Buried Without Ceremony

So, I've decided to enter Nanowrimo.
It's a month long writing contest which challenges you to write 50,000 words in that time.
I'm totally going to kickass and write all fifty thousand freaking words.

I've totally got a story idea:

It's the near future. Capitalism has reached dizzying heights/depths. It has spun out of control, and America is slowly starting to cave in. The American Anarchist Party has gained several seats in government, and is advocating a dismemberment of the national government, and all its arms.

They start advocating a Failure Ethos, where giving up on success, and turning your back on values of any kind, will lead to a better tomorrow. The american economy will implode without a labour force. They encourage people to give up their jobs, hammer the welfare system, sell their belongings to afford a workless lifestyle.

They invoke the image of Indian Ascetics, who believed that they could achieve longevity by introducing no karma into the world - by living a life of inaction. They invoke the image of pre-historic people, and how a life of scavenging was a life of simplicity. They invoke the image of post-Apocalypse scrounging, and invite the American people to become the apocalypse.

The apocalypse that stands between action and inaction, passion and apathy.
The Anarchist Party. Orderfukt. The Movement. The Resistance. The Great Giving Up of the American People.

...Yeah.
This all serves as the backdrop for several people's lives imploding. All these themes are brought onto a personal level.
Whether the Anarchist Party succeeds or not is unknown at the end, but the fact that they caused destruction is evident.

A note: The titled Orderfukt is a play off of the term "genderfukt", which I learned about in my Critical Studies in Sexuality. The term is used by people who refuse to subscribe to or against gender norms and tropes.

I'm considering including this within the Boulevard game - as a seperate, thin book.
Although it's a different focus than Boulevard, it shares a lot of themes and metalities with the game.
Also... it will very much read like a fantasy of one of the Boulevard characters.

I image that, if printed on cheap paper, with no interior illustrations, it would be pretty cheap to produce. It'd be a cool little extra for people who bought Boulevard. I'm not 100% sure if people would be like, "Aww, shweet, literature!" or "what a waste of paper. I'm not reading this, I'm too busy playing the game."

Lately, I've been playing around with and exploring the idea of blending artforms.

I'm working on Strained Depictions - a game about seniors who lose themselves in their pulp novels, and start confusing the real world with their book world.

The game involves tearing pages out of the book, and circling traits from the pages.
Who your character is depends on what kind of story is being told on that page - although there is a LOT of flexibility in what you pull from the story, and how you interpret it.

In ways, Boulevard is a very mixed media kind of activity too - it combines roleplaying with elements of public speaking, spoken word and slam poetry. The mechanics insist upon the players ranting/speaking/freestyling/doing spoken word in first person. The fluidity of their performance is a big part of the game.

I'm trying to create rules that help foster that kind of stuff. Trying to take people from one artistic discipline (roleplayers) and forcibly immerse them in another (spoken word poetry, punky Jello Biafra-esque speeches, etc.)

I am not sure if this is a really cool, cutting edge, avant-garde exercise or a silly waste of creative energy, but... Hey, it's all about experimenting, right?

So, a little while ago Ron Edwards picked up a game of Perfect with two guys.
It ended up going on for three sessions, which is an ideal time for Perfect story arcs.
He posted some great AP reports.

This was my first time reading about a game that I neither played in nor ran, which was pretty cool.
If anyone is interested in or skeptical about Perfect, I definitely suggest reading those AP reports at The Forge.

But... from them I lifted some of the most positive stuff, and posted it on the Inciteful Entertainment website.
I just wanted to repost it here.

I presented a couple games to some friends, and fairly quickly, they chose Perfect, which I described as a combination of V for Vendetta and A Clockwork Orange. "That's fucked up!" said Brian, which in guy-hangout mode, you understand, is a ringing endorsement.

The fun part was seeing the two guys get so much out of it. For example, I have no trouble at all understanding why they chose to loathe bankers and lawyers - as intended I'm sure, Gaillist society is not being treated as a disconnected fantasy by our impromptu group, but rather as a medium through which real-life frustrations and confusions can be acted upon.

As for the system, they fucking loved it. Both of them totally got into the crimes, pushed the envelope, and repeatedly stated how much they were enjoying their characters. A little later than I should, I realized who I was playing with, and stated, very strongly: "it's all about the Payout." They tuned into that like sharks.

As far as soundbytes go, that is pretty amazing, no?

The only thing that gives it a run for it's money is Malcolm Craig's quote about Perfect:
"It's like Kafka and Charlotte Bronte had children, and those children wrote Blade Runner."