What did we do here?
Technically I was a Sapphire Heart as well as a Lune, two classes available to play as in Lost Girls. My Sapphire Heart was more involved, though. She helped her friends steal some bikes from a child in a poor neighborhood, then raided the home of some people who weren't doing anything to them besides being a little weird. In cold blood, we worked together to murder a man sleeping in his bed and followed that with an invasion into the bedroom of a couple in love.
Tirin smiled arrogantly, luxuriously. “Don’t tell me what to do, you profiteer. Shut up and get into that cell!” And as Kadagv turned to obey, Tirin pushed him straight-arm in the back so that he fell sprawling. He gave a sharp grunt of surprise or pain, and sat up nursing a finger that had been scraped or sprained against the back wall of the cell. Shevek and Tirin did not speak.
Later I realized the GM had warned us that the first man we killed was terrified and desperate. I think I either didn't hear her or wasn't listening, too caught up in the excitement of holding a hammer in a house full of nails. I had a weapon or two, a job, and the skills to justify this kind of engagement with the dungeon. When you want to succeed on rolls and overpower everyone else, you use your strongest assets. Mine was a +3 to Violence.
They stood motionless, their faces without expression, in their role as guards. They were not playing the new role now, it was playing them. The younger boys returned with some holum bread, a melon, and a bottle of water. They were talking as they came, but the curious silence at the cell got into them at once. The food and water was shoved in, the door raised and braced. Kadagv was alone in the dark. The others gathered around the lantern. Gibesh whispered, “Where’ll he piss?”
One of the other players roleplayed a girl leaving the gang altogether shortly after I had my Sapphire Heart sledgehammer down an unlocked bedroom door, purely to terrify the occupants heavily implied to be in coitus. After this stunt, we exchanged attacks until the NPCs realized we weren't letting up. Annabelle, our target, asked us what we were doing there in her concession of the fight. Nobody knew. All we had to say for ourselves was that someone else asked us to make a mess in exchange for money.
The simple lure of perversity brought Tirin, Shevek, and three other boys together... Tirin had found an ideal prison, under the west wing of the learning center. It was a space just big enough to hold one person sitting or lying down... But the door had to be locked. Experimenting, they found that two props wedged between a facing wall and the slab shut it with awesome finality. Nobody inside could get that door open. “What about light?” “No light,” Tirin said. He spoke with authority about things like this, because his imagination put him straight into them.
It took me a few hours to realize that this had been upsetting for the other players, the GM, and ultimately, myself. Weird Writer's session recap contextualized our actions from her perspective--that of a bunch of kids goading each other into violent and brutal actions they didn't understand.
One of my favorite narrative experiences in a videogame happens in Baldur's Gate 3. You can play as the child of a god of violence, who rewards you with lust for brutalizing anyone he asks. If you follow his requests to the letter, the rewards are middling and you receive nothing but loneliness. But you have a knife. Isn't killing the point?
If I visited the house of Ghouls in Lost Girls again (that's what they were, by the way--Ghouls, cannibals, bioweapon engineers, in addition to people just sitting down for dinner or playing a game in the basement), I think I would approach the situation differently. I would knock on their unlocked door and tell them they were in danger. That someone more apathetic than us wanted to hurt them and wouldn't tell us why. That we were desperate, but that it wasn't their problem. I think that road still ends in playing at being morticians with a creepy seven year old girl.
Unfortunately, and if I can cornily borrow a metaphor from videogames, there is no reload option. We roleplayed ourselves traumatizing a family who had done nothing to hurt us, and there would be no do overs. When we reached the previously agreed upon end of the session, it felt more like a collective tap out than a triumphant conclusion. We all made it out alive, and we even accomplished what should have been a boon for our gang: cash in hand from a handler. He let us know that it would help him a great deal in screwing over a rival's apprentice--someone we would likely never meet. Someone we would never meet, actually, because Weird Writer concluded the campaign then and there.
I think there's value in heavy games. Going to a dark place and out again is an exercise in trust, cooperation, and intention. Most people don't choose for their roleplaying to end up bleak as shit, even when the game's setting just tells you that you belong to a class of people who fight to survive. Sometimes the thrust of the narrative coupled with curiosity is all it takes. Could we have benefited from safety tools? Perhaps, and fortunately things didn't get much worse from there. If I play as a mad dog with a gun and a need to survive ever again, I'll probably think about the ghouls and whether or not it's better just to tell an oppressive presence like Willard to fuck off. Maybe we'll die in the attempt. I think I would rather keep my humanity.
excerpts from The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin, 1974.