Line Segments

Videogame criticism and whatnot. Longer stuff at linehollis.com. Shorter stuff @LineHollis. 

[linehollis]

Backlog Diaries: on bees

on bees

Maddox Pratt, 2015 Web 5min

on bees is a short game poem about art, or really about a single artwork, and specifically about art as a way of introducing rigor to how one sees things. This makes writing about it feel a bit recursive. Rigorous perception is like, my whole thing. Every time I sit down to write something about a game or a TV show or what have you, I think a lot about how I'm looking at it; how others might look at it; what it means about me that I look at it the way I do.

on bees has a few lines that resonated with me a lot: "Perception is a commitment, / Perception is a responsibility, [...]" The artist in the poem makes drastic changes to her environment in an attempt to explore a certain experience of seeing. This makes a lot of sense to me; perception is an active process, one that involves a lot of choices. And the more you make those choices consciously and with intent, the more clearly you can see the world.

Well, I started calling these things diaries to give myself permission to go on self-indulgent tangents, so I'm going to go on a self-indulgent tangent. To be clear, the reason I think about perception in this way is that I never had the luxury of taking the world at face value. I've had to deal with distortions of reality my whole life, ranging from disordered emotion to paranoid delusions to hallucinations. I've grown into a certain acceptance of all this. What I see and hear and feel is all evidence, which I approach with the same open-minded skepticism that I would, say, information I found on Wikipedia.

Along the way, I got impatient with people who take perception for granted. Perception is a responsibility. You decide what you see and how you see it. If you're not doing so consciously, you're letting some part of your mind you don't understand decide for you. I respect the artistic project described in on bees because it acknowledges how active and strenuous the work of seeing clearly is. I dig this, and the Sisyphean nature of the task it describes. 

[linehollis]

I spent the last couple days watching the first season of Into the Badlands. In these days of P E A K  T V, the list of shows I'd like to get around to is almost as intimidating as my videogames backlog, so I'd put it off for a while. Now I regret that - at six episodes, it was a quick and to-the-point watch, and was as pleasantly aligned with my aesthetic as I'd expected it to be. Finally, a post-apocalypse with a fuckin color palette! Blues and reds and greens and opinionated costume design! Also the face-kicking, the face kicking and knife stabbing and juicy punches are all very good.

The writing on Badlands kind of fascinated me because it had a pretty tight set of character constraints and relationships coupled with a plot that verged on narrative word salad. The characters are simple but well-designed. There's a lot of rigmarole around the world-building, but also a lot of care shown in how factions are introduced and characterized to maintain coherence of conflict. There's a lot of different antagonists on this show, and they're all at cross purposes with each other. This is a potential shitshow, but Badlands keeps it pretty streamlined.

And there's a little bit of pushing against conventions, which I dug. When Sunny's girlfriend tells him she's pregnant in the first episode, my inital reaction was "fuck, she's dead already." So I was pleasantly surprised that she not only stayed alive the whole season but had plot functions outside of being Sunny's motivation for various actions. She has her own subplots with several characters that don't directly involve Sunny, which is maybe a low bar but one that a lot of genre shows fail to clear.

All that said, the plot is sheer nonsense, and mostly stemming from one reason: there's absolutely no management of information flow. It is very common for Character A to tell Character B that they've known B's secret all along!! while completely glossing over how A got that information. At the same time, secrets are being used as plot motivators all over the place: M.K.'s magic powers, Veil's pregnancy, The Widow's location. The visuals and the backstory are all telling us that the Barons and their followers live in ironclad strongholds and deeply distrust each other. But those walls start feeling porous and meaningless when characters keep randomly figuring stuff out for dramatic effect.

This issue has a ripple effect on the plotting. If anyone can figure out anything at any time, a lot of suspense gets softened. Since information can't be protected, characters look like they're wasting time when they try to protect it. And then it just raises expectations! When a character learns something in a normal way, with the audience observing their train of thought, they look like they're being outwitted whether that's the case or not.

It's kind of a neat problem. I don't mind it all that much, because the show is pretty and the characters are showy and people start kicking each other when I get bored. I can see it getting tiresome in the longer term, though, so I hope it's something they address in future seasons.

