Vegas After Midnight

There’s an interesting thread going on over at Story Games called “In X, you play people who Y” and I decided to try to put Vegas After Midnight through the wringer, because I think that explicitly and concisely being able to state what players do in any given game is a good thing. Certainly it is in VAM. Answering questions like this has been a challenge for me, but that’s all the more reason to keep at it.

My first few attempts have been sub-par, and I’ve gotten helpful advice and criticism from folks to encourage me to step up. Well, I figured I’d do that here, so as not to threadnap the discussion over there.

This is stuff coming mostly off the top of my head, so who knows what I’ll end up writing. But I need to try out a bunch of different ideas. Some will be dumb, some funny, some might even actually hit the mark. Your input and comments are welcome.

Here we go …

In VAM, you hack up DRYH and dump a bunch of Vegas pastiche all over it. No wait, I do that, not you.

In VAM, you play deranged Elvis cultists in sequin jumpsuits who kick the snot out of a bunch of evil clowns who are trying to kill you and take your stuff. Potentially true, and capable of hooking attention, but too limited in scope and a bit snarky.

In VAM, you play characters who wake up into the neon-drenched madness of a nightmare pastiche of Vegas and match wits, blood, and sanity with deranged Elvis cultists, Rat-Packer gangsters, and evil circus freaks in a high-stakes game of life and death for the fate of reality. Entirely accurate, but too long and probably confusing. The actual statement lies within this one, but needs to be distilled into something concise.

In VAM, you play characters who wake up into a neon-drenched nightmare pastiche of Vegas and decide to play instead of being played, no matter what the cost. Grrr. Cleverness without clarity is not cleverness.

In VAM, you play …

Well, tell me what impressions YOU have, based upon what you’ve heard and read. I’m not above stealing good ideas.

First, a mini-catchup:

I am sitting here while Liam plays on the Playhouse Disney Website and there’s all kinds of stuff rolling around in my head. There are several things I want to write about. I literally have two partially-written posts in my drafts waiting to be finished and published – a political post about Bill Maher and a personal post about an epiphany I had during my recent trip to Cleveland. And this morning one of my newest Facebook friends, Tammy (who happens to be a significantly memorable high-school girlfriend and a fellow thespian) asked me to elaborate on something I mentioned in an earlier tweet about my “ALT experience”. “ALT” is insider shorthand for Amarillo Little Theatre, which is where I spent almost nine years in my 20s trodding the boards. So adding to my other posts-in-waiting I want to write about my years at ALT in more detail than I have ever done since I began to blog.

But what I will actually be doing in this post is writing about Vegas After Midnight again – because during lunch Liam and I were rocking out to my VAM playlist and it reminded me of a conversation I had with my lovely Leah a couple of days ago that I want to share.

So, the actual point of this post, as promised in the title, is … Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Daniel Perez, the sexiest male voice in podcasting, sent me a little gift in honor of my recent posts about VAM and Picchiatello Jack. It’s an audio version  – with sound effects! – of the recent intro speech I shared (see this post).

Click on this player to listen/download:

[wpaudio url="http://www.harpingmonkey.com/wp-content/uploads/VAMJack.mp3" text = "Daniel Perez as Picchiatello Jack"]

The cool payoff of my choice to post items about Vegas After Midnight here on the Monkey is that it gets conversations going, and conversations motivate me to think more about the setting and to keep sharing more. Daniel and J.J. have been especially helpful in this regard lately with their comments in previous VAM-related posts. Thanks guys. Feel free to keep it up.

The other day when I shared a draft text of what I plan to use as an opener for the book, a conversation got started about how that text reads very differently depending on whom the reader envisions to be speaking it – and that (as I interpreted the comments) if a person doesn’t have the right kind of image in her head when reading it, it can come off as obtuse and overly chewy. This is something I appreciated hearing, because it motivated me to think and clarify my plans for the character who is going to be “saying” those words, not to mention writing/saying most of the flavor text of the whole book. Picchiatello Jack is THE narrative voice through which I’ll be communicating. So I agree, it’s important to be sure I frame his voice and style right up front. And I plan to do just that as the text goes through its various editorial and playtest stages.

Meanwhile, the immediate thought-exercise that I was inspired to try (and share here) is to construct a recipe of the various archetypal ingredients and pop-culture inspirations for this newly-revealed narrative voice, Picchiatello Jack. The things I’ve shared about him so far have pretty overtly taken the character in the direction of a Tim Curry kind of guy, since he’s the only name I’ve specifically associated – and Curry IS a solid influence, to be sure. But I decided to sit down and work out where else I am drawing inspiration from with this guy, and to what degree.

So, here’s my recipe for Picchiatello Jack: Read the rest of this entry »

The timing of Joe McDonald’s post about music and the questions it asks could not be more perfect for me. (And of course everything is all about me – hah!) Seriously, though – right when I’m in the midst of grappling with how various types of music invoke my creative expression, along comes this:

This Particular Darkness « Buried Without Ceremony.

You might think I tend to draw from the same few wells far too often when I share cool stuff that I’ve encountered, but if it moves me or makes me think or reaches down and grabs me by the scruff of the soul, then that’s what I wanna share and it kinda makes sense that a writer capable of doing that once will probably be able to repeat the feat every so often. These days, Joe McDonald is doing just that for me. He’s a reliable feat-repeater.

Not only does his post add some flavor into my recent thought about music in Vegas After Midnight, but it goes beyond that to make me think more about my music preferences in general.

