#Claytalk 3

It’s time for more #claytalk! This time we’re talking about silence.

(If you missed my previous posts and are interested in reading them, here’s a link to the previous post, which you can follow backwards to the first post, if you want: https://plus.google.com/102721916927145169256/posts/dbH1KeFyeeE)

Silence is a living philosophy

The first thing I’d like to observe about silence is that every time it is described in the text, it is worded differently, without any single definition (for lack of a better word) covering everything. On page 18, we are told “Wild and fatherless [the first four minotaurs] didn’t naturally find a life in the society of men – not until they achieved silence. Silence is the minotaur philosophy of life conduct: puruse the social good, and pursue justice; do not want; do not use the names of women.” A few pages later, on page 22, we get this: “Over the centuries minotaurs have developed their cultural philosophy of silence: be contemplative, do not want, do not use the names of women, and do not express your emotions, for breaking silence in these ways is an expression of need.” Yet still later, on page 43, we are told, “Over the decades they developed a philosophy of life conduct: pursue justice and the social good; be courageous; act with wisdom; do not want; do not use the names of women.” Finally, each character sheet as the same definition of silence: “Be courageous. Act with wisdom. Work for justice and the social good. Do not use the names of women. Do not want. Do not express your emotions.”

I propose that these differences are not an error in editing, but a purposeful inconsistency. None of the definitions contradict each other, but none of them is complete either. This is because the philosophy of silence is just that, a philosophy, not a strict code or a mantra. It is something felt, something more extensive than a few catchy phrases, something to be lived, not just listed. These variations communicated the living nature of silence.

A brief look at the problematic nature of gender in the text and game

The most complete list, and the one that will undoubtedly be the guiding principle in any given game, is the one provided on the character sheets. This is the one the players will constantly be consulting and interpreting. But it is worth noting that every variation includes the two elements “do not want” and “do not use the names of women.” We are told that this last stricture is because “There are no female minotaurs, so nicknames are an effort to create distance from want.” In this game, women can be friends, employers, coworkers, and lovers, but each and every woman, by the very nature of her being a woman, is a potential object of want, which makes them first and foremost objects of sexual desire, no matter what other role they may have in society. That is problematic to say the least.

This de facto categorizing of women as objects of sexual want is further troubled by the repeated use of the word “men” to stand in for human beings within the Degringolade. The original minotaurs “didn’t naturally find life in the society of men” (page 18), “Untamed and troubled they didn’t easily find a life in the society of men” (page 43), and silence has “enabled [minotaurs] to live will among men” (page 43). It is clear from such passages (and many others) that the Degringolade is a solidly patriarchal society, in spite of many Empyrei being women.

The game has very good reasons, I think, for focusing on men, but this treatment of women is disturbing, and I would not be surprised if many women and men are put off enough to not want to bring the game to the table. Why would players troubled by the patriarchy want to play a game in which patriarchal attitudes are so deeply interwoven into the material?

But perhaps the game provides avenues to upset the patriarchy by finding a way to redefine masculinity and recreate the society we are given at the start of the game. We are told that the watchers, the giant leafless, bloomless trees that stretch out over the jungle canopy, “will fully frondesce and bloom again when the city below enters a new age of greatness” (page 16), and we are told that we’ll “play until it’s clear whether the watchers will frondesce and bloom again for society’s entrance into a new age of greatness” (page 22). Perhaps part of this new age of greatness will not include women being first and foremost objects of male desire. Obviously the fate of the society is bound up with the minotaurs we play, and the minotaurs are bound up in masculinity, so perhaps the solution to the one is naturally a solution to the other?

Having not played the game, I don’t know if that is where the game goes naturally. I don’t see anything in the mechanics that makes that likely to occur, since the course of the game is bound to the desires of the players, but that seems like something that could happen if the players pushed for it. I’m just not sure the game cares whether you push for it or not.

Let’s move on to why the minotaurs are all male in the first place.

Why only male minotaurs?

It’s clear Paul wants to say something - or explore something - about masculinity through The Clay that Woke. A brief look at the philosophy of silence reveals elements of what it means to “be a man” in various cultures throughout history. Being courageous, being wise, keeping tight reins on desire, not expressing emotions—these can all be seen as foundational tenets of western manhood.

But before we delve into what the game is saying about masculinity, I want to take a moment to look at how making all minotaurs male gives the games narrative energy.

The tension at the center of the fiction created by The Clay that Woke is the uneasy position that the minotaurs occupy in the human society of the Degringolade. Minotaurs are creatures that span the two realms of the game, with one foot in the jungle and the other in the city. They are both wild animals and civilized people, and silence is supposed to be the means by which the minotaurs can live peacefully and somewhat harmoniously among human beings.

