BATTLE (this is not a fucking therapy game, fuck therapy) ROYALE

(ᵟຶ︵ ᵟຶ) (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ (ᵟຶ︵ ᵟຶ)

This game was made for the #AloneGameJam hosted by  Justin Joyce.

Chances are you’ve at least heard of games like Fortnite or Apex Legends, even if you’re not a Fake Gamer Boi^TM like PewDiePie.  These games are a ton of fun, because you get to walk around a lushly sculpted 3D environment as someone who isn’t you for like 10-15 minutes collecting weapons and other useful things until you’re shot in the head by a 13 year old sniper hiding behind a rock.  I’m not even being sarcastic. They’re pretty cool, in their own strange, infuriating way. Go play them.

But if you’re looking for sparks, random collections of things that are sometimes garbage and sometimes not, and vistas mixed with violent imagery, you don’t even have to get online.  No XBox required. At any given time, there are several loud assholes—in various states of armament—clashing and jockeying for position in an arena near you.

The arena is your mind.  Those assholes are your thoughts.  

SETUP

To play, you’ll need:

• One player (you)
• 120 minutes or so
• A black marker, a red marker and a pencil
• Two six-sided dice
• Paper
• Scissors
• Tape
• Up to 10 small coins (pennies, nickels, quarters, whatever)
• An empty large pizza box
• Some negative thoughts

PIZZA

Play this game during a time when the bad feels are stronk, but not so stronk as to make your mind a red haze (if you’re punching holes in the wall, or loitering outside the police station shouting “FUCK WITH ME,” that’s probably not the best time to play).  

First, order a huge fucking pizza—as large as you can afford—and eat the whole thing.  While you do this, curl up in bed and talk to yourself about people you hate, or problems with your life, or things that make you angry.  If you can’t finish the pizza, give the rest to your dog (if you’re on good terms), your parents (if you think they’re hungry) or throw it against the wall and make it de facto rat food.  You can also put the pizza to the side and nibble on it while you play, which may be the Most Good Possible Option.

YOU’S A THOUGHT, THOUGHT, THOUGHT

In bed, prop yourself up and grip your pencil with greasy hands.  

Write down a thought you’re having about yourself right now, this very moment.  Try to frame it as a statement that can be assessed as “true” or “false.”

“I’m a useless piece of shit and I’m mostly a burden to friends and family.”

“My friends are all talking about me behind my back.”

“My brain doesn’t work right anymore and I’m losing myself.”

“I’d be better off if I blew my brains out.”

“I’ll never be shit, and I’m going to have to drop out of school.”

“I’m a forever NEET who’ll never hold a job.”

Do this as many times as you can (try to get 6-10 thoughts, if possible).  Assign these thoughts a letter of the alphabet, so that you can quickly distinguish them from each other.  Additionally, assign each of them an IMPACT score from 1-5 (1 being the least impactful and 5 being the most impactful), depending on how strong of a ripple they cause in your mind.  If something really gets to you, assign it a 5.  If it’s something that doesn’t give you much pause—either because it’s lost its edge over the course of many sad years or because it just isn’t that significant to you in the moment—assign it a 1 or 2.  

While you’re at it, also record any other thoughts that flash through your brain, even if they aren’t totally coherent, fully formed, or things about you personally.  Keep these separate from the others. If the thoughts are just images of things—especially if they’re past situations you’ve encountered or wild sadness/anger-adjacent fantasies you have—describe them in as much detail as you can.  Draw pictures of them if you’d like. Don’t bother assigning these an impact score.

I want to just crawl into a hole and die.

[Me, slapping that smarmy therapist upside the head.]

[A burqa or a blue sheet (?) blowing around in the wind.]

[My hands covered in shit, standing outside a brick building.]

Choking dog odor.  Yuck.

A tool.  Be a fucking man.

[A car (maybe mine?) driving through the wall of my boss’s office.]

[My father’s face, at my funeral, in front of my open coffin / a bloated me hanging by the neck.]

[A shotgun, shattered glass going into some secretary’s face, body.  Sirens.]

Before you go any further, you’ll want to put a face on your tormentors.  Look through your first list of bad thoughts and make each one a little effigy in your mind’s eye.  Personify them, or, if you can’t do that exactly, monsterify them and give them weird, twisted, eldritch, [additional Lovecraftian buzzword] forms.  Write a little bit about the way they look, and anything else you’d like, on your paper.

Cut several cardboard squares out of the top lid of the pizza box.  They should be small, no more than [1-2 inches x 1-2 inches] or so, though it’s fine if they vary a bit. Tape coins to the squares (hereafter referred to as zogs for simplicity, because I think the word “pogs” is trademarked or some bullshit) to give them some weight.

Each zog will be the physical avatar for one of your thoughts.  

Cut out a piece of paper about the size of each zog, and decorate it with whatever you’d like.  Create something for each thought. Faces, penises, Celtic runes, whatever fits the thought thematically.  Don’t worry about drawing quality or relevance or creating powerful symbolism, just go wild—you’re the only one playing, after all.  Stop when you’re satisfied that you’ve made some gnarly-looking idols to your neuroses. Tape the slips of paper to the zogs so that the coins are covered up.  

Write each thought’s letter and impact score somewhere on its zog (put both of these somewhere on the decorated side).  

