Dialect is a role-playing game about language and how it dies. Over the course of a game, players form an isolated community, create a private language, and watch it fade away as the community’s isolation is breached.
We’re very pleased and honoured to play a game of Dialect, with game creator Hakan Seyalıoğlu of Thorny Games leading us through it.
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Dialect: A game About Language and How It Dies
https://thornygames.com/pages/dialect
268: Dialect (featuring Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalioglu) | Talk the Talk
http://talkthetalkpodcast.com/268-dialect/
Dani’s memento
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Ben: Let’s all play a fun game called, “Ben just drank a huge cup of chai tea. Let’s see how long before he has to interrupt the game to go to the toilet.”
Hedvig: We can make it a competition because I’m drinking a cup of chamomile tea.
Daniel: When I do pee, I will do it in character.
Ben: Yes. Am I supposed to come up with a character? Pssh. Doesn’t matter. I’ll just make one up on the spot.
Hedvig: Hakan said we don’t need to do any preparation.
Ben: Wicked.
Hedvig: Yeah!
Ben: This is exactly my kind of game.
[Because Language theme]
Daniel: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this very special bonus patron episode of Because Language. For this one, we’re playing a role-playing game. It’s called Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies. In the game, you build a scenario, you build characters, and you are in an isolated situation with the people you’re playing with. You build language, you build words, you share them. And then, over the course of the game, the isolation is breached and the language that you’ve created stops being used. So, you get to see what happens when a language is built up and then dies.
Dialect comes from Thorny Games. If you’re a longtime listener, you might remember how in 2016, we did an interview with Hakan Seyalıoğlu and Kathryn Hymes of Thorny Games when the game first came out, when it was brand new. And at the time, we said, “Hey, we should really do a playthrough,” and we finally did it. We sat down with Hakan Seyalıoğlu of Thorny Games, and he conducted us through an entire game of Dialect. It’s a long episode, but I think you’ll find it very fulfilling. We’re going to join just as Ben, Hedvig, and I are sitting around the table waiting for Hakan to join us.
Hedvig: Ah, Hakan is here.
Daniel: Hakan.
Hakan: Hello!
Hedvig: Hello.
Daniel: Hey.
Hakan: How you all doing?
Hedvig: Good, very excited.
Hakan: Oh, good.
Daniel: It’s a real honor to have you, the game designer, here to take us through this. We’ve been looking forward to this for a really long time.
Hakan: [chuckles] Yeah, I know. I’m very excited to get started. Before we get started, I would love to just to get know you folks, do intros, pronouns, where you’re from, [unintelligible [00:02:18] that you just so we know where we’re coming with. I’m Hakan, recently moved to Washington DC about six months ago with Kathryn, who’s co-designer of the game [unintelligible 00:02:29] in the San Francisco Bay Area. Pronouns are he/him. I’m very excited to play with you folks. Cool, that’s me. That’s it. Love to hear from you folks too.
Hedvig: I’m Hedvig. I’m a linguist, and I talk on Because Language about linguistics languages. I also like role playing games. I’ve played D&D and other games when I was a teenager. And then lately, I’ve been getting back into D&D with friends. I’m also a big fan of Friends at the Table, and I listen to them playing through part of Dialect. So, I’m really excited. They play so many games, I listen to this so much, I don’t think I’m going to be– I also don’t think it’s a spoiler to have listened to it before. So, I’m really looking forward to it all because of them.
Ben: I will go next because on my screen, I am the next one along. I am Ben. I am also a presenter on Because Language. I am a teacher, and my preferred pronouns are he/him.
Hakan: You thankfully have hem in your name seems like so. She/her, Hedvig.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: My name is Daniel. I’m in Because Language, and been doing it for a number of years now. I am a roleplaying noob. I haven’t really done any, but I’m an enthusiastic learner and my pronouns are he, him, and his. And I also like [unintelligible [00:03:57].
Stephen: I am Stephen or Steve for short from the UK originally, now living in Germany with Hedvig. I’m Hedvig’s husband, which is why I’m here. I’m not a linguist. I have played some role-playing games but I haven’t played or experienced Dialect in any form. Over the past few weeks, occasionally, I’ve been saying, “Should I be checking out the rules? Should I be figuring out what I’m supposed to do?” Hedvig’s like, “No, it’s okay. We’ll pick it up as we go.” I guess you got at least one absolute new player if you want to use me as an audience surrogate figure. Oh, Ben as well.
Ben: Yeah, definitely a complete and utter unknown, this one.
Stephen: My pronouns are he/him.
Hedvig: Ben, you’ve played D&D.
Ben: Correct.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: So, I know exactly how to be the most kind of annoying.
[chuckles]
Hakan: Sure you’ll be great. All right. Well, that’s wonderful. Yeah, nothing else really, I think, that we need prep-wise. So, yes, this is Dialect. Dialect is a game that myself and Kathryn Hymes made a few years ago by now. The main premise of that– Oh, and this is one of our wonderful upside-down copies, we had one batch that was upside-down [crosstalk] just by accident.
Ben: [crosstalk] -had done everyone, that’s part of the test, some of it is upside down.
Hakan: [chuckles] Exactly. In this game, we’ll be telling the story of a community together. In many role-playing games, especially if you’re familiar with D&D, you might have games where the main purpose is to go around, make yourself as strong as possible. There’s one GM. Everyone else is a player in the world that the GM is creating. But Dialect is in a genre of games that’s a little different. So, this game doesn’t have a dungeon master. I’ll facilitate, which means that I’m just the person who’s in charge of making sure the rules are explained, that dynamics at the table are maintained, but I have no narrative authority over the story, and then anyone else. Everyone has the same authority to add to the story. It’s a collaborative experience.
It’s going to be a story where we all are having equal say in it and are building it up according to the structure and the rules that the game provides. Since we have some new folks at the table to roleplay, there’s a little bit of a spiel that we like giving at the beginning that I think would be helpful to go through. That’s three principles that we really try to keep in mind during play. Those are first, the obvious. I think a lot of times in games like this or our creative endeavors in general, we have a tendency to be judging our contribution by some self-imposed metric of creativity or novelty. That’s really not the point. We want to make sure that we’re all having fun, that we’re not getting in our own heads too much, because the lower the barrier is, just going through and like saying, what’s on your mind, I think the more fun to have, rather than really trying to be the wittiest at any point in time.
Ben: Oh, no.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: This is sort of why we have Ben on the show.
Hakan: Oh, yeah?
Ben: Oh, dear.
Hakan: If that’s your obvious, then that’s great. So, hopefully, we’ll be able to make that work. But the basic idea is by taking what’s obvious all of us together, we’ll be able to make something that’s not obvious to anyone. The second one is really to listen is another principle that we really tried to instill in folks. The only way we’re able to make all of our stories come together into something cohesive, is if we’re not all just telling our own story. We listen to folks at the table. We’re taking interest and really wanting to see where their story as a whole is going. That’s a really important principle from that perspective too.
And just the third one that we always bring up is to be kind. The big principle that we want to stress these games very often is that the players are more important than the game. So, at any point in time, if you think someone’s not having fun, if someone might seem excluded or for whatever reason, just not enjoying themselves, that should take priority over success of the game itself. So, we’re going to make space for them, fudge the rules, fudge the current order, whatever you have to do, just to make sure that everyone at the table is having fun because that’s more important than integrity of the game or integrity of the story or anything like that.
Those are just some general principles that I like to talk about, especially when we have new folks at the table. Does anyone have any questions about roleplaying games, collaborative storytelling games, something like that, in general, before we get started?
Ben: It’s a pretty good list for beginner GMs, I think. People who want to actually start running games, that is just the cheat code to running a successful game. [chuckles] Just be obvious, listen to people, and be kind. You’re there to make everyone’s time a really, really good time.
Hakan: I think that’s fair. In this one, all of us are going to be like mini-GMs. That’s why we all need to keep those principles in mind. One final mechanic that is good to cover in terms of a meta-technique before we start, is also the X card. Anyone here played with an X card before? Do you know what X card is? Hedvig does.
Ben: I do not.
Hakan: New to some folks. What the X card is it’s a tool we use in these collaborative storytelling games to make sure that the game is fun for everyone. We would usually have a small card that has an X on it in the middle of the table. All that means is if something comes up during the game that affects your enjoyment of the game for any reason, for the negative, this might be a topic comes up, someone introduces a theme, for example, that you don’t enjoy might be triggering for you in some way, or just would hamper your enjoyment of the game overall, it doesn’t even have to be anything serious. It might be something severe in terms of a triggering event, trauma, but also could just be like, “Hey, my boss’s name is Josh. And I’d rather there not be another Josh in the game, because we’re currently having an argument, and that would affect my enjoyment of it.” It doesn’t need to be a particularly serious thing or it could be. If something like that comes up, what we would do around the table is we point to the X card or tap it on. Since we’re on Zoom, we can just say X or make an X with their fingers, all that means is we’ll rewind, take that content out and just make another creative decision where that was introduced.
Ben: That’s a really cool mechanic that I’ve never heard of before, but I immediately like the idea of.
Hakan: It’s a helpful one for collaborative games, because so little is defined beforehand, that you don’t have to worry about having negated three hours of the GMs prep. We just rewind back and we make a different decision. It’s very easy to [unintelligible 00:11:39] in this game. One of the big principles that we’d like to keep in minds while we’re using the X card is we don’t ask why. That’s one of the principles that I like to set at the table, because we’re just glad folks are using it. It’s not meant as a creative judgment. This is just people looking out for themselves and their own enjoyment. Yeah, we’re just glad we don’t need justification or explain themselves. Sound good?
Ben: That’s great.
Hakan: All right. In that case, let us get started and we are going to play Dialect. Dialect is a game about telling the story of a community that’s got the isolation by how their language changes over time. The game takes place over three ages. In each of these ages, we’ll see what happens to this community, going from the very birth and emergence of the community to the eventual death of the community itself in age three. In each of those steps, we’re going to see what happens to their language as well.
In this game, we’re each going to have characters, someone’s to be our voice in the isolation. We will actually speak as and use this language that we’re developing. And really, when I say language, you can think of it more like a dialect that we’re developing over the course of the game. Each turn, we’re going to define new words according to some cards, that’s going to have a meaning, that’s built off of the principles of the community. So, there’s going to be a story behind why we have all the new piece of language that we do.
Each game a Dialect starts by picking a backdrop. So, the backdrops are the settings in which you will play. For this game, I’m going to facilitate– usually you could facilitate and play at the same time. But usually with five players, it ends up being a little longer than what we have time for. So, I’ll facilitate and just be on the outside. That means I’ll take part in all the language-building conversations but I won’t have a character of myself, but I’ll play any NPCs or something like that, that might come up in scenes. So, that’ll be what we do for that.
Now, for a backdrop. Usually, when we play with folks for the first time, we recommend the Martian outpost, which is an isolated Martian outpost that lost communications with earth and further we’ll then define it more for ourselves and see what their story is. But how does the outpost backdrop sound to everyone here. Does that sound like a good one?
Hedvig: Hmm. I sort of have a way of making it– Maybe, no. I was thinking if there’s any way of making it not in space, it’s still an outpost?
Hakan: Let’s see. How about the second one–
Hedvig: Maybe I’m being–? [crosstalk]
Hakan: No, that’s fine.
Ben: The thing I worry about, Hedvig, is the next most obvious places just like a real colonial setting, and I’m like, “Well, that’s probably worse.”
Hedvig: What about really far underground?
Ben: Ooh.
Hakan: So, the second one is actually the compounds, which is more like a group. This is set a couple decades in the past in 1982 and this is about a group that make a compound and where that is isn’t really defined. We’ll define that within the game itself. So, I think that might be one that kind of suits that better. So, how about we play in that backdrop instead, does that sound good?
Hedvig: Unless everyone thinks I’m being obnoxious.
Hakan: No, that sounds great.
Ben: [crosstalk] Bezos and Musk have just ruined Mars for you.
Hedvig: He just ruined space for me a little bit.
Ben: You should not give them that kind of power. Space is amazing. They’re just dicks.
Hedvig: It’s also I’ve been reading N. K. Jemisin and other sci-fi fantasy things that aren’t necessarily space, and it’s pretty cool.
Ben: Look, Jemisin is definitely not on trial here. That lady got mad chops when it comes to writing fantasy. So, yes, I agree. Let’s do a compound of some kind, and let’s just hope we can communally steer it away from weird racist tropes, that compounds and outposts so often hark back to.
Hakan: Yep, let’s give that a shot. Let’s do the compound. Firstly, we begin with reading the description of the compound. And here it says, “We’ve seen what’s become the world and we’re not interested in being a part of it any longer. 200 strong in number, we decided to make 1982, the year that we found ourselves a new home. We built our compound at a breakneck pace. Until recently, we still have to venture to the outside world from time to time for necessary supplies. How we dreaded those departure and longed to be back amongst our own again. Mercifully, those days are now behind us and for 20 years, we have known true solitude. We have walls, we have barracks and we produce enough food that we will never have to set foot in the outside world again.”
Let’s try that one. We can even change the year a little bit, if we’d like to see if we do want to try like a little futuristic compound. For example, we can take that 1982 and just fiddle with it a tiny bit. Maybe make it like 2030. Great. Does that sound good for folks? [crosstalk] -because I think we’re interested in technologically being a little in the future, but not in space. So, let’s try the compound, but in 2030. That’d be cool.
Hedvig: Okay.
Hakan: All right, awesome. Let’s do that.
Ben: 2030, it is.
Hakan: If anything else comes up that’s vaguely consistent with it being 2030, we’ll fix on the fly. It’s not a big deal. The first thing we do after having picked the backdrop is to generate the aspects. Whenever we generate language in this game, and we’ll get to that when we actually get to the turns, they’re all going to be based off of something fundamental to community as one of their aspects. These are real fundamentally defining traits of the community itself. So, these are what make us special as a group. There are going to be three of them. For each of them, I’ll ask a question and we’ll answer it together, kind of by consensus land on an answer. Then, I will put that out on the play space in Age One. These aspects will change over time as the community grows and evolves too. So, they’re on the very outside of the play space.
This is the play space. As you can see, it’s divided into three ages. If this was at a table, we’d have to have circular strands with beads on it to separate the table into three ages. The very outside is Age One, that’s where we’re going to start play. And then after we go around the table, once we’ll move into Age Two, and then after we go through again, we’ll go on to Age Three. And then after that, we just go into the epilogue.
In each of the ages, we’ll take index cards and lay them flat on the table, and those will be the aspects. We’ll place three of them outside the [unintelligible 00:18:33] and those will be the aspects for Age One. These are going to be, like I said, those defining aspects of the community. For compounds, our first question, The Wayward Flock. What about who we are made the compounds a necessity? Why did we retreat into the compounds?
Stephen: I’m guessing pandemic might be a little on the nose.
Hakan: [chuckles] A little too close.
Hedvig: [chuckles] Maybe.
Ben: Let’s see if we can stretch our creative legs just a little bit.
Hakan: Actually, this is reminding me that I did play Dialect once in the last year, I guess, because I didn’t have [unintelligible [00:19:12] suggestion from a game. [laughs]
Ben: What if we’re doing a little bit of like Israeli kibbutz-type thing where we’re just going, “Right. That’s it. Capitalism, not a thing, not happy with it.” But we realized that we can’t reject capitalism and still be in any way part of capitalism. So, we’ve had to physically distance ourselves from any of those structures and potentially become totally self-reliant with no outside connections, and that’s the only true way that we can really reject the capitalist overlords who want to colonize Mars rather than help the people on earth.
[laughter]
Hedvig: That sounds like it might be a missionary type. That sounds like wanting to accept new members, but I’m not sure. We’re quite a small group, right?
Hakan: Let’s see–
Daniel: 200.
Hakan: Yeah, 200.