[art-tension]

When a cosplayer recreates the horrible manga from Junji Ito

Japanese cosplayer Ikura is having fun recreating the horrible manga from Junji Ito, rightly regarded as one of the masters of horror manga. Ikura stages herself into scary, frightening and sordid compositions, trying to reproduce the images of the mangaka. Well, cosplay is far from being reserved for the famous superheroes and popular manga characters! Source: ufunk

[linehollis]

Backlog Diaries: Nod

Nod

Rose, 2013 Web 5 minutes

I'm always on the lookout for nonstandard conversation games, so I had a good time with Nod, a one-button game of nonverbal communication. Given how limited the one verb is, the game does a good job of playing around with the different types of response it could be used for: e.g., acknowledgement, greeting, agreeing to a plan

Nod is a Ludum Dare game, so it goes in on the one thing it does and finishes up quick. But it did make me wonder how far you could stretch the premise. In Nod, nodding is always the right thing to do. One variation would be a game where nodding is sometimes effective and sometimes not. That could very quickly veer into the kind of comedy bit where someone keeps agreeing without paying attention and ends up offending someone or agreeing to something ridiculous. That bit is so cliche that I was caught by surprise when Nod didn't do it.

Another thing it got me thinking is what it would look like to integrate this kind of always-available nonverbal response into a more traditional dialogue-based conversation system. I could imagine a visual novel-like interface where nonverbal gestures could be used to indicate your character's mood or disposition. Maybe those mood signals could then influence available dialogue options before they appear?

And one more aside. While I was typing this up, my partner's mother, who's on the phone, came over and asked if she could have some of the coffee I made using nonverbal signals. Which got me thinking: multiple modes of conversation input means the possibility of parallel conversations. A game about holding a phone conversation using a dialogue tree while nonverbally communicating with someone in the room could be a fun challenge.

[gamesandfood]

(via Line on Sierra: Space Quest III)

[linehollis]

Backlog Diaries: Bump Bump

Bump Bump

No1Game, 2014 Web 15min

Room escapes! My favorite underappreciated genre. I like them best when they have a blatant organizing gimmick, like Bump Bump does. It reminds me of the one escape I really liked in Zero Time Dilemma. If you only have a little space to work with, then really fuck around with that space, you know? I especially like how it incorporates items breaking as you go along. 

[linehollis]

Backlog Diaries: In Heaven

In Heaven

increpare, 2014 Web 1 minute  

My instinct when playing games is to continually look for alternate paths. In games as in life, I always suspect there's a "right," or at least expected way to act, and it's deeply important to me to know exactly what it is. In games, it's additionally important that I then find a way to act that isn't the expected one. I guess that's the fantasy I go for. If a game seems too straightforward, I will often either tune out, or, if possible, dig into the source code to figure out how it works. There's gotta be another way, right?

In Heaven is a straightforward game, and a sad one. Just a little poem about distance, unfolding click by click. The poem made me sad; my fruitless attempts to make the poem turn out differently made me sadder. Why do I need that so much?

[linehollis]

Backlog Diaries: The Unfinished Swan

The Unfinished Swan

Giant Sparrow, 2014 PS Vita, PS3, PS4 3 hours

I played The Unfinished Swan on the Vita over the course of a few evenings. I mostly played on the couch while my partner watched TV. At the time he was aggressively bingeing the entire run of House. When I try to picture The Unfinished Swan, all I can see is a column I couldn't figure out how to climb, and a House character going through a fraught one-episode romance in the background. Wasn't The Unfinished Swan about someone being sick, too? The girl in the picture was a dying or dead mom, right?

What it was really about, of course, was trying to expand a neat tech demonstration to something that people would feel was a satisfying product. This involves adding monsters, naturally, there always have to be friggin monsters. This kind of thing always bums me out a little. Swan just keeps trying different things with each chapter. New interactions! More architecture to explore! It's all visible now, sorry about that, that was not very user friendly. And a story! About a woman dying, probably!

Anyway, I played through it, and I didn't have to, so there was something that kept me going about it. It was a decent way to hang out with my partner while he was watching TV I wasn't into. And I liked watching the vines grow.

[linehollis]

Backlog Diaries: Five Nights at Freddy’s

Five Nights at Freddy’s

Scott Cawthorn, 2014 Windows, Android, iOS 3 hrs 

All this famous shit I've been finally getting around to lately! I am extremely easily scared by horror games, but I also crave being scared to an unreasonable degree, so I was excited when this popped up in my queue. I was kind of hyped up for it. One time I was at a friend's house doing a booze-n-Youtube evening and someone brought up a Freddy's Let's Play. I insisted on turning around and not watching while it was on - I still wanted to play it! - so I was treated to a full view of like six adults shrieking and recoiling in unison to something happening behind me. Delightful!

