Player Dynamics in Bedlam Beautiful, a Textual Reading

​I want to talk about Vincent and Meguey Baker’s game Bedlam Beautiful.  The game isn't officially released yet, so let me take a moment to explain how the game works.  (Sorry to talk about a game that isn't released, but when I wrote this, I thought it was--oops!)
 
It’s a three-player game, and like Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, Murderous Ghosts, and The King is Dead, it is a booklet-based game.  During play, each player has a copy of the book, which contains the rules, explanatory information, and lists from which the players can choose during their turn.  Here’s how the text summarizes the division of play: 

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To play Bedlam Beautiful, you’ll need three players.  Player one is called, ‘the player.’  Players two and three are called, ‘the system and the disease,” without regard for which might be which. There is no need, you see, to distinguish them.  Decide now which of you will be ‘the player.’  The remainder become ‘they system and the disease (1).

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​Okay. The conceit of the game is that the “player” plays a person (she’s referred to as “she” in the text) who has been institutionalized in English Victorian period, named Mad Maudlin.  The system and the disease players portray characters visiting Mad Maudlin.  Only, none of that is true.  As the text says, “The player’s true character and circumstances are ambiguous.  It’s appropriate for all of you to speculate and imagine what they might be, but there is no way to know for sure, and no need to assert your opinions” (3).
 
So yeah, you cannot know what the reality is even as you play the game.  Talk and speculate amongst yourselves if you like, but no amount of asserting will make a thing true because the “truth” isn’t relevant to the game.  What is important is that Mad Maudlin is searching through the cast of characters portrayed by the system and the disease for her true love, Tom O’Bedlam.  But the player is never certain who the system and the disease are playing at any given moment.
 
To some extent the game is a deduction game.  The game is played with 13 playing cards, each card representing a specific character.  At the beginning of each round, the system and the disease draw a card from the small deck, check their booklet to see who that card represents and what that character’s goals and nature are, and then set a scene from the list of options in the booklet, placing Mad Maudlin and this new character together.  On Mad Maudlin’s turn, the player selects a question from her list and asks it of the character played by the system and the disease, who in turn selects an answer from their own list.  The exchanges go back and forth until the Mad Maudlin character asks to be left alone, shuts up, lashes out, flees the scene, or chooses to stay with the other character forevermore.
 
Here’s each player’s goal as described by the text:

For the player, the object of the game is to find Tom O’Bedlam, the Joker in the deck.  For the system and the disease, the object of the game is to provoke the player to shut up forever, or to kill, and the more the better (1).

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​That’s the back and forth of play.  The system and the disease go through the 13 character cards, trying to get the player to shut up or kill as much as they can while the player wants to discern which character is Tom O’Bedlam and choose Tom as her love.
 
There are so many interesting things to talk about with this game, but the one I want to focus on is the difficulty of winning the game, and how the rules give the player a fair shot in what is inarguably an unfair world.
 
Just looking at the goal of the game, it is hard to see how the player could ever win.  The system and the disease players control all the information that the player will ever receive.  They portray all of the characters and can decide as they please how to respond to the player’s questions.  They could easily mislead the player into thinking Dr. Walter Freeman (“the inventor of the transorbital, or ‘ice pick,’ lobotomy”) is her Tom O’Bedlam, or trick her into killing the “real” Tom O’Bedlam.  So what is to prevent that from happening?  A number of things, really.
 
First, the system and the disease are played by two players, not one.  This is not because they are separate entities.  The text repeatedly makes clear that the distinction is one of name only; remember, “There is no need, you see, to distinguish them.”  The system and the disease players are not supposed to play the separate rolls, one the system and one the disease, but to both together be both the system and the disease.  Similarly, even though the system and the disease keep separate scores as determined by the player’s actions, the game makes it clear that it doesn’t matter which of the two wins, only that the player loses:
 
“Report the final total victory scores: ‘—for the system, -- for the disease.’  If the system’s score is higher, the system wins; if the disease score is higher, the disease wins.  A tie is possible.  It makes no difference” (10).
 
So the two players play one role, and when playing the characters in the scene, “They must agree to their answer and give it promptly” (2). With this construction it becomes clear that it’s important to the design to have two separate heads making decisions as the system and the disease.  The game could be a two-player game, but the designers want the system and the disease to be a split entity even though they act as one.
 
The second feature of the game that gives the player a chance at winning is related to the first.  The system and the disease are given contradictory rules for behavior.  On the one hand, they are told their goal is “to provoke the player to shut up forever, or to kill, and the more the better.”  But on the other hand, they are told to follow the instincts and natures of the individual characters that they play: “They take upon them the role of the figure represented by the card” (2).  The system and the disease players are asked to try to get the player to shut up or kill while simultaneously playing Tom O’Bedlam and the other figures true to their nature.  These two requirements of the system and the disease clash, if not outright contradict each other.  Not only are the system and the disease player then one player with two minds but they are tasked with serving two masters.
 
This dissonance provides a crack into which the player can slip to sway the system and the disease to get them to sympathize with her, to take pity on her, and even to root for her against their own game-dictated interests.
 
The player’s lack of power is made clear by the setup, obviously, but also by the questions she is allowed to ask of her interlocutor.  All she can express is what she’d “like” her companion to do, and then ask if her companion will do it.  What she asks for in all her questions is sympathy, support, love, kindness, and acceptance.  To these repeated requests, the system and the disease players, both, have to repeatedly be awful to the player.  So is it any surprise that when the system and the disease have permission to be kind to the player while playing, say, the gentlewoman or Tom O’Bedlam or any of the more gentle-seeming figures that they seize upon it, giving nudges and signals to the player about whom to trust and whom not to trust?  Each game becomes something of a social experiment between the players.