Hedvig: Yeah. I like it, but I’m thinking of how to make it more unique yet, because there’s a lot of hippies who reject capitalism around the world, and we don’t want to have all of them. Want to be smaller, I think. What if there is something more specific?
Daniel: It sounds like we’re a utopian movement.
Hedvig: What about anti-capitalism and anti-data surveillance, maybe because I’m in Germany.
Ben: [crosstalk]
Hedvig: [chuckles] Where everyone hates data gathering in every way. We just watched Now You See Me 2 where that was a part of– [laughs] actually.
Stephen: Yeah. Maybe data surveillance became so pervasive that what was required in order to fully opt out of all of it was to eventually, essentially sever all remaining ties. Even stripping down to like the bare bones of existing technological networks was not sufficient. We had to really, really cut ourselves off.
Ben: In networking parlance, we needed a literal air gap between our community and every other aspect of the wider world.
Hedvig: And maybe there are so few people who want to– because it means not having Instagram. It means not having connection with your loved ones. There’s very few people who are up for that, I think. That could be 200 people.
Hakan: Yeah, that sounds great. And it could also just be, if there were more than 200 people, we picked our favorite 200 because of resource limitations, something like that too. It could also be possible. Anyway, that sounds fantastic. How about for that one, we’ll place example aspects? So, it sounds like anti-surveillance or maybe even to a radical degree. What’s a good way to summarize that in a few words?
Ben: A radical rejection of surveillance capitalism.
Stephen: Data anarchy.
Hedvig: I like that word. That’s funny.
Hakan: Is that a good one? Okay. And we all know what that means based on our discussion. I think that sounds good. Our first aspect on the outside is data anarchy, where that’s a rejection of surveillance capitalism to a radical degree. Second one, More Than Walls. What’s special property about the compound keeps us secure?
Ben: Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. I’ve been thinking about this since we talked about compounds. Okay.
[chuckles]
Ben: See what you guys think about this. I think that we have taken over or come into possession of the Kerguelen Islands, also known as the Desolation Islands. Do you guys know about them?
Daniel: No, I do not.
Ben: The Kerguelen Islands, they are essentially France’s most remote island colony, but it was never inhabited by humans. So, you get away from all of the creepy colonialism vibes. They’re just not very far away from Antarctica and are a fairly substantial archipelago of islands that are a couple of 1000 miles from anything at all. To get to them and to supply them and all that kind of stuff is extraordinarily difficult, like planes and boats both really struggle with it. So, I was thinking that that could be our air gap approach. It could also be the self-limiting factor for numbers as well. We could say like, “Hey, anyone who wants to join us can come, but you’ve got to get here. Have fun.”
Hedvig: Hmm. I’m looking at a map now. It’s almost equal distance between Madagascar, Perth, and Antarctica.
Ben: Yeah, exactly. It’s about as far away as you can get from anything at all.
Hedvig: Yeah. That’s super desolation. I know about Disappointment Islands, but now, I know about Desolation Islands. Yeah, I like it.
Hakan: All right, let’s see that. I think I looked it up, too. Yeah–
Ben: K-E-R-G-U-E-L-E-N.
Hakan: Perfect. All right. We have made our compound on Kerguelen Islands. For our third one, now this is a free aspect. The choice is ours. Anything that we think would be interesting to explore in this game that would play well with the fact that we’re on this remote island chain, and are extreme data anarchists. We’re now going to pick one more aspect that we think would be fun to play with here. Anyone have any suggestions?
Stephen: I’m not totally sure of what’s within the bound of aspect, but what about issues regarding like food security? What is going to be possible to grow there as well as the sort of difficult climate just for living? We’re near enough in the future that those basic problems have been solved by some kind of technology that we can bring with us, that we have. So, we have a certain amount of freedom and security because of those technologies that exists. Whether that be just the ability to grow things inside our houses that are pretty safe and the seeds are very fruitful because they’ve got a little bit of genetic modification or whatever, something along those lines.
Hakan: I think something like that sounds great. I think this is probably a place where it helps to nail it down and be a little specific. So, if it is the hot houses or if it’s a special type of–
Hedvig: Algae.
Hakan: Yeah, algae or genetically modified seeds that have made it so that they’ll grow in a wide variety of climates, just nailing it down and picking one of them will probably make it easier for us to build off of.
Stephen: [crosstalk] -the ocean.
Hedvig: What about–
Stephen: Maybe algae like you say.
Hedvig: I like the idea of having like– you know how in some communities is just we have this one thing yaks and we use their fur for this, we use to dung for the floor, we use their milk for this, we use their bones for this, and you can just have your entire community run by one thing. Because I’ve seen algae bricks, house bricks. You can make a lot things from algae, I think.
Ben: Okay, I’m happy to roll with algae.
Hakan: And we don’t have to be very scientifically– Even if some of that is scientifically dubious, that’s fine.
[laughter]
Hakan: It all sounds very plausible to me.
Ben: We essentially have algae as our technological fulcrum about which kind of our society is built on and relies on. It’s used in our building products. It’s used to fertilize things, to sustain us. It’s just central to our– we figured out algae maybe and that was the thing that actually allowed us to do this.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] we’re religious about it too or are we still atheists, rationalists, how do you like?
Daniel: Some of us are kind of a little bit woo-woo-ey about it, but some of us aren’t.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: [crosstalk] -differently.
Ben: What a great potential friction point later in the game.
[laughter]
Hakan: Yeah. So, I think that’s great. I think we’ll be able to nail that down a little bit into questions that follow. For this aspect, let’s see, what shall we call it? Algae everywhere– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: [laughs]
Hakan: Let’s see that.
Ben: That’s perfect.
Hakan: All right, wonderful. Now, we have the overall bones of what the story is going to be about or what’s going to start it out. We have our data anarchy or our anti-surveillance capitalism, which is really what drove us to our isolation. We know where we are on the Kerguelen Islands. Very cold, very inaccessible, very remote. And we have this great reliance on our algae for power, for food, for building materials. Probably for clothing, I would guess, naturally. That’s great.
Next, I’m going to ask everyone one question to add a little bit more detail into this outline about the community because we have a vague idea, let’s put little specifics on to that. I’ll start with just the order on my screen. So, that’ll be with you, Hedvig, to start. The first question is, where did we come from and how did we come to know one another?
Hedvig: Ooh. That’s a good question. So, it has to be– huh, academia is too close at hand. I don’t want to use that. But I was thinking of algae scientists being in a conference and having agreement about things, but that’s a bit– I’m trying to think if it’s the algae that brought us together or the ideology of rejecting data surveillance. I’m not sure which it is. Maybe it was the rejection of data surveillance and then everyone was very dissatisfied for a long time, but couldn’t do anything about it. And then, when someone came with this idea of how you could use algae, it was possible to separate. Where’s a place that people who don’t want to be surveilled meet? Because it can’t be in like forums online, I think, or would have to be like super dark web, which feels like that sketchy– So, maybe it would have to be people who already were in close proximity to each other. Maybe it was like a small town in France or a small village. The locals already were dissatisfied with the surveillance from the state, because then they could meet just generally, because they were in the same place. I’m finding it a bit hard to pull together. Does anyone else have any ideas?
Hakan: Maybe there were some group in one village that was the core of this movement and then maybe attracted more people to their brought more people around the world who like heard of it, even though they weren’t able to talk together that eventually formed some critical mass, maybe brought in some algae scientists, for example, that were able to, at some point, pitch this idea. “Just let’s just leave.” Does that sound okay?
Hedvig: Yeah. So, they met because they were all in a geographical spot in France but they noticed that France was still too not remote enough. But because the majority of people were French citizens or could become French citizens, they applied to the government to be like, “You don’t do anything with this effing island anyway. And we’re really disruptive to you all the time with all of our GDPR complaints. We promise to not file any more GDPR complaints if you just give us this piece of land to build on.”
Hakan: So, they were a big enough thorn in the government side, and they allowed them to go–
[crosstalk]
Ben: Annoy them until they give us what we want. I like it. [crosstalk]
Hakan: Do you think all of us were from this village, or were there some outsiders that came as well? [crosstalk]
Daniel: Do we have an online presence for a while that we didn’t really like doing, but we did it anyway, so we have tracked?
Hedvig: No. I think it was all word of mouth and piece of paper on telephone posts with those little things you can like pull. And there’s like, “We meet at the village hall because we’ve taken over the village. So, we meet at town hall.” And that’s why so few people as well.
Ben: I like the idea that we were probably setting up like ad hoc networks that we controlled, like with Pringles cans and stuff from one mountain top to another, like it’s the only way we can communicate.
Hakan: And where we all born in– did we all come from this village or did some people come to the village because of their idealism as well? Either way, it totally works.
Daniel: Some people found out about it, because of wacky news stories, and they were attracted.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah, that’s true. After a while, there had to be a rule that you can’t talk to journalists anymore because you’re tired of being featured in like–
Ben: Fight Club. We had to institute Fight Club rules.
Hedvig: Yeah. I would say that maybe 70% of people already came from that area but there were outsiders who came as well.
Hakan: Perfect. That sounds great. Cool. Let’s go to Daniel next for next question. What does the compound look like physically? Why is maintaining it so difficult?
Daniel: It’s difficult to maintain because that area is so cold and remote. We tried to make it technological looking, but it didn’t really work, and many of us just wanted it to look homey as well. So, there’s a patina of homeliness and comfort, but if you peel back that patina a little bit, you’ll find some pretty intense structural engineering going on both above ground and below.
Hakan: So, it looks homey from the outside, but it’s a bit artificial, just because of the measures we had to go to, to erect and build it, all that stuff. Is that [crosstalk] Daniel?
Daniel: I think so. What do you think?
Hakan: Yeah, no, I like the artificial home– Artificially looking like a quaint French village in some way when really it’s built off these algae bricks and stuff.
Ben: Yeah. We’ve got like algae brick geodesic domes, but with the fleur-de-lis painted on the outside.
Hedvig: [chuckles]
Hakan: Cool. Ben, next one’s for you. Where do members of the compound spend private time? Are there communal spaces?
Ben: Definitely are communal spaces. I would envision it to be probably not structurally dissimilar in terms of how things are organized from something like McMurdo Station in Antarctica, which would be there would be fairly substantial communal, holy dining room type, leisure spaces, where the entire community potentially could fit in for the needs of communicating and conducting culturally significant moments, birthdays, deaths, that sort of thing.
But similarly, there are private spaces for all the members of the community, but those private spaces maybe don’t look quite so private as we would think of them in a contemporary Western society. We would think of private spaces being like you have your own entire house with all of the necessary facilities in that house and that’s your private space. Private spaces maybe a little bit more like cabins, or shelters partially underground, made of these algae bricks. These shelters would provide short term everything we need, like a bed, and a sink and a toilet and that sort of thing. But if we wanted to eat or really do much at all, we would probably need to avail ourselves to some of these slightly more communal spaces.
Hakan: Are those shelters connected to the communal spaces or do you have to go outside to get to the communal spaces?
Ben: I’m going to say that that is an ongoing project and that some of the spaces have been connected via algae brick arch tunnels so they allow for relatively easy commute back into those communal spaces. But some by design, some people elected to have their personal space actually quite far away from the compound because they’re a little bit more isolationist. And so, connecting all of them is an ongoing project to give members of the community purpose and direction.
Hakan: Perfect. All right, and Stephen, the last one will be for you. For whom is the hardest in the compound and why?
Ben: Ah, good question.
Stephen: The technicians and scientists whose job it is to tend and grow and look after and harvest the algae, have to be out in the ocean, or whichever portion of the ocean or bay has been ring fenced in order to grows algae. It’s both technically difficult, a challenge to actually grow the stuff and harvest it but it’s also very high pressure, given that everybody knows that pretty much all of the security, both food security and shelter is all built out of algae, is dependent on them doing their job well and a lot of that is down to chance. So, it’s going to be difficult for them every day to fix problems, and bring in the algae as and when. And presumably to expand it as well in order to try and create as much buffer as possible if there’s any kind of algae failures, and they want to try and give themselves as much leeway as they can.
Hakan: Perfect. Cool. To summarize everything a little bit. We came from a small village of very privacy minded, ideologically oriented group in France, about 70%, 80% of us originally there, after some quirky news exposés about all these people in France who refuse to have an online presence, I guess. Some more people joined as well, started coming to the community, seek them out. The community was such a thorn in the side of the EU and France in particular, that at some point, they gave us permission to go to the Kerguelen Islands to get out of their hair, stop our constant GDPR complaints. And so, we were allowed to go there and make that our home.
The settlements are very necessarily stark and industrial because of the harsh climate, because the limited building resources but an effort is made to make them look homely and cozy as much as possible from the outside even though sometimes the patina is very thin. There are communal spaces. You can think of it like a McMurdo Station, where there are cafeterias or hallways or things that connects maybe a few large base buildings, but individual shelters are generally away from that building at various distances. There are ongoing projects to actually connect them so we don’t have to walk outside all the time. But at the moment, there are still a lot of going outside that we have to do in these harsh climates, which also makes it why being a technician as to maintain the algae is so difficult, and it’s one of the most difficult jobs in the compound itself. That sounds great. And that’s our little summary.
Let’s go back into the play space now, because now we’re each going to make our character groups. Now is when we will first experiment with the card decks and see if they work for everyone. The way this works is, I’m going to deal everyone three archetypes. You should see a little card back with the number three on top of your portraits. If you click that, that should show you the three cards that you have in your hands. Now for me, I’m just going to put one of them out on the play space to explain what this is. You can see one of my archetypes in my hand is the Explorer. We’re each going to pick one of the archetypes, and that’s going to be the basis for our character. And then, we’ll define out what that means after that. So, here for the Explorer, it says, “We rely on you to venture beyond where the rest of us do to push boundaries and uncovering potential. People talk to you about the unknown.” And then, there it says, you identify with all the aspects, there’s discovered potential in one.
After everyone has picked their archetype, we’ll go around and do little short introductions about different characters. We have different names that we can– I have a name list for this first backdrop that we can use for inspiration for names, if you’d like. But the only thing mechanically that’s required at this point for that’s really imposed is this bottom part about identifying with the aspects. So, not everyone is going to feel the same way about all of the aspects of the community. Maybe there’s someone who actually is very skeptical about the algae, doesn’t like eating, doesn’t like the feel of it, and tries to have some other things that they snuck in with themselves or only engages in that role reluctantly. Maybe there’s some people that have some doubts about the data anarchy system that we have. Maybe they’re the kids of someone who wasn’t really into it, and they got dragged along [unintelligible [00:41:32]. And maybe there are some people who just always really wanted to go to the Kerguelen Islands, and that’s how they ended up as part of this expedition.
The only point here being is that not everyone is going to feel exactly the same way about these pillars of the community. The little text at the bottom is what defines that for each of the archetypes. So, the Explorer, for example, does identify with all of these. They’re very important parts of their life. Generally, they follow the main communal interpretation of that aspect, but they also have a little something special about it, where it says there’s undiscovered potential in one. So, if I was introducing the Explorer, I would take this, I’d put it down. I’d say what my character’s name is like, “Okay, I’m such and such and such. I work in the algae fields doing this. I think maybe there’s particular places off the islands that are more hospitable towards the farming operations we do on the algae. And so, we regularly have to go out on these like small boats, we have to go and find them explore.” That’s what my character does. That’s why I’m the Explorer. Give a little physical description of them, say who they are, they could give their pronouns and then at the end, talk about their relationships with the aspects. What it means that you identify with those three and which one do you feel like there’s undiscovered potential in. Like the fact that there’s undiscovered potential in one, maybe the Explorer believes that the Kerguelen Islands actually have some undiscovered geothermal potential and all the stuff that we’re doing with the algae could be supplemented at some point. Maybe they believe there’s some like mystical property in the algae themselves or in these farms. All sorts of different pieces of potential for them. That could be how I interpret this character if I was making a character from it.