The whole reason minotaurs need to fit in with human society in the first place is the fact that they are all male. If the race of minotaurs hopes to survive the current generation, they need to mate with human women, and the same goes for every generation that follows. Only human men mating with human women will produce future women for future mating, so minotaurs cannot drastically upset human civilization without compromising their own future. That is a brilliant position from which to make dramatic fiction. It’s a classic case of not being able to live with them and not being able to live without them. No matter how frustrated minotaurs might get with human men and women, they cannot say fuck it and run off to the jungle permanently.

But individuals don’t always think of the whole, so there needs to be some mechanism in place to protect the herd by shaping the individuals’ behavior. That’s where silence comes in. Silence creates a code of personal conduct that ensures that each individual minotaur can coexist with humans in their city without jeopardizing their own well-being or the well-being of the herd.

If the larger social tension is created by minotaurs needing to exist within human society, then the localized tension within each minotaur character is created by the need to achieve silence by suppressing half of their own nature. If we look at the six elements of silence as they are written on the character sheets, half of them are aspirational goals (be courageous, act with wisdom, work for justice and the social good) while the other half are restrictions on their behavior (do not use the names of women, do not want, do not express your emotions). Actually, the goal of not wanting goes beyond controlling behavior and seeks to limit natural impulses. Achieving this incredible state of self-control would be hard enough in an ideal setting, but doing so while being second-class citizens makes it all but impossible, which the text alludes to: “Human society employs them for menial and dangerous and brutal work. So, not surprisingly, they often fail to live up to the ideals of their philosophy” (page 43). The larger tensions aggravates and ratchets up the individual tension, which again makes for excellent drama.

Silence as a part of play

The beautiful part of the game is that the game mechanics surrounding silence create tensions in play that mirror the situation I describe above. How do you force players to play their minotaurs as the game demands? How do you make them feel the pressure to achieve silence? Those silence tokens do so much work! I love that the GM is instructed to take away silence tokens when a minotaur PC breaks silence. The player doesn’t pay a token to break silence; the GM takes it away if they do. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one, both thematically and psychologically. Starting with three silence tokens means that you get to break silence three times before the GM takes control of your character and sends them to the jungle, possibly with a trail of broken human bodies in their wake. The player needs to choose carefully when their character will break silence and when they’ll adhere to it, which invites the GM to have her own characters apply pressure to see what the characters are willing to break silence over and what they are not.

It’s a brilliant setup because the players don’t need to read a book full of fiction to understand the difficult position the minotaur occupies because the silence tokens and rules that govern their behavior let them feel it directly. It’s a powerful statement when a game’s mechanics can do that work instead of requiring long explanations and discussions about players’ buy-in. Once the GM knows what kind of world needs to be presented to the players, the players just need to respond to the GM and the pressures of the mechanics. Oh! And then there is the list of how their character broke silence that they have to maintain on their character sheet—oooh, I love that. It does so many things at once. It is a reminder of the critical moments that have happened before; it is a way of making sure the player knows why their silence token was seized by the GM as the philosophy of silence meets the real world; and it is a list of the minotaurs shameful moments, like writing on the chalkboard 50 times, and like the list the minotaur repeats to himself when he is torturing himself at night with a list of his errors.

The two halves of the silence philosophy are naturally at odds with one another, because to pursue justice and the social good assumes a desire in the minotaur for justice. There’s the excellent bit of fiction in the text of when the narrating minotaur confronts Feru, the maker of the poison that affects the young wives of Saemung Empyreus, in his shop. He is working for justice and the social good, but he is also acting out of his own desire to be a protector and to stop this asshole. As he runs out of the store it is clear that he broke silence by confront Feru even as he acts to uphold silence.

So silence and the minotaurs’ status as second-class citizens work to create an ever-unsettled situation that the minotaurs are forced to navigate. Silence is an unsteady platform upon which the minotaurs are forced to do a balancing act, only the fulcrum and platform have no point of equilibrium at which the minotaur can rest; instead they are constantly shifting their weight to steady themselves, which they can never do. It is a Sisyphean task, but it makes for self-propelling drama, which is great for an RPG.

There’s of course more to say about silence in spite of how long this post is. I didn’t even touch upon how silence works with names to create the back and forth between city and jungle as the basic engine of movement in the game. But I’ll leave it here. Tell me your thoughts, what I missed, what I got wrong, what thoughts I’ve spurred you on to. Go on, break silence.