exaggerated and often missing many of the subtle and not-so-subtle things that make up life. This creates what Fisher termed "the eerie". Much that should be "there" is not, yet some law of puppetry seems to govern their universe, laws that do not apply in the same way to us. Nor do our laws apply to them. So which reality is real? Which laws actually inhere?

Just as the paradox of life seemingly manifest in dead things causes unease and fascination, the utter unknowability of what it feels, tastes, smells, or sounds like to be a dead thing that was once living simultaneously terrifies us and fills us with curiosity, longing, even, to know and, with much fear and uncertainty, to experience what the dead experience. It is the age old push and pull of existential dread, brought to life(?) by the infusion of seeming intent into dead matter. The puppeteer possesses the puppet with life-force, animating it, the living possessing the dead in a reverse-seance. Who is the medium here?

Puppeteers I have met indeed often speak of waiting for some impulse from the puppet they hold, a gesture or form of motion that they can then develop often being shocked by what emerges.

The act of puppeteering blurs the line between tool and wielder. yes, the human informs the dead material, but the dead material imposes its own limitations, resisting, even fighting back!

The unliving puppet is, of course, innocent, as it can only react to others' manipulations. Yet many puppet shows are transgressive and anything but innocent (go watch a Punch and Judy show, if you don't believe me). Here the inherent innocence of the puppet allows for a buffer to the audience. Hence the shocking nature of the horror trope of puppets and other artificially animated human stand-ins possessed of self-realized inimical animation.

Remember, though, that's it not always the humans facing the puppet that have need to fear that strange intersection of life and death, of immaterial energy and material existence. As Gross implies, this liminal zone is fraught with danger for all:

Then there was the marionette of Antigone who had hung herself with the very strings that had earlier given her life. That had its own kind of truth.

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Saturday, April 15, 2023

Games I Haven't Played

 Tabletop Roleplaying Game conventions are a thing of wonder. Scores, sometimes hundreds of games to choose from. I still have my preferences, as I outlined in my post on TTRPG Conventions Tips and Tricks, but we don't always get what we want, do we?


So, here is a list of games I ended up not playing at conventions, either because I had scheduling conflicts with other games, because availability slips so rapidly (DCCRPG, I'm looking at you), or because the GM had to cancel. I supposed this is a sort of hauntological view of  "what might have been," that strange, forward looking nostalgia for a future that was never fulfilled. Ah, well, there's only so much time in life and I can only give up so much sleep. Anyway, here goes, these are the ones I really wanted to play, and had a fighter's chance at getting into, but just missed out on. Had I not gotten some of my first choices, or if availability wasn't snatched away from me by those pesky gold ticket holders, I might have played:


Gamehole 2016, I wasn't keeping good notes back then. Sorry!


Garycon 2017:

Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea: Black Briars and a Dead Rabbit

DCCRPG: The Heist (Run by Harley Stroh, whose games are notoriously difficult to get in to because they sell out so fast)

Metamorphosis Alpha: Androids, Androids, Androids

AD&D 1e: The Tomb of Aethering the Damned (run by my friend Julian Bernick)


Gameholecon 2017:

Fantasy Trip: Guerillas in the Mist

DCCRPG: Symptom of the Universe (run by my friend Brendan Lasalle. Brendan's games sell out FAST!)

 Call of Cthulhu: The Star on the Shore

Chill: A Lamp Gone Dark

Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea: Shooting Star Watcher


Garycon 2018:

Traveller: Secret of the Ancients

Traveller: Into the Kinunir (featured event run by Marc Miller, the creator of Traveller. Sigh.)

AS&SH: The Palace of Xambaala (run by the creator, Jeff Talanian, as well)

Call of Cthulhu + DCCRPG(!): Crawl of Cthulhu


Gameholecon 2018:

Fantasy Trip/Melee/Wizard: Introductory demo game

GURPS: BPRD (yes, that BPRD)

Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Blood in the Chocolate


Garycon 2019:

Traveller: Prison Planet

Operation Whitebox WWII: Operation Peardrop (run by Bruce Cunnington, the coolest englishman I know)

Call of Cthulhu: Midnight under the Bharat Sun (run by the always awesome You Too Can Cthulhu crew - I try to get into at least one of their games every convention)


Gameholecon 2019:

Delta Green: Fire from Heaven

Empire of the Petal Throne: Beyond the Plain of Towers

Empire of the Petal Throne: Hinlakte Hijinx


Garycon 2020 was virtual, so I didn't take great notes on my schedule. 


Gameholecon 2020 (Virtual). Seems like I inadvertently nuked my notes on this. 