But bottom-line point, that’s the only mechanical restriction on how you make your characters. After everyone has picked an archetype that they’re excited about, you can just say which one you picked. So, if I was doing this, I would say, “Okay, I pick the Explorer,” and once everyone has picked theirs, we would then go on to introductions. So, you don’t have to have everything figured out by the time you say which one you picked. You could just say what archetype you picked, and then we’ll fill in the blanks as we go along.
Okay, hope that wasn’t too long winded. Go ahead, pick your archetypes. Say what you pick as you pick them. And after everyone has picked, we’ll do introductions. Does anyone know which one they’d like to play from their hand?
Stephen: I’m going to choose the magician. Is there a way to– if I drag and drop, is that right?
Hakan: That should work in theory.
Stephen: Okay. “No one understands how you accomplish what you do. You have your secrets. People talk to you when they’ve exhausted all rational options. Then, you identify with only one of the aspects. Your secret lies within it.”
Hedvig: Very cool.
Ben: I can go next. I will actually drag it onto the field. I am the artist. “The isolation has a certain charm to it, thanks to you. You keep us going when things look the darkest. People talk to you about your masterpiece. And I identify with two of the aspects. One of those two is my muse.”
Hakan: Perfect. We’ll talk about what that means once everyone has gotten their archetypes picked.
Hedvig: Daniel, have you picked?
Daniel: I have chosen the healer. “When we hurt, we come to you. You make sure we’re ready to serve the isolation for another day. People talk to you about their pain. I identify with two of the aspects. One of them is the cause of our pain.”
Hedvig: Ooh. I like that. I’ve picked as well. I picked the sage. “You know so much of the past, so much that we’re doomed to repeat. People talk to you about burning questions. You identify with two of the aspects. One is the source of your knowledge.”
Hakan: All right, wonderful. So, if you could move that on to the play space too, Hedvig?
Hedvig: Yep.
Hakan: All right, great. Why don’t we take a couple minutes as a little break, while we formed the rest of our characters in our minds?
Hedvig: Here he is. Ben and–[crosstalk]
Ben: [crosstalk] Sorry, am I late? Oh, I’m a minute late, I apologize. I was just filling my partner in on everything we’ve done so far.
[laughter]
Hakan: Excellent.
Ben: That wasn’t a joke. I literally just did that. I was like, “I’ve got three aspects. And these are the three aspects. And then we’ve each [crosstalk] had to choose from details. And I had like three different cards. And this is the one I chose.”
Hakan: Right after we do introductions, we’ll start actually doing the language for the games.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: That was that was the interesting thing in the explanation. She was like, “What are you doing?” I was like, “I don’t know yet. It’s really fun.”
Hakan: Yeah, we haven’t actually gotten to the turn structure yet. But right after characters, we’ll get into what happens every turn. So, this is great. Does anyone need example character names, anything like that? Have you all thought of names for characters as well?
Ben: I have been given a name, and I apologize to everyone ahead of time.
Hedvig: Oh, your partner made a name for you?
Ben: Yep. More than an hour ago, I was like, “I’ve got to play this game, give me a name, whatever it is.” And so, yeah, she might have been in a bit more of a fantasy space at the time. But that’s okay, because I’m the artist and that’s going to fit in with my character.
Hakan: Yeah, sounds perfect.
Daniel: I could use some help, to be honest.
Ben: [chuckles]
Daniel: I could use a suggestion.
Hedvig: I think I would like to know what words of the language are going to sound like before–
Hakan: Generally, most of the words that we generate are going to be repurposed or mashed-up words in the language that we’re actually speaking as players. There are some special cards that introduce new words from actual phonemes and things. But that’s a smaller percentage of the new words that we come up with. For the most part, they’re going to be repurposing of existing words into different contexts, take to words mashing together, take something from a sound in nature, stuff like that. I’m not a linguist, so I apologize for misusing any of these things. But the phonemic inventory we would be using is generally from the language that we’re speaking as players.
Ben: Bad English, got it.
Hakan: Is that helpful?
Hedvig: Yeah, it is. I think I know a name. I think I’m good with my character, how do you feel, Steve?
Stephen: Uh, yeah, I’m going to pick a name from this optional names list.
Ben: Daniel, did you need to avail yourself of the services of the artist in terms of–
Daniel: Yes, please.
Ben: [chuckles]
Daniel: That’ll be wonderful.
Ben: So, you’re the healer, aren’t you?
Daniel: Yes.
Ben: I think that you should be called, your first name should be Danny so that’s good for either gender. So, you could go with a D-A-N-I, if you wanted to. I think your last name should be Louette.
Hedvig: Okay.
Hakan: Sounds good to me.
Ben: Danny Louette. And you spell that in whatever sort of vaguely French way you want to.
Daniel: [chuckles] I have.
Hakan: All right, perfect. For each of these, I’m just going to take [unintelligible [00:49:33] on the play space and put it next to the character card. So, for playing a person, we would take an index card fold it in two and put our character on there. Okay, cool. So, Sage being the first one on my list, let’s hear about your character.
Hedvig: I was thinking, the sage card says, I’m just going to enlarge it, “You know so much of the past, so much that we were doing to repeat people talk to you about burning questions, you identify with two of the aspects. One of them is source of your knowledge.” So, I’m going to play a man who’s in his, I’d say 60s. And he is the one who has filed the most GDPR complaints and knows the most about our exit from the data system. He identifies very much with the data security, data integrity aspect. He identifies a bit with the reason of being on desolate islands, and the algae is just ends to a mean. If [unintelligible 00:50:34] geothermal energy or whatever, he wouldn’t care so much.
Whenever something comes up, like someone’s like, “Oh, I’ve just discovered that I gave birth to a child, and she without our knowledge has been enrolled in the French healthcare system,” or whatever, I’m the person they come to with their burning questions about how to deal this. And I think he had a different name, but he has taken the name– this is very stupid, but it got stuck in my brain. So, I’m going to go with it. He’s taken the name Anti Admin.
Hakan: Cool.
Ben: I love it, and it makes my name in a second seem so much less dumb. So, I really appreciate that.
Hedvig: You’re welcome.
Hakan: All right. It sounds like Anti Admin is also somewhat of a– is he like a moral authority in some ways, because of-
Hedvig: Yeah.
Hakan: -how much he identifies with this– it sounds like he was one of the originators of this ideology.
Hedvig: I think he’s quite zealous and judgmental.
Hakan: [chuckles] Awesome.
Ben: What was the first word you said there, sorry, Hedvig, before judgmental?
Hedvig: Zealous.
Daniel: Zealous.
Ben: Zealous. I couldn’t catch it.
Hedvig: I’ve been playing Crusader Kings. It’s a trait.
Ben: [laughs]
Hakan: I also play too much Crusader Kings.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Hakan: Wonderful. Okay, magician. Let’s do the magician next.
Stephen: Okay, I’m hoping there’s not going to be too much overlap here, because I take it that your aspect was being the data anarchy aspect, but maybe in a slightly different way. My prompt is, “I identify as one of the aspects of my secret lies within it.” So, I’ll give you the name first. The name that I came up with is Esther Forte. F-O-R-T-E, because I saw it on a packet of medicine that’s on my desk. The Forte that is not the– Esther was in the example names, I look for a surname that sort of French– Forte is French surname, right? Anyway, Esther Forte, she was in charge of ensuring that the people who came onto the compound did not sneak in any devices that could be used to attached to the outside world, because the range of devices that could be attached is so wide now on the means of attachment is so wide, there is incredibly strict prohibition. So, pretty much anything electronic above the level of a very old calculator would have been confiscated, if it was brought on. But she used this position of power to keep her own device, which is still air gapped, she actually still believes in the data anarchy, no connections cause–
Hedvig: But?
Stephen: But what she did was–
[laughter]
Stephen: What she did– in her own mind, this is how it’s just– she got the– there’s like, I think, a read-only version of Wikipedia that you can compress and download all of the, let’s say, English or French, I’m not sure exactly how we’re going to do the operating language. But the English language Wikipedia is larger, I take it, so she wanted to take as much information as she could. She’s compressed that she’s got on a device so she has access to it, but completely secretly. She was pretty much the only one who’s able to do this because she had the most power in preventing other people from bringing devices onto the island. She seems to be a magician. Nobody understands how she accomplishes what she does, because she has access to all this information that other people don’t.
Hedvig: I like that.
Hakan: Perfect. I assume that this is still quite a valuable skill, given that no one else has access to all this information. Even stuff like what are the geographic coordinates of the next island. Like in the chain of what do you do if someone is suffering from some sort of mineral deficiency or hypothermia or medical knowledge, all sorts of different things, Esther just always seems to have the answer and never really revealed why.
Stephen: Right.
Hedvig: Yeah. I like that a lot.
Hakan: All right. Let’s go to our artist next.
Ben: Okay. Just to convey how this character just arrived as far as the community is concerned. When everyone went to the Kerguelen Islands, as we mentioned, there had been vague kooky news stories, and everyone basically just went, fuck it, up sticks, we’re going. But it’s known. This place is known and who were there is known, and so that open invitation that we nibble around the edges of earlier of like, “Hey, anyone who wants to join us, who believes what we believe, just show up.” Basically, relatively recently, in the auspices of the community, so the community was there, it got set up. And then, a while later, a very small, like a concerningly small, one-person sailboat arrived at the island in just a horrific state of disrepair, think Jack Sparrow, just stepping off the mast of the sinking dingy at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean.
My character who stepped off the boat, it’s a she and just waited patiently by the shore, not wanting to be rude to anyone. When members of the community kind of came up like, “Hi.” She just said, “Look, hello, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Grinchelwald, the Harbinger of Übermensch. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: [laughs] My God.
Ben: Just in case you missed that, that’s Grinchelwald, the Harbinger of Übermensch, that is my name. That is my full name. I am an artist, a creator, and I am here to contribute to your community in as many ways as I am able to contribute. I know about this community, I’ve done preliminary research. I have a real strong affinity with two of the key aspects being the– as a bit of a change, I’m going to go with the isolation. So, like the Kerguelen Islands themselves, I feel a deep connection to them. Also, to the technology, which is the central aspect of what allows everything that I see something profoundly artistically significant about one real tangible aspect of existence, literally being the ultimate building block of an entire society, that core concept to me is profoundly artistically fascinating. One of those two aspects is the muse through which all of my artistic work is lens through. Do I tell that to you guys now or do I keep that to myself?
Hakan: You can tell it to us now. Our characters might not know about it, but I think it’s usually fun for players, us humans to know about them.
Ben: The Kerguelen Islands themselves are my ultimate creative muse, through which I am slowly constructing some sort of ultimate masterpiece, which people like to ask me about all the time. But aside from the ultimate masterpiece, I’d like to think that I am a useful member of the community in that you can always rely on me to just be playing a nice, fun tune on a Friday night in the communal space. Or you can find me just randomly giving a beautiful painting to someone for their home just to spruce it up a little bit. I just make stuff and I just try and make everyone’s experience just a little bit less grim and cold and Antarctic.
Hakan: Very nice. I’m sure everyone appreciates that. [chuckles] Maybe. Last, we have the healer. Daniel, let’s hear about the– Oh, what’s Esther’s pronouns, by the way? I don’t think I caught that.
Ben: Grinchelwald goes by she, her or they.
Hakan: Or they. Okay, perfect.
Stephen: Esther is she/her.
Daniel: I came to the community a little bit later. My name is Danny, and my pronouns are he/him/his. I came because of– I was actually against the aims of the community, but then something happened. A loss that I suffered that I have never talked about with anybody in the community. But it has deepened me and made me more empathetic. The two aspects that I identify with are the data anarchy, the privacy and surveillance, because I know what happened. And then, I am into the algae. I love technology. I like what’s happening. I’m constantly impressed with what the technicians come up with. The aspect that is painful for me is the Kerguelen Islands. I have deep ties to place and I miss where I used to be, and these islands have a way of getting to you after a while, this place. I’d be happy to do this somewhere else, but this is where we are. So, that’s the pain for me.
Hakan: That sounds perfect. Could you tell me a little bit more about the healer part of it? Do people come to talk to you as a therapist because you know what people have gone through? Why do people come to talk to you about? Let me remember what the phrase is. Is it about their pain, right? Do you help them with it? Do they just naturally gravitate towards you?
Daniel: I don’t have any background in counseling or anything like that. I just seem to be the one that people always come to with this. Maybe this is because I don’t know much and I don’t say much, but I listen and I allow the sadness to have a space.
Hakan: Perfect. All right, wonderful.
Ben: You’re the Mr. Rogers of the community. You’ve got no formal training in any kind of psychological anything, but you are just a phenomenal, emotionally salient human being.
Daniel: Yes.
Hakan: And maybe a more angsty, tortured [crosstalk].
[chuckles]
Daniel: I carry a lot of my own pain, and so people feel that.
Ben: Goth Mr. Rogers, got it.
Hakan: That sounds perfect. I just want to make sure we all have reasons why others come to talk to us. And that sounds great, that people naturally gravitate towards you, and they have pain, they want to talk about something, I think is exactly what we’re looking for. Now, I will put that deck away. And now we’re ready to get started.
Everyone should have three cards in their hands. These are three concepts and each turn– well, let me phrase it this way. Every turn of Dialect has three phases. Those are, make a connection, build a word, have a conversation. Every single turn of the game is going to go that exact same way. Make a connection, build the word, have a conversation. Just remember that there are three phases and what they are will be pretty clear after I start explaining it. The first phase, make a connection. For that, you’ll take one of the cards from your hand. For example, here, I’ll take friends. Now, make a connection means I’m going to take that card and I’m going to connect it to one of the aspects in the community. When I do that, I’ll explain why that aspect has led to us having a special word for this concept. I’m not going to define what this new word is at this point. I’m going to say like– so let’s say for friends, I might tie that to–
Let’s say data anarchy. Here I’ll explain why our word for friend was affected or we have a new word for friend, because of our data anarch aspect. So, I might say like, the reason why we have a new word here is, let’s say–
Hedvig: Facebook-ruined friend.
Hakan: Yep. Facebook-ruined friend. Yeah, exactly. Maybe we just have so much baggage around the word friends because of Facebook. That’s a great reason.
Ben: That’s– Wow.
[laughter]
Stephen: You played this game before.
Hakan: That’s a great explanation. But I haven’t made a new word for it. I’ve just said why we have a new word for it. Now, we’ll have a little conversation where everyone can suggest words for what this new word might be. I ask the player whose turn it is will choose ultimately what becomes the new word, what our new word for friend is. But that doesn’t mean that I have to come up with it on my own, is the point I’m trying to make. I can say like, “I’m looking for a word that kind of feels like this, that kind of goes this way, and so other folks can give suggestions. If I do have just the perfect word in my mind already, I can just be like, “Okay, cool. I already know what’s going to be the words going to be. The word is going to be this,” and that’s going to be our new word for friend.
In this example here, when I put down friends, I might say– I think that because this was such a deliberate motion, where we deliberately eliminated the word ‘friend’ from our vocabulary, we picked a word that just never appeared online, that denoted some amount of connection to be our word for friend. Just something that as removed from the internet from the digital world as possible. What that word is, where it comes from, I don’t really have a great idea, but I’d love to hear what other people might suggest for what our word here could be.
What do you folks think? What might we have decided to call friends based on that? Thinking certainly something tied to, the physical world in terms of geology, like actual tangible, like soil, dirt, rocks, stuff, like that might make sense but that doesn’t quite get that friendship vibe to it. Anyone have anything striking people in terms of what lines of thoughts might be appropriate there–? [crosstalk]
Stephen: Yeah. In terms of physicality, something to do with the body as well, maybe even the face or head or even the eyes, the fact that it’s not possible to be friends in a data anarchy society or almost impossible, unless you have face-to-face contact in some way, or at least physical proximity.