I’m going to admit something that might slightly soil my self-advertised misfit cred. When I was a tween and teen back in Michigan in the 80s, my musical tastes were dominated by pop-radio rock (Prince, Duran Duran, Hall & Oates, Journey, etc.) and certain types of “classic” rock (The Beatles, Elvis, Queen, etc).  I used to shy away from punk and hard/metal rock. Too subversive, too much the music of the kids in my school who were stoners and rebels. True, I secretly wanted to BE a rebel, but in my school all the rebels were pot-smoking pill-popping drunkards who were nowhere near as cool and compelling as Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club or Robin Johnson’s character in Times Square.

So as it turned out, my teenage rebel phase didn’t actually emerge until I was in my late 20s and I started hearing the music of the misfit teens and art-class rebels who were regulars in the theatre groups I was part of and the teen residential-treatment home I worked at. They listened to lots of grunge, punk, neo-punk, proto-emo, etc. and when I heard it it clicked with me in ways that it never did when I was younger.

So now, I tend to listen to some pretty edgy stuff, some emo, angry, hard stuff, both modern and classic. And I’m much more appreciative of the subversive elements of the stuff I used to listen to but didn’t recognize as subversive.

So, when Joe poses his thoughts on the questions asked by punk genre, and he brings up the notion of raging against machines and fighting against oppressive institutions, and placing blame… I wonder.  Because I agree with him, but I’m not particularly involved in actually fighting or raging or rebelling any more than I used to be when I used to listen to processed pop music.

So my inner-rebel has always been sort of a wannabe. And I begin to realize that what I’m doing with VAM is to try to finally openly express – or at least grapple with – all the conflicting stuff I feel about the pros and cons of “fighting the status quo”. Because really, VAM is a game about waking up and doing something proactive in terms of raging against the dying of the light. It’s about not sleeping through the chaos in order to hide from it, but actually facing it down, shouting at it, and DOING something about it. I’ve always thought of VAM as my magnum opus, my statement. And it is. But I hafta admit, I’m not altogether sure, even at my age and “maturity”, whether the statement I’m claiming to espouse is entirely sincere, or if I just WISH I felt that way.

This bears more pondering. I’ll go listen to some Pink Floyd or Smashing Pumpkins and get back to you later.

I’m having fun sharing bits of VAM stuff these days, so I’ll continue the trend by posting what I’m currently thinking I’ll use as the opening text. This is something I jotted down over a year ago but after making a few changes over the past two days I’m pretty happy with it.  I suspect that some of you will notice it is a direct homage <cough>ripoff<cough> of one of my favorite speeches from Shakespeare.

Picchiatello Jack is the name of my narrator, the guy whose voice the game text will be written in. He also happens to be the Tim Curry-esque DJ who broadcasts from atop the Needle. It all comes together.

Picchiatello speaks:

“If I could show you this story properly, I’d call down fire from the sky and conjure the scenes up right out on the Strip. The movers and shakers would play their own parts and the Aces would sit at attention and watch it all go down. Then we could kick it into high gear in one big orgasmic explosion of blood and madness and passion and pain that you could see with your own peepers.

But that’s not what you get tonight, Kiddoes. Tonight all you get is the words from my measly mouth and the truth from my meager soul, fumbling words cobbled together and shoved out through a ratty microphone along gossamer waves through the aether to try to paint you the epic spectacle of The Game.

It’s a fool’s errand, is what it is. But I’m just the fool to do it; I can ask your pardon and decry my skills all I want, but it needs be done.

So I’m asking you to let my words slip past your defenses to massage your imagination, because I can’t bring this story to life without it. I ask you to suppose that within the space between my speaking and your hearing exists a vast and arid waste of hardscrabble sand and jagged rock surrounding an isolated kingdom of steel, glass, and neon where life is hard & cheap and where death is easy & cheap. A place where Midnight has passed and Dawn never comes; where the many Sleepers slog through the streets like robot zombies and the few Awakened rise up to fight Madness with Madness in an all-out all-in Game of control, hope, chaos, and chance.

Help me bring it to life with your thoughts, Kiddoes. Because only your imaginations can put flesh on my words and breathe action into being. The clock is ticking and we’ve only got a short time, so please, let’s settle in and get going. I’ll be with you all the while to tell you what you need to know, so let me introduce myself: I am Picchiatello Jack, your humble voice calling out in the wilderness. I pray you’ll listen and understand. It’s time to wake up and get in The Game.”

Writing that last entry about VAM music has brought the issue back to the front-burner over the past few days and now it is percolating big-time.  I’ve had several minor epiphanies and maybe one or two that I’d call major epiphanies about how music can play a role in the setting – not the mechanics per se, but the ambiance and flavor.

The first thing I realized after sharing the first part of my VAM playlist is that if I were actually going to recommend a slate of songs as a true “Vegas After Midnight soundtrack album”, then I’d need to go in and switch things around a bit, adding a few songs and reshuffling a few of the current ones into different spots so that the mix flows better (this makes me think of the mix-tape philosophy espoused by John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity, which I think is pretty spot-on). So I’ll go in when I get a chance and adjust the list I shared to fit the new scheme. Hopefully the fifteen of you who already read that post won’t mind much.

But there’s a bigger epiphany flowing out of all this music stuff. While I was mowing the lawn over the weekend I was, as usual, listening to my iRiver, which had a test version of the new VAM playlist on it. For some reason as the songs were playing I started talking between songs – out loud, mind you, as though I were a DJ spinning these songs on some hip Vegas radio station. And I was talking in my Tim Curry voice. I don’t claim it’s a good impression, but the point is, it was clear to me who I was channeling. And I started to wonder WHY that particular persona came to mind. Then, a door got unlocked in my mind. Read the rest of this entry »