Garycon 2021 (Virtual):

DCC: The Jeweler that Dealt in Stardust

DCC: Descent into the Depths of the Earth


Gameholecon 2021 (back to in-person!):

Troika!: The Black Pearl (run by my friend Jon Carnes)

Call of Cthulhu D10: A Nightmare on Sesame Street

Tales from the Loop: Time After Time

Cthulhu Dark Ages: People of the Book

Star Fleet Battles


Garycon 2022:

The King in Yellow: The Unspeakable Oath

Barbarians of the Ruined Earth: Meeting the Metal Menace

DCCRPG: Return to the Purple Planet

Troika!: So You've Been Thrown Down a Well

DCCRPG: Dark Sun Arena Bloodbath

DCCRPG Dying Earth: Escapades and Expeditions of the Dying Earth (Julian Bernick)


Gameholecon 2022

Traveller: Getting Up

Trail of Cthulhu: The Coldest Walk

DCCRPG: Blood in the Brutal Lands (Michael Curtis, whose games also fill quickly)

Solar Blades and Cosmic Spells: Temple of the Cyber Lich

Traveller Seminar: Advanced Traveller (with Marc Miller, who had to cancel. Sigh.)


Garycon 2023

DCCRPG: Day of the Kaiju (run by my friend Hector Cruz)

Traveller: Derelict Starship (run by my friend Victor Raymond)

Call of Cthulhu: Eve of Darkness (You Too Can Cthulhu)

Star Wars: Shadowport, All Jawas

Call of Cthulhu: The King in Yellow


There you have it, the games that I had not. Despite all of these misses, I have had a fantastic time at every Gameholecon and Garycon I've attended. They are a wealth of riches, and these are just some of the gems that spilt out of the bag. Of course, if you're reading this, and you ran one of these games, and wanted to run it again, who am I to stop you? Just save me a seat!

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Thursday, April 13, 2023

TTRPGs versus Competition

 While listening to a Patreon-subscriber extra on my favorite Podcast, Weird Studies, it dawned on me why I love tabletop roleplaying games in a way that I don't love miniature wargames or boardgames. Now, don't get me wrong. I love miniature wargames and many boardgames, but they have a "low ceiling" when it comes to fulfillment for me. There's something that rings in my soul when playing or running TTRPGs that isn't present with the others.

I've thought a lot about why TTRPGs are my main hobby of choice. What do I get out of it? It's not mere nostalgia for having played the games as a kid. I have nostalgia for other things (the past ubiquity of used bookstores, the freedom of being a more-or-less free-range child, video game arcades, and so forth), but, whereas those things are nostalgic explicitly because I can't go back to them, tabletop games are still around and I feel like they've grown with me. But that's not the reason I love them.

Here's the secret: I'm a competitor. In fact, I'm very competitive. My wife and I used to play Risk a lot when we were first married and had no money (but we had a beat up copy of Risk), but we discovered that we simply could not play the game together because we are (gasp!) both competitive. That competitiveness has served us well when we're facing the rest of the world, but we have learned to compromise, to give, forgive, and work around our competitive streaks.

Back to the present (more or less): Not long ago, I was playing a miniatures game. I knew the person running the game and I knew two other players. Three of the other players were strangers to me. One of these seemed to know the game master or had had some past interaction with them. As we progressed along, I got a sort of irritated vibe from this particular player, especially when the game wasn't moving at the pace he wanted it to. Truth be told only two people at the table had played the game before, and one of them was him (I was not the other - this was a brand new mini game to me). He became increasingly curt with . . . well, everyone who wasn't him, if I'm being honest. He was extremely rules-lawyerly, which I can understand in a mini's game where measurements matter, but this guy was borderline belligerent. I admit, I pushed back a bit, and he finally backed down, but, to be frank, it felt yucky. I realized, upon stopping to think about the man's behavior for a bit, that he was really, REALLY competitive.

Now, I've known some people to be overly competitive while playing TTRPGs. In games and people that I normally play with, those players are looked upon as anathema. I've seen people acting like jerks being jettisoned from a table by a DM and I'm glad it was done. It was ugly, but necessary for the enjoyment of the rest of us. I've been lucky in that I've never had to eject someone for being a jerk. But I would, in a heartbeat, because I believe that TTRPGs are a cooperative venture, even, at times, when there is some "player versus player" element present or, more properly, "character versus character". 

It is this cooperative aspect, unbounded by proscriptive rules, that I think draws me to TTRPGs above other genres of game. I've played cooperative boardgames and rather enjoyed them, but these are bounded by the rules as written. The cooperation in TTRPGs is of a different hemisphere, or another order of magnitude, where an individual's creativity can transcend the bounds of the game by creating something with other players that the writers of the game could have never anticipated. It is a meeting of the imaginations of the players, rather than a forced constraint provided by the machinations of the game designer. Perhaps this is why the proverbial "rules lawyer" is universally despised by all but himself? TTRPG players, for the most part, want freedom to choose and the freedom to interact within a set of agreed upon rules. The "rules lawyer" breaks this assumed social contract.

This is also why I am not opposed to character versus character interactions, so long as allowing such interactions was agreed upon before the start of the game. Of course, there must be full consensus here, so players must ask themselves what do they really want out of the game? Are they willing to sacrifice some comfort for the sake of the communal game? And what is "too far"? All of these questions (and I'm certain I'm missing some) need to be considered in this instance.

What do you think? Do you also find more freedom of expression in TTRPGs than in boardgames? Are there exceptions? If so, I'd love to hear about specific boardgames that allow the same degree of freedom and creativity among players. 

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