Daniel: And I feel like– maybe just kicking out, the part of the word that keeps coming back to me is “Am,” like “I am” because there’s so many words like friendship, because we’re kind of French based. And so, the French word ‘ami’ comes back to me. So, having that part somewhere in there just seems natural.
Ben: I was thinking words for physical person-to-person connection. So, clasp, grasp, grip, or could be viable stand-ins for friend, “Oh, that’s my grip, Bob. He’s just such a great guy.”
[chuckles]
Hakan: Oh, yeah. Maybe that’s something that friends do when they greet each other too [crosstalk] grab each other.
Ben: Yeah, exactly, like we grip hands or we grip forearms or something like that. I don’t know.
Hakan: I think that sounds great. I like the French phonetic piece of it too. But I think it might be a little hard to put both of them at once. I’m going to pick the grip suggestion. So, let’s do grip is our word for friend.
Ben: Sorry, Daniel.
Daniel: No, it’s cool.
Hakan: It’s all collaborative. [laughs] It’s fun. It’s not a judgment on anything. I think that’s a wonderful idea too.
Ben: It’s all collaborative and I need to collaborate the most.
Hakan: And I collaborated the best. Yeah. Here, we’ll make that now– Grip will be our new word for friend. I put grip down and I will say (friends) as being our little word for friends. So, we did make a connection was when we played the card on the table. Build a word is when we came up with our new word based on that aspect. And the third thing now is have a conversation where two of the characters will have a conversation based on the prompt at the bottom. The prompt at the bottom is a revelation among friends. For this, usually, since I don’t have a character and I took the first turn, it’s a little wonky. But here normally we would pick on the characters– or the person whose turn it is will pick another character arcs to have a short conversation with, where the only restriction needs is that both of the players will demonstrate their characters’ relationship to this word in some way, either by using it or conspicuously avoiding to use it. So, not all the characters are going to love all the words, not all the characters use all the words all the time. But by the end of this conversation, we should understand how both of the characters in the scene feel about this word. And the prompt for the scene is revelation among friends. Who do we think are friends here and who might be able to think of something their character might want to reveal to another one?
Hedvig: Oh. Wait, both the healer and the artist arrived after the initial settlement?
Hakan: Mm-hmm.
Hedvig: Because I think means that my character is just still on the fence about them. So, I don’t think we’re friends. I think my characters also a little bit skeptical of Esther’s vast knowledge [crosstalk].
Hakan: Yeah.
Ben: Basically, what you’re establishing–
Hedvig: I’m not friends with anyone.
Ben: [crosstalk] -you’re not friends with anyone? [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah. I think it was among friends, so I think some of the other people. How do you pronounce the first name, Ben, again?
Ben: Grinchelwald.
Hedvig: Grinchelwald and Danny are both newer. Maybe they’re more friends because of that. I don’t know.
Ben: I can absolutely-
Daniel: I got that too.
Ben: -improv a conversation with Danny.
Hakan: Cool. The prompt for the conversation is a revelation among friends. Adhere to that as closely or as loosely as you want. It’s just meant as a prompt to get you going. By the end, we can call the scene and then the scene, when we both heard you use the word ‘grip’, or explicitly conspicuously not use the word. So, go ahead. Where do you think this revelation is taking place? Set the scene before we start talking a little bit.
Ben: I was thinking that I have knocked on Danny’s algae door, algae curtain, algae plastic wrap that fixes the front of his domicile. Because Danny, like myself, came fairly late on thinking that he’s one of the ones that is fairly removed from the central community. So, I’m taking it upon myself to make sure that Danny doesn’t, just by the nature of the distance, just naturally become excluded. So, that’s why I’m knocking on his algae flap.
Daniel: Grinchelwald, what a surprise.
Ben: Danny, I’m so sorry to bother you. I hope I’m not putting you out. I’m not finding you in the middle of something where you’d rather be alone right now.
Daniel: No, no, that’s great. Anybody’s welcome.
Ben: Excellent. Actually, I’ve brought something for you, if that’s not too unusual.
Daniel: That’s very kind. Well, what is it? Oh, it’s all wrapped up. What is it? What have you got there?
Ben: Well, I’ve actually prepared a small work for you. I know you haven’t been on the island long. So, I imagine that you’ve pretty much only got what you came with here in the hut. So, I thought a small token of our burgeoning grip-ship would be something that you might find quite helpful, or at least a little bit. Kerguelen, as much as I love it, it can be a little bit hostile, a little bit harsh. So, I thought something just to soften some of those craggy edges off these fair islands might help you out.
Daniel: Well, thank you very much, Grinchel. I’ve got to ask though, how do you do it? I’ve seen the kinds of things that you’re doing out here, I know how you love this place, and it’s great. It’s a great place and I’m really glad to be here on the mission. How do you manage? How do you come to love this place so much?
Ben: Ah, I just have always felt a deep affinity for that which I guess other people see no value in. The Kerguelen Islands just always struck me as a place of such phenomenal, exceptional isolation. Isolation in an order pretty much unparalleled anywhere else in the world. I think if I can get a little bit weird on you for a second, I think I draw a power from that in its own way. I think I would be happy here even if no one else was here.
Daniel: Well, the power of isolation. Well, I suppose that is what we signed up for when we came here. Thank you for thinking of me. That’s very grip like of you.
Ben: Honestly, this is what I love to do. Don’t feel obligated to– if you look at this in your house for a while, and in any way brings bad feelings or vibes to you, feel free to just chuck it straight into the algae recycler, because I’m going to just keep making work. So, don’t feel for a second that you’re obligated to hold on to something. But if it does bring you joy and happiness.
Daniel: No, it’s lovely. Thank you, I really do appreciate that. It reminds me of the kinds of things that my daughter used to bring home from school back in the old place.
Ben: I’m glad. I’m really, really glad. And if you ever wanted to come around and talk more about the old times, I know it doesn’t get talked about a lot, but always love to chat.
Daniel: And it’s not good to dwell on it. This is where we are and it’s a great place. It’s a great place to be. But thank you.
Ben: Well, I’ll see you soon. Okay?
Daniel: Okay. Thank you.
Hakan: And scene. Perfect. We both got to learn a little bit about your relationship together, learn a little bit more about some of your backgrounds, and see some variants on grip too. We heard grip like, grip-ship, all sorts of stuff like that. So, very, very nice. We go around and take one turn each. Ben, since you did the conversation, how about we kind of consider that your turn in Age One just to make sure we go through the correct amounts? Next in my order here would be– Stephen, would you be ready to go?
Stephen: Yeah.
Hakan: Okay, great.
Stephen: My card is going to be, “Good luck. How we affirm our hope in happy outcomes. A spoken wish for victory that bonds us together. A particular kind of look or fortune for the isolation,” and I assign this to an aspect, right?
Hakan: Yeah, versus make a connection. So, you’ll connect the turn aspect, say why we have a new word for it.
Stephen: Yes. I’m thinking that since so much is tied to the success of the algae blooming, that it makes sense that our concepts and words for good-looking beneficence would be very strongly tied to the well-functioning of that system. So, I’m going to put it down with the algae. On my screen, at least much, much huger than the algae aspects. So, it sort of covering up that entire quarter of the board. But I’ll just leave it there.
Hakan: Go for it. I’ll make it a little tinier.
Stephen: Oh, that’s better.
Hakan: That sounds fantastic. So that’s your connection. What kind of word are you feeling for that something around the algae something to capture that unpredictableness, well wish, that there’s a good bloom, something like that.
Stephen: Yeah. Bloom was the first word that came to mind, but really any kind of verb, I think, that would describe some kind of biological fecundity in that sense. Maybe even tied to water as well, because it’s always going to be growing in the water. That’s the first set of thoughts I had.
Hakan: Our new words also don’t have to necessarily just be one word. We could take two words that are related and mash them together. It could be something based on a sound. Really, feel free to make up any weird reason why a word might have come to replace good luck.
Hedvig: Mm. Do we have rain– you talk about water. Have we got a way of making sweet water, or do we rely on rain?
Stephen: Freshwater. Yeah, I guess rain makes a lot of sense, if there’s enough of it.
Hedvig: Hmm, but then I don’t know how to say– I don’t know how rain could be luck. Maybe, I don’t know.
Stephen: Yeah, I don’t know– [crosstalk]
Ben: I’m trying to think a word like quench maybe or in terms of– what’s the nicest thing to word for water being really nutrient rich? Is there a good word for that? Because that feels like a thing that we, as algae harvesters, would always really want and desire, and not–[crosstalk]
Hakan: I think I always associate with that as like murkiness. Like, I always feel that or I remember hearing a lot, that the clearer the water is, the less stuff is in it, the less likely things are to grow in it.
Ben: Muck or brackish, brack, something like that?
Hakan: Brack.
Hedvig: Isn’t brackish a mix between freshwater–
Ben: Salt and water. Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah. Which maybe is exactly where the algae love to be. I don’t know. Yeah, we just decided there’s some sort of river or something. Maybe.
Hakan: Muck also sounds like luck.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: Maybe the fertilizer is called muck.
Ben: Oh, I like that. Like slurry, like we feed some sort of nutrient-rich slurry into the water to make it ready for the algae, I don’t know.
Hedvig: But how does that become a phrase? Because good luck is something you wish upon someone else, because you’re like, “Good luck for tomorrow with,” whatever. So, is it like, “I hope you have a nice slurry.” [chuckles] what’s the–
Ben: So, we have to feed the algae something. Like, “I hope you slurry the feed.”
Hedvig: But that just sounds like, “I hope you did the dishes.” [laughs]
Ben: Okay, fair enough.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Which sounds specific. Maybe I’m–[crosstalk]
Hakan: [laughs]
Stephen: I think brack can look good just because of the ‘r’ sound because I was thinking like when you say break a leg, that also has the K and G. It seems like–
Hedvig: Hmm.
Ben: Yeah. Okay.
Stephen: [crosstalk] -those are things that are just punching because it’s like, I don’t know the type of phrase it is.
Ben: What if we use both? Brackymuck is really invoking, like I either have just one huge or I hope you win huge. Whereas brack or muck is like lower-order luck.
Stephen: Did you say brackymuck, like one–
Daniel: Brackymuck.
Stephen: Brackymuck, that’s good.
[crosstalk]
Hakan: Brackymuck, that sounds great.
[crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah, you decide.
Hakan: Your turn.
Stephen: Oh, okay. Yeah, then brackymuck sounds great.
Hakan: Well, brackymuck it this. I’ll put that down next to it.
Stephen: And like Daniel said, you can have one or the other, but if you really want to push it, then it’s both.
Hakan: Yeah, maybe there are even other ways to make it punchier two. Brackymuck. It’s just like one word, right?
Stephen: Yeah, sure.
Hakan: All right. Brackymuck. What’s the conversation prompt on your card?
Stephen: It says when good luck is needed most.
Hakan: All right. So, who would Esther have a conversation about when good luck is needed most with at the table?
Stephen: I guess none of us are actual technicians. But as the Sage, Anti also has some– you have some kind of say, but that’s more with the data kind of thing.
Hedvig: I think Sage is like, I know about the past because now there’s nothing to– you’re apparently the police enforcer more than me.
Ben: Only in a relatively narrow margin. Esther enforces essentially what I interpreted it as digital customs, like when people got there–
Stephen: Yeah, when you arrived, “Yeah, I just checked you out. Make sure everything was okay. Make sure your ship was safely sunk and wasn’t going to be resurrected.” [crosstalk]
Ben: Since then, it needs to be noted. Not that our characters are aware of this. You have some sort of be the natural technical know-how on just about every polymath field possible because you’ve got Wikipedia in your back pocket.
Stephen: Right.
Hedvig: By the way, I still really liked the idea of having Wikipedia when no one else has it, is essentially magic. Which is–
Ben: You’re God now.
Hedvig: Yeah, which is pretty true. Where were you going with the theme, idea?
Stephen: Oh, just the idea that it was maybe the new season for an algae bloom and one of us was going out or going to assist on it. Or maybe everyone necessarily as a kibbutz-type thing. Maybe everyone takes their turn in assisting in doing the labor work. So, maybe your card has come up to help the scientists and technicians, so you’re only going to be doing the leg work or whatever but you still–
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: That’s a fun idea. Like one of you is arrived at the other person’s space just to basically be like, “Oh, we’re both on the thing you do today.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. And I may or may not be trying to incept some ideas into you, that I’ve checked out by reading secret Wikipedia that would actually help the scientists.
Hedvig: Oh, interesting.
Stephen: Now that might be a bit too on the nose.
Hakan: I like how you used incept as another [unintelligible [01:22:21] word.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah. Okay.
Hakan: And feel free to use past words too, like grip that comes up. It’s not required. We just need to hear the brackymuck to fulfill the requirements of the scene. But the more words we use, the more fun it is too.
Stephen: Okay. I’m going to come to your door early. [door knocks]
Hedvig: What is it?
Stephen: [French language]
Hedvig: [laughs] Do you want to do this in French?
Stephen: I’m not going to do it in French. No, that was just–
Hedvig: Por favor? But that feels really– Yeah, let me just get the mask and the suit on. We’re on the same roster, are we? Is that why you’re here?
Stephen: Hi. No, I’m not on today, actually, Anti, I just came to issue brackymuck on the first day of the new seeding.
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I think this year, it looks like an exceptionally tough year. So, I’m very thankful for good grips like you wishing me brackymuck.
Stephen: Yeah, you know you can always come over if there’s been any issues with the seeding or anything, you can always talk to me about it. I don’t know as much as you about it or the scientists obviously, but being just next door, we can always have a word.
Hedvig: Oh, that’s very kind of you. Did you have any particular suggestions for this year’s harvest?
Stephen: Well, I’m grips with a couple of the scientists down there, and I just hear them talking. I don’t know much, but it did sound like mixing in a couple of quarts of sodium benzothrate would maybe increase the yield by a couple of percentage points. But I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Hedvig: Uh-huh. [chuckles] I named my character, Anti-Admin, sort of narrows his eyes and it’s like, “Uh-huh. Yeah. I’ll relay that. That’s a great suggestion, maybe, I don’t know.”
Stephen: You know, who knows with a bit of bracky, just have good thoughts about it. You can push that, I’m sure you can manage.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm. Well, I am very grateful for all the– this is a nice community. I’m really happy that so many people know that we can come together as a community and be supportive of each other. Even if we don’t know all of each other’s business, so I’ll refrain from asking you how you found out where sodium benzoate works on algae, but that is very interesting. I’ll talk to you more about it later.
Stephen: Yeah, sodium benzothrate. Definitely don’t try sodium benzoate, I assume. I have no idea. Yeah, those are two very different chemicals, I imagine.
[laughter]
Stephen: Probably good not to get–[crosstalk] I can write it down. No, probably best not. Actually, you know what? Just forget that I was here. Brackymuck, and have a good one. I’ll see you tonight.
Hedvig: Okay. Thank you.
Stephen: Au revoir.
Hedvig: I think Esther scurries away quickly.
Hakan: Brackymuck, too cute. All right, the lightbulb. So, now we know a little bit more about the tension between Esther and Anti. Next one in my current order is Anti.
Hedvig: Oh, right. Yeah, I was actually thinking of something related to what we just did. So, I was going to think of a new word for a greeting. How we greet one another, small rituals to open conversations that reflect who we are. It may differ based on who we say it to or when we say it, and prompt is meeting unexpected space. I was thinking that maybe this algae cultivation has rosters, like maybe there needs to be someone there all the time, so you have maybe three or four shifts a day. And maybe greetings are based on shifts in some sort of way. Or, maybe you greet someone who’s on the same shift as you with a different word than people who are in a different shift from you.
Hakan: Also, you think the shifts are permanently set? Like the morning crew is always the morning crew and they have their greetings amongst themselves after–[crosstalk]
Ben: Like on a ship?