The game itself let me down a little. The use of the voicemail messages running in the background while you figure things out is great way to set up its particular horror-comedy tone. And I dig the pinned-down feeling. But I like my horror games best when they're just awful spaces for me to walk around and feel bad in. Dying kills the fear, as does the kind of fiddly resource management that turns out to be the bulk of Freddy's. Ultimately, this is a game about being so bad at your job that you die. I respect that thematic focus, but doing a bad job isn't scary to me. That's how I feel all the time! Maybe this is scarier to kids, for whom jobs are some horrible, half-understood thing that will happen to them in the future?

Further Reading

“Why Five Nights at Freddy’s Is So Popular”, Patricia Hernandez “Murder, Ghosts, and Revenge: The Larger Story Behind the Five Nights at Freddy's Games,” Nadia Oxford

[linehollis]

Disorientation

Here's what I remember from that summer:

Great science-fiction looking structures off in the distance.

Riding a borrowed bike along the river in the mornings. The wind in my face is hot, but feels better than the rest of the heat because it's moving.

St. Vincent, Actor; Woods, Songs of Shame. 

It was the first time I tried a randomly-timed mood rating app. I learned that I was happy when talking to people, and extremely unhappy immediately before and after.

One night my landlady told me the entire plot of the Twilight series over dinner, in detail.

Quails, snakes, lizards, dragonflies. I was warned of scorpions but never saw one. My landlady's pet koi, who swim up and mouth the surface of the water when human approach.

A circular diagram with two overlapping rings. It reminds me of Malkuth from the Tree of Life.

Borges, the complete short stories, and a crowded park. I'm wearing my hair in pigtails to keep it off my back.

But that method of conveying my memories, while accurate, may be hard for you to care about. So let me try this another way.

The year before I completed my PhD, I spent the summer at an internship out in Richland, WA. Richland is an oddly sterile-feeling company town built around the Department of Energy lab where I worked, best known for its nuclear waste, excellent orchards, and the difficulty of travelling to and from it. 

Out in the middle of the desert, renting a room from a couple who both worked at the lab, and largely unsupervised at work, I spent a weird, isolated couple of months finding ways to occupy my time. My mandate in the internship was to do something with visualizing news stories. I soon found out that my supervisor was going to be gone most of the summer. Once it became clear that no one was paying any attention to me, I found little reason not to follow whatever tangents I got on to their natural endpoint.

The result is that I ended up spending most of the summer learning everything I could about narrative theory. I had to understand stories to visualize them, right? I read Barthes, I read Vladimir Propp and various Russian formalists, I found a paper by a pair of linguists that became one of the most important things I'd ever read. Surprisingly, I even got a half-decent little classification model for news stories out of it, once I dragged myself back down to earth. Long after I'd left the desert and returned to more typical work, the summer I'd spent learning about stories affected how I approached all media from then on. 

Here are some things I don't remember about that summer:

Whether my supervisor was around or not.

Why I started studying narrative theory.

How successful my classification model was. 

How much time my narrative theory studies actually took up. 

Whether people were paying attention to me, and who those people would have been anyway.

I had to lie about these memory gaps to tell a story that made sense. Isn't that strange? How does any of this work? And why does it work the way it does?

[linehollis]

Would They Be Fighting in Stuttgart?

I've been rereading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, which I've mentioned here before is one of my favorite books. Parts of it are resonating with me more the second time through. The Unconsoled is told in the style of an epic anxiety dream, and the dream is about loss of things you can't get back, failures of communication, and letting people down, emotionally focused on two types of relationships: that between parents and children, and that between an artist and the community. It's the latter that feels a bit less abstract this time around.

The Unconsoled depicts a small European-ish city that, we are frequently told, has been driven to the point of crisis. The crisis is described in vague terms, as though Ryder, the protagonist, is already expected to know its dimensions (he doesn't). However, it is linked to the city's lack of an artistic talent to admire and to make them feel urbane. In desperation, the city fathers and an unreasonable number of artistic and cultural societies have - among other tactics - come together to elevate the reputation of an alcoholic former conductor named Brodsky.

