WOW. This was a super rad game of Shock if I've ever played one. Like really--super wow.

Who: Caroline, Megan, and Mycorah
When: Thursday November 8th

So we started out by placing down a few issues we were interested in. These were: the objectification of women, lying in advertising, and passing (as straight, able-bodied, male, etc.). They fit together fabulously well. Through discussion, lying in advertising became about photoshopping women's bodies so much they reach the uncanny valley, and from there, we just had to admit that our shock was robots.

Through our minutae, we discovered that in our world, the robots were primarily used as sexual companions, despite their sentient-level of AI. Their bodies were horribly proprotioned to be the worst in sexual exploitation. The use of real women was banned in advertising--perhaps a feminist movement gone wrong, perhaps a perversion in conservative protection of women's bodies. Many of these sentient robots were men trapped in hyper-sexed women's bodies, and a full quarter of the robots identified as trans-male.

When a family tires of their robot, they can trade it in for a new one. They aren't aware that the old robot isn't exchanged to a new family, but is rather destroyed. This becomes particularly insidious when we realize that baby-bots who are being traded in for toddler bots are really being killed. Sheesh humans, when you trade in your ersatz child, you are really killing it.

Our stories really worked as reflections of the horrible society we created. I played the regular guy, plagued by insecurities, finding hollow satisfaction through banging the most outrageously sexy robots. Megan played the advertising exec, just doing her job to get the power and acclaim she wanted--regardless of how untrue the lies were that she peddled. Mycorah played the sad and lonely woman trying to get with the man of her dreams the only way her culture tells her she can--by becoming as robot-like as possible. She destroys her body and her future, only to be scrapped a few weeks after becoming her beloved's sex-bot.

Our fulcra were truthfulness-deception and authenticity-performance and they worked wonderfully with our issues (the former for lies in advertising, the latter for passing). It was a beautiful, depressing, and wonderfully engaging game. I wish one of us had played a robot, but maybe it's best that we didn't. We were exploring the way humans treat things they think of as objects, anyway. :)

Thanks for the awesome times!

Oh! And how could I forget--you can trade in your teenage robot (you know, the one you've been raising) to be a starter sex-bot for another family's teenage son! Yay!

that sounds great.