Hedvig: Yeah. I’ve always wanted to try and get English or any language to– like good morning should be referred for the first time you meet someone, regardless of when in the day that is. So, if you meet someone in night, you say good morning, because it’s the first time you meet them.
Hakan: That’s the morning of your relationship for that day?
Hedvig: The morning of your interactive session. Yeah.
Ben: I love that one of the two linguists on the show has somehow figured out in a game about being a language isolate be like, “What if we could make three different language isolates within the same?”
Hedvig: [laughs] That is a good point. Maybe it’s not good for people to always be on the night shift. So, maybe it does rotate, but I don’t know, something with shift and greetings. What do you guys think?
Stephen: Just for the change of shift was that one of the ideas, like, they’re coming in, they’re coming out. That seems like a particularly–[crosstalk]
Ben: Yeah, I was thinking change or a word, what do you call it, a thingy? What’s the word I’m looking for? What’s the word that means a word that also means the different word?
Hedvig: [crosstalk]
Ben: Yeah, that one. Something like change, for change, and you would basically say, “Good change to you, sir,” or whatever it would be.
Hedvig: Ah.
Ben: The changes in the shifts are kind of the part of the day where all of those agitator-y forces where you come into contact with others and all that kind of stuff.
Hedvig: Hmm. Or, how about good on, good off?
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: Wow. I like it.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -it’s different for.
Ben: What I like there is it’s right for contraction. So, you’ve got like, goodon and goodoff, that sort of thing.
Stephen: Yeah.
Hedvig: [crosstalk]
Stephen: And anytime if you come in, and then if it changes to like, you use it just coming in and out of rooms or something, then it’s if you just–
Daniel: Yeah.
Stephen: You just entered a room, you have to say one of them, and the other person says the other one or something.
Hedvig: It’s like you know how when you say like happy travels, you want to have a good answer. You want to say like happy stay at home.
[laughter]
Ben: You too.
Hedvig: You too. I don’t know. So, I like that there is already a created answer. Even if it’s wrong, if someone said goodon to you, you’re supposed to answer goodoff.
Stephen: Yeah.
Ben: I like the idea that there would also be some sort of vague, almost like– what’s the word I’m looking for? Like you could communicate your interest or disinterest in someone with how you bargain with the greeting. So, if I come in and I’m taking over from, say, someone’s shift or I’m just like, my shift is beginning and someone else’s shift is ending. And I start with goodon as the person coming off, even though it’s the other person’s turn to start by saying good– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Oh, yeah.
Ben: I’m trying to saying, like, “I don’t care very much about you. I’m more concerned with my space and what’s going on for me,” kind of thing.
Hedvig: Oh, wow. Way to get passive aggressiveness into it. [chuckles]
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Hakan: Just to make sure that I’m understanding correctly, is this something we only use while changing shifts or has it merged into the rest of the language from there?
Hedvig: Well, I was going to ask about that, because if you enter the communal space, and neither of you are on a shift, maybe there’s the third term, but I think Ben is just saying you use goodon, goodoff in those situations as well.
Ben: What if in a situation like that, if you’ve both come to the communal space for some sort of like recreational time, then the accepted thing is goodon and goodon because you’re both there to start. This sort of tacit understanding that if people are going to a place to engage in a thing, it’s not really about shifts anymore, it’s just about like, whatever you’re doing at that moment.
Hakan: Yeah, it kind of sounds like goodon is acknowledgement of entering, and goodoff is like the “I am leaving” kind of thing [crosstalk] shifts.
Ben: Yeah, it’s [crosstalk] goodbye.
[crosstalk]
Hakan: Well, kind of.
[laughter]
Hakan: Based on the shifts, but that’s what the sense I got from the last line of conversation, but that might not be accurate, or may not be what you’re seeing there.
Hedvig: No, I think you’re right, but I am happy with that. Yeah, sure.
Hakan: Because I think that it’s a cool– you can contract it, you could make it just like on, off. You can do all sorts of weird stuff with it. So, I think it’ll be a rich one to play with. So goodon, goodoff, we’ll say, for greeting/valediction. What’s your prompt for conversation?
Hedvig: Meeting in an unexpected place.
Hakan: Cool. Who are you going to meet?
Hedvig: First of all, I was thinking that we can just continue the scene from before that I have now gone to my shift that you’ve wished me brackymuck for. Either I meet Grenchelwald or Danny at the shift. Oh, maybe it’s a bit confusing, because maybe I know we’re on the same shift together but we accidentally meet in the bathroom. So, normally, you say goodon and goodoff as you’re going through a particular hallway. But we meet in the bathroom, and it’s a bit awkward.
Hakan: [chuckles]
Hedvig: I’m assuming we don’t really have necessarily gender-separated bathrooms, maybe just have a bunch of stalls?
Ben: Let’s say so, yeah. We probably got a slightly more enlightened approach to toileting than Western society.
Hakan: And resource constrained too, I’m sure.
Hedvig: Yeah, building two entirely different things with urinals like, felt like a lot. I don’t know which one make most sense to meet. Maybe Grinchelwald, my notes here include obsessed with algae.
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Hedvig: So, maybe you have a particular enthusiasm for getting on the shift. And, yeah, maybe we start there.
Ben: Okay, so we’re in the toilet. Am I already in the toilet and you’ve just walked in?
Hedvig: Yes, you’re at the sink.
Ben: We’re proximal to where a shift is about to start, but we would have normally met at some sort of monitoring console, but now we’re both in the toilet.
Hedvig: Yeah. And I open door. “Oh.”
Ben: Okay. You come into the toilet and I’m sitting on a toilet, but my pants aren’t down. I’m not using the toilet. I’m just sitting on the toilet like a chair. The stall door is open. So, as you walk in, I can see you from where I’m sitting and you can see me, and I am just absentmindedly like drumming on my thighs, like I’m just looking into the middle distance and I’m just like, [drumming] clearly not using the toilet. There is no real, ostensible reason for me to be in the toilet, that just happens to be where I am doing a little drumming thing, and you walk in. I don’t stop drumming but you come in and you say, “Oh,” and I’m just, like, “Goodon to you, Anti. How are ya?”
Hedvig: Good on, Grinchelwald. What made you so excited this morning?
Ben: Just working with the algae obviously, only the greatest thing going on in our lives [drumming].
Hedvig: I agree that it’s led us to a lot of great success in being in this space, but surely, we should continue our research to find maybe even greater, more efficient ways of generating energy and food.
Ben: No doubt. Yeah, I’m down with that. I’ve got no– I am so okay with anything that happens on these islands because if it’s happening on these islands, then it was meant to happen on these islands and I am for it. Having said that, uh, don’t see us moving completely away from algae anytime soon, considering it literally powers, fuels, and builds basically everything. So, I’m just grooving to the vibe of the algae. [drumming]
Hedvig: That’s very good of you, Grinchelwald. You’re new here, aren’t you?
Ben: Relatively. Yeah, I’ve only been here like maybe two years.
Hedvig: Well, that’s not that new.
[chuckles]
Ben: Sorry. When I said that I’m kind of assuming, stepping out of my character for a moment, that the original cohort of people have maybe been here for like five or six years, so by their standards, I’m still very much new.
Hedvig: Oh, okay.
Ben: Interesting new thing by the understood chronology of the space.
Hedvig: I’m thinking of a way of being skeptical towards your attachment to the anarchy, but I’m struggling with a good in that, so maybe I won’t have one.
Ben: What if while I’m drumming, you can see that I’ve got little headphones coming from my ears, like old school wired headphones. And while I’m drumming like a few suspiciously sounding alerts, like message alerts, are blipping through on my phone or whatever device I’ve got in my pocket. You don’t know what it is but I it looks very out of place in this deeply data anarchistic society.
Hedvig: I think Anti would take two steps away and be like, “What the fuck is that?” and point at your pocket.
Ben: Oh, yes. Fair response. I understand why you would be so afraid. I take the headphones out, which I can’t actually do because then I can’t hear you. I almost slapstickily spool out this suspiciously long cord to like a really old iPod Shuffle. You remember the tiny little ones that just have the– and I just go look, I’ve just actually got on this a series of hydrophone recordings of the aquatic environment around the Kerguelen Islands. So, right now, what I’m just like rocking out to is the sound of the monarch penguins feeding around the springtime and they’re the incessant cackling of their beaks as they harvest anchovies from around the rocks. It’s just– Oh, man, it’s nothing like it. Do you want to listen? Do you want to hear?
Hedvig: I know there are different opinions in our community, but I do believe that our fellow grips in the animal kingdom also have a right to privacy.
Ben: [exhales] I never thought about it like that.
Hedvig: This is not something we wrote in our foundations, it’s not something that everyone needs to abide by, but I would like to not engage in this activity. I don’t want to listen to other beings eating or doing anything else without them knowing that they’re being recorded.
Ben: I just slowly retract my offered headphone.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: It just very slowly goes back into my ear. And I just look at you, and I give you one of those annoying artist stares, which isn’t really judgmental, but it gives off this wafting sense of, “Argh, here we go again,” kind of thing. I don’t roll my eyes, but you can tell I’ve rolled my eyes on the inside kind of thing. And I just go, “Look, the last thing I would want to do, Anti, is upset you, obviously, because you are a very important member of the community who I would love to never be on the wrong side of, so whatever it is you want me to do with these bad boys, you just let me know, and I will– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: No, it’s a schism within our community, whether animals deserve privacy or not and there are the people in the community who believe like you, so I won’t force you to do something one way or another. This isn’t part of our rules. It’s just my personal preference. So, you do whatever you want, but I would just like to not take part of it. Anti surprisingly walks around and forgets that he was supposed to have a wee and walks out and says, “Goodon, goodon. See you in a bit.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. I’ll be right out. The Monarchs are basically finishing up their frenzy now anyway, so I’ll just be a sec. Good– good– goodon to you too.
Hakan: And scene. Perfect. All right. We got to learn about animal privacy rights a little bit. Daniel, do you have a card picked up for your connection?
Daniel: I have. They were all so good but I have chosen filler word.
Hedvig: Hmm.
Daniel: Sometimes we need to fill the air and stall for time. This unique way of gathering space to speak is particular to us, and it’s a scene in which someone is left speechless. It’s got to be something short, and it has to be a reason why we don’t use ‘um’ because that’s so natural.
Ben: I like the idea that in this place that we are, the wind is near ever present. So, it’s almost oppressive in its windiness. Because so nothing really controls our lives or impacts our lives more than the intensity of the physical environment that we find ourselves in, what if our filler word isn’t actually a word in the traditional sense, but a mimicry or an imitation of a whistling wind? Similar to the idea of when you’re really impressed by something, you go [whistles] but we replaced the whistle with more like a [mimics wind swhoosh].
Hedvig: I was thinking the same sound, but for a completely different reason.
Ben: [laughs] Cool.
Hedvig: I was thinking of just a long S sound, because it’s the most similar to white noise, so you would mask if you’re being recorded. Maybe I’m paranoid.
Ben: [laughs]
Stephen: That’s amazing.
Daniel: This is who we are.
Hedvig: I think I picked the most paranoid character.
Ben: True. You just play a character, Hedvig. [crosstalk]
Daniel: So, do we go [hissing]?
Hedvig: [woof] or whatever Ben wanted.
Daniel: [whoosh] with a W.
Ben: Or go, [whoo]
Hedvig: You want to be able to stay in it?
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: I don’t know, maybe you don’t.
Ben: You can break it up with little T’s and stuff. If you’re just like [mimics noise]
Hakan: Anything that would give a recording device trouble, basically.
[laughter]
Stephen: There’s something a little paradoxical about attempting to reconstruct this while we’re all recording– [crosstalk]
Daniel: [laughs] Fricatives are awesome.
Stephen: The next.
Ben: Yeah, my bad everyone. Sorry.
Stephen: [laughs]
Daniel: No, I like it though.
Hakan: So, a whooshing sound is what we landed on. I will tie that to the data anarchy. It’s like half data anarcy, half islands themselves. Why don’t I just put on the islands since we don’t have one there but it’s clearly influenced by both, I think. The whooshing sound, maybe that spoke to us of the wind because of how much it interfered with recording devices, stuff like that. That’s perfect.
Ben: Yeah, it’s really hard to record someone surreptitiously when there is an ever-present wind all of the time.
Hakan: Perfect.
Daniel: That’s good.
Hakan: All right. Who is Danny going to be having a conversation with that will leave someone speechless?
Daniel: I feel like Danny is going to talk– I’m going to go visit Esther.
Hakan: Cool. The all-knowing Esther. [laughs] Very nice.
Daniel: Yep.
Hakan: In Esther shelter?
Daniel: Let’s see. I found Esther outside. It’s not very common for us to be outside, but we’re both finding ourselves there. Okay. Esther, goodon.
Stephen: Oh, goodon, Danny. Surprised to see you here.
Daniel: Well, same as well. I mean it’s a cold one, isn’t it?
Stephen: Yeah. I can barely hear you over the sound of the wind.
Daniel: [chuckles]
Stephen: Come a little closer, grip.
Daniel: I was [whoosh] I was thinking about something and I thought I would bring it to you.
Stephen: Sure.
Daniel: Has it ever occurred to you that we came here to get away from surveillance? And yet [whoosh] I don’t really know how to say this. The nature of our community has put us under a good deal of surveillance ourselves. Seems like a lot of us are [whooshing] hiding something. We came to escape the watchful eye, but here we are being watched. Do you get that sense?
Stephen: [whoosh] No.
[chuckles]
Stephen: Sorry, I should have said [sshhh]. By someone in particular, Danny, do you mean by the island itself?
Daniel: [whoosh] Oh. I hadn’t thought about it that way. Maybe a sense of isolation means that when you feel somebody is watching you, you notice it. Is that what you mean?
Stephen: Well, that’s true enough. It does seem as though the island itself is always just on the cusp of saying something, but it never quite enunciates. Rather than that, [whoosh] I’m a bit lost for words, really.
Daniel: I don’t think that’s what I mean.
Stephen: Okay.
Daniel: I don’t think it’s just the island. Do you know what I’m saying?
Stephen: No. No, I don’t. She shakes her head.
Daniel: It could just be my imagination. Anyway, I don’t mean to imply too much. You’ve always been a good grip.
Stephen: You too, Danny. Isolated environments often give people cause to have more feelings of paranoia. As anyone else, Danny, I would counsel them to go talk to you. It can be a bit troubling.
Daniel: As well, what do you do when you’re a healer? How do you get healed? I suppose I try to draw my strength from the grips around me. Anyway, thanks so much for the chat. Goodoff.
Stephen: Goodoff, Danny, goodoff.
Hakan: All right. And scene. Very nice. That was a little bit more.
Stephen: That was nerve racking.
Ben: So good. I love it.
Hakan: All right, fantastic. So now, we’ve all gone around once. So, we’ll move on to Age Two. Let’s move on to Age Two. Every backdrop has two ways in which the story can go based on the pathway. So, when transitioning from age to age, something major will happen to the community that kind of brings up the next step. When you’re going into Age Two, the overall prompt for what’s going on is an event to foreshadow the end of the isolation, it finds its way into all conversation and is impossible to ignore. And then, there are two pathways, each of them has another paragraph that explains a little bit more specifically something that’s happening to the compounds. And so, we’ll follow each of those as we go from Age One to Age Two, Age Three, and they’ll define on a large scale of what happens to the compound.
The two choices we have, and so we’ll pick one of these, how we interpret this will very much be up to us, but they give you an outline of what happens to your story, is either we let in more outsiders because something about the community starts to fail. Or, the other one is, we get caught up in basically a global conflict in some way. And so, we are now not allowed to be isolated anymore, and eventually, we end up as collateral damage in this global conflict. I’ll read both paragraphs, and then we can pick which one that we think would be more interesting for our story to follow.