THE NEXTMAP IS DE_STRUGGLE

Now that you’ve got some thoughts, some kind-of-protagonists for your mental Hunger Games, they’ll need a place to fight.  

Using the second set of thoughts you recorded as inspiration, draw a bird’s eye view map of the battle space.  Use your black marker to do this, and be sure to cover as much of the pizza box as you possibly can.  Games like Fortnite typically have different biomes represented on their maps—deserts, forests, icy tundras, urban environments—but you are under no obligation to follow that formula.  Read over your thoughts again. What images do they conjure immediately? If they were translated into a landscape painting, what colors would be used? Tonally, what do they invoke within you (fear?  hatred? irreverent, self-deprecating laughter?). Decorate the hell out of that greasy, grimy box. Make it your own. Craft someplace worthy of a fight. It doesn’t all have to be symbolic or surreal.  If you want to include a space elevator, include it. A crashed alien ship? Knock yourself out. The lime-lit corridors of your high school? Well, you get the idea.

Once you’ve fleshed it out visually, divide your new map into a grid, six spaces long and six spaces wide.  Use your red marker to do this.  Label the rows with numbers (1-6) and the columns with numbers (1-6).  Free hand draw the grid, don’t bother using a ruler.  Each grid section must contain some part of the map, but other than that there are no rules for how big or small sections should be.  

PLAY

TAKE OFF EVERY ZOG

Start the battle proper off by picturing your personified thoughts flying over the arena in some kind of airplane.  What do their warfaces look like?

When you’re ready, take all of your zogs in your hands, shake them around a bit, then drop them, allowing them to scatter into the pizza box like leaves.  If any land on top of each other, separate them by moving them about an inch apart, close to where they landed. Any that land outside the pizza box are gone.  Oops! Make sure all the zogs are face-side up.

MOVE ZOG

After the landing, choose a zog to make the first move.  Put your finger tip on it and try to think of a fact that seemingly confirms or justifies the thought attached to it.  If you can’t think of anything, flip the zog over and withdraw your finger. You may not move that particular zog this turn.  

If you were able to think of a fact, you may launch the zog with your finger so that it slides across the board, either into other zogs or into a wall.  After making a move, flip it over. You can also choose not to launch certain zogs (or any of them). If that’s the case, flip the ones you don’t want to move over.

When all zogs have been flipped, the turn is over.  

GREAT JUSTICE

After a zog moves, compare its impact number with those of any it is touching.  The zog with the highest impact number triumphs over the other ones. Say out loud how the personified version of that thought trounces the loser(s).  What you narrate will vary depending on your particular personification, but it should be brutally violent, convoluted, or excessively detailed. Or all three.  Remove the loser(s) from play, then reduce the victor’s impact number by 1 and flip it over.

If a zog flies out of the pizza box as a result of a collision (or just because you overshot), it’s gone.  Say what happened to it.

If there is a tie, things get hairy.  For any tied zogs, think of some fact(s) that diminishes or calls into question their corresponding thoughts.  If you can’t think of anything, say the thought out loud a number of times equal to its current impact score.

After you’ve done one of the above things for each tied zog, REASSESS each of their impact numbers depending on how you feel about them at this moment.  When you reassess thoughts, you may move their number up or down, or keep it the same.  Say what this means for the battle. Maybe it’s a firefight that leads to a stalemate. Maybe there’s a mad scramble to accumulate resources (say, weapons or tools) inside of a bombed out building and those involved briefly catch sight of each other.

While you’re narrating, keep the battlefield itself in mind.  What does navigating it look like (picture your thought-persons running through it as their zogs fly across the map)?  Are thought-dudes destroying parts of it while they fight? What kind of useful shit is just lying around, waiting to be picked up and consumed?

ALL YOUR BASE …

Owing to the cliche of being a representation of your mind, the battlefield is dynamic.  It is constantly folding in on itself.

Before every turn starts, roll 2 six-sided dice.  Using these as X, Y coordinates, scribble out the segment of the battlefield at the resulting location.  If your resulting coordinates point to a segment that’s already been scribbled out, cross out all spaces adjacent to it.  If all adjacent spaces are already scribbled out, roll again. Scribbled out segments are now out of bounds (zogs can still move through them, however).  

Any zogs that are fully enveloped by out of bounds segments at the end of the turn are lost.  Don’t narrate anything when this happens, simply airbrush the zog’s corresponding thought out of your mind as best you can.  When only one segment remains, stop rolling.

Whenever the battlefield shrinks, lament the sweet drawings that you’re losing and focus more intently on those thoughts that still remain in play.  Compare them to the ones that have been removed. Are the ones that have been lost more or less distressing than what’s still on the table?

MAKE YOUR TIME

When only one thought remains, it has won.  Its prize? Your attention. Focus your mind on it.  Flog yourself with this thought. Run it through your head over and over.  Conjure images related to it. When the images start to speak in the voices of your friends and enemies (“You are this,” “You did that,” “Your X is too Y,”), talk back, out loud.  Scream if you want. Take the thought’s zog and pin it to your clothing.  Parade it around. If you play again, throw it back into the arena with the new competitors and see how long it lasts.

If no thoughts make it out, throw the pizza box against the wall and go back to your life.  Keep the zogs if you want to. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be able to reuse most of them in any future playthroughs you decide to do because your thoughts will be similar.