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November 11, 2024 OK big one up today; I am happy with it. THank you for READING.

I just posted the fifth episode of FLAT ART SHOW, a little podcast project. Conversation with Meredith Gran of Perfect Tides and Octopus Pie. I think it is a good little episode of a podcast; you can listen on spotify or soundcloud or youtube.

BOSTON, I am going to be tabling at MICE next month.

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Latest Letter Column

You can email me something at 3rdvoicemail@gmail.com and I will maybe get to it here.

I have been playing a lot of dnd with my friends lately. our sessions are more concerned about storytelling rather than combat, but we still try to make the combat fun. the structure of 3rd voice feels a little like a ttrpg campaign to me, following a somewhat consistent cast of characters going from place to place, this made me think of a few ttrpg/dnd related questions.

-Have you ever played a ttrpg campaign as a either a player character or a dm? Or if you have not, have you ever planned on playing any ttrpg’s?
-What are your thoughts on ttrpg’s? do you feel that the world of 3rd voice would make a good fit for a ttrpg?
-not technically ttrpg related but i read somewhere before you had a board game designer help you out with the board game featured prominently in vattu, were there ever any plans to release an actual board game based on it or was it never intended to go that far.

Thanks -Lou * September 17, 2024

Broadly here is an angle I have been thinking about on this stuff: If we see GENRE FICTION as having a particular attitude of literalism (i.e., a ghost isn’t a literary device to talk about ideas metaphorically, it’s Literally A Ghost), then TTRPGs and other sorts of technologized narrative games are kind of a FURTHER STEP in the same direction (it’s not just a ghost, it’s a ghost with A Certain Number of Hitpoints). I know Tom McHenry was just talking along parallel lines about this on bluesky and I forgot to mention it to him when I saw him last weekend at SPX.

Personally I think literalism has become The Problem, ideologically, with genre fiction and much of pop culture and how its thought about. This is something I have articulated in a lot of ways in the past. BUT, I am certainly working within a tradition that’s very LITERAL— I certainly tend to use comics in a very literal way— my fundamental thing is trying to present a believable fictional world in a way that seems “OBJECTIVE” (this is Problematic, in the way people used to use that word but in the way they use it now, too), and trying to use comics in a way that’s as “seamless” and “transparent” as possible (also Problematic, impossible). Basically I have an ambivalent relationship to this sort of literalization but that ambivalence feels PRODUCTIVE to me. I cannot resolve this ambivalence and I don’t want to! A dialectic!!!

I can kind of see the RPGish angle you’re talking about! I have some experience with TTRPGs but they haven’t fully Grabbed me. Involving short-term improvisation and social interaction in storytelling makes it very extremely difficult for me to do, I think. I have slightly more and deeper experience with videogame RPGs because they don’t involve those things lol. It is interesting to think about a 3V RPG— in particular there’s a kind of built-in character class logic, with the textual focus on people’s Stations. But thinking about it too hard pushes things too much in direction of that literalism! It would require making OBJECTIVE statements about the world in a way that would break the story, it would require defining things that are intentionally not defined within the story, or defining them outside of the sequence I’m laying out in the story! Does that make sense!

In the last letter I talked about extratextual “lore” revelation, which this sort of ties into. I can’t tell why I feel so strongly about this stuff; it feels like a really ideological thing to me that all secondary-world fiction is necessarily centered around. TTRPGs and the videogames that evolved from them maybe amplify these problems, right?? Because the presentation of “a world” is so much louder and more apparently objectively-presented. Anyway forgive me for just jumping off in a direction from your letter; this isn’t meant as a read on your thoughts or questions, they just connect with some thoughts I’ve had.

I worked with Malcolm Christiansen on designing the board game in Vattu, probably in 2010. Fun experience!! Had no intention of making it! I just wanted help to make something plausible. THANK YOU for letter

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