The first paragraph is, we had no choice. The compound would have collapsed without their help. We let an outsider in. We thought we could control it, but they have the ear of someone important, while some suggested we should bring in more. And the second one, the outside world has changed. It was dangerous before, but looks to be far worse now. We smell ash in the air and hear planes overhead. There are whispers that war is brewing. How do we pull further into our isolation? Either war conflict or we let in an outsider. Both these will lead in some way to the destruction of our community, either as community itself or the physical destruction. So, what do we think? We picked this together as to which one we think fits better story as we pulled it so far. Does anyone have strong feelings?
Ben: One thing that jumped out to me straight away about the second option is rather than some kind of global conflict, I could see our what we consider to be our sovereign waters to be invaded by corporate interests looking to extract mineral. If we started in 2030 and as the times going on, and oil crisis really starts to ramp up, oil companies will look to extract whatever oil is out there including previously not very fertile fields, but we might be sitting on a pretty substantial reserve that people want to extract but we lack any kind of resources to ward off or to prevent that extraction on the part of massive multinational corporations.
Daniel: Yeah, the phrase that I thought of in connection with part two, the second option was, “They won’t leave us alone.”
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Hedvig: Hmm.
Hakan: Yeah, I think that sounds fair. So, we interpret the war more metaphorically in terms of the war for dwindling resources on Earth, is what I’m hearing, which I think we can definitely work with. How does that sound, folks? Ships are coming closer and closer, we don’t have the ability to ward them off.
Ben: We’re seeing rigs on the horizon bedding down. We’re seeing helicopters and planes that service them, that sort of thing.
Hakan: I think that could be interesting. Does that sound fun to everyone else?
Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
Stephen: Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hakan: Okay, great. Let’s try that. So, now as we’re going from– okay, [unintelligible [01:50:52] of our pathway. Next, we’re going to move the aspects now from Age One into Age Two. But while we’re doing that, one of them’s going to change slightly based on what’s happening to the community. One of them’s going to be left behind in Age One and morph in some way, so what do we think? We have the data anarchy, we have the Kerguelen Islands and we have algae everywhere. Which one of these do we think will shift–? [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Surely, all the rigs are fucking with the algae, which is awful.
Hakan: Yeah.
Hedvig: But it seems like the most–
Daniel: That’s very good.
Ben: Yeah, it’s a good extant threat to our continued existence.
Hakan: Does that sound right to everyone?
Stephen: Yeah, it was the first thing I thought.
Hakan: All right. Let’s do that. What do we think? Do you think this is sickly, dwindling algae, dwindling supplies? How do we think we could summarize of what’s going to the algae here?
Hedvig: Yeah–
Hakan: [crosstalk] -waters.
Hedvig: Yeah. Are they all dying or is it a slow gradual process?
Ben: I was envisioning a bit more of a gradual thing, like It wasn’t one huge oil spill, but our yields year-on-year, no matter what we try, no matter what amazing information Esther manages to pull from her back pocket, just can’t continue. We are seeing a drop year on year and we just can’t help it or explain it really. We don’t even know for sure, but we’re like, “Well, fuck. It started doing this pretty much when they showed up and it’s not stopping and we can’t seem to figure out why.”
Hakan: Yes.
Stephen: Best suggestion is some kind of resource displacement as well. Esther is guessing, obviously, but the places where the oil rigs are now have pushed out whatever wildlife or even plant life was there, that’s been pushed one step closer to the shore which pushes something else wants to closer, so the stuff which the algae was using in the water is getting taken away. All linked, it’s all a chain.
Ben: [crosstalk] Yep. Competition. There wasn’t there before, but now is.
Stephen: [crosstalk] -exclusion.
Hakan: Yeah. So, how—
Stephen: [crosstalk] -that you have to come up with a name for it.
Hedvig: [singing]
Hakan: How about just tainted water supply, maybe. Or not water supply, I guess, it’s such in terms of drinking water, but like–
Hedvig: Tainted waters.
Hakan: Yeah, tainted water. [crosstalk]
Daniel: Algae under threats.
Hakan: Tainted waters/algae under threat.
Ben: That’s, by the way, the name of the one-person punk band that Grinchelwald has started on the island.
[chuckles]
Ben: Who plays every Friday afternoon. You can be sure in the communal space to catch Tainted Waters ripping out a wicked one-person punk, grip.
Hakan: Yeah, what is the phrase that people use that’s so terrible, at least we’ll get great art out of it? I would guess Grinchel will probably [unintelligible [01:53:56] out of this tragedy.
Ben: My rage, my ineffectual rage is all just Tainted Water on stage.
Hakan: Perfect. The last thing we do when we’re switching from turn to turn as everyone discards optionally one of their cards, and I’ll give you cards from Age Two now, which is a slightly different supply from Age One. Ben, since he didn’t use one of your cards because it was mine, go ahead and discard two, and I’ll give you two cards from Age Two.
Ben: Okay. I can do that.
Hakan: Just move them out to the table. I’ll delete them.
Hedvig: Danny, what do you think of playing roleplaying games so far?
Daniel: Oh, it’s lots of fun. I’ve been surprised at how easy it is to build scenes. I was a theater nerd in high school and uni, so making up scenes and acting them out has been always been fun for me. So, I’m having a good time.
Hedvig: Good.
Ben: I’m amazed that this is the first time you’ve ever found yourself in a roleplaying game.
Daniel: Oh. [chuckles] Yeah, well, I was busy otherwise.
Ben: Seems like this sort of thing that– Oh no, I guess like there was probably a vague moral panic around roleplaying games in religious communities–[crosstalk]
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: There was.
Ben: It has dice, and dice have six, and six is the number of the beast.
Hedvig: Yeah, maybe–
Hakan: [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Don’t know if you know if Daniel’s Mormon past or thinking about that, actually, yes, we were going through the prompt for the compound.
Daniel: And it wasn’t even the Mormon thing. There was a lot of moral panic just in middle class circles, generally.
Ben: That is true. Actually, I was listening to a good podcast on it the other day, it was definitely not just like wacky religious folk. There was a real Middle America Dungeons & Dragons is turning our kids into like murderers and suicidal maniacs and stuff.
Daniel: Yeah, there was there was a novel and then the TV adaptation of the novel, Mazes and Monsters.
Ben: With a very, very early Tom Hanks.
Hedvig: Really?
Daniel: [gasps] What? What did he play?
Ben: He was the main character in Mazes and Monsters.
Daniel: But he’s just a kid.
Ben: He’s the kid.
[crosstalk]
Daniel: Oh, my gosh.
Ben: He tries to [crosstalk] himself off the top of the World Trade Center, because he’s lost himself in the game.
Daniel: That’s right. Spoiler.
Ben: It was a for TV movie, if that’s from like 1978, or something, like it’s pretty–
Daniel: That’s right.
Hedvig: Mazes and Monster, that’s so funny.
Hakan: But he was a child, right? And all the art I’m seeing currently, he looks like a grown Tom Hanks.
Ben: Yes.
[laughter]
Hedvig: 26 years old, it says.
Hakan: Okay.
Ben: College student, because that’s where Dungeon & Dragons got it’s– that was a nascent fertile ground. But from what I’ve seen of it, and I haven’t seen the whole film, it is to D&D what hackers, the mid 90s film, was to actual hacking, it’s just so ridiculously off the time. [laughs]
Hedvig: Wow. He looks like a proper– what’s the expression, Chad, in some of these images.
Ben: [laughs]
Hakan: Wow. All right. So, on to Age Two. We now have tainted waters, algae under threat, is our new aspect. We now have story is changing slightly, because of this threat and remember the prompt we had is, an event to foreshadow the end of the isolation and find its way into all conversations, it’s impossible to ignore. So, these encroaching tankards, rigs are a big deal to us. They’re fundamentally threatening what we’re trying to do here, either if it’s because our attachment to algae or attachment to the location or attachment to data privacy. All of those are directly under threat because of what’s happening. We’ll get started with the next age.
In this phase, and in Age Three as well, you’ll see some cards that instead of a concept will actually say action on them. Those on the card itself will explain what they do. Usually, they will have repurposed existing word. They might do something with one of the words that are already on the table. They might change the turn structure in some other way, instead of doing the normal make a connection, have a conversation. But each of those should be spelled out exactly on the card. So, if you don’t have it, don’t worry about it, but if you do, just read what it says on the card. If it’s still confusing after that, let me know and we can clarify what that should mean. Ben, I think you were first in turn order. So, let’s go with you. You know what card you’re going to play?
Ben: I do, and it is exactly the type of card you just mentioned. So, I’m going to play an evolve card. Sorry, I’ve lost my glasses. As pressure builds, we change in ways big and small. As we change, so does our language. Make a connection play on an aspect in the current age and choose a word from a previous age. Now, the word in the new aspect and explain how the world has changed meaning. Okay, cool. I think I know how to do this. So, the word that we’re taking from the previous age is going to be brackymuck, but we’re moving it from its algae aspect, if I’ve got the right of this card, over to the Kerguelen Island’s isolation aspect.
Basically, brackymuck used to mean like good luck or good fortune. And now, it’s basically come to mean this looming presence or the ill omen on the horizons. Our algae is failing and everyone knows it. So, brackymuck is just kind of this concept. Some people use it to mean the actual unseen thing that is affecting our algae, but a lot of people are just kind of referring to this oncoming change that we all see happening as just a broader brackymuck.
Hakan: Why we pick brackymuck? Why did that word in particular end up being the thing that signified this incoming demise?
Ben: I think because we as a group, brackymuck as a word for good luck or good fortune had really come to symbolize the apex of our utopic fervor. When the community was at its strongest, and everyone was getting on it at best, and the algae works were just churning out all sorts of things, brackymuck as a word had just come to exemplify our community at its best. When these rigs started to show up and plane started to be there, and maybe even on some of the outlying islands, actual small supply depots have been set up with actual infrastructure on some of what we consider to be our islands, brackymuck, as our idealism crashed upon the rocks. So too did the symbolic representation of that idealism have to also shatter. And so, that shattering looks being turned from a word of goodness, into a word of impending dooms.
Hakan: Yeah. Brackymuck, I think as I’m hearing you, rather than being something that we wish good luck was more like a restatement of who we were and a statement of our idealism in terms of what the community was founded on. And as this threat came, the meaning of that changed from an optimistic one to impending doom feeling. Is that accurate or–?
Ben: And that might be a generational thing. Maybe it’s been long enough for a younger generation to be– like teenagers now, maybe the kids who were first brought to the island when they were in their 5s and 10s and now all 18, 19, 20. So, in true teenage style, the words that mean cool for our parents do not mean cool, and the words that mean bad have come to mean good, and all that kind of stuff.
Hedvig: Is it also the kids make fun of it, because it is a new word that the community created that was attached to the ideology that they now see as passé?
Ben: Yes. I’d say that’s absolutely tied into it. Also, maybe the kids are just a bit more cynical. Far from being the first generation of homegrown data anarchy zealots. They’re actually a little bit like all kids. They’re just like, “Whatever, man. This is home, home sucks.” It’s normal, and thus, very boring. And like you said, passé.
Hakan: Perfect. All right, let’s see it. What’s the prompt?
Ben: Okay. I have to choose someone to have a conversation with now, don’t I?
Hakan: Mm-hmm.
Ben: I’m going to pick Esther simply because Grinchelwald hasn’t had a conversation with Esther yet, I think. Greenwald has for the last indeterminant period of time, let’s say years, stuck to her guns when it comes to believing that the Kerguelen Islands themselves are the key to our power, more so than the data anarchy and more so even than the algae as our central linchpin. She’s got almost an annoying and borderline dismissive attitude when it comes to people’s concerns and fears around our dwindling capacity to manufacture algae products, and what these newer things on the horizon mean for the community, because she has absolute faith that the Kerguelen Islands themselves are guardians of this place. And so, that’s where Grinchelwald is at as a character. And she is currently– I don’t know, something that we haven’t done before. Maybe she’s–
Hedvig: We haven’t used the common spaces.
Ben: Yeah, exactly. Maybe she’s wanting to put herself up for some sort of position of significance. Not necessarily like the mayor of the town or anything but just maybe an elected representative to act as a go-between for the people on the horizon. She’s in the communal space preparing for her talk, like maybe running through some talking points on flashcards or whatever. And maybe Esther, before the meeting takes place, comes in or something I don’t know. I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Sorry, Steve.
Stephen: I’ll come in and notice you setting up and say, “Oh, goodon, Grinchel.”
Ben: Esther, good on. Good on to you. You’re a bit early, but I’m really glad you’ve come.
Stephen: No, I heard what was going on. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see one of my oldest grips make the transition from punk artist to political hopeful. This is the same stage, isn’t it, where you first debuted Tainted Waters?
Ben: I run my hands over a particular stain on the carpet of the stage sort of lovingly. And I was like, yep, this is where I spat out two of my teeth from head banging-
[laughter]
Ben: -too intensely. And I grin when I say that, and the two teeth that are missing, they’re actually molars. I hit really hard, like a glancing blow. I tongue the hole where the molars were lovingly and I’m like, God, we’ve all just been through so much. It’s been such a ride. I’m so glad to hear that you still consider me such a close grip to you. I’m hoping that even though everyone, they’re so caught up in the brackymuck that’s coming, there’s so much fear, and I’m really hoping that today I can put a bit of an interrupt between that fear and some of our people, you know what I mean?
Stephen: [whoosh] I think so. I noticed that you initially floated a slogan, No Brackymuck. But then, you changed that. It strikes me that– I mean, I’m one of the old guard, I still take break him up to be a positive word. You know it’s what keeps our algae flowing. But you don’t want to take ownership of brackymuck anymore. Why to you and yours, does that now connote something negative?
Ben: Well, a lot of people came out here thinking that they could create something new, but we did that. We made something new. For the longest time there, the brackymuck spirit of us all seem to just be this uniting force. But I guess I think that perhaps a lot of us, to a certain degree, probably me included, maybe we were living in a little bit of a fantasy land, thinking that we were immune to change. I think the reason I want to take a step back from brackymuck is not so much to take a shit on what it meant to us as a people, but to acknowledge that that was our time, and we’re moving into a new time, and brackymuck is part of that old time. It feels a little bit like flogging the horse after it’s bolted the stable. I furiously scribble on my little flashcard because that was clearly like a talking point I was going to try and it just doesn’t work. So, I’m like, “Oh, no, no, I’ve got to [crosstalk] some better than that. Something better than that.”
[chuckles]
Stephen: Well, I would wish you brackymuck, but it sounds that’s no longer the order of the day anymore. I do hope that this plays well for you. I’ve got a feeling that you see things as they really are. I consider myself one of the old guard, I still struggle to keep up my lingo with the times, but I’m also a realist. I think you’re probably better than Anti, your only opponent for the position.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Stephen: I’ve never quite got on with him. So, don’t mention this, but you can count on one vote at least.
Hakan: Does that sound okay to you, Anti?
Hedvig: Yes, okay.
Hakan: That’s something about you– Okay.
Hedvig: No, that’s fine.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: This is very funny. It’s very Steve to do this.
Ben: My husband can say whatever he wants.
Hedvig: [laughs] It’s very funny. Yeah.
Ben: I don’t really say anything. I just put my hand out in what has come to be one of our community’s strongest signs of solidarity, and it’s not a handshake, but we do the monkey grip on each other’s wrists like that. And that’s a physical manifestation of true grip-ship between us. I don’t even really need to say anything. It’s understood that I consider Esther to be one of my– not necessarily my super BFF, but someone for whom I have just immense respect and goodwill towards, all in a gesture.
Hakan: All right. Sounds like end scene. You’ve tied the script some way. Fantastic. What I think we’ll likely do just to make sure that we– and like I say, a little past I’ve initially said, I think, but probably if we do three turns and four on Age Two and Age Three, that’ll help us wrap up. Time is usually as a fine variant that I do just to make sure that we stick to time. Cool. So, we did the first in Age Two. Now, we’ll go to the second one. And who was second turn order? Last one did–
Stephen: I think it was me.