The title of this post comes from a scene in which the guests at a dinner party in Brodsky's honor nearly come to blows over their anxiety about his condition. While waiting for him to arrive, they learn that his dog has just died. This causes them to collectively become convinced that he has resumed drinking and that all their efforts are in vain, leading to violent despair. One normally timid guest jumps up and shouts out a speech about how they're all disgracing themselves and it'll be fine if they do something or other, and despite the vagueness the crowd's mood immediately corrects itself. By the time Brodsky arrives they're all putting on a show of witty calm. After a lot of whispered drama about who should say what when and with what emotional tenor during dinner, several guests finally stand up one by one and make grandiloquent speeches about how the dog was either the greatest dog who ever lived or actually just a gross menace and everyone's being ridiculous. Brodsky, for his part, is not as broken up about the dog as everyone assumes and just says a few depressing lines about missing his ex-wife while everyone's hollering at each other. This novel was published in 1995, which is an astonishing feat of prognostication, since this scene is the Twitterest fucking thing I've ever read.

Those two relationship types I mentioned above are often drawn in parallel in The Unconsoled, with the community of the city feeling the same desperate anxiety to shelter and properly nurture their artistic talent that the parents in the novel do about their children. What I think is compelling about the analogy is that it presents this behavior as not only damaging to the artist/child, but also as deeply selfish on the part of the community/parent. A story is told about a cellist named Christoff, who was discovered as having some musical pedigree when he first moved to town, was begged by the city to perform recital after recital for years, was elevated to a central role in the community, came to be considered not actually as great as people thought he was, and is now a pariah and embarrassment who is blamed for the city's current crisis. (Again, I must emphasize that Ishiguro could not have had any knowledge of games twitter while writing this novel.) The artist is material for the community's opinion about itself; the artist must be protected from all negativity, not for his own sake, but because that negativity would damage the self-image of those who admire him.

Another repeated theme in The Unconsoled is that of relationships between people who no longer speak to each other except through intermediaries and distant observation. A woman no longer speaks to her father except through her kid ("Did we have fun with Grandfather today?"), a couple communicates entirely through emotional abuse of their son, a community endlessly speculates about the moods of its artists without ever interacting with the artists themselves. Characters continually assume things and never check their assumptions. If those assumptions run up against reality, reality is either ignored or the character apologizes loudly and elaborately enough that the person correcting them is drowned out. There is an air of oppressive politeness throughout the whole book, a sense that with a few exceptions every character speaks in the same voice of barely contained fury masked in passive aggressive flattery.

One of those exceptions just showed up on my reread. The character of Fiona, Ryder's childhood friend, stood out to me vividly the first time I read it, and I see why now: she's the first character in the whole novel to tell Ryder to his face that he's disappointed her. Up to this point, every character Ryder inconvenienced or hurt (of which there are many) has effusively excused his behavior to the point that it's never been clear what they were actually expecting of him. Ryder is one of those artistic geniuses who needs to be protected, you see. Fiona, by contrast, tells him exactly what she expected of him and how his failure to do it hurt her. She's also introduced in a flashback as someone who tried to be honest with Ryder about his parents' painful relationship when they were children, only to be stopped by her own mother. Children need to be protected from that kind of thing, Fiona's mother told her. Ryder will go on to disappoint Fiona again, because he moves through a dreamlike universe where time is fluid, memory barely exists, and he has only the vaguest control over his actions.

I don't really have a good way to end this, because now I'm just making myself sad in increasingly elaborate ways. This book has a lot to say about how unexpressed expectations can fuck people up, and it's gotten deep in my head for a number of reasons. It has me thinking about my responsibilities as a part of a community that surrounds artists, most of whom receive more expectations than support. The storyline of artists being elevated as symbols of a community then torn down when a community feels bad about itself no longer strikes me as a satirical fantasy. There's a reason I felt the need to read this book again now, I think.

[bboyizilla]

Life goes on …

[linehollis]

Mandala

The other day I played a game called Mandala, sort of. It had been in my backlog for a couple of years, as many games have. I like the feel of playing games long after their release date, when no one is talking about them anymore and they feel like something I discovered digging through a used book store. I get self conscious about this sometimes, but I also like being someone who's still looking after the majority of attention is gone. Short games especially get treated as ephemeral, when people pay attention to them at all: a curiosity that gets shared around for a couple of days at best. There are rare and valuable critics who do close readings of these games, like Lana Polansky and the crew at the Arcade Review, but that work mostly gets treated as ephemeral curiosities as well. The Arcade Review is gone now. The #altgames tag got shouted down early in its lifespan by inscrutable forum drama. Me, I do my best to find quiet evenings where I can walk through the small works of 2012-2015 and at least pay attention, even if I'm not good for much else.

Mandala was a game about attention. It was a small text-based environment explored through hypertext. Every time it was played, it deleted a portion of itself. Everyone who explored it left it a little bit smaller for the next player, I suppose, in the way that tourists might slowly destroy the natural environment they travel to see. By the time I reached it a few days ago, there was nothing left.

This wasn't the first time I've tried to play a game and been confronted with a blank page, left to wonder whether this was intentional, a browser incompatibility, a bug, an abandoned domain, or what. A blank game is an interesting thing. If I listen to John Cage's 4'33" or view a painting that's a blank canvas, I think of that blankness as intentional, and think about what the artist is trying to convey with it. If I see a blank game, I think about the ways I could be doing something wrong, or failing to do something expected. I see the blankness as something I'm supposed to fix.

There's no fixing Mandala, of course. It's gone, as intended. I'm kind of happy that enough people played it to get it to its final state. I'm also sad in ways that are hard for me to express. Sad about the feeling that the games I love are being lost to time, that the way I approach media might be one of the reasons I'm lonely a lot of the time, sad about the way attention and lack of attention affects art. There's a pair of lines in another game about art I played recently, Maddox Pratt's on bees: "Perception is a commitment/Perception is a responsibility". That resonates with me. Perception is an active thing, and the way you choose to perceive affects who you are. Looking at things the way I do, am I being the person I want to be? Am I affecting the world with my attention the way I intend to? I don't know. I'm trying to.  

[linehollis]

Mostly when I'm not sure what to write about here, I'll just write about whatever I've been playing/watching/reading lately, which is nice and I like doing it. But I haven't been finding much time for games lately, and I've been spending most of my off time reading Language, Consciousness, Culture by cognitive linguist Ray Jackendoff. I love this book so far, but I don't really know what to say about it without quoting large passages, which seems like a hassle. I'm bad at describing a lot of the dense cognitive science stuff that I'm super into. I feel like I understand it very well when reading it, but if I stumble when I try to talk about it, maybe I'm wrong about that? But I think it's more that I find cognitive science very intuitive, so I immediately start tying what I learn into all my own personal brain shit. And that leaves my understanding of it written in the dialect of one I use to describe anything that's going on in my mind. Translating all this is the work of a lifetime, let me tell you.

[linehollis]

Okay, so: how would a game about a bunch of people agreeing with each other work? What kind of moves would a player make, and what should those moves feel like? This is a practical question for me, as I've got the skeleton of such a game assembled in Twine but I keep unraveling the thing impatiently because I'm not sure where I'm going with it.

My first idea was that it's a game about turn-taking in conversation, with the player choosing the next character who talks after each round. This approach comes from my interest in how, even with a group of people all agreeing with each other, there's often still a typical conflict of who gets to talk the most and the loudest. But while usually I think of this kind of conflict in conversation as being about dominance, I don't know if that's the most interesting frame for conversations of agreement. Here's what I mean. I have a coworker (and I say this with love) who has a habit of initiating conversations like this:

HIM: I think we should do [x] ME: Yes I agree HIM: [15 minutes of arguing for the merits of doing x] ME: uh huh

So, I could think of this as a dominance maneuver, although that doesn't really track with my impression of the guy's character. Instead, I think this is more likely the outcome of over-rehearsing his arguments in case there's opposition, and having trouble course correcting when faced with agreement. That tells me something specific about this guy sees the world and how he approaches social situations. That I see agreement as an opportunity to blessedly end a conversation, in turn, tells you something about me and how I see the world.

How people behave in an argument tells us about what they value enough to fight about, what their tactics are, what hurts them and what they think hurts other people. What do we learn from how people behave when they offer something and see it accepted right away? I think it tells us, for one, whether they expect that to happen; what defenses they have that remain or fall away under those circumstances; and maybe, crucially, what they expect in return for their offer being accepted. Does my coworker want something more from me that I'm not giving him? I think one reason some people might push harder when they face agreement is that they don't know how to resolve a situation that doesn't involve conflict.

So maybe that's the key question for me to answer. Of this set of characters, what kind of resolution is each expecting from this discussion? When will they be satisfied, if ever? And what are the possible kinds of resolution that the player could push towards - what do different ends to a conversation of agreement look like, and how does each character feel about them?

[linehollis]

Editing

The other day I went back and read through all the posts I've done since the beginning of June. I was looking for examples of particular sentence structures that might imply certain tendencies of thought, because me. I found them, which is a story for another time, but I also found that I liked most of what I wrote. There were things I was scared of rereading, like the one about zeuglodons, because they might sound like There's Something Wrong With Me; but they were mostly fine. Some of them, like the one about The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo, might be worth building out into something longer. And there are a lot of tossed off paragraphs where I'm worrying about my brain, and those are fine too. No authorities arrived on account of them.

I've been thinking about editing, and why it's such a struggle for me. Editing is a process of figuring out what works and what doesn't work in a piece, so you can't do it if you refuse to see what works. Or, perhaps to be more precise, if you have learned to punish yourself for noticing what works. If all you can see is what needs to be torn out, of course every draft turns into useless scraps after a few rounds. You have to know what to preserve.

To be honest, I've made it pretty far on the instinct to tear myself to shreds every time I notice something wrong. I don't think I'd be here without it. But there come times in life when you have to lay down the weapons that kept you alive, before they turn into household hazards. Like self-improvement, I've always thought of editing as a destructive process. It's time to think of it as a process of preservation, whatever that looks like.

I’ll tell you this much: it’s a lot easier to write these when I’m pretty sure I won’t hate them in a month.

[linehollis]

Tonight I mentioned to my cousin that I felt like I was outgrowing people who enjoy arguments. This is a bit of a glib and irritating thing to say but I haven't outgrown being glib and irritating yet, so. I think about argument a lot because I think about the function of conversation a lot, and argument is a form of conversation that's very easy to view through a functional lens. One person wins, the other loses. Both have the well-defined goal of changing each other's mind. Argument can be formalized, as in competitive debate, and there have been some great games that build off that formal structure, like Argument Champion.

But lately I've been thinking more about conversations that are essentially about people agreeing with each other. A lot of conversations I see out in the wild, especially among a group of friends, are pretty much of the form:

A: Hey, we think [x], right? B: Oh my god, seriously C: Yeah but maybe with a couple modifications B: Oh yeah, yeah, of course, of course A: Agreed, agreed

These conversations are interesting to me for a number of reasons. One of them is that it's a type of conversation that I think of as typically taking place among three or more people. Group conversations are hard to model and think about! They don't show up in games very often, in my experience. When they do, they tend to feel more like a bunch of side characters making comments around a main character who acts as a hub for the flow of dialogue:

A: Okay gang, we're in a real bad situation now B: Let's chaotic evil it C: B, what's wrong with you D: I am of a more neutral disposition C: A, what do YOU think we should do? >>>

Visual novels and RPGs with dialogue systems feature scenes like this a lot. They're efficient at setting up and reminding about long-running conflicts between characters, and they can also be pretty modular. That is, if a character is dead or skipping a mission, their dialogue can be removed without affecting the flow of the scene.

They're also essentially arguments again. They're of a different form than the formal debate style used in Argument Champion. This is more like a bunch of courtiers currying favor with a ruler or something. A conflict about being declared right by an authority, rather than defeating an opponent. I like a lot of games that use this style, but I've never liked what it does to the main character. Always getting pushed into the role of the one who decides makes it hard to play characters who aren't brash and confident, and outside of a military hierarchy setting like Mass Effect it often requires awkward explanations.

And I guess I'm also just tired of conversations that are always about revealing conflict! I'm not that big a fan of the apparent idea that characters have to be constantly squabbling to have strong personalities. Sitcom technology has moved past this point, why can't videogames?

(I'm being a dick here, I know. I'll think of like fifty counterexamples the minute I hit publish. I'm just warming to a theme, okay?)

All right, so here's the theme I'm warming to. I'm curious about that group consensus conversation I mentioned above. It can reveal character too, right? It can reveal the character of individuals, through the way they introduce modifications or when they talk and don't talk. Even if everyone's agreeing, they can be agreeing in different ways. It can also reveal the character of a group. What values and concerns bind them together? How are relationships revealed when everyone's doing their best to be polite and agreeable?

And here's the other thing I like about this kind of conversation: IT CAN BE SO MUCH MEANER. There's nothing more vicious I can think of then a group of people coming to an agreement about someone who's not in the room. Like seriously, let's talk about conversations that are polite and mean as hell. How do the dynamics of that stuff work?