i love making pointless lists let's make another pointless list
re: an open notebook: a body is a thing you use to tell a story (consider: changing skins to indicate Significant Events Have Occurred. the acting out of behaviours such as limping when there is zero mechanical need for it. a body anchors you in a specific time and place from which a story can be unfolded). other people's bodies can be conscripted into your story. you know that thing in mcrp where in matters of disagreement about what happened fictionally, the person who has more narrative authority tends to get to decide? not as a product of actual mechanics or behind-the-scenes negotiation but because that's what the audience will know/remember/hear about? falling into someone's orbit or putting yourself in someone's orbit until you have made yourself legible to them and entangled with them, until they can reach into [who you are / what you are for / what you care about] and twist it for their own ends. drag you into a plot beat that forces you to change the entire way you present yourself to the world. overwrite the associations people have with your face.
re: an interrogation: a demand from the game itself that you ask what happened because (1) a body, as in a minecraft avatar, is not actually supposed to linger after the moment of death. the presence of a body after death indicates A Problem on the level of the game's mechanics. inviting questions of not just how and why did this death happen but also how and why did the outcomes that followed the death happen. (pointing at martyn's double life episode 3. around 48:30 he sees that ren has died. he goes to where it happened and ren's body is just there, tinted red, fallen over on the hillside. Something's Really Wrong There! also, separately, shoutouts to evan wengine for the concept of [the items a person drops when they die == their corpse] on account of that fucking rules. and that stuff despawns after five minutes too, so if you're seeing it, you should probably pay attention before you get got too <3) (2) being in a place invites the question how did you come to be in this place and to what end? i think minecraft's a really good game for ruined and abandoned places, the feeling of [something happened a while ago and you missed what exactly that was but nothing has really changed in the meantime], and A Body in that place is a question mark. why here if this place was otherwise untouched for so long? why you? also being in another person's / your old abandoned base is being in someone's body. i believe this.
re: a performance: a thing i recall being struck by when i was watching third life was the use of red life skins specifically to signal i'm dangerous, you should be afraid of me. digging up notes from the wip i still haven't gotten back to: "if this is a story about bodies as performance, mechs as self-aggrandizing projections into the world of intention and threat, then you have to talk about the handlers’ bodies too, how they perform, how they hold themselves." also, reading someone's armour to assess how much of a threat they are. we can take them because they're just in iron. we should stay clear of all that because they've got diamond. this is like the open notebook thing in that it's about a body as a surface to write on before it's really much of anything else? thirdly (are we on the third point? i'm about to fall asleep at my desk) i'm sort of enchanted by the way that minecraft bodies can... overlap? blend together? yknow, like, stand a little too close to someone and oops you are Inside Them and it's not always easy to tell where you start and end. the not being able to tell is the crux of it to me. insistently performing a separate/distinct self when it'd be so easy to not... additionally from my notes: "clutching at each other in the dark, whole-body, and touching and touching and touching and it doesn’t feel like anything, it doesn’t quite have weight — imagining it, after, lying under the blankets, is almost the same. shuddering, then slipping right through each other, wrenching each other apart and fighting for breath as indiscriminate viscera splatters across the blankets, the wooden planks"
re: a bargaining chip: been thinking about this in relation to vsmp because i feel like my interest in Bodies has kind of faded into a background thing, which is funny when vampires are so good for thinking about bodies, and i wanna see what other angles i can spin up. thing is, i dunno, everyone seems so intent on talking around video game mechanics in the videos that that's just not where my attention has gone so far. but. gestures at how apo was turned. gestures at owen framing [agreeing with legs in this negotiation] as [having his autonomy taken from him]. hmmm. it's cool how minecraft bodies are like. A Whole Thing? it's not like you can mechanically chop someone's arm off in vanilla. you can't give up a piece of yourself, it has to be your whole body or nothing. i've considered something adjacent to this before when thinking about [mcrp working best at the level of the operatic], like, you have to do the big dramatic gesture, if you want for example to communicate that you're protecting someone you can't just yank them out of the way or hold your arm out in front of them, you have to physically put your entire self between them and the danger. the vampires get their hands on you and they get all of you, the way you make sense of the world and the way you move through a space and the way you are understood by others, whether you like it or not.