Hakan: Stephen, yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Hakan: Wonderful.
Stephen: There has been a discovery. Something new is discovered, a geographic feature, a piece of technology or something about ourselves, which was previously unknown. Name this new discovery. So, I’m going to put this under tainted waters, and say it is something that enables the algae at least to remain at the sustainable level for now, it can’t counteract the negative forces, but it does slightly delay the impending brackymuck. Obviously, it’s something that a bit of experiment by the scientists with some input from Esther has managed to synthesize. So, we need a name for it. I’m thinking some kind of synthetic name. It doesn’t have to be super long word, but it could be something a shortened form of something long, scientific sounding.
Hedvig: Have you told the scientists that you’re just a scientist, and that’s why you come with such valuable information? Or are they on to you?
Stephen: I think the question. If she’s managed to stay secret this long, then she’s just done it by being very, very good at withholding certain information and only coming out when it’s really, really important.
Hedvig: Okay.
Ben: What a curse for Esther. To protect her identity, she would have to have on many occasions allowed shitty things to transpire, knowing that she could have helped or improved in some way.
Stephen: It’s a real arc. That’s why she looks so good now.
Ben: What a weight. What a weight on her little shoulders.
Stephen: And this is the one where she’s come out of retirement, it’s been about five or six years since she’s even opened the device, but because this was such a doom that was upon us, she had to look and see if she could help synthesize something.
Hakan: There was some chemical you had mentioned earlier.
Hedvig: Sodium benzoate.
Daniel: Sodium benzothrate.
Stephen: Benzothrate, yeah.
Ben: [laughs]
Hakan: I immediately went to that as being maybe a basis for work or something.
Stephen: I do like the phoneme thwaite. Is that a phoneme or what is that?
Hedvig: Thwaite?
Stephen: Thwaite.
Hedvig: Thwaite, I don’t know.
Stephen: Although if we’re French, we won’t be able to pronounce the T-H, right?
Hedvig: No.
Ben: Waite, waite?
Hedvig: I think it might be a morpheme. I don’t know what it is.
[swhoosh[?]]
[chuckles]
Stephen: It could be something– she could try and assign it to some fictional person, call it like Thwaite’s booster or Thwaite’s cure or something like that. It could be–
Ben: Well, hang on. If you’re the semi-saving grace here. What if we call it like Forte something or something Forte?
Stephen: Yeah, that’s very dangerous. Maybe this is the point actually at which she revealed she over plays her hand because it’s so dangerous. She over plays it, turns out she had this thing. And so at this point, it turns out that it actually was her that came up with it and that’s the reason why they named after her. I don’t know, what do you think? And, yeah, Forte. It just mean stronger, whatever. And it makes the algae a bit stronger.
Ben: Forte solution, meaning both like the liquid and the fix?
Stephen: Hmm. Forte solve, Forte solution.
Hakan: Yeah, maybe we shorten up the Fortesol or something.
Stephen: Fortesol. There we go.
Ben: Fortesol, there we go. That’s it.
Hakan: Perfect.
Ben: That’s the money shot.
Hakan: What do you think happens with the knowledge that you have this device, is there like a–[crosstalk]
Ben: [chuckles]
[crosstalk]
Stephen: -new president whoever won the vote.
Hedvig: [chuckles]
Hakan: Yeah.
Stephen: Esther just sort of–
Hedvig: Yeah, I don’t know who won.
Stephen: [crosstalk] -makes her open to the authorities.
Hakan: Well, let’s see what was the conversation prompt on that one, did you–[crosstalk]
Stephen: I’ve lost the card now. [chuckles]
Hakan: It’s discovery here, I have it here. Hoping an unexpected place. So, this could either be about the Fortesol or about something else.
Hedvig: About the fact that Grinchelwald won the election when you didn’t think she would, because I think that Anti might be ideologically quite radical. We already know that he thinks that animals have a right to privacy. Most people in the community don’t think that. I think if he heard that you had a device with Wikipedia on it, but it wasn’t attached to the internet, I think he would still see that as really dangerous, reckless behavior. Whereas some parts of the community are like, “Well, it’s not connected to the internet, it’s not a problem.” So, I think he’s gone more and more extreme in his old age, and this is a bit on, and I think maybe despite everyone’s predictions, he lost the elections. Maybe that’s where he found hoping an unexpected place.
Stephen: So, the hope that I would be able to reveal the information was found in the unexpected place of Anti losing the election. Is that what I’m hearing?
Hedvig: Yeah, but you’re not as much in danger of being ostracized.
Stephen: Right.
Ben: Okay. I like that. That works.
Stephen: We can have a conversation after your [crosstalk] speech or which way?
Hedvig: I don’t know. It doesn’t need to be me.
Stephen: I was going to say, does it have to be me that does the conversation with one other person or can it be any pair?
Hakan: It can be any pair. So, it doesn’t need to be you, by the strict rules. Usually, the person [unintelligible [02:17:23] does end up being in that, but there’s a really good reason for you not to be in that, there’s another really interesting scene, then we can wait that role.
Stephen: Yeah, you can tell me if this isn’t right, but for me, the interesting scene is the debate or the conversation over whether to use Fortesol, given that you’re still against it, given where the source of the information came from, but Grinch’s pro using it.
Hedvig: Okay. Yeah, sure.
Stephen: Does that sound okay with everybody?
Hedvig: Maybe that’s the final debate.
Ben: Oh, my God, are [laughs] we engaging in a political debate on stage right now?
Hedvig: I don’t know.
Stephen: It doesn’t have to be that but, me personally, I would enjoy that.
Hedvig: Okay.
Ben: Yeah, let’s do it. I am here to entertain and lead and support.
Hedvig: Sorry, is that your slogan?
Ben: That was just the final bit of one of my talking points, and now it’s over to you.
Hedvig: The way we’ve always done it has always worked. We stand firm in our foundations, and if the algae are failing, we shall find another source.
Ben: But what other source, Anti? What- what the– I don’t– Like everyone else in this audience, I see a roomful of faces, who asked the same question, “If not this solution, what solution? What solution meets your criteria for acceptability?”
Hedvig: We should never put all of our eggs in one basket. We can’t just put all of our faith into this algae. We should broaden our horizon. We should invest in geothermal energy. We’re on a volcanic island, for crying out loud. We can find other things. We should look at things we can grow on land. We shouldn’t put all of our eggs in one basket. And fixing this will just continue our dependence on this one source.
Ben: No one here, I think, would be trying to say we should only ever think to algae. But at the same time, tapping into geothermal energy is an enterprise that is going to require resources and technology and a timeframe that we simply don’t have. We don’t look to algae for some fetishistic reason because it’s sitting on a pedestal in my living room. Side note, there is a pedestal in my living room made of algae that I worship all the time, but that’s not for reasons– I’m not stupid, and I don’t think anyone here is stupid. But if we look at what is possible right now and where we could be spending our time and energy, we have in our hands, because of Esther, a workable solution right now. And you sound like you’re saying, instead of doing that, we should instead funnel all of our time and all of our energy into pie in the sky projects that could potentially take years and resources we don’t possess to pay off.
Hedvig: We all came here with one purpose in mind. We have a shared ideology and a shared faith in a sense. And the way by which Esther achieved this solution goes against the very foundations of why we’re here. And if we go down that path and don’t develop knowledge of our own, but derived knowledge from other people, we will cease to exist as a community in a meaningful way. We will abandon the very point of why we’re here.
Ben: I think we’re stronger than that. I think our community, after all these years together, is able to withstand some ingress from the outside world without it poisoning the well in the way that you seem to fear it will. I believe that we are stronger and better, and that we are enough of a community to never lose sight of the grip-ship that we all share together. It is us who listen to the wailing of the wind. And don’t be afraid, but turn towards it, we face the wind. And this is just– the Fortesol now is today’s wind, and tomorrow will be a different wind, and the day after that will be a different wind. And as a community, we’ll face all of the winds.
Hedvig: I think this is the path maybe to our continued survival, but dissolvement of our community, I think a vote for you is a vote against our discrete community in a meaningful way. We have to call it at some point because I know Ben and me can both–
[laughter]
Ben: So, at this point, does Anti just sort of bend the gooseneck microphone away and just signal clearly that he has very– [crosstalk]
Hedvig: He’s a very grumpy old man. He’s going to just like, “Well, I’m done now,” and walk off stage.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Hakan: [crosstalk] -grumpy off stage. Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Hakan: Perfect. All right, the lightbuld. And we know what happens after this. Grinchelwald wins the election. So, a new step forward for the community.
Ben: Anti, I want you to know that I take no personal pleasure in this. It was never a contest between you and me, but just a set of visions for what was best for our community.
Hakan: A set of deeply held ideologies that define us as people. [chuckles]
Ben: [unintelligible [02:22:54].
Hakan: Perfect. Wonderful. The last turn of Age Two. Hedvig, you were third in turn order, right?
Hedvig: Oh, yeah. But if Daniel had a card he really wants to play.
Daniel: There is one and it’s faction. Maybe this is implied already. A group emerges within the isolation with a strong opinion on how things need to change [crosstalk].
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: That sounds like–
Daniel: A disagreement made public. That’s the prompt.
Hakan: That sounds great.
Hedvig: That feels like we’re almost done half.
Daniel: Yeah, I think so. I think we could have– yeah.
Hakan: [crosstalk] -give it name though, but yeah.
Ben: Yeah, that’s true. That’s absolutely true. I feel this is a perfect synergy rather than doubling up.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: Okay, propels the story on.
Hakan: Which aspect would you play that on then, to capture that? I guess would be on tainted waters, probably.
Stephen: I liked Grinch’s advocation of the wind. And that was obviously inspired by Grinch’s love of the islands. So, if the faction, if I understood it right, is going to be the faction that standing behind Grinch, it could also be something associated with the islands and even specifically with the wind.
Hakan: Also, is the data anarchy too.
Daniel: I like to place this on the island, because this is something that I’ve come to peace with. It was the hardest thing for me. It’s a source of pain and now I’ve turned it into something I love.
Hakan: Very nice.
Ben: Ooh, can I make a suggestion?
Daniel: [chuckles] Always.
Ben: In Grinchelwald’s very first conversation with Danny, Danny alluded to a daughter.
Daniel: I got it.
Ben: [crosstalk] -used to– Yeah, okay.
Daniel: Okay. I’m having this conversation with Anti Admin.
Hedvig: Oh, this is still the formation of the faction.
Daniel: We’re seeing a disagreement made public.
Hedvig: Okay. [chuckles] By the way, I feel like I should say for the record that I intentionally usually play people who are very different from myself.
Ben: Whatever, grumpy horse.
Hakan: You’re all about the online marketing tracking or– [laughs]
Hedvig: My brother is, I’m not.
Hakan: [crosstalk] -business. Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Hakan: Esther, do you want to reveal the name of this faction in the scene, Daniel, or do we want to [crosstalk] for him?
Stephen: Yes.
Hakan: Okay. Perfect. So, we’ll bend the rule slightly for dramatic effect.
Hedvig: Where do you want to have the scene?
Daniel: It’s after the election. You’ve come to me because I’m a healer.
Hedvig: Oh, ah–
Ben: Ooh. Way to eat some crow there.
Hedvig: I don’t know what that means.
Ben: Eating crows like humble pie. You are a grumpy man, so you’d avail yourself of a healer’s–
Daniel: You’re stung by your defeat.
Hedvig: Would Anti go to a healer for that?
Daniel: In a rare move, he might.
Hedvig: Maybe he might.
Hakan: [crosstalk] Hedvig.
Hedvig: Uh, I’m trying to think of what’s another– I don’t think Anti thinks he can talk about problems, you can like–
Ben: What if Danny goes to Anti instead of the other way round?
Hedvig: That could be it, yeah.
Daniel: I’ll do it. Okay. Anti, goodon to you.
Hedvig: Goodon. Goodon. How you doing?
Daniel: I was [whoosh]. I know how you must be feeling after this. This hasn’t been easy.
Hedvig: Do you?
Daniel: I believe I do, and the reason I say that is that I share your vision. And yet, it may be a vision that has passed.
Hedvig: I think it has passed if we believe that it’s past, and it’s not, if we hold on to it. I think it’s something we can do something about. And I believe that giving into convenience, and of quick solutions is the way will lose it.
Daniel: I believe you. And I’ve come to believe even more in our vision. Ever since the horizon years arrived with their ships and their supplies impinging on us, I felt something. I felt the pull of the outside world that I vowed never to return to. I’ve never shown anyone this. You remember how the disappearances started when they started tracking us?
Hedvig: Yes.
Ben: I think I can infer what he means, like before we came to the island.
Daniel: Before we came to the island and people– well, there were many– I don’t need to tell you how many were lost. That was what spurred our decision to remove ourselves. This is something I kept and I never let it slip. This was given to me by– once I had a daughter and she was among them. I look at this and I remember my determination never to return to the old ways, to stay with ourselves as grips and avoid the society that would track us, and all that brackymuck. I feel as powerless as you do, and I don’t know what to do.
Hedvig: Well, [sighs] maybe this is the way it goes. Maybe we need to go somewhere else, somewhere even more isolated. Maybe we shouldn’t impinge our ideas on other people, but take those who want and go to yet another place or throw them out and say that if they want to live this life of convenience and abundance and security, they can go do that offshore.
Daniel: This is hard. [whoosh] All I know is that I’m not going back, despite the scarcity, I’m not going back to the old place. This place is me now.
Hedvig: Oh, did you want to call scene?
Daniel: How did I go?
Hedvig: I think it went well. I need the word.
Ben: Do we need the name of the faction?
Hedvig: Yes.
Stephen: Horizon Years.
Daniel: Horizon Years.
Ben: So, that’s the people who are coming from the rigs and that sort of thing.
Hedvig: Ah, okay.
Daniel: But also, the people who are allied with this new way.
Hedvig: Ah.
Ben: Okay. Horizon Years, I like that.
Hakan: Perfect. All right, and we put that on the islands.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Hakan: Very nice.
Daniel: This is a prop that my daughter who still hasn’t gone to bed slipped under the door, so I decided to work it in.
Hedvig: [laughs]
[crosstalk]
Hakan: All right. So, entering Age Three. The prompt is, what was foreshadowed has now come to pass. The end of the isolation is near. There’s no escaping it. The paragraph that usually would go along the kind of pathway you’ve chosen all reads, but since we’re interpreting it a little broadly, we will decide what it means for our story in particular. The fight has come to us. When the smoke and rumble were cleared, the final count was 10. The explosion shook the compound in the cool of the day taking 10 innocent lives in its wake. Our walls are now breached. Most rally and try to repair, but there are whispers that some are concerning thinkable leaving, who tries to stop them. So, we’ll interpret that broadly and see what that means for us in particular. I think we could interpret that as being since the war we were interpreting as the encroachments of these vessels and the tainting of our water supply, or the tainting of our algae supply. We’ll have to decide how that plays with Fortesol in particular.
Hedvig: Maybe it failed. Maybe it exploded.
Ben: Well, I was actually going to float the idea that it did explode but in a way that it was clear that someone made that happen. There’s rumors that either it was outside corporate interests, which means someone in our community communicated to them. And were like, by the way, if you hit this strategic dump, you were going to sink the community. Or, someone from the community has deliberately sabotaged it in order to sink the community. And we as a community don’t know which of those two options are–
Hedvig: Or, not in order to sink the community, but keep the community on the right path.
Ben: [laughs] Wow. I wonder who it could have been.
Hedvig: [laughs] Maybe that’s too dark.
Ben: No, that’s exactly the kind of scummy human behavior that humans are so good at.
Hedvig: What do you think, babe? We need to establish these things. Okay. What do you think, babe?
Stephen: Well, it wasn’t me, because I was heavily invested in the success of the Fortesol.
