This polar vortex feels like a strange sort of unplanned holiday. Classes are canceled and no one seems entirely sure what to do to fill the time, especially when leaving your dorm might mean frostbite if a little bit of uncovered flesh peeks out between your coat sleeve and mitten. The dining hall is down to limited rations, mostly starch and meat, served by a skeleton crew for a dwindling population, since most people stockpiled food before the worst of the vortex hit. A couple of my friends bought bubbles from Walmart and I spent a couple happy minutes watching them as the clouds of shimmering liquid thinned out, until the few that didn’t pop froze and rolled on the ground, intact for a few delicate seconds before they collapsed into an iridescent skin that will probably stick around on the ground like any other trash until this chill ends.
A couple of my friends (the same ones who thought to bring the bubbles) and I passed our time playing End of the World in the new and nearly deserted Humanities and Social Sciences Building. End of the World is a unique RPG, not the kind of thing that everyone finds fun right away, so I was a little scared introducing my friends to it, but that day seemed like an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. In End of the World, your character is you, your stats for strength and speed and intelligence are supposed to be estimations of your own skills (using the honor system, which works to mixed results), your equipment is everything you have on you as the game starts, and your setting is the exact time and place where you start playing. The only element of fantasy is that, at the time when all your self-insert characters sit down together, human society suddenly collapses.
The hard part is keeping your players from getting too firm a handle on the world. Since they usually know the world they’re in better than I do, I’ve played a few sessions where pretty soon they’re holed up in a house with barred windows and enough food and water and guns and ammo to outlast basically anything I throw at them, at which point the game kind of falls apart because there’s not much else left to do. But for today’s game I had a very precise strategy in mind for getting them out of their safe haven: at the moment the world ended, the heat went off.
As usual, it turned out to be a light satire of wherever the game is set, with only a couple legitimate scares and not many real stakes in the end. A rogue artificial intelligence system, created in a rare collaboration between the Computer Science and English departments, was luring the students into the only heated building on campus, then permanently solving the human condition corporeal angst and isolating individuality by assimilating them into a digital hive mind. I had a great time imitating a robotic post-structuralist when the heroes finally confronted the AI.
But, walking back to my dorm and feeling the cold wind across the uncovered places on myself in that blank pain that doesn’t even feel hot or cold so much as it just plain hurts, it seemed a little strange that surviving the winter (not to mention philosophical killer robots and cultist students) had all seemed so fun, when the burning reality of it was just one thin windowpane away. There’s a lot to be said about the way that we turn horror into fun through storytelling, from Aristotle’s theory on the cathartic release of pity and fear to modern neuroscience’s ideas on how fiction is an evolutionary adaptation to help us simulate disaster scenarios so we can survive them when they come.
But, for once, I don’t want to get too deep into the theory of it. I’m fine saving the mystery of pleasure in terror for another blog post. All I want to say for now is that I got back to my dorm, took of my hat and coat and the three layers of socks I’d been wearing over my gloves to keep my extremities warm, and sat by the radiator. I remembered the crazy, clichéd disaster scenario I’d dreamt up, and the real disaster scenario swirling just outside my room, and I felt happy. It’s a rare thing to recognize in the moment, so I’ll say it again. I felt happy. I’m still happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment