players: Jess, Martin, Tim, Ben

Twelve contestants journey to Challenge Island for a new reality television show, but little do they know the challenge they face… will be to SURVIVE!

Cue offensive Hollywood tribal drum music. Pan up over sapphire ocean to golden beach, emerald jungle, and uh grey mountain peaks.

Smash cuts of contestants looking around in wonder. Contestants arguing. Contestants saying funny things. Contestants running thru jungle and almost getting eaten by pumas.

Fade to black. Fade up to watery red logo rising from the dark surf.

BLOOD BEACH. Coming Summer 2012.

Fun times! The best parts were definitely inventing the deaths (Vaughn* pushing past Jun, leaving him to get sliced in half by the closing door, only to fall into the acid pool himself; Moonbeam swinging back and forth impaled on the spiky log during the Very Serious scene that followed).

As we discussed, we sabotaged ourselves a bit by having all the characters be strangers; it meant that our character goals were pretty much irrelevant, and while we did some character development, we didn't have any really meaningful exchanges, because they were all strangers who were pretty much constantly irritated by each other. Also, there's that weird quirk where you end up liking your non-survivor characters much better. I kinda wish I'd made Jun a survivor.

*It was Vaughn who did this, right?

Yeah, the B-characters had the sweet deaths. I can totally picture the plastic surgeon hearing the click, looking down and seeing the landmine he's standing on and just getting a moment to say "what the…" before the boom.

I could easily see an "emerging survivors" hack where each player gets to declare who they want to have be a potential survivor as the game progresses. That way you have the first four "no attack" scenes to get to know people and decide who's interesting.

But yeah, our goals just weren't that interesting to us, which is a fail. Tim had the only really solid one (find her husband) but we didn't give him enough to work with soon enough. That's part of the trick of Geiger Counter that I definitely didn't explain well enough: for plot to emerge, the current player has to frame scenes where revelations can occur. Like the cargo container with all the gear in there: that was so we could have reveals that gave us a clue why all this was happening, but it got blown up. There's definitely some "seize the day" aspects to it.

The other thing Jess and I talked about on the way home was that the Menace demanded far too much creativity from us. On top of the usual demands for framing a scene- decide on an interesting mix of characters, and a setting, and make these things move the story forward- you also had to come up with a novel way for the setting to try and kill people. If the Menace had been, I dunno, a mutant slime monster from the deep, that last part would be taken care of, because it would just be about describing how the slime monster attacks. But the evil producers laid a different kind of trap in every scene, and that required thought and originality which in no way advanced the story. It definitely contributed to my brainlock.

The other thing that contributed to my brainlock and which might have been idiosyncratic was that I wasn't prepared for the "we are making a movie" trope; I was totally caught by surprise when Ben said we should come up with the movie trailer, for instance. I might have missed a line in your introduction? I know you asked us what the special effects budget was, but I assumed you were speaking metaphorically about how over the top we wanted the tone to be. I also have zero experience with movies like this story, and I think some tone and structure expectations went over my head.

I did have fun, though. It just made me want to play Geiger Counter again with a setting I could get more engaged with.

you also had to come up with a novel way for the setting to try and kill people. If the Menace had been, I dunno, a mutant slime monster from the deep, that last part would be taken care of, because it would just be about describing how the slime monster attacks. But the evil producers laid a different kind of trap in every scene, and that required thought and originality which in no way advanced the story.

Yeah, it basically led to me concluding, okay, I'm making "Cube", in which all the deaths are spectacular, gory, and wildly different from each other; and any character development is almost incidental. And then I went ahead and had fun on that basis, but it didn't make for a very deep story.