Ben: [laughs]
Stephen: 10% of me suspects Anti, but 90% the oil corporates. I’m still invested in the isolation and I’m still suspicious of the outside world. Esther doesn’t seriously believe that Anti would go to those lengths, nor that he would be able to at the age of whatever he is now.
Hedvig: 75, I don’t know, something.
Stephen: 75.
Ben: 75 on an Antarctic Island, which is like 95 in normal–[crosstalk]
[laughter]
Hakan: [crosstalk] And I think that this is also possibly something we– that could really be a mystery for all of us. We all have our– [crosstalk]
Ben: That’s what I was thinking. It’s never going to be clear whether someone tipped off the oil companies or someone sabotaged the dump. And that kernel of doubt is the real thing that might end up sinking the community.
Hakan: Yeah, but we really did have 10 people die, in that case, like that part of the thing will take literally, so some people did pass. So, the one thing we do now is as we move from age to age, we’ll also change one of the aspects slightly. So, which one of these are we going to leave behind? The islands, the tainted waters, or data anarchy, which one of those I going to morph slightly?
Ben: I mean, it seems obvious that the tainted waters, our supply of thing that was helping us keep that sort of algae system ticking along is literally up in smoke now. So, surely, algae production similarly is just basically kaput.
Hedvig: Oh. tainted waters doesn’t mean that tainted waters goes away and algae flourishes. It just means that the algae goes away entirely.
Ben: Well, because the Fortesol is the substance that got emulated right and the Foresol was the substance that was allowing us to kind of limp out algae production along out–
Hedvig: Oh, okay.
Ben: [crosstalk] – level. So, without it, I think our algae production just continued its inevitable decline into nothingness.
Hedvig: Okay.
Hakan: Dwindling algae supply.
Hedvig: Is now none.
Hakan: Yeah, dwindling/none. And lastly, everyone can now discard a card, and I will give you an Age Three card. And I think, Hedvig, you didn’t get a turn last time, so we’ll start with you. And then, we’ll go Ben, Stephen, to move into the epilogue. After we do this, after Age Three, basically what happens is we all do one final narrated scene with the legacy deck where we just kind of wrap up our stories. Also, don’t feel like you have to wrap up everything within this age, is the only point I’m trying to make, but we’re going to play three more cards and that’ll signal time the epilogue phase of the game.
Hedvig: Oh. Okay. I have one that builds on the previous things, but I think we’ve mined that. I think I’m going to play disuse, a word which was once common is gradually forgotten. Perhaps, the reason we spoke about it has faded away, or we’ve intentionally left it behind. So, I think that people have stopped using our greetings because we no longer have shifts for the algae production.
Ben: Ah, perfect.
Hedvig: I want to connect it– well, what do I connected to in that case, I guess?
Hakan: Does it say on the thing because they say like play it on a word or–?
Hedvig: Make a connection, pick a previously defined word. Oh, yeah, pick a previously defined word, fine. Explain why we no longer use the word. Skip to build a word phrase. In the conversation, explore the disuse, finally tear up the word. New conventions. I think that most people have stopped using the word, but some people haven’t. So, I think the scene is just Anti walking around the island saying goodon to everyone he meets and being replied with hello.
Ben: Or, yeah, rebuffed with a polite non-goodon greeting. I love it.
Hedvig: Yeah. I like that as a montage. I don’t really have a conversation to play out there. I just like the montage of him getting grumpier and grumpier, and more riled up throughout the day.
Ben: You’re painting such a wonderful mental film picture for me right now. This is epic one take with everyone organized in such a way so that they walk into screen are like, “Hey, Anti.” “Goodon.” [normal “Hi, Anti.” “Goodon.”
Hedvig: [laughs] Yeah. It’s like that. He goes to get breakfast in the morning and says goodon to the people in the canteen, and they’re like, “Oh, good morning. Hello.” He’s like, “Argh, people these days.” Yeah, I like that. I don’t think there’s a good scene for that. I think it’s better to keep it as that.
Ben: No, that’s a great scene for that. It makes me– I was Anti’s rival, and I just feel such an outpouring of pity for this old believer who just will not let go of what is a fundamentally very hopeful space.
Daniel: Yeah, come around to each of us, and then you come to me.
Hedvig: Goodon, Danny.
Daniel: And I say nothing.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: What do you want me to say, Anti?
Hedvig: The custom is to say goodon or goodoff depending on your activity of the day. I don’t know why this is so hard. People all day have been — It’s not a difficult convention. I don’t know why it’s so hard.
Daniel: I’m going to put a hand on your shoulder, and I say goodon.
Hedvig: Thank you, finally.
Hakan: Aw, delightful.
Daniel: Hurts. It hurts.
Hakan: All right. So, our second I think was Ben in turn order, right?
Ben: Me, did you say, sorry?
Hakan: Mm-hmm. Yeah, for in the turn order for playing card.
Ben: Okay, so I’ve got a symbol of hope. I’ll drag it onto the board, that’s a good idea. We see a beam of hope when things are most dire. We turn to this. And so, I was thinking, I’m super open for suggestions, but for the sake of brevity, I was thinking that the phrase or something like the phrase still wind or quiet wind or basically something that denotes the wind has stopped, however briefly, which just allows everyone a moment to breathe and to think. So, it’s come into usage recently, because there’s been so much change and so much upheaval, and most presently, everyone for just a moment, after the explosion, which rocked our community. The force of that concussive force for just a moment pushed all the wind quiet for just a moment. And so now as a reappropriating, the community is using still wind to mean change, but also renewal and maybe something new and something different.
Hedvig: Hmm.
Hakan: Very nice. And so, you tied that to the islands then, in that case, it sounds like?
Ben: Yes, because we’ve left the algae behind. So, yeah. I would. I tie it to the islands. I’m trying to figure out who I would talk to about this. Maybe instead of talking to someone, perhaps I am sitting at the foot of one of the glaciers of the main mountain of our main island. And I’ve found just perfect spot where these katabatic winds that fall down the glacier, they create a tumbling motion. And if you sit in this particular spot semiregularly, but at an interval that you can’t predict, the wind just stops dead for just a moment, just for a couple of seconds before it kind of like [mimics wind] again. So, I’m just sitting there in this meditation as I reflect on my time on the islands and everything that it’s meant to me. The picture that you would see is just this fairly older artistic woman sitting cross legged on some ice and sitting very still in very serene, despite the fact that her body is just assaulted by this insane 100 kilometer an hour wind. But then, every now and then the wind would stop and her hair, kind of all askew, would just drift for a moment. And just like a very slight smile would come on to a face before the wind just comes back and she resumes this meditative pose.
Hakan: Very nice. And that stillness, do you think that has the significance outside of Grinchel specifically or is it just in this moment?
Ben: I would think that it is a thing that she has in her art– did anyone watch– [chuckles] this is a weird reference? Did anyone watch the Love Death + Robots episode, Zima Blue?
Stephen: Yeah, and I read the story that it’s based on as well.
Ben: Oh, I didn’t know is based on a story. Oh, fucking I know what I’m doing when I finished the game. In that story, there’s this famous solar system wide artist who makes the world’s most amazing art, and a blue dot begins and start seeing all of his works at one stage and just gets bigger and bigger and bigger until he paints entire planets blue. And I think my art practice probably reflects this. All of my work, whether it’s music or painting, or sculpture or whatever, has this growing presence of stillness in some artistic measure or another.
Hakan: Very nice. Perfect. Stephen, you will do the last standard turn of the game and then we’ll do our epilogue phase. But what were you planning on? What’s your card?
Stephen: So, this is going to build off Grinch’s movement of still wind, its perceptions. Using this word carries a weight when we say people form an image, and it changes what they think of us. To play this on a previously defined word and explain how using this word changes others’ perceptions of the speaker. I’m actually going to play this on the whoosh as a filler word because I feel like as the still wind’s movement is growing, it no longer becomes appropriate to use the whoosh as a filler word, because we’re more wanting the silence rather than the wind that’s blowing around us. So, now when anybody slips and continues to use that whoosh, it’s very, very noticeable. And instead, silences, pauses, possibly even sort of long gaps in between things that you’re saying, become more conventional and that whoosh quite quickly falls out of use.
Hakan: Perfect. And the prompt here says may have outsiders. If appropriate for the story, this is the only times when you can bring people from outside the community in, since they’re basically at our doorstep now. But you can also keep it to the people at the table depending on how you want to do it.
Stephen: Yeah, because we don’t have any outsiders in or at least not yet in the story, I was thinking more just it’s between the people themselves who are consciously committed to still winds, but unconsciously still using the same filler vocalization or fricative or whatever it is, and try and catch themselves not doing it. [chuckles] We could try and play that out if you want, but I like the idea of where just describe what’s happening like the other previous ones did as well. Imagine as the constantly catching yourself doing the whooshing sound and then stopping, it would be really funny if I was skilled enough to work that out.
[chuckles]
Ben: I like the idea as well, but perhaps this will happen in the epilogue, as outsiders come in one of the most telling signifiers of an outsider is then discomfort with silence, because by the time they get there, our entire community, it’s like long, pregnant, pauses of quiet are completely socially acceptable in a way that are just absolutely not in other speaking norms.
Stephen: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah. I’m terrified when I meet people who have that norm. I’ve met some people like that, and it’s terrifying.
Ben: [laughs] There’s a little insight into Hedvig.
Hedvig: No, it’s just because to me, it means they’re angry at me. So, I just think they’re angry at me. So, I’m just like, “Ah-ah,” yeah.
Ben: So, introverts are terrifying to you.
Hedvig: Somewhat, yeah.
Ben: [laughs] Fair enough. [crosstalk] -be known introvert.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m probably terrifying to them in other ways. So, hey. No, please don’t scratch that thing. I know, I love you very much.
Hakan: That’s the exact same conversation I have with my cats. [laughs] “I’m very sorry I have to get mad at you, because I love you. But you really can’t do that.”
[chuckles]
Hedvig: He really doesn’t get it either.
Hakan: All right, fantastic. That was our last standard age of the game. So, what the legacy phase looks like, is I’ll now deal everyone one special card. Oh, actually, there’s a little prompt. The last moments are the aftermath, the transitioning from Age Three to the legacy phase.
All we wanted was a home of our own, but the strikes didn’t stop. We kept the compound operational for as long as we could, but eventually the loss was too much. We had chosen the solitude and they took that from us. Maybe one day someone will find our tattered home. Will it mean anything to them?
Hedvig: Aw. Very sad.
Hakan: Legacy deck and deal one to every player. These don’t have to go in turn order, but you’ll see– does everyone have a legacy card? It should look different than the other ones.
Hedvig: Yes.
Ben: Yes.
Hakan: Where there are three prompts on it. Okay, great. And so here, it says on it, choose one option for your final narrated epilogue. So, like we did in Age Three or just something that you narrate, you don’t have to do them in character, but feel free to add in character bits to it if you’d like. It may be about your character or the isolation as a whole and your story. And so, you’ll pick one of those three prompts to be the prompts for your ending to the story itself. So, yeah, and like I said, they don’t have to go in order. Once someone feels like they have an appropriate one to add, just play it and tell us which one you picked, and we can go from there. So, feel free to take a moment to see as you think of which one that you’d like to do.
Ben: I’m going to claim nice and early, a ritual for the dead.
Hakan: Do you want to do that now or do you want to hold on?
Ben: I can do, but I fear that may narratively obligate others to do some stuff, and I don’t really want to do that. So, I’m happy for other people to go first.
Hakan: Sure. That sounds great. Does anyone have one that they feel like would be a good candidate for going first?
Hedvig: I think I could probably go and then count myself out of whatever Ben’s doing maybe. I think I think for Anti-Admin, I’m going to pick cast out again and again. I think our community has become famous and there are imitating communities in places. And Anti goes there and expects to be welcomed, and is at first, but sooner or later, either he’s too radical for the community or the community falls apart in some other way. So, he is cast out again and again.
Ben: You made one hell fucking tragic arc for this poor dude.
Hedvig: [chuckles] Yeah, I think he’s very stubborn, and I think this is what he would do.
Hakan: There is some amount of ideals or hopes to admire their though in terms of that he keeps looking for it.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly. Well, Hakan, that’s smart. [chuckles]
Hakan: All right. And who would like to go next?
Stephen: I can take one. The option I’m taking is, something the outsiders stand to learn. So, as the algae died away and the last of our stores dwindled, eventually, rescue ships were sent. I think we had forced– the isolation is forced in somehow, so I’ll try and keep it relatively vague. At some point, Esther is up for being taken off the island and away to safety. One of the staging places on the way from the Kerguelen Islands back to the mainland is actually not an oil rig. It’s an algae farm in the South Seas. She notices the scientists are having a little bit of trouble getting the algae to take and bloom. She goes down and on the night before she’s due to leave, has a little word with one of the scientists, takes a little vial out of her pocket. The camera gets a close-up of the little label, Fortesol 2. [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Stephen: -on the scientist’s nightstand.
Hedvig: Nice.
Hakan: The label.
Hedvig: I like that.
Daniel: I’ll go. Mine is a feeling of relief in your new life. I joined the movement to have privacy to be anonymous. And ironically, afterward the rescue, we were more notorious than ever. But it feels like a load has been lifted off of me. I’ve made new grips. Nobody uses that word anymore. And I help others by talking about what we went through in our quest for privacy. It is gratifying to see that so many people are now taking up our cause. From being the person who people came to for healing, I have learned to heal myself.
Hakan: Perfect.
Ben: All right. For my ritual for the dead, Grinchelwald elects to stay on the island in the bones of the colony, the dead colony. She does so knowing full well that she probably won’t survive for a particularly long time, like there’s enough residual material left on the island to keep her going at a really quite subsistence level for a while potentially. But she’s all in in terms of the love of the islands, and she doesn’t ever want to leave. But the main communal space where the community came together and where she used to perform and where she had her debate with Anti and all that kind of stuff, that was actually damaged in that explosion that took 10 of the lives of our community. So, Fortesol was actually stored up against one side. And so when it blew, it took just whole side off that community center. And so now the stage where she used to stand looks out– there’s a wall behind her and there’s a wall on either side, but the other opposite wall, it’s almost as if the stage is looking out over the sweeping bay of the island where the algae farms used to be, and you can see the rotting infrastructure sitting in the water just decaying over time.
She just lives a really simple, simple life just killing seal and just generally subsisting, but every Friday in the afternoon, she fires up a genny, and she plugs in her amp, and she just stands there on this stage is ancient aged artsy rocker, and she just belts out like an epic Tainted Waters number to no one and nothing, and as loud as fuck. And it is one of the only things that will ever overcome the whistling of the wind, even if it’s just for that two and a half minutes of rancid punk rock. And then, she will unplug the amp and waddle back to her little hut. And then, she’ll just wait until next Friday to do it again.
Hedvig: Ah, I like that. I like the idea of a little penguins a bit far off being like, “Fuck.”
[laughter]
Stephen: [unintelligible 02:54:22] sound.
[laughter]
Hakan: That’s great. All right, wonderful. And with that, we’ll bring down the curtain. And that was Dialect.
[crosstalk]
[applause]
Hakan: [crosstalk] – a very nice time.
Daniel: Hakan, thank you so much for taking us through this. This was a real experience.
Hakan: Yeah, I’m glad. I would have never known it was a lot of your first time. So, that was a lot of fun. And, yeah, thank you, folks, for having us on.
Hedvig: Yeah, it was super fun.
Ben: That was actually a hoot. Now, I just want to figure out a way that we can play Because Language roleplaying games semiregularly.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Yeah, we can do that.
Stephen: Do a lucrative spinoff series, yeah. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yes. Thank you, Hakan. That was wonderful. It’s a wonderful game you’ve created. I think it’s really cool.
Daniel: Dialect, a game about language and how it dies, available from Thorny Games.
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[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]